Tight budgets have created some differing opinions on the need for higher-end operational tests, the Pentagon’s top tester said at a conference Wednesday morning.
Speaking at the International Test and Evaluation Association’s annual conference, Director of Operational Test and Evaluation J. Michael Gilmore noted varied opinions on conducting live-fire operational tests for the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system, meant to protect combat ships from a range of incoming threats.
On the one hand, the Missile Defense Agency recently spent more than $200 million on a single flight test. Flight Test Operational (FTO)-01 looked at the Aegis BMD’s ability to work with the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and other parts of the Ballistic Missile Defense System to detect and defeat medium-range threats.
“That was an important test and we learned a lot from it, and those are real threats,” he said. “I don’t mean to trivialize the problem, but [MDA Director Vice Adm. James] Syring himself said, you know, it’s easier to hit an RV (reentry vehicle) on a ballistic trajectory than it is a maneuvering supersonic cruise missile.”
Testing Aegis’ ability to detect and defeat cruise missiles would fall under ship self-protection, not missile defense, and therefore would be the Navy’s responsibility to arrange instead of MDA’s.
“So, [MDA] has decided to allocate the resources to ballistic missile defense testing, and I obviously am not opposed to that,” Gilmore continued. “But we’re having a fight over self-defense testing of Navy surface combatants.”
The Navy can spend equally large amounts of money to prepare for its operational tests–it can cost $100 million to simply outfit the Self-Defense Test Ship with the Aegis system for testing, as well as other costs for planning, manning, buying weapons to shoot at the test ship, and more, Gilmore said.
“The Navy’s actually expending a fair amount of resources to try to fix the problems that have been identified” after testing on the Self-Defense Test Ship, he said, but there has been some resistance to doing the live-fire test in the first place. Some people wish to do simulated testing, and others prefer to fire dummy weapons at an actual ship with Aegis already installed, he said. When the latter strategy was attempted in testing with the cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62) last year, an aerial target drone malfunctioned and slammed into the fully manned ship instead of veering away as planned. The better and safer–if not more expensive–way to test is live-fire against the unmanned test ship, he said.
In the big picture, Gilmore said, the Navy will spend more than $50 billion on Aegis-equipped Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and hundreds of billions of dollars on all combat ships in its 30-year shipbuilding plan. The hundreds of millions spent testing the defense systems against realistic threats will more than pay off in the long run, he said.
After his presentation, Gilmore told Defense Daily that “I think [the reluctance] is primarily budget-driven, which at one level I can understand. The Navy is obviously highly supportive of Aegis testing against ballistic missiles because MDA pays for it. And the Navy would have to pay the bill associated with self-defense testing. So I think common sense would tell you that that’s probably figuring in their position,” though he said there could be other factors at play as well.