The first version of the anti-missile umbrella that President Bush envisions will almost certainly leak, the Pentagon acknowledges.
But the administration will try to turn that weakness, already the subject of Democratic attack Wednesday, into political and military strength.
Before Bush orders the huge, vastly expensive layered missile defense he outlined in his major policy speech Tuesday, the administration will propose fielding a small system in the next few years.
Consisting of as few as five interceptor missiles based in Alaska and possibly a sea-based anti-missile platform, this first phase of the system won’t come with a guarantee that every incoming missile would be shot down.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon is banking that it will change the thinking of U.S. adversaries.
The White House hopes it will be easier to sell a big system later once it gets Congress to sign on to a small system now.
Pointing to recent failed flight tests of the Pentagon’s prototype missile interceptor, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) worried that Bush “is buying a lemon” as he prepares to embark the nation on what could be a $60 billion to $100 billion venture. Daschle seized on indications from the Pentagon and White House that a system could be ready to deploy by 2004, before Bush’s first term is up.
“They argue that deploying an ineffective defense can still be an effective system simply because it would cause uncertainty in the minds of our adversaries,” Daschle said Wednesday in a news conference. “That position is based on the flawed assumption that a president would be willing to gamble our nation’s security on a bluff, and that no adversary would be willing or able to call such a bluff.”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld concedes that if the aim is to shoot down actual incoming missiles, the first system will likely have problems. But if the aim is to prevent missiles from being fired in the first place, it may succeed.
“Most systems are imperfect,” Rumsfeld said. “What we’re talking about here is a new set of capabilities to be sure to dissuade or deter . . . as well as to defend against a growing threat in the world. They need not be 100 percent perfect, in my opinion, and they are certainly unlikely to be in their early stages of evolution.”
In the face of skeptics who question the viability of missile defense technology, Rumsfeld’s argument may have some political appeal.
The relatively small-scale system Bush says he will deploy in the “near term” will carry a much smaller price tag than the layered defense in his long-term plan. That will make it a much easier sell on Capitol Hill, especially at a time when Bush is pushing for tax cuts.
If Bush can persuade at least some of the skeptics that even a flawed missile defense will increase U.S. security by making enemies uncertain about the effectiveness of their own weapons, he may be able to bypass the considerable concerns about the as-yet unproven missile defense technology.
Called `buy-in strategy’
“It’s a classic Pentagon buy-in strategy,” said John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocacy group. “They’re playing along the classic Pentagon line: Once you start production, once you start deployment, it’s much harder to turn off.”
With that in mind, Isaacs, one of the leading organizers of opposition to national missile defense, sums up his counterstrategy in one word: Delay.
Short of a major technological breakthrough and a enormous infusion of funds, the missile defense programs in the works would likely not be ready until late in a second Bush term, if then.
By that time, Isaacs hopes, a thawing of relations with North Korea and possibly Iran would reduce the urgency of going forward with a full-blown missile defense system.
Opponents acknowledge they have major challenges of their own.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said in a Senate floor speech Wednesday that the possibility a hostile state might destroy a U.S. city with a missile makes the Bush plan difficult to oppose.
“If it ever happened, no leader could ever explain not having chosen to defend against the disaster when doing so made sense,” Kerry said.
Opposition from Kerry and others stems from concern that Russia and China will react to missile defense by expanding their nuclear arsenals, reigniting the old Cold War arms race and reducing rather than enhancing U.S. security.
They also oppose Bush’s plan to radically alter or even discard the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, considered a pillar of nuclear stability and arms reduction.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) assembled a group of scientists and academics on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to raise questions about the ability to, in essence, hit a bullet with a bullet in shooting down an incoming warhead with a guided “kill vehicle.”
The problem, say the scientists, is whatever technology the U.S. fields could relatively easily be defeated with countermeasures, requiring still newer and more expensive technology, leading to yet another arms race.
“We must be sure the missile defense system we intend to field works,” Durbin said. “It must undergo rigorous, realistic and peer-reviewed testing.”
One of the attendees at Durbin’s news conference, mathematician Roy Danchick, was an employee of TRW, one of the contractors working on the national missile defense, or NMD, program.
“The Pentagon’s own test data show that the NMD system developed by the Clinton administration cannot discriminate a real target from a decoy,” Danchick said. “If this `layer’ of Bush’s NMD plan won’t work, the overall performance of the system is highly questionable.”
The administration has tactfully avoided mentioning that the missile defense most likely to be deployed soonest is essentially the same one planned under President Bill Clinton. During the campaign Bush derided the Clinton plan as woefully inadequate.
Fear of `blackmail’
On Wednesday, Rumsfeld told reporters that “the use of land and sea and air and space are all things that need to be considered.” But those technologies will take years to sort out.
Rumsfeld’s formula–quickly installing a limited defensive shield in hopes of changing enemy calculations–goes to the heart of what Bush talks about when he warns of “blackmail” by hostile states.
The point of missile defense, Rumsfeld says, is to deter an adversary from considering launching a missile, or, better yet, from ever threatening an attack. Free of the threat of nuclear blackmail, the United States could maintain its posture of intervening if necessary with conventional forces should an adversary threaten or attack a neighbor.
In his speech, Bush said the U.S. confronts “tyrants . . . gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States. . . . They hate our friends, they hate our values, they hate democracy and freedom and individual liberty.”
The unpredictability of such leaders is what makes missile defense necessary, Bush argues.
Critics question that reasoning.
If a missile defense system is leaky, why would a U.S. president feel safe in protecting our allies with force against an adversary armed with ICBMs, Daschle asked.
And Isaacs says Bush is “caught in a contradiction.” The president said old-fashioned nuclear deterrence won’t work against fanatical enemies. Yet Rumsfeld’s argument for a quick deployment of a less-than-perfect defense is based on the idea that deterrence based on missile defense will work.
