The Bush administration announced in December a goal of having a limited ground-based system operational in Alaska and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California by Oct. 1, 2004.
"The moves last year were just about reporting requirements. This is different," said Philip Coyle, director of operational testing and evaluation for the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001. "This is about obeying the law. Without these tests, we may never know whether this system works or not, and if they are done after this system is deployed, we won't know until we've spent $70 billion on a ground-based missile defense system."
The proposed waiver has raised concerns of Senate Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein of California, missile defense critic Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking member of his party on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island.
In a letter to Rumsfeld dated Wednesday, Feinstein wrote: "I believe that any deployed missile defense system must meet the same requirements and standards that we set for all other fully operational weapons systems. Indeed, given the potential cost of a failure of missile defense, I believe that, if anything, it should be required to meet more stringent test standards than normally required."
Feinstein's letter came one week after Rumsfeld had been grilled on the issue by Levin and Reed at an Armed Services Committee hearing.
"That law exists to prevent the production and fielding of a weapons system that doesn't work right," Levin said.
Rumsfeld replied that an exemption made sense in the case of missile defense.
"I happen to think that thinking we cannot deploy something ... until you have everything perfect, every 'i' dotted and every 't' crossed, it's probably not a good idea," he said. "In the case of missile defense, I think we need to get something out there, in the ground, at sea, and in a way that we can test it, we can look at it, we can develop it, we can evolve it, and ... learn from the experimentation with it."
Rumsfeld pointed out that two other weapon systems in recent years -- the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle and the Joint-STAR aircraft radar systems -- were deployed before they were tested operationally. But those systems did eventually go through operational testing, and neither went into full production until the testing was completed.
There is no guarantee the operational testing will ever take place if the law is changed to allow the system to be deployed.
