Pentagon Insists Anti-Missile Flight Tests Are Not Rigged

The Pentagon admitted Friday that it used simpler decoys in recent flight tests of an anti-missile interceptor, but it denied allegations that the switch amounted to dishonest manipulation to hide a fatal flaw.

The first two interceptor flight tests, in 1997 and 1998, used more complex and challenging decoys because the Pentagon was testing competing designs of interceptors built by Boeing Co. and Raytheon Corp., said Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. He said the intent was to stress the interceptors’ sensors as part of choosing the superior design.

Starting with test flight No. 3, last October, simpler and fewer decoys were used because that marked the start of testing with the winning design, by Raytheon, and the plan has been gradually to increase the level of difficulty.

The October test hit the mock warhead, but the interceptor missed its target in the most recent test, in January. The next test is scheduled for early July, and more than a dozen others are planned.

Decoys are used in the testing because it is anticipated that any hostile nation that would fire a long-range ballistic missile at the United States would try to confuse the interceptor with false targets during the missile’s flight.

Friday’s New York Times quoted Theodore Postol, an arms expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as saying the Pentagon’s flight tests were rigged to hide the inability of the interceptor’s sensors to distinguish between enemy warheads and decoys.

“That is blatantly untrue,” Lehner said Friday.

Jacques Gansler, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, said the Postol accusation amounted to slander and unfairly impugned the integrity of Pentagon officials from Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen on down.

“I will categorically deny that we’re fixing the flights, that we’re lying, that we’re cheating,” he said.

Lehner said the Pentagon has made no secret that the interceptor, at least in its initial configuration, will be unable to defeat sophisticated missiles, with highly challenging decoys and other countermeasures, that Russia or China possesses. Instead it is designed to shoot down crude warheads, with relatively simple countermeasures, that might be launched in the coming decade by North Korea, Iraq or Iran.

Gansler said a decision was made to not make the defense system more complex and costly than necessary. “We have a choice of spending more and more money on more and more complexity to address all the [missile] threats that one could hypothesize, versus using our intelligence estimates and our technical talents to say, ‘What are the likely threats that we’re likely to see? . . . And can we defeat those?’ ” he said.

The political debate over missile defense is heating up as President Clinton nears a decision--probably this autumn--whether to give the go-ahead to deploy the weapon system.

Postol and other critics assert that the Pentagon is rushing to deploy an unproven weapon. They have some support in that from an independent panel, headed by retired Air Force Gen. Larry Welch, which reported to the Pentagon last November that it found “a legacy of over-optimism” about progress in developing reliable interceptor technology.