07 June 2001

Defense Department Report on Missile Defense

Navy Rear Admiral Craig Quigley told reporters at the biweekly Pentagon briefing June 7 that the United States will spend more time talking to its allies about the specific requirements of a missile defense system, as well as seeking their views on the subject, before any single architecture or system of architectures is selected.

Quigley was responding to a reporter's question about when the U.S. missile defense system's architecture would be formalized. He said the United States expects "to work very closely with our allies and friends to try to ascertain how we can cooperate" on missile defense. Eventually, the acting spokesman said, the United States would likely select a layered missile defense system "using a variety of means to intercept ballistic missiles at various points in their paths."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who currently is meeting with his defense counterparts in Europe and discussing missile defense as well as other issues, advocates pursuing "a very robust test and evaluation period -- to try out different means of intercepting ballistic missiles in flight," according to Quigley. The fruitful tests will be pursued, while the least productive ones will be abandoned, he said.

Several nations already have working components of missile defense systems, Quigley said, and the United States wants to see if it can make use of their research and development efforts to discover whether any of them could play a role" in development of a future architecture.

Whether missile defenses are of a theater or national variety, the spokesman said, "depends on where you are and what sort of a method you choose to engage the ballistic missile during its path. I can shoot at it in boost-phase, in mid-course phase, or terminal-phase" and different systems might be used at different stages. Selecting the hardware, he said, "is a work in progress."