Three Potential Problems With President Obama's Missile Defense Plan

A new arms-control pact with Russia has finally received Senate approval, helped along with an amendment assuring Republicans that START won't limit the United States' ability to pursue missile defense. In some ironic timing, however, the Government Accountability Office this week released a report that is deeply critical of the administration's missile defense plans.

n a photo provided by the U.S. Navy, a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) is launched from the Aegis cruiser.

U.S. Navy / AP

A Standard Missile-3 is launched from the Aegis cruiser USS Shiloh during a ballistic missile flight test in 2006, off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii. The Bush administration focused on placing ground-based interceptors and radar in Europe that could knock long-range ballistic missiles out of the sky, but President Barack Obama has shifted attention to a sea-based system called the European Phased Adaptive Approach.

The report raises a number of criticisms of this approach:

1. Bad management. The Pentagon still hasn't established a process to ensure "transparency and accountability" of this new approach to new missile defense, the GAO says. The report criticizes the lack of clear information on the cost and schedule of the new system.

2. It might miss the mark. To accurately target a missile, the interceptors rely on something called a Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications system, which helps integrate the sensor data and provide targeting information to guide the interceptor to the threat missile. But, the GAO says, the system may not be able to accurately track incoming missiles "and may present an incorrect picture of the battlespace."

3. It's not fully tested. The Pentagon will be buying elements of the new missile defense system before it has been demonstrated that the technology actually works as promised. For example, the Pentagon is buying new interceptors before they are fully tested. GAO points out that flight tests designed to test whether the interceptors work are scheduled for after the Pentagon has already bought 38 of the new interceptor missiles. In fact, the Pentagon will have bought about a third of the planned inventory of 320 interceptors, paying more than $1 billion, before it is sure the missiles work as planned.

The Pentagon, in a letter to the GAO, said it believed that the office had "inaccurately" portrayed its missile defense plans, but missile defense opponents said the report was more evidence that the missile defense system is misguided.

"This, and several previous GAO reports, while accurately outlining the problems portray only some of the symptoms of what is actually a terminally diseased patient," Yousaf Butt, a physicist in the High-Energy Astrophysics Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in an e-mail to AOL News.

Riki Ellison, chairman of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, told AOL News that the GAO report is not an indictment of missile defense but simply a description of longstanding problems with advancing the technology to the point that it can do what policymakers would like it to do. "I think what you're seeing is a gap that's been pretty well established," he said.