BY : the International Herald Tribune

To block American proposals for building missile defenses in Europe, President Vladimir Putin of Russia surprised the White House in June with a counteroffer to let the United States use of one of the Kremlin's most secret early-warning radars.

That Russian radar, located in Azerbaijan, a neighbor of Iran, has since been a central focus of negotiations between Washington and Moscow. But much about it had remained mysterious.

Now, the first American military officer to visit the Russian radar said Friday that he came away with significant impressions: The radar is huge, almost twice the size of a similar American system. Despite its reliance on outdated, vacuum tube technology, the system is extremely capable as an early warning radar scanning the skies over the Middle East.

But the officer, Brigadier General Patrick O'Reilly, deputy director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, said the Russian early warning system could not replace the American radar proposed for the Czech Republic, which is designed for very precise tracking and targeting.

After Putin's offer this summer of access to the radar, O'Reilly led a six-member team to the site in Azerbaijan in mid-September, the first time American military officers had been allowed inside one of Russia's most secret installations.Despite the older technology of the system, "I was impressed by what I saw," O'Reilly said. "It would be a false impression to dismiss the capabilities they have. They just chose another way of achieving it. It is an excellent radar for the case of early warning."

The radar has been well-maintained and upgraded since its design in the 1970s and construction in the 1980s, prompting O'Reilly to report back to Washington that the Russian system offers an extremely desirable capability for early warning of ballistic missile attack from a country such as Iran.

That analysis prompted the United States to invite Russia to link the radar to an American and NATO missile defense system in Europe, which would include a radar in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptors in Poland.

But O'Reilly stressed that the Russian radar was not designed to perform the same function as the American radar proposed for the Czech Republic.

The American radar is to track specific targets and then precisely guide an interceptor to destroy a warhead, something the Russian radar cannot do, since it was designed to scan larger areas, but with less detail, he said.

O'Reilly's comments came as Congress is poised to cut $85 million from the proposed budget for the European missile defense system until Poland and the Czech Republic agree to host the sites. Bush administration officials had hoped for agreements by the end of this year, but that now is not expected before 2008. The Polish and Czech parliaments must approve the agreements.

In his first interview since inspecting the Russian radar in Azerbaijan, which borders Iran, O'Reilly said he was surprised by the enormity of the system, which filled two buildings - one 17 stories tall and one of 8 stories.

Russian military technology is known for designs that are super-sized, an outgrowth of Soviet military strategy in which a centrally planned economy could push vast sums of rubles to the military to counter American technological superiority with superior numbers.

And while American military technology adopted solid-state semiconductor electronics decades ago, the Russian radar still operates using vacuum tubes, O'Reilly said.

He noted that Russia had improved tube technology far beyond where scientists in the United States had taken it before moving to electrical semiconductors.

Following the American visit to the Russian radar, two Russian colonels joined O'Reilly and his boss, Lieutenant General Henry Obering 3rd, the missile agency director, at their Washington headquarters to view operations of an American missile defense test over the Pacific Ocean on Sept. 28. That also was a first for the two militaries.

In an effort to overcome the Kremlin's objections to missile defense in Europe, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Moscow last month to invite Russia to join the United States and NATO as a full partner in designing and operating an antimissile system guarding all of Europe.

Gates said that while the United States hoped to proceed with building the two missile defense sites in Europe, it might delay activation of the system until there was "definitive proof" that Iran poses a missile threat to Europe, which he has defined as the test-flight of an Iranian missile that could strike the Continent.
"The whole premise of the suggestion that I made in Moscow of when you 'operationalize' this would be tied to seeing a flight test," Gates said at the Pentagon on Thursday.

"It's a pretty straightforward threshold. And our belief is we will see those flight tests considerably sooner than the Russians seem to think we will see those flight tests."