The Pentagon is evaluating hundreds of locations for a potential East Coast missile defense site and will work this summer to select the few places that will be subject to thorough environmental reviews.
Vice Adm. James Syring, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), said May 9 “the effort has started in terms of defining criteria and evaluating potential sites” in the East Coast at which missile interceptors could be buried.
The action comes in response to the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization act, which directs the Pentagon to evaluate three potential missile-interceptor locations in the United States–at least two of which are on the East Coast–that will be scrutinized in environmental-impact assessments. (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2012).
The MDA will whittle the list of potential sites to approximately three, which then will be subject to extensive environmental-impact statement (EIS) reviews, which can take two years to complete. The Pentagon will likely announce the final few sites “toward the end of the year,” in advance of a Dec. 31 deadline, Syring said.
“There’s literally hundreds of sites that are under consideration,” Syring told the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee.
He said “10 or 12 major factors” are being considered at the potential locations, including booster-drop zones, proximity to population centers, and the “operational efficacy” of the sites.
The MDA will go through “a weaning process, an approval process, through the summer to come out with briefing to the leadership and recommendation on what the few sites are for possible inclusion” in the environmental-assessment effort, Syring said. Congress has not directed the Pentagon to actually build a new interceptor site, which could take up to seven years to construct.
Syring said the number of final sites subject to the environmental reviews could be three, though Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs Madelyn Creedon said at the same hearing the number could be “three, maybe more.”
“The EISs will be completed for all of those,” she said. “And this will allow us, should there be a decision at some point that we do need an East Coast missile defense site, this will allow an acceleration of the time that we would need one.”
Still, she maintained the Pentagon has “other options” and the entire United States currently is “well protected” from any potential future missile attacks from North Korea and Iran.
“There are many options that would be available to us depending on the rapidity with which a threat in (a) hypothetical (scenario) from Iran would emerge, not the least of which is frankly the ability to look at additional interceptors at Ft. Greeley (in Alaska),” she said.