Le dernier truc dont il faut être fier: la défense anti-missiles

Washington, le Pentagone, les médias, les experts, tout le monde est sur les dents. Depuis qu’on reparle du réseau des missiles anti-missiles à cause de la grotesque affaire des menaces d’interception du missile nord-coréen Taepodong-2, le dernier sujet à la mode à Washington est effectivement l’extraordinaire capacité d’interception du réseau BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense), ou plutôt de sa sous-section dite GMD (Ground-Based Midcourse Defense), qui est la seule à avoir réalisé le déploiement d’une poignée de ces braves choses.

Victoria Samson et Robert Gard décrivent (pour UPI le 23 juin) ce nouveau sentiment washingtonien, en se demandant sur quel événement il peut bien être basé :

« A small amount of confidence and self-promotion in Washington is often a good thing, but too much can be deadly. The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA), charged with developing a multi-layered system that could defend the United States, its allies, and troops abroad from missile attack, has gone too far. U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, head of MDA, said at a conference in late March, “We could certainly shoot down an incoming missile if we needed to.”

(...)

» This bravado is perplexing; during flight testing, the GMD system intercepted the target in only five out of 10 attempts — and this was under highly scripted circumstances that do not reflect a realistic attack. Plus, there hasn't been a successful flight test with an intercept, even of an artificial target, since October 2002.

» Obering's statement raises obvious questions: if the MDA system is capable of engaging an incoming hostile missile, why hasn't that that been demonstrated by a realistic test already? Shouldn't the interceptors function properly during flight tests that cost $100 million each? And finally: on what is Obering basing his confidence in the system?

» Sure, GMD hasn't achieved an intercept in three-and-a-half years. But maybe MDA has excellent developmental practices in place that provide it confidence in its assessments of the system's progress? But in the two most recent flight intercept attempts, the interceptor rocket failed to get off the ground. The U.S. military has been launching rockets for decades; that should not be difficult to accomplish.

» MDA did, finally, in December 2005, manage to get its interceptor off the launch pad, after undertaking several reviews to try to figure out what had gone wrong. However, according to a Government Accountability Office report that came out this month, MDA's own auditors found that “the interceptor design requirements were unclear and sometimes incomplete, design changes were poorly controlled, and the interceptor's design resulted in uncertain reliability and service life.” This does not evoke much certainty in the system's dependability. »

Mis en ligne le 27 juin 2006 à 13H47