The United States will have a limited defence against incoming ballistic missiles by the end of this year, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday in prepared remarks, calling it a "triumph of hope and vision over pessimism and scepticism."
Rumsfeld hailed the developers of the missile defence system in a speech prepared for delivery to a conference in Huntsville, Alabama, a day after President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, clashed over the controversial project on the campaign trail.
"It has been two years since President Bush announced the decision to deploy an initial missile defence capability and in the past few weeks, the first interceptor was put in place at Fort Greely, Alaska," Rumsfeld said.
"By the end of this year, we expect to have a limited operational capability against ballistic missiles," he said.
"These achievements represent the triumph of hope and vision over pessimism," he said.
Plans call for having up to 20 interceptor missiles at Fort Greely and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California by the end of 2005.
Five ground-based interceptor missiles are slated to go into silos at Fort Greely by the end of this year, and three or four more at Vandenberg by early next year. Another 10 interceptors are to be added in Fort Greely by the end of next year.
Pentagon officials say they will form an initial capability to intercept and destroy long-range ballistic missiles fired over the Pacific at the United States.
In tests, target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five of eight attempts.
But the last intercept attempt was in December 2002, and critics say the system is being fielded without sufficient testing. Ten billion dollars have been budgeted for the program this year.
Rumsfeld defended what he said was "an evolutionary approach" to developing and deploying defences against long-range missile attack by rogue states.
"Rather than waiting for a fixed and final architecture, we are deploying an initial set of capabilities," he said. "They will evolve over time, as technology advances - as we are able to make these limited defences more robust."
Rumsfeld broke little new ground in his speech the Space and Missile Defence Conference in Huntsville, which echoed one by Bush at a campaign stop Tuesday at a Boeing military equipment factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
"Those who oppose this ballistic missile system really don't understand the threats of the 21st century," Bush said. "They're living in the past. We're living in the future. We're going to do what's necessary to protect this country."
But in a sharply worded response, Kerry national security adviser Rand Beers derided Bush's "near obsession with missile defence," and said that "the greatest threat facing our homeland comes from terrorists."
In the months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, "Bush and his closest advisors were preoccupied with missile defence and their misunderstanding about the threats we face continues to this day," Beers said in a statement.