7/07/00 1:40 p.m.
Rigged Journalism at Time
Mark Thompson fires missiles that totally miss the mark.

By Rich Lowry, NR editor

n an article that is tendentious even for Time magazine, Mark Thompson reports in this week's issue that Friday night's missile-interceptor test is not an actual missile attack against the United States!

It seems the Pentagon's tests are against a single warhead when they could actually be faced with "tens" of incoming warheads in a real attack. The Pentagon will know what sort of rocket it is targeting in the test, how powerful it is, where it is coming from, etc., etc. — when in a real attack all this will probably be a mystery. Finally, Thompson might as well add, if the interceptor fails, no American cities will be obliterated when, of course, they would in an actual attack. What a fraud!

Missile-defense critics have now turned to a series of catch 22s to try to discredit the idea of missile defense. It used to be that if tests failed, they proved the impossibility of defense; now, if they succeed, it shows the impossibility of missile defense (because their very success show the tests were hopelessly "rigged"). For instance, critics on the one hand complain that not enough decoy balloons are included in the tests; on the other, they complain that the one decoy balloon that is included helps the interceptor determine where the target is in the sky. But these criticisms are mutually exclusive — if there were more balloons it should, according to the latter theory, make it even easier for the interceptor to orient itself toward the target.

What critics like Time's Thompson are doing is attacking the idea of testing. When a new military airplane is being tried out, it first passes "a taxi test;" i.e., it drives down the runway. This, of course, in no way duplicates actual flight in combat. But that's not the point. It does provide useful information about how the plane operates — it's a start. Then, there's a flight test — still not an accurate simulation of combat. Then, there's a flight test and a weapons test — getting closer.

This steady building of information through incrementally more difficult tasks is what testing is all about. It is what is happening with missile-defense interceptors. Indeed, if you read between the lines of Thompson's opinion and concentrate on the facts he presents, what is being tested Friday night is extraordinary. Consider:

"The war head [i.e. the target] and the balloon, along with the container in which they rode into space, will reach a top speed of 14,700 m.p.h. and a peak altitude nearly 1,000 miles above the earth. Within moments of liftoff, the infrared sensors on a Pentagon satellite perched 22,000 miles above the earth should pick up the rocket's flaming plume," and on and on, "until [w]ithin minutes, the first draft of this electronic map will be zapped nearly 6,000 miles . . . into the interceptor's electronic brain."

After more technical wizardry, "[t]he interceptors clusters will fire in precisely choreographed microsecond bursts to guide it into a collision with its chosen target. There are no explosives aboard the interceptor. The sheer kinetic force of the crash at a combined speed of nearly 17,000 m.p.h. makes explosives superfluous."

You don't have to be Robert Jastrow to marvel at this accomplishment. The trick of critics like Thompson is to dismiss all this technological proficiency and posit perfect "counter-measures" that don't even exist yet, and haven't even been tested!

There is no doubt that the Pentagon is rushing to develop a system — as well it should, given the importance of protecting the United States from attack.

And there is no doubt too that this task is extremely complex. But, all things considered, things are going remarkably well. Critics like to quote General Larry Walsh, a missile-defense watchdog, when he emphasizes the negative. They are not so eager to cite him (although Time does) when he says, as he did recently before the Senate armed services committee, that "the program is on track." Time, of course, would never lead with that.