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Japan-US missile defense test fails off Hawaii

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-11-20 21:35

WASHINGTON -- A Japanese warship failed to shoot down a ballistic missile target in a joint test with US forces Wednesday because of a glitch in the final stage of an interceptor made by Raytheon Co, a US military official said.

A missile is launched from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship Chokai in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii November 20, 2008. [Agencies]

The kinetic warhead's infrared "seeker" lost track in the last few seconds of the $55 million test, about 100 miles above Hawaiian waters, said US Rear Admiral Brad Hicks, program director of the Aegis sea-based leg of an emerging US anti-missile shield.

"This was a failure," he said in a teleconference with reporters. It brought the tally of Aegis intercepts to 16 in 20 tries.

The problem "hopefully was related just to a single interceptor," not to a systemic issue with the Standard Missile-3 Block 1A, the same missile used in February to blow apart a crippled US spy satellite, Hicks said.

John Patterson, a spokesman at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Arizona, said the company would not comment pending the results of an engineering analysis of what may have gone wrong.

The test involved the Chokai, the second Japanese Kongo-class ship to be outfitted by the United States for missile defense, and a dummy missile fired from a range on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

A Japanese defense official said he thought Japan would continue with its missile defense plans.

"I believe the system is sufficiently reliable," Japan's top military bureaucrat, Vice Minister Kohei Masuda, told reporters later.

"I don't think there will be any effect on the construction schedule Japan is planning," he added.

The drill off Kauai featured the ship-borne Aegis ballistic missile defense system made by Lockheed Martin Corp, which apparently worked without a hitch.

The operation of the Aegis system by the Chokai's crew and the missile's "flyout" toward the target were successful even though the intercept was not achieved, said Rear Adm. Tomohisa Takei, operations and plans director for the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, and US Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.

More information will be available after a thorough investigation, they said in the statement.

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