Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly spoke at the House of Representatives’ Strategic Forces Subcommittee on February 25, 2009. Congresswoman Ellen O.tauscher headed the panel that LTG Patrick O’Reilly addressed during the 111th Congress, which included this speech. Congress and the Department of Defense both praised General Patrick O’Reilly’s speech, which was well regarded. The defensive system against ballistic missiles During his speech to the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Patrick O’Reilly discussed the Department of Defense’s ballistic missile defense system testing program. During Lt Gen. Patrick O’Reilly’s speech, the army, navy, and air force were collaborating with the Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency to assess the state of the ballistic missile defense system. According to Ltg Patrick O’Reilly, these organizations collaborated to develop a method for evaluating the ballistic missile defense system’s sustainability and efficacy. Our goal is to set test objectives that measure the performance of critical functions necessary for robust missile defense operations and create an event-oriented plan that extends out as many years as necessary to collect sufficient data to determine the operational effectiveness, suitability, survivability, and supportability of the system, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly stated in his own words. The difficulties of developing a ballistic missile defense system that was capable of intercepting fundamentally diverse kinds of missiles flying at high speeds and over enormous distances was a primary evaluation problem in General Patrick O’Reilly’s speech. Although no single system can guarantee total protection from missile assault, LTG Patrick O’Reilly said that the ballistic missile defense system’s twin sensor and interceptor system, placed at separate atmospheric levels, give what seems to be the finest defense. At the hearing, Dr. McQueary acknowledged the difficulty of the testing and said, I do applaud General O’Reilly’s personal commitment to the initiative. Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly said that the Department of Defense’s evaluation of the Ballistic Missile Defense system was anticipated to be one of the most intricate projects in the agency’s history. As he clarified to the media, we’re working with the operational test communities to put together a comprehensive testing program that does convince everyone of (the) capabilities and limitations of these missile defense systems, not just the MDA but the independent reviewers as well. It was a significant task. The ballistic missile defense system really lacked a lot of crucial elements that were necessary for an efficient test program and had to be evaluated, such a clear understanding of the system’s intended functionality and the ability to test the system extensively and frequently. In his statement to the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Ltg Patrick O’Reilly made it apparent that substantial modeling and simulation based on real flight test data were simply required for such an assessment. Going ahead, Patrick O’Reilly spoke about how the ballistic missile defense system is always changing in this 2009 speech. As a dynamic barrier that is always changing to counter new technological threats, the system presents a unique challenge to efficient evaluation. Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly placed these challenges in the context of certain significant accomplishments made by the Department of Defense in evaluating the ballistic missile defense system. General Patrick O’Reilly claimed that with persistent computer modeling and thorough testing, it was feasible to get clarity on the efficacy of this approach. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/chrg-111hhrg51659/html/chrg-111hhrg51659.htm is one of the sources for further information. Here’s a link to Newsmax’s article about missile defense review from February 26, 2009: ixzz2vp2phzma The article La Fimo Missile Defense Test-20121025 can be found at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/25/business. Here’s a link to Newsmax’s article about missile defense review from February 26, 2009: ixzz2vp2phzma