If the United States is wondering why an interceptor rocket failed to launch on cue from the Marshall Islands they might want to ask China who in 2003 strengthened bonds with Nauru just south of the Marshall Islands.
China may have erected a tracking station on Nauru to compensate for the loss of what may have been a tracking station on Kiribati. This is only speculation but the dragon usually makes good use of alliances.
China could even have caused the failure although I am not sure how.
Reflecting on the battle lines China is drawing in the Pacific, while nothing is yet written in stone Kiribati seems out of the dragon’s reach. Media reports indicate that the recently dismantled site on Kiribati may have also been used to monitor the U.S. missile range at Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands. However Nauru which is closer to Guam and the Marshall Islands and has been caught in a long-running diplomatic tug-of-war between China and Taiwan is strengthening bonds with China. Difficult to get stuff on these islands and could not find anything on a Nauru tracking station. #msg-4484913
-Am
Defense Missile for U.S. System Fails to Launch By DAVID STOUT and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
Published: December 16, 2004
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - An important test of the United States' fledgling missile defense system ended in failure early Wednesday as an interceptor rocket failed to launch on cue from the Marshall Islands, the Pentagon said.
After a rocket carrying a mock warhead as a target was launched from Kodiak, Alaska, the interceptor, which was intended to go aloft 16 minutes later and home in on the target 100 miles over the earth, automatically shut down because of "an unknown anomaly," according to the Missile Defense Agency of the Defense Department.
The launching had been planned as the first full test in two years of this element of the Bush administration's effort to deploy a multilayered missile defense shield.
The setback threatened to delay further the initial step of activating a basic missile defense, which had once been planned for September but slipped into next year after a series of canceled tests and developmental difficulties.
The launching had been delayed several times because of bad weather or problems with equipment at the Pacific test range on Kwajalein Atoll, where officials must now try to determine what went wrong on Wednesday.
The last test of the interceptor, on Dec. 12, 2002, was also a failure, as the interceptor failed to separate from its booster rocket, missed its target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere.
But shortly after that, President Bush ordered the Pentagon to proceed with initial deployment of a limited system, a goal that he campaigned on in the election this year.
In 2003, a test of another part of the system, based on Navy ships, also failed.
Before Wednesday's test, the Missile Defense Agency had conducted eight tests with interceptor vehicles, scoring hits in five under carefully controlled conditions. Some critics of the agency, which has spent more than $80 billion since 1985, say the entire test program is unrealistic and that the tests have been scripted.
The failure was the latest challenge to the administration's drive to deploy the system piecemeal even as developmental tests, fraught as they are with technical difficulties, are carried out.
The overall missile defense program is to cost more than $50 billion over the next five years; the first group of land- and sea-based missiles, sensors and associated systems envisioned for deployment is to cost more than $7 billion, and this test alone had a budget of $85 million.
The failure Wednesday may renew a running debate on Capitol Hill over the missile program when the new Congress convenes early next year.
A Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who has been critical of the program, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said the latest setback might make lawmakers wonder whether money for the Pentagon might be better spent elsewhere, particularly in light of the mounting costs of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"It reinforces the point I've been trying to make," Mr. Reed said in a telephone interview. "This is a very complicated system that requires testing."
But a spokesman for Senator John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, a strong advocate of the program, said "one bum test" would not alter support for it.
Indeed, despite a series of delays in testing this year, Congress has embraced the deployment of a rudimentary system, which is favored by those who want to field even a limited system sooner rather than later.
Advocates say that fielding even a few interceptors of modest abilities, and improving them later, would help defend against potential threats that themselves are only just emerging, especially from North Korea's missile and nuclear weapons programs.
The military spending bill that Congress approved in October allocated $4.6 billion in the current fiscal year to support the initial fielding of the ground-based missiles. Recognizing the "challenges" involved in the attempt, the House and Senate members who negotiated the final bill approved an additional $200 million, and ordered the Pentagon to "fully fund this critical program" in next year's budget request.
The idea is to deploy 10 interceptor missiles initially, 6 in Alaska and 4 in California, to be supplemented later by another 10. Later still would come ship-based missiles that could hit enemy missiles as they lifted off and an airborne laser defense to intercept inbound warheads as they re-entered the atmosphere.
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