By Marina Malenic
Following a failed intercept in a flight test of the Pentagon’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, a senior Missile Defense Agency (MDA) official criticized industry for quality control problems with MDA programs across the board.
“I’m not going to name names today, but I’m going to tell you we continue to be disappointed in the quality that we are receiving from our prime contractors and their subs– very, very disappointed,” said David Altwegg, the agency’s executive director and former missile engineer. He was speaking to reporters at a Feb. 1 budget briefing at the Pentagon.
The Jan. 31 GMD failure occurred when a target missile was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and a silo-based interceptor fired from Vandenberg AFB, Calif., failed to hit the dummy missile. Boeing [BA] is the prime contractor for GMD.
The agency said the target was intended to simulate launch of a missile that a country such as Iran or North Korea could develop given current technological know-how. A statement released by the agency blames a malfunction of Boeing’s Sea-Based X-Band radar system for triggering the intercept failure.
“Our intent, I believe, would be to do it over again when we are ready,” Altwegg said. Payment for a retest would require congressional consent for reallocation of 2010 funds from elsewhere in the GMD budget, he explained.
Since GMD intercept flight tests began in 1999, eight of 16 missiles have successfully intercepted their targets. Six have failed, while two other tests did not conclude due to failure to launch a target missile.
Altwegg said he was uncertain whether quality control problems contributed to the most recent test failure, but he blamed contractors for shoddy work on several of the agency’s programs. He said that nearly every contractor “across the enterprise” was to blame for “quality design issues” and for “quality of products delivered.”
Faulty components and a “lack of attention to detail” have saddled the Pentagon with a significant amount of “rework,” according to Altwegg.
“Missilery is all about detail,” he said.
“I am excusing no one from this conversation,” he added. “We have problems with all of our” prime contractors.
As a recent example of a quality control failure, Altwegg cited a December 2009 test of Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. He told reporters that a Pentagon failure review board “disclosed a big-time quality problem” as the cause of the intercept failure.
Altwegg said the agency is “working this problem assiduously.” He said officials from the Government Accountability Office will meet with MDA officials to discuss the quality control problems tomorrow.
Altwegg also defended the agency’s plan to conduct just one GMD flight test per year. Several officials have called for more frequent and realistic testing. The Ballistic Missile Defense Review, released on Monday in conjunction with the budget, echoes those concerns.
“We find with the pre-mission analysis that goes on and the post-flight analysis, to have that done thoroughly and prepare the round and correct things that we discovered on the previous flight test, one year is about the limit and it certainly is a challenge financially,” Altwegg said.