Posted on 04/11/2004 1:41:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Twenty-one years and $100-billion ago, President Ronald Reagan described his Star Wars dream of a safe and secure nation.
"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack?" he asked. What if "we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"
Today, while most of the world's attention is elsewhere, the United States is taking the first step toward Reagan's elusive and costly goal. Construction is underway in California and Alaska of a ground-based missile system intended to detect, track and destroy an enemy missile before it could strike a target in this country.
Sometime this summer or fall, the United States will put 10 missile interceptors in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Ten more will follow next year. In addition, major radar improvements are planned in Alaska and the United Kingdom.
But is this a step toward the safer nation envisioned by Reagan? Or is it a step toward a new Cold War, an arms-race-in-space with old nemesis Russia and new participants China and North Korea?
Consider the developments of the last few months:
* The Russians boasted of soon having a new weapon of their own. It is a hypersonic, intercontinental cruise missile, they said in February, capable of maneuvering through any missile defense system.
* Last month the United States announced a successful test of a similar vehicle, the hypersonic X43A, a missilelike aircraft designed to fly to the edges of outer space and then return to Earth. NASA touts the peacetime potential of the X43A, but the U.S. military makes no secret of its interest in an aircraft that might become a bomber too fast to be shot down.
* Just a few days ago, Japan announced it would spend $1-billion this year to start work on a joint project with the United States to build a missile shield to protect that nation. The system would be operational in about three years. The United States is reportedly making the same offer of protection to other nations, among them India.
* In response, China complained that the U.S.-Japan project destabilizes the region, that it is intended to dilute Chinese power and keep it from ever assimilating Taiwan. Meanwhile, China itself has become a major power in space and missile development.
It all has a familiar ring for Victoria Samson, a defense analyst for the independent Center for Defense Information. "The Cold War is far from over," she said. "It may just be entering a new phase."
The Russian posturing about a new hypersonic cruise missile is a reaction to the U.S. plan to deploy the first stages of an antimissile system this summer, she said, and the United States should expect other nations to behave the same way. "This kind of thing makes other countries very nervous and it forces them to step up their own military spending," she said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin put it bluntly. "As other countries increase the number and quality of their arms and military potential," he said recently, "then Russia will also need to ensure it has a new generation of arms and technology."
But critics of the U.S. plan are worried about more than a new arms race, or "missile gap."
They say the antimissile system now being deployed by the United States is costly and unproven - that it has "boondoggle" stenciled all over it.
Testing as we go along Recently, a group of 49 high-ranking, retired military officers asked President Bush to delay deployment of the antimissile system, calling it the "responsible" thing to do. One of those who signed the March 26 letter was Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, former head of the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
Only two of 10 "critical technologies" have been verified workable by adequate testing, they charged. The money saved by delaying deployment should be redirected to protecting "the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials, and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists."
Critics of the system have strong doubts about the way it is being tested - or rather, the way it is not being tested.
The military's usual test requirements have been suspended to meet the deployment deadline later this year. In their place is a process called "spiral development," which means testing incrementally as the system is deployed, piece by piece.
"That's a foolish way to go," said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration and now an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in an interview last week.
"That's the kind of thing to do if a threat is imminent. But there's no imminent threat now. It's foolish, even bizarre, and it's likely to run up huge costs. That's why those generals and admirals wrote that letter."
Samson agreed. "The problem is that the system being deployed this year is schedule-driven," she said. "The United States is unwisely whisking its programs through development. This rush to failure is creating a missile defense system which offers no defense and will spend billions of dollars in the process."
The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, an independent nonprofit focusing on national security, argues that use of any untested components puts the program "in danger of getting off the track early and impairing the effort over the long term."
In a report on the issue, the center acknowledges that "hostile rogue states, especially North Korea, will have the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction by ballistic missile on the U.S., perhaps in the next decade. However, even our obsolescent Defense Support Program satellites are capable of pinpointing the location of a ballistic missile launch. Why would any state, rogue or otherwise, employ a ballistic missile or missiles to deliver a weapon of mass destruction on the U.S., and thereby invite a devastating retaliatory strike?
"There is no evidence that leaders of rogue regimes, including Korea and Iran, have suicidal tendencies."
Making matters worse, the testing done on the system thus far has been rigged, the center charges.
"Of the 10 flight tests that have been completed, eight were intercept tests; five of the eight have been declared successful. However, all five have employed the same unrealistic target missile trajectory, known in advance, and flown at low speed and altitude. The simple target missiles have been rigged with transmitters that exaggerate their signatures . . . for midcourse tracking."
In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency, defended the system. Today, missile defense development "takes place in uncharted waters," he said. "We are no longer compelled to pursue a 100 percent solution for every possible attack scenario before we can provide any defense at all."
The president, Kadish said, recognizes that the first system will have limited capability. "He directed that we field what we have, then improve what have fielded."
"Which would we rather have," he asked. "Some capability today, or none as we seek a 100 percent solution?"
Korb discounted Russian claims of having developed a super weapon that would defeat any missile defense system.
"What the U.S. is building would not halt a Russian attack anyway," he said. "They have on the order of 7,000 warheads," far more than could be intercepted. Russians, he said, are particularly sensitive about their missile capability, "because that's all they have left."
Countering an unknown threat The 10 missiles going into the ground in Alaska and California this fall are just the first piece of a much larger system planned for land, sea and space.
The idea is to be able to knock a missile out of the sky as it leaves the ground (boost phase), as it flies to its target (midcourse phase), or as it descends to its target (terminal phase).
Eventually, if built as currently planned, the system will use shipboard missiles, ground-based missiles, satellites and radar to detect a launch, track the missile in flight, then destroy it in one of its three phases. The Pentagon is studying a laser mounted aboard a Boeing 747, too, but development of that weapon has suffered recent setbacks.
The ground-based missile system under construction in Alaska and California is designed to protect against the most dangerous but most remote threat - that posed by a long-range, intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
To be successful, the ground-launched interceptor must hit the attacking missile in the midcourse, outer space part of its flight. Near misses don't count. The launch must be detected, its course determined, and the interceptor launched. But how do Pentagon officials assure U.S. taxpayers they can hit a bullet with a bullet? How can they cause a 16,000 mph hit on a speck in space, especially one surrounded by decoy specks?
Here's the plan. With a rough idea of the incoming missile's track, the interceptor is launched. Atop the interceptor sits the exoatmospheric kill vehicle. Once in outer space, it disengages from the booster rocket and receives last-minute target information from the ground and from tracking satellites. Finally, it must locate the incoming warheads on its own, distinguish the real from the fake, and then steer itself into the warhead's path. The interceptor carries no explosives; the collision destroys the incoming missile.
A second key part of the system, to be deployed by the end of 2006, is a fleet of 15 destroyers and three cruisers, each equipped with the Aegis antimissile system. The missile used on the warships is not the same as those to be launched from Alaska and California. The ships used a modified version of a proven Navy antiaircraft missile, linked to the high-tech Aegis radar.
Since the Navy missile is built to intercept a missile in boost phase, the Aegis system is considered a "theater" or regional system. According to published reports, the first Aegis vessel will arrive in the Sea of Japan in September.
It is the Aegis system - and the fact that the Pentagon recently announced a $1.78-billion sale of radar equipment to Taiwan - that critics say will immediately disrupt the balance of power in the region.
China, already displeased with Japan's decision to spend a billion dollars on missile defense, said the radar sale to Taiwan sent the "wrong message." Typically, North Korea was more blunt. The Navy deployment in the Sea of Japan was preparation for war, a spokesman said, and part of its "attempt to dominate the Asia-Pacific region."
Howard Baker, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, acknowledged that a shield would rob missile-armed nations of offensive power and could encourage the development of shield-piercing missiles, but he said it would not destabilize Asia.
"Missile defense is a unique military concept," he told reporters recently. "It is inherently incapable of offensive operation. It is purely defensive. And therefore I don't think anybody should be concerned about it."
A Pox on All Space Control-Relevant Technologies?
Last October, cancellation of two of these three programs -- an asteroid intercept experiment that would have further validated the feasibility of space-based anti-missile technology developed under the Strategic Defense Initiative (Clementine II) and the Army's Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite (KE-ASAT) program -- was justified on policy grounds. A programmatic rationale was offered for the third, the Military Space Plane. As a practical matter, however, the capabilities inherent in a space plane optimized for military purposes would also have fallen afoul of Administration opposition to technologies that enable the United States to neutralize or destroy missiles and other objects flying through space. 1998 Source
Bump! for a great dissection.
Can't the idiots understand that we have to focus on many threats; not only on the Islamic hordes!
Before 9/11 I wouldn't have worried about terrorists taking over and ICBM silo in the former USSR and launching it at us. Of course there's also the silo commander goes nuts and the accidental launch scenarios.
National Missile Defense is not about Russia. It's about the countries with only a few missiles now having the same deterrence as Russia and U.S. Come to think of it, we'll need to defend against France once their government switches to an Islamic theocracy.
Wonderful, we'll send "law enforcement" to avenge the radioactive city or the quarantined enclave of the dead and dying. And what about the allies downwind of the launch site? Or the 10's of millions in the city near the launch site where Al-Q operatives launched their attack with their black-market road-portable missile? Did it ever occur to them that the launcher of the missile might be counting on a retaliatory strike against the launch site?
Why do these people want us to be defenseless????????
Bull. When someone from the leftist Center for Defense Information says:
"The Cold War is far from over," she said. "It may just be entering a new phase."
She is echoing the point I have been making for many years. Amazing that these people would grasp this truth. The Cold War never ended. The Soviet Union did not "collapse". It morphed. We are dealing, after all, with the people who invented the Potemkin Village. And although they are supposedly "broke" they managed to design, test, and field a new generation of ICBMs...aimed at us.
--Boris
Would be nice to have an umbrella that could stop thousands of warheads. Right now, I'd say neutering North Korea's threat is more important.
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