WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's breakneck effort to field a rudimentary missile defense system by 2004 is moving so fast that the Pentagon may end up with unworkable hardware that needs to be redesigned at a steep cost, Congress' independent watchdog agency warned Wednesday.
In the first official, unclassified challenge to the administration's plans, the General Accounting Office issued a report saying that the Pentagon's use of new and little-tested antimissile technology puts the program "in danger of getting off track early and impairing the effort over the long term."
If parts of the system don't work, the report said, the Pentagon "will be faced either with fielding a less than credible system, or likely spending more money in an attempt to develop the desired capability within the time allowed."
The administration is hurrying to field by Oct. 1, 2004, a system that will be based in Ft. Greeley, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Los Angeles, and intended to shield the country from an intercontinental ballistic missile attack.
Administration officials argue that, facing a growing missile threat from North Korea and other countries, the Pentagon needs to deploy a basic system as soon as possible and then improve and expand it.
But the GAO argued that this approach, while preserving flexibility, "increases the potential that some components may not work as intended."
The GAO's criticism was seized on by congressional critics of the $9-billion weapons program, which is by far the largest proposed by the Pentagon for the coming fiscal years and is under review as conferees consider the $400-billion 2004 defense authorization bill.
Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that they had "grave concern" about the report's findings.
The report "clearly shows that the missile defense system the administration plans to field in 2004 will not be fully tested or proven to work under realistic conditions," Levin said.
Officials of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which oversees the program, insisted in a statement that "we are highly confident that we will field an effective, reliable defense against long-range ballistic missiles aimed at any of our 50 states by the fall of 2004."
They noted that the GAO did give them credit for taking steps to "manage and reduce the risks of the program."
