The Pentagon is evaluating potential missile-defense sites in states including Maine and plans to conduct site surveys by the end of the year, a senior official told lawmakers Wednesday.
Vice Adm. James Syring, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), told the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee (SAC-D) that the Pentagon soon will unveil which U.S. communities it is considering for a new facility with Ground-Based Interceptors, which are intended to better protect the country from missiles.
Congress directs the Pentagon in the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization act to evaluate three potential missile-interceptor locations in the United States–at least two of which are on the East Coast–to be scrutinized in extensive environmental-impact statements. (Defense Daily, Dec. 19, 2012). Yet actual funding for those environmental studies, which would be conducted in fiscal year 2014, still has to be approved by Congress. And many Democrats are skeptical about building another homeland missile-interceptor site in addition to those already in Alaska and California.
Prodded about the status of the review of potential new sites by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Syring confirmed the MDA is looking at “two sites in Maine in conjunction with other sites as well.”
He said the agency is “screening” multiple locales, and plans to ask local government officials soon for additional information on them. Syring said he expects “within the next two to three weeks” to complete screening of the current cadre of sites. They are being judged on criteria such safety, location, system-effectiveness, geographic location, base infrastructure, and land infrastructure, he said.
“What we’ll do is, we will notify the Congress before we go public with any of those selections,” Syring said. “And, once we do that, and brief the staff members, we’ll go ask the sites for more information. We’ll then take that information and study it for another few weeks and then send people to the sites that have the most promise. It’s a very serious effort that is backed up with thousands of pages of documentation and analysis. It is no haphazard.”
By the end of the year military officials will “go on site to several of these places” for site surveys, he said.
Collins noted a National Research Council report that concluded there are gaps in the United States’ ballistic-missile-defense system and its protection of the East Coast. She said, for her part, that Maine has a “real gap” in coverage.
The MDA would welcome additional missile radar, along with the interceptors, to protect the East Coast from potential threats from the Middle East, Syring confirmed in response to a question from Collins.
“An additional radar would help us with the discrimination problem and threat that we see in the future,” he said.
Asked whether the ballistic-missile threat from potential adversaries has grown, Syring said “the threat has advanced,” noting North Korea’s long-range rocket launch last December.