A New Missile Threat?

Industry experts believe the nation is vulnerable to a sneak attack from the sea, and the idea is gaining traction in Washington

By OTTO KREISHER, Special Correspondent

The Pentagon has spent $92.5 billion during the past 20 years trying to build a shield for the nation against intercontinental ballistic missiles, even though few potential adversaries may have the capability to strike U.S. territory from their own soil.

But the military has spent very little to find a way to defend the country against a missile capability that perhaps a dozen unfriendly nations currently possess, and which soon could be in the hands of terrorists, some experts believe: relatively short-range ballistic or cruise missiles — perhaps armed with chemical, biological or even nuclear warheads — that could be launched from an innocent-looking merchant ship a hundred or so miles off the extensive U.S. coastline.

Lockheed Martin, however, has been spending its own money to develop a system, called Passive Coherent Locator (PCL), that could detect such a ship-launched missile and feed accurate tracking information into the existing national missile defense command-and-control system for a response.

The PCL system envisions a network of sensors that could be operational from Washington to Boston within two years of government funding and along the entire U.S. coastline some years later, said David Kier, vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Protection Division.

The reality of the threat has become increasingly evident, he said.

“They don’t need an intercontinental ballistic missile to attack us. An enemy could put a SCUD on a tramp steamer and launch it off the coast,” Kier said, referring to the common Soviet-developed tactical ballistic missile that Iraq fired a number of times by mobile, land-based launchers during Operation Desert Storm.

The vulnerable area is immense, with a U.S. coastline of 12,400 miles — including Alaska and the Great Lakes — and 75 percent of the nation’s population and military bases within 200 miles of the coast, Kier said. The number of potential launch platforms is equally large, with about 130,000 merchant ships registered in 195 countries, many with minimal government control.

Thousands of SCUDs and other cheap short-range ballistic missiles are spread worldwide, many in countries where terrorist organizations operate freely.

All the components for a SCUD missile were found in a container on a ship inspected last year in San Pedro, Calif., Kier said.

During congressional testimony early this year, Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), noted that while his program has focused on intercontinental missiles, “there are also other ballistic missile threats to the homeland that we must address in the years ahead, including the possibility of offshore launches.”

MDA demonstrated that capability to provide a target for the Israeli-U.S. Arrow antimissile program in a test last year, Obering told reporters recently. “We launched a SCUD off an ocean-going platform. … It was very easy to do.”

U.S. intelligence has reported that Iran also launched a tactical ballistic missile from a ship last year.

The potential threat is aggravated by the rapid proliferation of cruise missiles.

Seventy countries share an estimated 75,000 antiship cruise missiles, many of which can be converted to land-attack weapons. At least 10 nations already have land-attack cruise missiles and the number is growing, a recent report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) said.

“While the Defense Department has numerous programs to address threats to forward-deployed ground and naval forces, it has devoted much less attention to cruise missile threats to the homeland,” the report noted.

“Even the relatively large Seersucker can be hidden and launched from a standard 12-meter shipping container,” CSBA said, referring to a Soviet-designed antiship cruise missile. “The balance between cruise missiles and defenses currently favor the offense.”

Obering said he was “concerned about” the potential for a ship-launched missile attack on the country and that MDA has “more than one program taking a look at that.

“There is a difference of opinion in terms of whether that constitutes a real threat, but that’s something I’m personally concerned about. So we’re working on it,” he said.

Cruise-missile defense, however, is not part of MDA’s responsibility — that is shared by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and the Joint Theater Air and Missile Organization.

MDA currently has no active program to counter ship-launched missiles, said Rick Lehner, the agency’s spokesman. As a result, it has no connection to Lockheed Martin’s PCL program.

Lockheed’s interest in the ship-launched missile threat is a natural extension of the company’s extensive involvement in other antimissile programs. Although Lockheed has been developing PCL since the 1990s, Kier said he widened the focus in February 2004 after analyzing President Bush’s November 2003 directive on missile defense, which called for programs to address “all ranges of threats and all phases of flight for the defense of the homeland, friends and allies, and deployed forces.”

The analysis showed PCL could be part of a comprehensive “Asymmetric Missile Defense” effort to protect friends, allies and U.S. forces abroad, as well as the homeland, against cruise and ballistic missiles, UAVs and aircraft, Kier said.

The PCL system works by transmitting a signal, or noise, that bounces off the incoming missile and is recorded by a receiver, which measures the change in the frequency. For accurate location information, the system needs two or more reflected signals, which can be obtained by multiple transmitters and a single receiver, or one transmitter and multiple receivers.

To ensure enough signal strength far enough offshore, the PCL system would have to focus the energy of its transmissions out to sea, instead of over land, as a commercial radio station would.

Kier’s suggested way to deploy PCL would be to put an antenna and transmitter on top of the tall water towers present in most towns along the coast.

“There’s no environmental impact, no damage to the FM radio capability, yet we get a strong signal,” he said.

The system’s effective range depends on the elevation of the transmitters, he said. With a tower on a hill, an effective signal could reach 200 kilometers — about 124 miles.

“We need 150 kilometers to get the kill probability up to where we want it,” Kier said.

The data from PCL would be fed into MDA’s Command, Control, Battle Management, Communications system, which became operational Oct. 1, 2004, Kier said.

Although Lockheed developed and is refining the PCL concept on corporate money, it has received some help in system verification from the government, including defense agencies and NASA.

“We have tested the technology against a number of airborne platforms — various types of aircraft and space launch vehicles — and have verified the system’s accuracies through these tests,” said Thad Madden, a Lockheed spokesman.

Kier said Lockheed “absolutely” is counting on gaining Pentagon funding to field the PCL system.

The first such Pentagon funds could come from $20 million provided to MDA in the House 2006 defense appropriations bill. The House Appropriations Committee “believes that a sea-based missile threat now has a low probability of detection,” according to text in the bill. The funds would be spent on an analysis of the need for, and deployment of, a defensive system to counter a short-range missile attack from the sea, Kier said.

As of early October, the Senate had not passed its version of the defense appropriations bill.