Last Saturday the Pentagon secretly met with five defense contractors; Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman.
The meeting was to discuss how to divide up the billion dollar contracts for NMD (National Missile Defense) re-structuring.
These are the same people who rigged the missile tests last July and have been wasting our money on a defective system for the past 12 years.
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November 7, 2001
Politics & Policy
Pentagon and Weapons Contractors Weigh
Restructuring of Missile-Defense Program
By ANNE MARIE SQUEO and GREG JAFFE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Pentagon is weighing a restructuring of its missile-defense programs to better respond to enemy attacks here and abroad.
Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, who heads the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, met secretly Saturday with top executives of five big defense companies to enlist their help, people familiar with the meeting said. Among the companies that attended were those already playing key roles in developing missile-defense systems, including Boeing Co., Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Any restructuring could realign the fortunes of weapons contractors currently reaping billions of dollars from this work. For example, Boeing, which has been overseeing development of a national missile-defense system for several years, could see its role diminished in that program, which focuses on the interception of missiles aimed at U.S. soil.
General Dynamics Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. also attended the weekend meeting, a sign these companies could see an expansion of their limited work in this area.
Gen. Kadish asked the companies to craft a plan for restructuring the missile-defense work, possibly to create a "national team" of partners working more closely together, people familiar with the meeting said. The companies are to provide their responses before the end of the year. Then Gen. Kadish and top Pentagon officials are expected to decide how sweeping a realignment to undertake. Representatives for all five companies declined to comment on the topic, as did a spokesman for the Pentagon's ballistic missile-defense agency.
One possibility would be creation of an uber-integrator within the industry to oversee all missile-defense systems being developed, including the one currently managed by Boeing. The goal, said one defense official, is a cohesive military system to track the path of an incoming enemy missile and use any number of defensive measures to stop it before it hits U.S. territory. The U.S. might choose to name three lead integrators to divvy up work according to the point at which a missile is intercepted -- either right after launch in the "boost" phase, in midflight or just before descent.
The change appears to flow from a massive reorganization of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization over the summer. The changes were intended to integrate various missile-defense systems that are under development. For example, the Navy had two systems in the works: one that would intercept missiles within the atmosphere and one outside. The Air Force has been developing an intercept system using a laser fired from an aircraft to detonate a missile shortly after launch. And the Army has a system that was intended to intercept an enemy missile before it strikes ground troops.
These programs account for tens of billions of dollars in federal money. Under the restructured Pentagon missile-defense agency, the lines are blurring between these formerly independent projects and the larger missile-intercept system intended to protect the U.S. from missile attack. Now all weapons programs still in experimental stages are managed by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which reports directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Once a program has matured enough to be deployed, the Pentagon plans to switch oversight back to the service that had been sponsoring it.
Write to Anne Marie Squeo at annemarie.squeo@wsj.com1 and Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com2
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