WASHINGTON: As the Pentagon boosts spending and intensifies development of a national anti-missile system, it is also taking steps to shield the programme from Congress and the public, as well as traditional oversight measures within the Defence Department.

In recent months, defence officials have exempted missile defence projects from the planning and reporting requirements normally applied to major acquisition programmes. They have stopped providing Congress with detailed cost estimates and timetables for anti-missile systems. And they have announced plans to restrict information about targets and decoys used in flight tests of the most advanced option under development, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defence.

The moves come against the formal demise of the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty, allowing the US for the first time in 30 years, to pursue a nationwide antimissile system — and to do so by whatever means it wishes.

The new missile site is portrayed by the Pentagon as primarily a “test bed” for gauging how interceptors and command and control networks withstand the Alaskan cold. But defence officials have made no secret of their intention to be able to use the site as an operational anti-missile system should the need arise. The facility is scheduled for completion by September 2004, just as the next presidential election campaign will be peaking.

Citing the Pentagon’s heightened guard about its anti-missile programmes, Democratic lawmakers and other missile defence skeptics accuse the administration of trying to pull a veil over a development effort long troubled by test failures and cost overruns. Without the kind of standard reports and disclosures used in the past to assess missile defence programmes, critics argue, it will be harder to hold the administration accountable for the additional billions of dollars it is investing in the effort.

Pentagon officials say that they are not trying to cover up anything. They say the experimental nature of the missile defence effort and the need for flexibility warrant exemption from traditional requirements and make it impossible to generate meaningful cost estimates or production schedules.—Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service