The Pentagon's Airborne Laser project was one of the big winners in President George W. Bush's amended defense budget for fiscal 2002, which he sent to Congress late in June. The amended budget—which reflects the conclusions of a massive review of US defense strategy in the few months since the Bush administration took office—would increase the 2002 budget for the Airborne Laser (ABL) program to $410 million, almost twice what the administration had proposed as recently as February. The additional funds would keep the ABL program on track for tests in 2003 and for deployment as early as 2008.
The focus of the Airborne Laser program is the development of a Boeing 747 equipped with a chemical oxygen iodine laser that could destroy ballistic missiles in the moments after being launched by an enemy. The airborne laser is being designed and built by a team of contractors headed by TRW Space and Electronics (Redondo Beach CA), Boeing Co. (Seattle WA), and Lockheed Martin (Palo Alto CA).
Although the project enjoys strong support in Congress, the US Air Force last year proposed spending less money on it than was needed to keep the ABL on schedule. Congress overruled that idea, giving ABL $234 million, $85 million more than the Clinton administration had requested.
The Bush administration's latest budget request gives even more money to the program, and moves it—as well as the Space-Based Laser program, which aims at developing an orbiting laser system that could destroy ballistic missiles in flight—out of the Air Force and under the aegis of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. That move was part of a general restructuring of the nation's missile-defense program, said Dov Zakheim, the Defense Department's controller. Mature missile-defense systems, such as an upgrade to the Patriot ground-based missile, have been turned over to the military services, while the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization has taken charge of systems that are not as mature, such as the ABL, he said.
Not everyone is happy with the direction of the program. At a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee the day after the revised budget was unveiled, Rep. Thomas Allen (D-Maine), criticized the planned tests of the ABL system. He told defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the thrust of the budget in money and politics is to "intentionally rig a test as early as possible to violate" the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
The treaty does not bar defenses against theater, or short-range missiles, and the ABL system could be tested in a fashion that does not violate the treaty, the congressman said. But the Pentagon has gone out of its way to structure the tests in a way that would violate the treaty, he said. "For example, the airborne laser technologies could be tested in 2003 against as short-range target, which would be treaty compliant, but then you apparently have chosen to arbitrarily test it against an ICBM, which would not be treaty compliant," he said. "Why does your budget precipitously force a confrontation over the ABM Treaty issue before it has to, thus limiting the time we have to renegotiate the treaty with the Russians?" he asked Rumsfeld.
While Rumsfeld did not directly address the allegation about ABL's tests, he acknowledged that he's no fan of the ABM Treaty. "The Cold War is over. We need to get over it, it seems to me," said Rumsfeld.
But support among lawmakers for the Airborne Laser progam was evident a week before the Bush administration released its revised 2002 Pentagon budget, when the House of Representatives debated another bill, this one to provide extra funds to the Pentagon for fiscal 2001. That bill included an extra $153 million for the ABL program. The House turned aside a proposal by Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) to cut $55 million from that figure.
Kucinich told lawmakers that the Pentagon's schedule for conducting tests of the ABL in 2003 is arbitrary in the face of technical problems the project has encountered, and he noted that the request was $55 million more than the Air Force previously had requested as recently as January. "We are helping to accelerate a flawed testing program," he said. "Appropriating $153 million for the airborne laser . . . does not represent good government, it does not represent smart budgeting, and it may not represent common sense," he said.
But Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, said the extra $55 million would be used to purchase spare equipment for use in testing and to cover growth in costs of the program's suppliers. And Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), told lawmakers that the extra funds were essential to keeping the ABL program on track. "If we do not fund this supplemental request, that question of being able to get the test to see if this will work to protect our troops when they are deployed in the field will be jeopardized."
Further, Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas), the Republicans' deputy whip and a former Boeing employee, said the ABL is not as experimental as Kucinich suggests. "It has worked in the lab and it will work on the airplane. It is not a crazy missile program," he said. "It is a commonsense approach to protecting our young men and women who put themselves at risk."