Engineer Memoirs
The problem was that it was too costly. Even the optimistic estimates were too costly,
and there were some pessimistic estimates that said it would cost a great deal more than
that. They decided that they wanted to get somebody to study this who was not from
the air-defense community because they felt that everybody in the air-defense
community was biased. They selected me to do this.
Q:
This was an independent effort on your part?
A:
I left OCE and had an office in the Pentagon. I reported to the Assistant Chief of Staff
for Force Development. I received a small staff of about a half-dozen people. There
were some civilians on it that had been in air defense, and there were some military.
We set up a study effort that involved the Missile Command at Huntsville and the
contractor for the system, Raytheon, which is located in Andover, Massachusetts.
Another participant in this study was the Army Air Defense Center at Fort Bliss
[Texas]. We got the Air Force involved. We had Braddock, Dunn and MacDonald
[BDM], a well-known military think tank, which had an air defense computer model
called TACOS. That does stand for tactical air something-or-other [tactical air combat
operations simulation], but it also has a Mexican-sounding name, consistent with the
location of BDM's office in El Paso.
This was a model for an air attack against Western Europe. You could put different air
defense weapons in this simulation to see how they did. You could fly red attacks
against blue defenses. You could put up a defense where you assumed you used Hawk
on the one hand. Or, you could put up a defense where you assumed you used SAMD.
Then you could simulate the same attack and see how much you reduced the enemy air
forces.
Q:
This was a straight ground-to-air missile. It wasn't part of the ICBM system that was
being developed at the time.
A:
It was a tactical air defense system, which is what Patriot is. They were claiming at the
time that SAMD, with its phased array radar, would have a capability to engage enemy
tactical missiles. The requirement would be to put a nuclear warhead on SAMD,
which would be used to engage either enemy aircraft, but more importantly, enemy
missiles.
With a nuclear warhead, you didn't have to have such an accurate engagement in order
to kill the incoming missile. If you assumed the incoming missile was nuclear-capable,
then you would launch a defensive missile, possibly with a nuclear warhead.
128
Previous Page
