Missile Defense Takes Off

[darrels joy]

Missile Defense Takes Off

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, December 03, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Strategic Defense: The Air Force's airborne laser program passes yet another test, proving "unproven" missile defense once again. The question is not whether we can get it to work, but whether we can afford not to.


The news that Iran has enough nuclear material to build a nuclear weapon in relatively short order and is well along on missiles to deliver its nukes has put a sense of urgency on the proposed missile defense system slated for Poland and the Czech Republic.

Fortunately, another answer to the threat posed by rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea has just passed a critical milestone.

That answer is the YAL-1A, a modified Boeing 747-400F equipped with the Airborne Laser (ABL) system, which includes a high-energy chemical laser designed to destroy ballistic missiles in their very vulnerable boost phase, missiles such as Iran's Shahab series.

The ABL program places a megawatt-class, high-energy Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) on a modified Boeing 747-400F aircraft to detect, track and destroy all classes of ballistic missiles. ABL also can pass information on launch sites, target tracks and predicted impact points to other layers of the global ballistic missile defense system.

This week, Boeing and the Missile Defense Agency announced another successful test — the first ground test of the entire weapon system integrated aboard the aircraft, including the firing of a high-energy laser through the ABL beam control/fire control system. Earlier tests had unit-tested other components of the system, particularly the ability to find, track and target missiles in flight.

Last July, a YAL-1A took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and actively acquired, tracked and targeted a simulated ballistic missile.
It used its infrared sensors and a tracking laser to zero in on a "target board" aboard another aircraft, firing its two solid-state illuminator lasers at the NC-135E "Big Crow" test aircraft to verify the ABL's ability to track an airborne target and compensate for atmospheric turbulence.

On Sept. 7, the COIL was successfully fired for the first time. Missile defense supporter Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said that test was "proof positive that this weapon system is no longer the stuff of science fiction — it is scientific fact."

A test intercept of an actual in-flight ballistic missile is set for early 2009, unless a Democratic Congress and a President Obama, both hostile to missile defense, shoot down the program first.

Anyone who witnessed the tragic launch of the shuttle Challenger in 1986 can see the vulnerability of missiles in their launch phase. ABL aircraft would patrol in pairs at 40,000 feet, flying in orbits over friendly airspace or international waters, scanning the horizon for plumes of rising missiles.

The ABL would acquire and track the missile with a tracking laser while computers calculate the distance to and trajectory of the target.

A second laser with weapons-class strength would fire a three- to five-second burst from a turret located in the 747's nose, destroying the missile over its launch site. The ABL's big chemical oxygen iodine laser is designed to reach out over 200 miles, maintaining beam focus and stability, and still have enough power to heat a ballistic missile to destruction.

Unlike its fixed-site cousins, the ground-based interceptors deployed in California and Alaska and (hopefully) Europe, ABL aircraft can be deployed where needed and are reusable.

Not only can they patrol off unfriendly nations, they would be quite useful patrolling our shores.

We have pointed out the dangers of an Iranian freighter launching a Shahab that would detonate its warhead high over the United States, unleashing an electromagnetic pulse that would send our high-tech economy back to the days of the covered wagons.

Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, director of the Missile Defense Agency, in announcing the flight testing of the ABL system in late 2005, said he welcomed critics' comparison to the "Star Wars" movies.

He said at the rollout ceremony, in words that will make the Democratic opponents of missile defense cringe: "I believe we are building the forces of good to beat the forces of evil. . . . We are taking a major step in giving the American people their first light saber."

May the (air) force be with us.


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