Hawaii’s congressional delegation is pulling back its support of a controversial missile defense radar after years of fighting the Pentagon to get it built here.

Under both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the Department of Defense has attempted to pull funding for the Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii, citing difficulty in finding a suitable place to build in the islands and a desire to explore alternatives. The military is looking to spaced-based systems as well as putting ground- and sea-based radars farther into the Western Pacific.

Over the last two years, members of the delegation successfully fought to continue funding for the project, which was expected to create construction jobs and what supporters hoped to be long-term technical and engineering work to help keep local students pursuing those fields in the islands.

However, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz said in an email to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser last week that he no longer supports HDR-H.

“Based on new and ongoing assessments, there seem to be better, more-effective ways to protect Hawaii from missile attacks without this program. For that reason, I will no longer be supporting it,” Schatz said.

U.S. Rep. Ed Case agreed, saying he is awaiting further military review of missile defense options for Hawaii.

“The Department of Defense is reassessing how best to protect Hawaii from missile attack and pending that reassessment has not supported continuing HDR-H as is in the proposed FY23 budget,” Case said in an email to the Star-Advertiser. “I am suspending my support for HDR-H while the DoD works through its review, while supporting a full and timely review to assure Hawaii’s defense.”

Riki Ellison, chairman of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said it appears a decision has been made that such a radar system “is more important forward in Guam, and they see the threat to the U.S. homeland in Guam as a priority.”

Ellison, whose organization seeks to generate support for the continued testing, development and deployment of missile defense systems, according to its website, said the thinking now is that putting detection capabilities on Guam will allow the military to detect missile launches faster than those based in Hawaii.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command did not respond to Star-Advertiser requests for comment.

U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, who had called the Hawaii radar project a “top priority,” and U.S. Rep. Kai Kahele, who supported building it on Kauai, did not respond to Star-Advertiser requests for comment. However, both told Honolulu Civil Beat that their positions had changed, with Kahele withdrawing his support and Hirono saying a “more comprehensive next-generation system is necessary” to protect the islands.

The HDR-H project proved controversial from the start.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a contract for $585 million in December 2018 to develop, build and deliver the radar, with work being done in New Jersey and Hawaii. The contract came on the heels of the Jan. 13, 2018, false missile alert that rattled Hawaii residents amid heightened tensions with North Korea.

Hawaii currently depends on ship-based Aegis radar systems and the Sea-Based X-Band Radar to detect incoming missiles.

Formerly based at Pearl Harbor, the SBX is a mobile radar that was placed on a converted oil rig. The distinctive system, sometimes called “the golf ball” for its large white dome, is now nominally based in Alaska but moves around the Pacific.

Ellison said the SBX “has to be towed out into the middle of the Pacific islands at a very high cost … and to be put in position prior to a ballistic missile threat to Hawaii from North Korea.”

“That was the driving force to have a permanent capability on the islands so you didn’t have to do that,” Ellison said of the rationale behind building the HDR-H.

But costs quickly started stacking up. In 2019, the estimated price tag to build the entire HDR-H facility was about $1 billion, and by 2020 officials were using an estimate of $1.9 billion as planners during the location scouting process began taking into account the challenges of building it on rugged terrain.

The plan also received almost immediate pushback from residents near proposed locations, who raised concerns about its potential impact on the environment and Native Hawaiian cultural sites.

Some critics also have argued that the space-based detection systems being developed would render the HDR-H obsolete and redundant by the time it was finished. They also contend that the ground-based radar wouldn’t be able detect newer hypersonic missiles that China and Russia have been adding to their arsenals. In January, North Korea successfully tested its first hypersonic missiles.

“These capabilities are going so fast that terrestrial radars on land or on sea, they pass them before they can get tracking information to a missile interceptor,” Ellison said. “So we have to have a space-based satellite system.”

IN December 2019, a bout a year after Lockheed Martin got the contract, then-President Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered the Missile Defense Agency to postpone the program and directed planners to conduct a study of various missile detection systems that could be placed around the Pacific.

The Pentagon zeroed out funding for the HDR-H in its budget request for 2021, getting immediate pushback from the Hawaii congressional delegation.

Hirono questioned Esper about the funding in a heated exchange during congressional testimony in March 2020. Esper responded that defunding the project didn’t necessarily mean it was canceled, but that “if I develop a system and can’t put it somewhere, it has no effect. It’s wasted money.”

Last year the Pentagon, under Biden, again zeroed out funding for the radar. The Hawaii delegation again successfully pushed to restore funding in the defense funding bill that Congress passed over the Pentagon’s objections.

“It just struck me as a jobs program,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on missile policy at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “MDA is perfectly happy to light money on fire. So I think if MDA comes along and says, ‘This is a waste of money,’ then it’s waste of money.”

Missile Defense Agency officials did not respond to Star-Advertiser questions by press time.

Ellison said that while moving more missile detection and defense resources to Guam makes military sense, leaving Hawaii without its own radar and waiting for new space-based detection systems to protect the islands is a risk.

Lewis is skeptical of many U.S. missile defense systems and policies but said “the missile proliferation environment is just getting significantly worse.”

China has been rapidly developing new missile technology as well as expanding its arsenal.

“I’m involved in lots of debates about how big that’s going to be,” Lewis said. “I tend to think it’s going to be smaller than other people think, but even I think it’s pretty big.”

North Korea, which had already developed intercontinental ballistic missiles believed to be capable of hitting anywhere in North America, also has developed ICBMs with multiple warheads meant specifically to overwhelm American missile defense systems.

Lewis said if a major Pacific conflict breaks out, Hawaii would be a strategic target.

“The North Koreans have spoken very directly about targeting the fleet in San Diego and Pearl because they want to try to interdict sealift that would sustain an invasion,” he said.

“I imagine the Chinese have a similar idea. If the United States were trying to support Taiwan, those bases might well be a target,” Lewis added. “So if you’re near Pearl, I would take the threat fairly seriously. It’s an important military facility in the Pacific that was a target in World War II and would be a target again.”

THE Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai has become a key testing facility as the U.S. military develops its own new missiles and countermeasures. In recent years, the Russian military has sent spy ships off the coast of Kauai with increasing frequency to monitor missile tests.

“We got to test and track our ability to shoot these down and that’s why PMRF is going be so valuable for us, because you do a lot of testing right now on our own hypersonic offense and hypersonic defense,” Ellison said. “So your island is tremendously valuable right now for the testing and development of these systems that we’re trying to be able to negate and defeat.”

Lewis said that whichever system the U.S. goes with should be built with an eye toward efficiency and cost-effectiveness. But, he argues, ultimately the U.S. and other countries should focus more on diplomacy to reduce the missile risk in the region rather than counting on being able to shoot missiles out of the sky.

“It tends to be cheaper and easier to build missiles than it is to build anti-missiles, and so the math just sort of never works out,” he said. “So the real solution is trying to limit the number of missiles that two sides are building, because if you don’t have a limit you just end up with like a U.S.-Soviet arms race where you end up with 30,000 nuclear weapons each. There’s really no end to it.”