Last week, missile-defense critics Theodore Postol and George Lewis touched off a controversy after they questioned the Pentagon’s claims of test success for the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptor. But in a roundtable yesterday with bloggers, Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner suggested, in effect, that the two critics were relying on Looney Tunes physics to go after the program.
MDA claims the SM-3 has a strong track record, hitting 84 percent of incoming targets in 16 different test events between 2002 and 2009. But the question Postol and Lewis raised was simple: Does hitting a target missile’s airframe, as opposed to its warhead, count as a hit? “In eight or nine of the 10 SM-3 intercept tests from 2002 to 2009 … the SM-3 kill vehicle failed to hit the warhead target directly,” they wrote. “This means that, in real combat, the warhead would have not been destroyed but would have continued toward the target and detonated in eight or nine of the 10 SM-3 experimental tests.”
In other words, the SM-3’s kill vehicle would punch right through the thin walls of the rocket body like a bullet zipping through an empty soda can, they argued.
Full story: Pentagon: Missile Critics Use ‘Wile E. Coyote’ Physics
