Pentagon Study Casts Doubt on Missile Defense Schedule. ‘Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has indicated a willingness to

deploy a system before tests have been completed if an attack seems imminent,’ but here’s where we are so far:

‘…An October 1999 test in

which a Global Positioning System inside a mock warhead helped guide an

intercept missile toward a target over the Pacific…was successful, but two

more recent flight tests failed.

None of those tests used the kinds of sophisticated decoys that a real ballistic

missile would use to confuse an antimissile system, the report said. Instead, the

decoy in each test was a large balloon that did not look like a warhead and that

the kill vehicle’s sensors could easily distinguish from the target.

The report also asserted that the Pentagon had not even scheduled a test

involving multiple targets, the likely situation in an attack. And it found software

problems with a training simulator that made it appear as if twice as many

warheads had been fired at the United States as had been intended in a 1999

exercise.

The simulator then fired interceptors at those “phantom tracks,” and operators

were unable to override it, the report said.’ New York Times