It is not clear how the national missile defense system to be deployed by 2004 will be manned 24 hours a day.

You want that system in Alaska by the end of 2004.

Secretary Crouch, when does the U.S. plan to upgrade the radars in the U.K. and Greenland for missile defense, and how much funding will be required to protect the upgraded radars and the local inhabitants from potential terrorist strikes…

Although presumably the warhead would not be armed. Unless they do not have the arming techniques.

What do you think about the potential side benefit of this kind of system?

If you are going to have 16 more tests, and this thing is operational in 2004, you are really going to have a challenge of how do you pull it off of operational to get all those tests done.

Where is Shemya?

Do you not have a lot of promise on your boost phase right now with the Aegis system?

If you can shoot down a rocket in its boost phase with a laser from a big airplane, you can shoot down anything.

But the technical capability has to follow a policy decision. That is why I raised the issue for you to start thinking about.

Okay. So, that is a little island, you have it there or the floating platform.

The Missile Defense Agency is an R&D agency that has no operational control over the system it develops.

Let me ask a policy question to the secretary over there. That would be the first time that we would be weaponizing space.

That is why you need my vote.

Why, then, is there no current capability against a real threat?

Yet you have had some interceptor successes?

So, since your statement in February, there has been such sufficient confidence in the system and the testing that you feel like that it is not going to affect the effectiveness in order to deploy this in 2004?

Mr. Christie, in your February assessment of the ground-based national missile defense program, you stated that 'only a very limited range of engagement parameters have been explored so far,' that 'overall only limited potential…