John Tierney: “Again, I go to the point of Philip Coyle, who was the director of the operations and testing evaluation program for the…”

“Again, I go to the point of Philip Coyle, who was the director of the operations and testing evaluation program for the Pentagon, who came out clearly and has testified before committees in this House and has made it quite known publicly on the record both while he was in office and since his retirement from the last administration that the testing regime for this national missile defense is nowhere near adequate for us to have any level of confidence that it will be workable, particularly within the time frame that this administration has now set forth, which they claim they are going to have a system workable by 2004. Certainly moving forward and looking at their proposed space-based matters, they are nowhere near that date, or any date within a decade or more beyond that, for deployment. However, within this budget they have some $44.4 million for space-based boost interceptors or the so-called kinetic interceptors and it makes no common sense at all to move forward on this until there has been a formalized plan that lays out specifically how the system can demonstrate its effectiveness and establish some reasonable time frame for accomplishing the goals that the administration has in mind.”