Pentagon cancels billion-dollar missile defense project

The Pentagon is pulling the plug on a billion-dollar, technically troubled project to build a better weapon to destroy incoming missiles.

The move is aimed in part at considering new approaches to missile defence at a time of rapid technological change.

The announced reason for cancelling the Boeing contract, effective Thursday, was that the project's design problems were so significant as to be either insurmountable or too costly to correct.

Beyond those immediate concerns, the Pentagon is considering whether it needs to start over with designing a defence against intercontinental-range ballistic missiles, such as those North Korea aspires to build, as well as newly emerging types of missiles.

One indication of that broader concern is the Pentagon's statement that it will now invite industry competition to develop a "new, next-generation interceptor" potentially a weapon that could take on hypersonic missiles being developed by China and Russia.

The Pentagon currently has 44 missile interceptors based mostly in Alaska.

Each is designed to be launched from an underground silo, soar beyond the Earth's atmosphere and release a "kill vehicle" a device that steers into its target and destroys it by force of collision.

These weapons have been tested but never used in actual combat.

It is that "kill vehicle" device that the Pentagon had asked Boeing to redesign so that it could be more reliable against the kind of long-range missiles that North Korea has said it is building to target the US.

The Pentagon had spent nearly USD 1.2 billion on the project when Michael Griffin, the under secretary of defence for research and engineering, decided last week to end it. In May he had ordered Boeing to stop its work, pending a decision on a way forward.

"Ending the programme was the responsible thing to do," Griffin said in a statement Wednesday.

"Development programs sometimes encounter problems. After exercising due diligence, we decided the path we're going down wouldn't be fruitful, so we're not going down that path anymore."
Mark Wright, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency, said details about the technical problems that led to the project's termination would not be released "due to the classified nature of the program."