The critical issue of Missile Defense now confronts our nation. The key questions remain: How mandatory is it? What is the threat that we need to protect ourselves against? What kind of system do we need? Is the one that is in the plans effective enough? How expensive will it be and how long will it take to build? And do we have the political will and leadership to get it done?
To discuss these issues with us today, we have assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests are:
Thomas Karako, the Director of Programs at the Claremont Institute and the editor of Missilethreat.com. He is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University, and a member of the Independent Working Group, which in July issued a major report, Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the Twenty-First Century.
Austin Bay, an author and a syndicated newspaper columnist (Creators Syndicate, www.creators.com). He is also a contributing editor at StrategyPage.com and on the advisory board of PajamasMedia.com. Bay's newspaper columns focus on national security issues. He is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, who served in the Persian Gulf War. In 2004, he returned to active duty to serve with Multi-National Corps-Iraq in Baghdad. He has a Ph.D. from Columbia University and is a senior lecturer in the University of Texas' Plan 2 honors program. His most recent novel is The Wrong Side of Brightness (Penguin/Berkley). Visit his website at www.austinbay.net.
Ilan Berman, Vice President for Policy of the Washington-based American Foreign Policy Council. An Adjunct Professor for International Law and Global Security at the National Defense University in Washington, DC., he serves as a member of the reconstituted Committee on the Present Danger, and as Editor of the Journal of International Security Affairs. He is the author of the book Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States and a member of the Independent Working Group, which recently issued a major report on Missile Defense.
and
Jed Babbin, the former deputy undersecretary of defense in the administration of George H.W. Bush. He writes weekly for RealClearPolitics.com and the American Spectator. He occasionally guest-hosts on Hugh Hewitt's and Michael Medved's radio shows. He's the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think, and the co-author (with Ed Timperlake) of the new book Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States.
FP: Ilan Berman, Jed Babbin, Austin Bay and Thomas Karako, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Ilan Berman, let’s begin with you. What are the key issues involved?
Berman: The central issue today is whether or not the emerging American missile defense system is robust enough, versatile enough, and capable enough to offer a comprehensive defense against all potential adversaries or strategic competitors. Without question, the Bush administration should be credited for taking serious strides in this direction over the past several years -- most significantly, by withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in June of 2002. Nevertheless, our missile defense effort is still very much driven by political considerations (about accommodating Russia, preserving the status quo with China, and so forth). The result is a system that -- at least in its current form -- does not have the ability to adequately respond to the complexity of the 21st century threat environment facing the United States.
Back in 1998, the Rumsfeld Commission warned that the ballistic missile threat to the United States was "broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly" than commonly understood. Thankfully, public awareness of these dangers in increasing, but our ability to confront them still lags far behind.
FP: Austin Bay, what do you make of Mr. Berman’s assessment that our ability to confront the dangers lags far behind because of political considerations?
Bay: In my mind there is no doubt -- none whatsoever-- that our current limited anti-missile system isn’t what it should be or could be, and yes, myopic, wrong-headed politics played a key role in delaying program funding, testing, and deployment.
From 1995 to 1999 I served as a reservist in the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Clinton Administration’s name for SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative (now simply Missile Defense). I credit Clinton’s first SecDef, Les Aspin, with keeping the “embers” of the SDI program going, despite the constant anti-ABM cant of major media and opposition from the McGovernite wing of his own party.
That said, our anti-missile programs didn’t receive the kind of affirmative executive emphasis and focus they deserved, particularly with the emerging threat of a “missile pulse” fired by a rogue nation. We concentrated on "anti-theater missile weapons" and avoided discussion of "strategic missiles" (ICBM) because to do so might challenge the authority of the 1972 ABM Treaty.
However, new technologies and proliferating weapons technologies had made the ABM Treaty a relic sometime in the late 1980s, but certainly after Saddam’s SCUD display in the Persian Gulf War and with the formal demise of the Soviet Union that miserable treaty was a collection of dead paragraphs. Proponents of the ABM Treaty remained trapped in an odd, Cold War amber. For them the treaty was a religious document that guaranteed peace to all who professed it.
I suspect the hardest elements of the Left had invested a lot of time, energy, and youth in portraying Reagan as a mad, nuclear armed cowboy. (Recall the 1983 so-called Euro-Missile Crisis? If you don’t read about it here.) The anti-Reaganites derided SDI as “Star Wars.” Agreed, the “Astrodome” SDI (one capable of stopping, say, two hundred Soviet ICBMs) was sci-fi –or a very long sci-reach, decades away—but the hard core opposed the idea of even deploying a limited defensive system to counter an accidental launch. That hard core created political friction, especially when anti-missile missile test failures were treated to big “we told you so” headlines in the New York Times. In my opinion we didn’t shoot enough. Missile testing is about failing and learning from failures. You expect to fail when you are learning to hit a bullet with a bullet. What do I mean by not enough failures? We didn’t shoot enough because testing our anti-missile missiles was provocative– or some such nonsense.
My experience at BMDO underscored several truths missile-defense advocates and responsible critics acknowledge. Hitting a bullet with a bullet is a tough mission. The technology is expensive. You must test the technology, thoroughly. I also concluded removing 1972 treaty restrictions on space-based targeting would dramatically improve current and projected ABM capabilities.
This ended in 2001 when the Bush Administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty — Cold War fossil that it was– and committed the US to deploying a “thin shield” ABM. Thank goodness. The politicos who opposed ABM development and worshiped that fossil called the 1972 ABM Treaty need to be damned in public.
Babbin: I beg to differ. First, the issue to be addressed at the outset is not to pin the tail on the donkeys who have prevented a robust missile defense since President Reagan announced the initiative twenty years ago. If we want to play those games, the principal blame goes to Sen. Carl Levin and no credit whatever goes to the Clinton administration, who did absolutely nothing other than slow-roll missile defense. To say anything else is risible.
The issue is, what is the threat we need to answer and how best to answer it? The threat we have to face is at least twofold. First is the conventional ICBM attack for which we have the relatively long window of response (less than five minutes) to launch or deploy from space a defensive measure. Second is the no-notice launch from a tramp steamer that can send a short-range missile armed with nuclear or other similarly deadly weapons aimed at our population. How best to answer it is with a multi-layered defense that includes -- expressly -- defensive weapons that include directed energy weapons and kinetic kill weapons in earth orbit. It includes, as well, weapons designed to protect essential satellite tracking, communications, command and control assets.
Second, we need the leadership -- and here a call to bipartisanship should affect all but the worst missile defense diehards -- to get the urgent planning and funding accomplished to get this done. What is our time frame? No one here knows. Urgency is required. Will the Dems join in or will they again only serve the Michael Moorons of their party who want America to remain virtually defenseless?
Karako: It says something about the issue of missile defense when on July 4, 2006, a two-bit, third world country run by a first rate thug launches seven missiles of decades-old technology, causing news cycles around the world to flail in paroxysms of confusion and disbelief. It is almost incredible that world economic powers such as the United States and Japan should have to wonder about their near total vulnerability to such comparatively inexpensive technology. How is it that we find ourselves in such a situation?
The answer is that the United States had for some 40 years made the deliberate choice to remain vulnerable to ballistic missiles, weapons with the unique capability to deliver with accuracy large payloads through space and over intercontinental distances in a very short period of time. We have done so consciously and deliberately, placing our hopes in a peculiar sort of strategic stability based upon a purely offensive form of nuclear deterrence—“the balance of terror.”
If a balance of terror was ever a sound basis for defense policy during the Cold War, when we attempted with arms control to artificially sustain “symmetry,” it makes even less sense now. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 environment, we have been reminded that “asymmetry” is the default setting in the history of war, that “terror” is also an instrument of statecraft, and that every country seeks a competitive advantage to play to its strengths and the competitor’s weaknesses at the least cost. North Korea and Iran rationally made ballistic missile development a priority because deliberate vulnerability grants disproportionate heft, both military and diplomatic. The peculiar circumstance in which we find ourselves today is not that they do so, but that we have chosen not to compete, even though this is an arms competition we can win.
Lest anyone think that the missile defense fight is not a political one, or indulge the happy delusion that the acquisition of robust missile defenses are inevitable, one need only look in the past few weeks and see the number of Democrats who have lined up in the face of North Korean belligerence, and renewed the tired opposition to missile defenses as destabilizing and provocative. John Kerry promised to halve the MDA budget if elected president. Is that not a possibility again if a Democrat were elected in 2008?
The legacy of the Cold War hostility to strategic defense has taken a long time to overcome. Ronald Reagan re-questioned the sanity of the whole prospect of assured destruction in 1983. That was 23 years ago, and Russian, Chinese, and even rogue missiles still have a “free ride” to the United States, despite the 1999 Act of Congress (signed by President Clinton) declaring it the policy of the U.S. to field a defense against limited attacks from any quarter—presumably including the ship-launched Scud scenario which Babbin notes.
To speak to the comments by Bay and Babbin: keeping embers warm is admirable inasmuch as one is opposing an administration bent on extinguishing the embers entirely. But merely keeping on the lights at BMDO did not and could not overcome the decades-long strategic atrophy which had come to infect national security thinking at every level. As Berman notes, the Bush administration has done very important things to changing the perception of assured destruction, both in very important international agreements and in withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, which even Reagan did not do.
Yet despite great work in the past five years on a number of missile defense systems, the culture and premises of MAD have proven to be powerful and long lasting. We have not funded or deployed the assets necessary to make strategic vulnerability a relic of the Cold War. So it remains unclear whether or how long our defenses will, to quote President Bush from July, remain “modest and new.”
Berman: I think Tom has it exactly right. The political circumstances surrounding our failure to deploy a robust missile defense transcend any one party or particular candidate. The debate over whether to defend America from ballistic missile attack has gone on for decades, and politicians on both sides of the aisle have consistently decided that the American people should not be protected from the threat posed by enemy missiles. It would be hard to chalk this up to anything other than a complete failure of government.
All of which raises an interesting question: since the federal government has consistently and utterly failed to provide a defense against this threat, where should concerned Americans turn? Here, grassroots political pressure is crucial. Politicians can and should be forced to explain to their electorates why they have consistently chosen to shirk their responsibilities on such a critical issue. But efforts at the local and grassroots level are equally important. Since the federal government for all intents and purposes has given up this fight, the battleground over missile defense policy has shifted to state legislatures, local government initiatives and non-governmental initiatives. The good news here is that, in the wake of 9/11, these policy actors are more important and more relevant than ever before, and what they do has the ability to "trickle up" and influence national decision-making.
Bay: Jamie asked if political considerations created a lag in ABM programs. They did. To my mind answering the question requires pinning tails on several primarily Donkey derrieres. I noted Les Aspin because he didn’t capitulate to his own political culture. Aspin kept ABM programs alive despite what I called the lack of “affirmative executive emphasis” in his own administration. That was a soft way of damning President Clinton – and apparently Mr. Babbin found it too soft. He adds Carl Levin to the condemnation list, and I agree. With glee. (I also think it’s a howler –that’s risible raised two quanta-- that I appear to anyone as an apologist for the Clinton Administration.) As for Mr. Karako’s and Mr. Berman’s points on the deleterious effects of the “balance of terror” strategic culture – they’re right. And yes, Republicans bought off on MAD, though Reagan changed many if not most GOP minds. Strategic cultures are tough to challenge and bitterly hard to change, particularly when The New York Times is wedded to the strategic culture. We’ve watched the NY Times’ power diminish and the power of the “grassroots” Internet increase.
So I wholeheartedly agree that grassroots political efforts to build domestic support for ABM deployment is in order –though it was also in order twenty years ago.
Which is why I think it’s worth a quick review of what has been done. Strategic defense systems have what the procurement crowd calls “a long lead time.” We had to design and develop without overwhelming grassroots support.
And we did, which is why I disagree with Mr. Berman’s statement that the federal government has “consistently and utterly failed to provide a defense against this (complex missile) threat.” (And it is a complex threat, which Mr. Babbin describes very well.)
But let me make this very clear: “Keeping embers alive” wasn’t the right choice—it was merely “not the totally wrong choice.”
“Embers” has left us with a nascent, “thin shield” defense. Let’s credit the Bush Administration for what it’s done since 2001, but also thank the military officers who refused to leave forward deployed troops exposed to theater missile and cruise missile attack without at least some minimal level of protection. (An Air Defense Artillery colonel made this point in 1974 in a lecture to my Armor Officers Basic class –ie, we had to protect deployed American troops from ballistic missile attack. He told us at the moment we were “naked,” but the Army was demanding that its new anti-aircraft missile have “some” anti-missile capability. That new missile was eventually named the Patriot.) The “protection of forward deployed troops” argument was a quite legitimate argument, but it also provided just enough political wriggle room to finesse ABM opponents.
The nascent defense is an inadequate defense—I don’t think that’s debatable—but it is a defense and one that demonstrated its political utility in July when North Korea launched its missile volley. (What do I mean by that? Japan asked for Patriot PAC-3s and we have them. We also have a new US-Japanese missile monitoring station in Japan, which I believe was activated in the last few months.) The defense consists of bits and pieces of tactical and theater-level anti-missile programs supported by a dozen or so long-range missiles in Alaska and Hawaii. (The bits and pieces include the Army’s THAAD, Patriot PAC-3, and the Navy’s various advanced Standard missiles deployed on Aegis warships. These programs stretch back three decades.)
Grassroots pressure would be valuable if it led America’s political class to back the development and deployment of directed energy and advanced kinetic kill weapons Mr. Babbin mentioned. The directed energy weapons would leverage the R&D behind systems like USAF’s Airborne Laser ( a 747-mounted chemical laser). The ABL was also “kept alive” as an anti-theater ballistic missile system. It was also criticized as a “Cold War” program and a “Buck Rogers” fantasy—and in the 21st century the grassroots should be darn glad the USAF has pursued the fantasy. The system offers a model for the defensive platforms Mr. Babbin mentions (systems we desperately need).
Saddam’s 1991 SCUD offensive and the 1998 North Korean missile test should have convinced the anti-ABM crowd. But these demonstrations didn’t. July’s North Korean “missile volley” (“missile pulse” was jargon ten years ago, missile volley has more clarity ) occurred post 9/11 (as Mr. Berman noted) and from a rogue nation President Bush identified as a member of “the axis of evil.” Within two weeks of the North Korean missile volley Israelis were ducking rockets fired by a terrorist organization. Directed energy weapons we’re now testing should provide some defense against larger and longer-ranged tactical rockets. Perhaps the North Korean volley and Israel’s terrible experience with terrorist rockets will influence Mr. Berman’s American “trickle up.” I guess there’s a reason “torrent up” isn’t an idiom—but a “torrent up” demand by the American people for adequate anti-missile defense is long overdue.
Babbin: Messrs.Karako, Berman and Bay appear content to let the barn burn while they toast marshmallows on the fire. They're locked in the past. Yes, we have no adequate defense. Yes, there have been many presidents since Reagan, and all share the blame -- with other politicians -- for not fielding a defense. Ok, so what? Where do we go from here?
First, the president should give a strong speech declaring BMD a national priority on the order of the Manhattan Project. Second, any pol -- especially those such as Sen. Levin who are sure to object and play the delay game -- should bear the full pressure of public opinion that can be mobilized against them. It is simply wrong -- no, it's practically delusional-- to say that the concerns of missile defense transcend politics. Unless and until the Democrats commence behaving responsibly on this -- which they haven't since 1986 -- they should bear the entire burden of blame for our lack of defense. However long it is blocked, the delay should be hung around their necks like a millstone. Given the level of looniness among the Howard Dean - Michael Moore - Ned Lamont Dems, I don't see any hope that the Dems of today will be better on BMD than their predecessors. There's every reason to believe they'll be worse.
Second, we need to assess the threat and the goal we want to meet. ICBMs from China or North Korea, IRBMS from Iran, and terrorist-launched SRBMs housed on the deck of merchant ships may all be within the threat definition we have to defend against. But are they? We need -- right now -- a reassessment of the threat in a top-level classified review. On that basis the administration should go to Congress and get the appropriations to get this on the road posthaste. Let's also not worry too much about how the "international community" is going to deal with North Korea's nuclear and missile programs. They'll do very well with that. About as well as they have with, say, the UN Oil for Food program.
We probably need the layered defense I began this conversation by describing. THAAD -- Terminal High Altitude Area Defense -- works.
The Aegis Standard-3 missiles are rated at 50%: which means they will kill one of every two missiles they attack. The larger BMD interceptors based in Alaska and California have a 60% rating. You still need to fire two to kill a single incoming missile, and we have fewer than two dozen deployed. Neither of those systems works well enough. How many missiles are we defending against, and of what types? Unless we get these answers, we can't even start to build the defense we really need.
What do we need, how much will it cost and how soon can we deploy it? These are the questions. All else is quibbling.
Karako: We seem to be agreeing on much. I expect all of us agree, for example, that there are real differences between the parties. Mr. Babbin has provided a fine description of numerous components of a would-be layered defense and I suspect we all agree with his description of the virtues of THAAD, PAC-3, Aegis SM-3, and GBI—and the limits of GBIs—with which I expect we all agree as well. To this, I would only add that additional attention to sea-based defenses is in order and that long neglected attention to space-based defenses should begin. The nice thing about sea-based defenses is that they are mobile. The nice thing about space-based boost-phase interceptors is that they are already up in space, orbiting at 8km/sec, waiting to be redirected into the path of an oncoming delivery vehicle.
Despite much agreement, I respectfully disagree on one point, the apparent suggestion that reviewing arguments of strategic culture is a distraction from programmatic policy requirements. Indeed, this is not about marshmallows or donkey tails, it is about policy—policy which has been distorted by bad ideas.
More than the Michael Moores have imbibed the arms control kool-aid. On May 1, 2001, George W. Bush delivered an articulate speech at West Point about the problems with MAD. The following day, John Kerry delivered an articulate rejoinder rehearsing the same tired arguments about defenses being destabilizing and provocative as those made by Senators Al Gore and Ted Kennedy during the 1972 Senate hearings for the ABM Treaty. Similarly, quite irrespective of capabilities, space-based interceptors are considered as anathema as the divine right of kings. Why? Because the so-called “weaponization of space” is a political hot potato. In addition to chairing the 1998 report on missile defense, Rumsfeld also chaired the 2001 space commission report prior to becoming Secretary of Defense. That commission’s recommendations will probably not be implemented or even proposed until there is sufficient political clout to explain the foolishness of those who oppose strategic superiority. Lt. General Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, cannot even raise his hand in a congressional hearing to ask about cobbling together a space-test-bed sometime in the next decade without arms controllers hyperventilating and moving the doomsday clock a few minutes closer to midnight.
This is a case where policy is not threatened but informed by principle. The GBIs deployed in Alaska and California (and discussed for Europe) are currently the forefront of missile defense deployments. Why is that? Part of the reason may have something to do with the fact that they are less controversial precisely because they are insufficiently robust. The Clinton administration architecture originally called for some 100 interceptors in Alaska alone. The Russians and Chinese are not losing sleep about 11 GBIs, so we can get them to cooperate here and there in the war on terror. The low level of deployments currently being pursued makes more sense in reference to differences in strategic thinking which have been around for decades. Until we disabuse ourselves of the bad ideas which dominated during the Cold War, we will probably continue on the current course of expanding what was begun by the Clinton administration’s accords with Russia in 1997: missile defenses which are assured destruction-compliant as regards Russia and China.
Berman: In order to know where you are going, you have to know where you've been, or so the old saying goes. Jed Babbin is absolutely correct; the missile threat now facing the United States is serious and growing, and the U.S. government needs desperately to formulate a robust strategic response based upon the most immediate dangers... and to do so sooner rather than later. But, unless we decipher the reasons why such a response has not been forthcoming from our elected leadership on both sides of the aisle until now, whatever we do in the future is likely to prove similarly futile. Simply put, there has historic lack of political will to impliment a truly capable system. The considerations have run the gamut. During the Cold War, it was the desire to maintain the "balance of terror" with Moscow. More recently, during the 1990s, the Clinton administration seized on the preservation (and the strengthening) of the ABM Treaty as the cornerstone of a new relationship with Boris Yeltsin's Russia. We all know how that turned out. And make no mistake, even the Bush administration - for all of its early leadership on this issue - has ultimately succumbed to the same sort of inertia. One need look no further than the reassuring rhetoric that comes out of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency on regular intervals emphasizing the fact that our emerging system is intended solely to deal with simple "rogue state threats" to understand that we are artificially limiting our deployments in order to accomodate both Moscow and Beijing. There are certainly practical reasons for doing so (including assistance from those countries in the War on Terror, the preservation of our trade relationships, and so on). But, since a decade from now Russia could look quite different, while China is on track to be a serious long-term strategic competitor of the United States, prudence dictates that our defenses be robust enough to address threats from those countries as well. So far, political considerations have dictated where, how, and most importantly what we deploy to protect our citizenry against ballistic missile attack. In my opinion, it is high time to let the threat - rather than international diplomacy and partisan politics - dictate our response.
