Currently, the Bush administration and many media pundits appear to be making the same reckless error in overestimating the current capabilities of their own anti-ballistic missile defense system, an analysis posted June 26 on the Media Matters for America Web site suggests.

The analysis notes that on June 25th, syndicated Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer stated on ABC-TV's "Inside Washington" weekly talk show that the United States had successfully completed "seven out of eight" tests of its anti-ballistic missile defense system designed to intercept North Korea's Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Taeopondong-2 ICBM is designed to have an operational range of ultimately 9,600 miles, which could possibly allow it to hit cities in the United States.

However, following the failure of its July 4 test this week, U.S. analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote in a new study that he believed North Korea was probably five years away from having an ICBM capability that could threaten the U.S. mainland.

In fact, as has been widely reported and was noted by "Time" magazine in its July 3 cover story, the U.S. ABM system constructed at breakneck speed by the Bush administration to protect the United States against precisely the kind of threat that the Taepodong-2 poses has only succeeded in five out of 10 of its tests, and the last three tests have been total failures.

Further, even the successful tests were carefully carried out under highly controlled, optimal conditions.

And as readers of these columns will be well aware, there are enormous doubts among the leading BMD experts in the United States about the operational reliability of the 11 anti-ballistic missile interceptors that have so far been deployed since the Bush administration took office six and a half years ago.

"The fact is that if we fired today's test bed systems, they might well malfunction just as badly as the North Korean test did," Cordesman wrote in his new CSIS study, "North Korea's Missile tests; Saber-Rattling or Rocket's Red Glare?"

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his then top deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, put continued, intense pressure on the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and its prime contractors to rush the interceptors into deployment before almost all of the most routine and established component testing procedures could be done on them.

The problems and uncertainties caused by this deliberate abandonment of long-established Department of Defense procedures concerning the testing and evaluation of all missile systems has been documented in a hard-hitting U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in May this year and quoted in our previous BMD Focus column.

Further, the Web report noted, the system Krauthammer referred to in his comments was not even designed to shoot down ICBMs in the first place.

Krauthammer in his comments in fact was referring to the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system that has carried out a highly successful series of tests recently. The latest one, as reported at the time in our companion BMD Watch column, was on June 22. However, as Media Matters for America again correctly noted, the Aegis system is not designed to intercept ICBMs, such as North Korea's Taepodong-2.

Rather, it is the GMD system that is designed to intercept such missiles. And the GMD's 11 interceptors designed to provide defense against the Taepodong-2 -- nine at Fort Greeley Alaska and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California -- have not been successfully flight-tested in at least three years.

As the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's own Ballistic Missile Defense System booklet notes, Aegis system BMD-capable destroyers are able to "provide early warning" and "transmit track data to the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense command center" in the event of an ICBM launch.

However, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense 3.0 weapon system and its Standard Missile-3 Block I currently deployed aboard the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Cruisers are only "capable of intercepting short- and medium-range ballistic missiles," as the Media Matters for America Web site also noted.

Media Matters for America also cited a Los Angeles Times report of June 22 that stated the Aegis cruisers Shiloh, Lake Eerie, and Port Royal "are equipped with [SM-3] anti-missile rockets, but they are not expected to be directly involved in any response to North Korea's possible launch."

On June 22, an SM-3 launched from the Shiloh successfully shot down a test missile, marking the system's seventh successful intercept test out of a total of eight. It was this system that Krauthammer was mistakenly referring to.

Mistaking the capabilities of a BMD system designed to shoot down short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles with one designed to shoot down ICBMs might be funny if the issues at stake were not so colossal. North Korea Monday threatened thermonuclear retaliation against the United States if the United States attempted pre-emptive strike against it.

It is certainly true that North Korea has not yet successfully tested its Taepodong-2 ICBM. However, the technical challenges of building a reliable ICBM system have been mastered since 1957 whereas BMD is still on the frontier of technical and engineering development.

In other words, attack is still far easier and a far more reliable and known quantity than defense. Whenever brand new, still unreliable and untested technologies are involved, it is very rash to be too confident too soon.

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