the misguided quest for a state of absolute military superiority. The strongest push for missile defense has come
from Reaganite true believers in conservative think tanks, especially the small but highly effective Center for
Security Policy. On Capitol Hill, the NMD lobby is spearheaded by new-look conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl of
Arizona, who led last fall's successful Republican effort to defeat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Fresh from
that victory, the NMD lobby is now seeking to destroy the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty as the next target in its
campaign to promote "peace through strength rather than peace through paper," as Kyl put it in a recent
speech.
The right-wing crusade for missile defense has received aid and comfort from Bill Clinton & Al Gore, who have
decided that looking "tough" on defense is more important than protecting the world from weapons of mass
destruction. Support has also come from the lumbering behemoths of the military-industrial complex: Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, which are desperately seeking a new infusion of taxpayer funds to help them recover
from a string of technical failures and management fiascos that have cut their stock prices and drastically reduced
their profit margins. NMD's military boosters see the system primarily as a way to enhance the offensive capabilities
of US forces, not as a defensive measure. In its revealing "Vision for 2020" report, the US Space Command, a
unified military command that coordinates the space activities and assets of the Army, Navy and Air Force, sings
the praises of outer space as the ideal platform for projecting US military dominance "across the full spectrum of
conflict." Pentagon hard-liners have a more immediate military goal: using NMD as a shield to protect US forces in
interventions against states like North Korea (whose missile development effort,
it is worth noting, has been on hold for almost two years).
A growing number of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are also supportive of a limited NMD system. Whether
or not missile defense is an effective response to alleged threats, it seems to offer a sense of security to some
members of Congress, who lack the expertise & inclination to question the fevered threat projections of the US
military and intelligence establishments.While at least some of the motives of NMD advocates may be
understandable, They are also disastrously misguided: Even Clinton and Gore's "limited" system is unnecessary,
unworkable and unaffordable. The mere pursuit of an NMD system could pose the most serious threat to
international peace and stability since the height of the cold war.
Russian President Putin has emphatically stated that any US move to withdraw from the ABM treaty will lead
Moscow to treat all existing US/Russian arms agreements as null & void. And China's chief arms negotiator,
Sha Zukang, has warned that if Washington goes ahead with an NMD deployment designed to intercept "tens of
warheads" a figure suspiciously close to the eighteen to twenty single-warhead ballistic missiles that
represent China's entire nuclear deterrent capability-Beijing will not "sit on its hands." In short, the official
Clinton/Gore Administration position on NMD is that we should jeopardize the best chance in a generation to
reduce the world's nuclear arsenals in order to preserve the option to deploy a costly, technically dubious scheme
designed to defend against a Third World missile threat that does not currently exist and may not ever materialize.
To understand how we got into this mess, we need to take a look at the genesis, "death" and resurrection of
Reagan's Star Wars dream.
A Smile & a Shoeshine
When Reagan gave his March 1983 Star Wars speech, in which he pledged to launch a program designed to
render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," he was acting primarily on the advice of Edward Teller, the
infamous "father of the H-bomb." In closed-door meetings organized by the conservative businessmen in Reagan's
kitchen Cabinet, Teller sold Reagan on a new nuclear doctrine of "assured survival" based on the alleged technical
wonders of his latest brainchild, the X-ray laser. As New York Times science writer
William Broad pointed out in his 1992 book, Teller's War, the X-ray laser was largely a figment of Teller's
imagination, composed of scientific speculation, wishful thinking and outright deception. But Reagan was buying
into the concept of missile defense, not the details, so he forged ahead unaware of these inconvenient facts, his
enthusiasm reinforced by his desire to counter the nuclear freeze movement.
But, as Frances FitzGerald shows in her new book, Way Out There in the Blue (the title derives from Arthur Miller's
line in Death of a Salesman in which he describes Willy Loman as "a man way out there in the blue, riding on a
smile and a shoeshine"), Reagan's Star Wars proposal was more than just a political con game; it was also a
potent symbol that served radically different purposes for the different factions within his Administration. For hard-
liners like Caspar Weinberger, Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, a Perle protege who went on to found his own
pro-Star Wars think tank, the Center for Security Policy-Reagan's missile defense plan offered a chance to
promote their two main goals: sustaining the Reagan military buildup and thwarting progress on US/Soviet arms
control. For White House political strategists, the Star Wars plan was a way to boost Reagan's flagging popularity
ratings, which had plummeted in the face of the deepest recession since the thirties and a growing fear that the
President's aggressive anti-Soviet stance was moving the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation.
The most constructive response to the Star Wars speech within Reagan's inner circle came from his Secretary of
State, George Shultz. Rather than trying to convince Reagan of the manifold flaws in his pet project, Shultz treated
the Star Wars speech as an opportunity to press Reagan to engage in his first serious discussions with Soviet
leaders on nuclear weapons issues. Shultz found an unlikely ally in Paul Nitze, the old cold warrior who was
appointed as a special envoy to the US/Russian nuclear talks at Shultz's request. Nitze honed in on the fatal flaw
that has plagued all missile defense schemes to date, which is that it is much cheaper to overwhelm a
defensive system with additional warheads or decoys than it is to expand the defensive capability to meet these
new threats. As a result, Shultz and Nitze were able to prevail over the Weinberger/Perle faction and persuade
Reagan to endorse historic agreements to eliminate medium-range nuclear weapons from Europe and implement
substantial cuts in long-range weapons under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Star Wars was a
security blanket that allowed Reagan to engage in serious negotiations with the "evil empire" without being
perceived as some sort of weak-kneed liberal arms controller among the conservatives who formed his core
constituency.
When George Bush took office in January 1989, Reagan's Star Wars fantasy was rapidly overtaken by the reality of
sharp reductions in the US and Soviet nuclear forces. Both sides ratified the START I arms reduction pact and
followed up with a START II deal that called for cutting US and Soviet strategic arsenals to one-third their Reagan-
era levels. On a broader front, the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union between
1989 & 1991 made spending billions on a high-tech scheme to defend against Soviet missiles seem
irrelevant and absurd. Despite the decline of the Soviet "threat," however, the Bush Administration & Congress
continued to cough up $3-$4 billion per year for missile defense. The project's new focus was protection against an
accidental nuclear attack.
Soon yet another rationale appeared in the form of the "rogue state" strategy,
developed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and based on
the notion that the United States should be prepared to fight two heavily armed regional powers like Iraq and
North Korea simultaneously. In the 1991 Gulf War Saddam Hussein came to personify the rogue-state threat; Iraqi
missile attacks on Tel Aviv and a devastating direct hit on a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia prompted calls for
more effective defenses against medium-range ballistic missiles. But even that was not enough to sustain
enthusiasm for a major new program. A few months after Clinton took office in January 1993, Defense Secretary
Les Aspin proclaimed the Star Wars program dead (though the Pentagon continued to spend $3-$4 billion per year
on missile defense research).
Enter Newt
Newt Gingrich is gone from the political scene, but the most dangerous plank of his 1994 Contract With America
remains: the section that calls for "requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems capable
of defending the U.S. against ballistic missile attacks." That plan was added to the contract by Gingrich and his
fellow Republican co-author Dick Armey at the urging of Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. Efforts to
turn the contract's rhetoric into viable legislation proved unsuccessful in the short run, but in mid-1996 the Clinton
Administration decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by offering a missile defense compromise known
as the "3+3" plan, 3 years of research and testing followed by a 3 year crash program to deploy a system, if the
President decided it was necessary, feasible and affordable. The "3+3" gambit allowed Clinton to push off a
politically controversial decision on missile defense until a later date that fell well past the 1996 presidential
election.
Unfortunately for Al Gore, that "later date" is now smack in the middle of his second run for the White House. As
John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it, "This is a political decision driven by the need to defend
Al Gore from Republicans rather than defend America against missiles." While Clinton was yielding ground, Capitol
Hill Republicans were regrouping for their next offensive- one result of which was an amendment in the fiscal year
1997 defense authorization bill calling for the establishment of a blue-ribbon panel to "assess the nature &
magnitude of existing and emerging ballistic missile threats to the United States." The Republicans wanted their
new commission to be viewed as an authoritative and objective body, not just a partisan project. Bearing that in
mind, House Speaker Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who were empowered to nominate the
majority of the panel's members, chose former Ford Administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to head
the commission, in the hopes that they could capitalize on his reputation as a moderate Republican with pragmatic
views on military matters. Rumsfeld proved worthy of Gingrich's and Lott's confidence when he hammered out a
unanimous final report with the appropriate aura of bipartisanship, complete with signatures from Democratic
appointees such as former Carter Administration arms-control official Barry Blechman of the Henry L.
Stimson Center and eminent physicist and longtime missile defense critic Richard Garwin. Just two weeks after the
report came out, Garwin placed an Op-Ed in the New York Times denouncing the misuse of the report by missile
defense boosters, asserting, "I am alarmed that some have interpreted our findings as providing support for a new
national defense system."
The Rumsfeld Commission report was unveiled in July 1998 amid hysterical cries from Gingrich that it was the
"most important warning about our national security system since the end of the cold war." Hysteria aside, the
report's primary finding was that given enough foreign help, a rogue state like North Korea could acquire a
missile capable of reaching the United States within five years of making a decision to do so, one-third to one-half
the warning time projected in the CIA's official estimates. The Star Wars lobby finally got what it needed: an official,
govt-approved statement that could be interpreted as endorsing its own exaggerated view of the Third World
missile threat. While the Rumsfeld report drew heavy editorial fire in papers like the Chicago Tribune and the
Milwaukee Sentinel, the Wall Street Journal applauded it as a long-overdue clarion call for missile defense, and
Washington's newspaper of record, the Post, published a measured response that endorsed the panel's findings as
"useful and plausible."
Inside the Missile Defense Lobby
Upon reflection, it is clear that the Rumsfeld report's Republican backers had always intended to use the panel as a
tool to advance their pro-missile defense agenda. All the report actually says is that if a country like North Korea
gets major foreign assistance, including the extremely unlikely possibility that a country like China would simply
give Pyongyang a fully operational ballistic missile, it will achieve the capability to hit the U.S. much more quickly
than if it had to build the missile without outside help. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace demonstrated in Congressional testimony delivered this past February, the Rumsfeld
Commission's conservative backers have used the report as a vehicle for changing the intelligence community's
traditional means of assessing the ballistic missile threat, from one that attempts to predict the likely pace of missile
proliferation in a given nation in the light of political, economic and military factors, to a "worst-case scenario"
approach that asks how quickly a given nation could achieve a threatening missile capability if it had no economic
or political impediments. As Cirincione also demonstrated, the "sky is falling" approach has been used to obscure
the underlying reality that the ballistic missile threat to the U.S. has decreased in the last decade, not
increased.
Just as the Rumsfeld Commission turned out to be less objective than it first appeared to be, so did its chairman.
Far from being a moderate, Donald Rumsfeld is a card-carrying member of the missile defense lobby. Prior to his
appointment to head the commission that bears his name, he was publicly singled out as a special friend in the
annual report of the pro-Star Wars think tank, the Center for Security Policy. As a further sign of his commitment to
the missile defense cause, Rumsfeld has also given money to Frank Gaffney's group. If Gaffney's organization
were just an abstract "study group," that would be one thing. But it is a highly partisan advocacy organization that
serves as the de facto nerve center of the NMD lobby.
Gaffney's center, which now has an annual budget of $1.2 million, was started in 1988 with support from New Right
funders like Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors. Since that time, Gaffney has turned it into a sort of working
executive committee for the missile defense lobby. The center's advisory board includes representatives of larger
conservative organizations, incl Ed Feulner, president Heritage Fdtn; Wm Bennett, co-director Empower America;
and Henry Cooper of High Frontier, the original Star Wars think tank, which was launched during the early years of
the Reagan Administration. Other CSP advisory board members include Chas. Kupperman & Bruce Jackson,
who serve as vice president for Washington operations & director of planning & analysis, respectively, at
Lockheed Martin; key members of Congress like Republicans Curt Weldon, Christopher Cox and Jon Kyl; and a
who's who of Reagan-era Star Warriors like Edward Teller and former Reagan science adviser Geo. Keyworth.
Unlike most think tanks concerned with military issues, the Center for Security Policy receives a substantial portion
of its funding from weapons manufacturers. 3 out of the top 4 missile defense contractors, Boeing, Lockheed
Martin and TRW, are all major corporate contributors to CSP, which has received more than $2 million in corporate
donations since its founding, accounting for roughly one-quarter of its total budget. Rumsfeld's link to CSP is not
his only affiliation with the Star Wars lobby. He's also on the board of Empower America, which ran deceptive ads
against anti-NMD Senator Harry Reid of Nevada in the run-up to the November 1998 elections. In recognition of his
service to the missile defense lobby, in October 1998, just three months after his "objective" assessment of
the missile threat was released, CSP awarded Rumsfeld its "Keeper of the Flame" award for 1998 at a gala dinner
attended by several hundred Star Wars boosters. In accepting the award, Rumsfeld joined the company of Reagan,
Gingrich and several Congressional NMD boosters.
NMD Resurgent: Fast Track to Oblivion?
In a reprise of the political two-step that preceded the 1996 presidential elections (Republicans lead, Clintonites
follow), the Clinton Administration moved closer to the Republican position on missile defense with a January 1999
announcement that the President would seek a six-year, $112 billion increase in Pentagon spending. The proposal
included $6.6 billion in new funding for procurement of missile defense equipment before 2005, the new target date
for NMD deployment established by Defense Secretary William Cohen. Clinton's decision to accelerate NMD
funding was propelled in part by the furor caused by North Korea's August 1998 test of a two-stage ballistic missile,
but the trump card in the Republican-led effort to jack up both overall military spending and NMD "deployment
readiness" funding was the backlash from the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Long before the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton decided that throwing money at the Pentagon was the best way to shore
up his credentials as Commander in Chief and divert attention from allegations that he had dodged the draft during
the Vietnam War. By the fall of 1998, the combination of a growing federal budget surplus and the President's
perceived political weakness resulting from the Lewinsky matter emboldened Congressional Republicans and
Clinton's own Joint Chiefs of Staff to press him for billions of dollars in additional military funds.
In mid-September, the Joint Chiefs invited the President to a closed-door briefing where they read Clinton their
wish lists
|
Powell Dismisses Putin Threat ¹
6.23.01 AP
WASHINGTON Sec.State Powell is brushing aside a warning by
Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will upgrade his country's strategic nuclear arsenal if the U.S. deploys a
missile defense system. Putin has issued the warning on several occasions, and again on Saturday, but Powell
seemed almost dismissive of the Russian leader's stand when asked about it Friday in an interview with Associated
Press. "I am not in charge of Russia but I don't think that's what they would do,'' Powell said. He said he was
confident that Putin would not try to enhance Russia's strategic force once he takes into account the cost. Powell
added that Putin also will come to realize that a U.S. missile defense is not a threat to Russia.
Critics of the missile defense system argue that its deployment by the U.S. would touch off an arms race, with
Russia and China taking steps to build up their arsenals to overwhelm the U.S. defense shield. On Saturday, Putin
again threatened a nuclear buildup if the U.S. abandons the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, "This means that all
countries, including Russia, will have the right to install multiple warheads carrying nuclear weapons on their
missiles,'' he told reporters in Moscow. He said that for Russia, installing multiple nuclear warheads on existing
missiles "is the cheapest response.''
That echoed his comments Monday that while he would try to work cooperatively with the U.S. in developing a new
security framework, Russia would enhance its nuclear forces if the U.S. pursued a go-it-alone posture on missile
defense. On NATO, Powell said he was not surprised that many allied countries have expressed reservations
about the U.S. missile defense plan, given the fact that it represents a major doctrinal change from the current
security framework. But he said there is more openness among the allies about the concept than there was before
President Bush began consulting them in early May. "I think we have made progress,'' he said. …
U.S. security adv. sees progress on missile defense
7.25.01 Reuters
MOSCOW U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice arrived in Moscow on Wednesday to
put arms control talks with Russia on a fast track, saying the two sides had broken the deadlock on missile
defense. Rice told govt leaders in Kiev that Russia and the U.S. had moved beyond their dispute over the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Ukrainian officials said. "Rice expressed her satisfaction that, following meetings
in Genoa, ABM talks between Russia & the U.S. have moved beyond
deadlock," a spokesman for Ukraine's presidential press service told Reuters.
Washington sees the ABM treaty as a Cold War "relic" but Moscow has been unwilling to re-write a pact it says is
the cornerstone of strategic stability & 30 other arms accords. Rice has said Washington wants to pursue an
"aggressive schedule" of talks on arms issues with Moscow after a weekend G-8 summit. After a bilateral meeting
following the summit, President Bush & Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed for the first time to merge
talks on missile defense and deep cuts in their vast nuclear arsenals.
Putin downplays breakthrough talk
Rice's upbeat remarks contrasted with comments by Putin, who denied any breakthrough had been made in
Genoa. Russian media have accused him of retreating from his previous opposition to U.S. missile defense plans.
Washington says it needs a national missile shield to protect against the threat from "rogue states" like Iraq, Iran
and North Korea. Putin concedes the threat exists, but says it is greatly exaggerated. To counter it he has
proposed greater diplomatic efforts and, as a last resort, a non-strategic anti-missile system which would preserve
ABM and prevent a new arms race. Sunday's accord, however, also marks a shift by Bush, who had hitherto
wanted unilateral cuts in U.S. arsenals outside the framework of legally-binding & verifiable accords.
Washington argues that would give it more flexibility to counter emerging missile threats.
Russia & the U.S. have been jousting over the issue of missile defense for months, and Washington warned
earlier this month its research could "bump into" the ABM treaty in a matter of months, not years. Bush wants to
forge ahead with a $60 billion program after a third test this summer proved successful where two others had failed.
But Moscow remains skeptical the scheme can work and says Washington has still failed to tell it what sort of anti-
missile scheme it plans to build. The U.S. has promised to give answers soon, but Bush signaled on Monday that
he would press on with the scheme regardless of Russian concerns if the two sides failed to reach an agreement
quickly. "Time is of the essence...if we can't reach an agreement, we're going to implement," he told reporters
in Rome.
[ Homilies in place of reason. Why is "time of the essence? No rogue nation is
threatening to bombard anyone. ]
Rice was to meet Vladimir Rushailo, secretary of Russia's Security Council later on Wednesday, ahead of meetings
with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Thursday. She is due to meet Putin in the Kremlin around midday
on Thursday. Sec.State C.Powell & Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov discussed the timetable for security
talks in Hanoi this week, on the sidelines of a summit of Asian regional states. Defense ministry officials from both
sides are due to meet in Moscow & Washington next month.
LOS ANGELES While pie-in-the-sky to critics, Pres. GWBush's missile defense plan could deliver
billions of dollars to a handful of states as the Pentagon moves to develop the system. However, spending on the
multifaceted program would create fewer jobs than other lucrative defense contracts that regularly buoy the
economies of states like California & Texas, analysts say. Instead of jobs, the money would fund highly
focused research and development efforts and later lead to "boutique'' production of the small number of aircraft,
rockets, lasers, radar and satellites that would make up the system designed to intercept and destroy incoming
missiles. Although far more advanced technologically, the work would require less labor than more traditional,
large-ticket defense projects, like the production of aircraft, ships or tanks. "They're not bending a lot of metal,''
William Hartung, a senior fellow with New York's World Policy Institute said about the missile defense program.
"The same amounts of money might not generate as many jobs as previous defense contracts.''
Nor might the money. perhaps as much as $200 billion over the next few decades - flow to as many states, since
consolidation in the defense industry has left fewer companies positioned to do the work. "Where you might have
had 5 choices to send a contract to, and geography might have ruled, today you might have only two choices,'' said
Jon Kutler, chairman & chief executive officer of Quarterdeck Investment Partners, an L.A. investment bank
focused on the aerospace & defense industries. Hartung said analysis of past missile defense contracts show
two-thirds of the work went to just four firms: The Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc.
Although all four have facilities scattered throughout the U.S., work on developing the missile defense
program is likely to stay highly focused in only a few states. That means politics may have little to do with where the
contracts eventually go.
"I don't think it's going to have a lot to do with Republicans or Democrats. There's going to be a small number of
people who can do it, and they'll get the contracts,'' said Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute
who advised Bush on missile defense during his campaign. In fiscal 2000, 42 states shared $2.4 billion in
unclassified missile defense contracts. However, just 3, Alabama, California and Virginia, captured 83% of
that total, according to Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. "That's a highly stratified market,'' said Paul Murphy, president of
the Fairfax, Va. company, which crunches govt contract data. Total spending, classified and unclassified, on the
program could hit $5 billion this year. That number could increase in the next several months, when the Bush
administration announces how it intends to proceed with the program, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Rick
Lehner. Even if annual spending on missile defense doubles, as some predict, it will not necessarily translate into a
net increase in military spending. "I'd expect there would be some element of a zero-sum game to this: The money
you spend on this program will come at the expense of other programs,'' Quarterdeck's Kutler said.
If money to fund missile defense should come from the budgets of traditional weapons programs, it could benefit
California, since little of that current work is done in the state. "Anything that shifts from traditional platforms to
space, to electronics, to rockets is probably advantageous to California,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow
with the Brookings Institution in Wash., D.C. Even limited amounts of spending could lift the lagging defense
industry in Southern California, which has shed 200,000 workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties alone over
the past 15 years. "You're not going to create as many jobs, but the jobs you do create will be great jobs,'' said
Jack Kyser, chief economist for the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Rumsfeld charts missile defense course ¹
7.8.01 AP
WASHINGTON The Bush administration wants to greatly expand the number & kinds of testing
it believes is needed to build effective missile defenses, and is willing to spend billions more to do it. In a sense,
military planners have gone back to the drawing board to fulfill President Bush's goal of creating a reliable defense
against ballistic missile attack on U.S., its allies and U.S. forces abroad. The Bush administration sees no less
urgency in obtaining a missile defense capability. But after months of reviewing options and studying the Clinton
administration's approach, the Pentagon has decided to explore a wider range of technologies before deciding
when the system could be ready for use. "The focus of missile defense is no longer on deployment,'' says Lt.Col.
Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which manages the Pentagon's missile
defense work. The focus is on testing, and lots of it. "It is going to be structured & disciplined,'' Lehner
said.
[ Implementation studies are much easier hence more lucrative than production &
deployment. ]
It is also going to be expensive. Intercept tests conducted during the Clinton administration cost about $100 million
apiece. The Bush administration envisions more elaborate and more frequent tests. The proposed 2002 defense
budget submitted to Congress on June 27 provides $8.3 billion for missile defense, a nearly 40% increase over
the current budget. It would be expected to take tens of billions more before a system is ready for use, although the
administration has provided no firm figure. For starters, the Pentagon is piecing together a plan to create a Pacific
"test bed'', a collection of test ranges from Ft. Greeley and Kodiak Island in Alaska to Vandenberg AFBase, CA, to
Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to pursue more realistic missile intercept tests. ¹
Up to now, the only flight tests of interceptors designed to shoot down long-range missiles have involved launching
an unarmed target missile from Vandenberg and trying to hit it with an interceptor launched from Kwajalein. Just
such a test is scheduled for July 14, the first intercept attempt in 12 months. Last July's attempt failed, and several
weeks later President Clinton announced that the technology was not sufficiently mature to go ahead with
deploying missile defenses. Clinton was operating under a congressional requirement that he deploy a missile
defense as soon as it was technologically feasible. His administration chose to focus the bulk of its missile defense
effort on a ground-based interceptor designed to collide with a hostile missile outside the earth's atmosphere during
the midcourse of its flight. It did so because that technology is more advanced than others, such as interceptors
fired from ships or lasers fired from satellites or airplanes.
Def.Sec Rumsfeld has decided that the midcourse system alone is insufficient to provide global protection. He
wants to build a "layered'' system, a combination of missile defense weapons. Some would be designed to attack a
ballistic missile in the boost phase of its flight while it is easiest to detect, others in the descent phase and still
others in midcourse. Some of these anti-missile weapons would be based on land, others at sea, others possibly
aboard aircraft. "As we proceed in time, and technologies are proven or disproven, we narrow down heading
toward a solution,'' the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Pete Aldridge, told reporters late last month.
Lehner said the Pentagon is aiming for deployment sometime between 2004 and 2008, but it has not firm target
date. In its new approach, the Pentagon will not only pursue different combinations of missile defense technologies,
some well advanced, some largely untried, but also test them in ways not done before. For example, the Kodiak
Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, about 250 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska, would be used to launch target
missiles over the Pacific. Kodiak also would have interceptors for test flights against target missiles launched from
Vandenberg in California toward Kwajalein.
The Pentagon also would use Fort Greeley, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, as a site from which
to launch ground-based interceptors at target missiles fired from an aircraft. The government decided in 1995 to
close Ft. Greeley, but the 2001 defense supplemental bill before Congress now contains language permitting the
secretary of defense to retain the base for missile defense purposes. This more aggressive testing effort reflects
Bush's determination to "set aside'' the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids the testing of missile defense
weaponry from other than fixed points on land. Thus the Kwajalein-to-Vandenberg approach is allowed, but not
testing from aircraft or ships.
Even more fundamentally, the ABM treaty bans any missile defense that is designed to protect an entire nation.
Having declared the ABM treaty a Cold War relic ¹, the administration
plans to go ahead with testing without regard to treaty limitations, although it has not yet said definitely that it will
withdraw from the treaty. It hopes to persuade the Russians to either amend it or to replace it with a new
"framework'' in which U.S., its allies and Russia could pursue missile defenses cooperatively. The treaty's
limitations are not an immediate problem because testing of the kind that would violate the limits is not likely to be
ready for another year or more.
"U.S. likely to put arms in space", per USAF chief
8.1.01 Reuters ¹
WASHINGTON The U.S. will likely put weapons in space one day to protect satellites vital for
commerce, communications and military dominance, the Air Force's top general predicted on Wednesday. "I would
think that eventually we're going to have to have capabilities to take things out in orbit," Gen. Michael Ryan said of
the future ability of the Pentagon to destroy enemy space- and ground-based arms threatening U.S. satellites.
"And we had better not be second," he said in an interview with reporters.
DefSec D.Rumsfeld recently gave the Air Force oversight over U.S. military space programs. He stressed,
however, that the Bush administration had not decided whether the U.S. would become the first nation to station
arms such as lasers in space. Ryan, who will retire next month as Air Force chief of staff, said Washington was too
dependent on satellites for everything from spying to commerce and weather forecasting to leave them
unprotected. "I would suggest that sometime in the future here we are going to have to come to a policy decision on
whether we're going to use space for both defensive and offensive capabilities," he told reporters.
new space plane?
The general noted that the Air Force was developing arms including a laser based on a Boeing 747 aircraft within
the atmosphere and examining the possibility of building a futuristic bomber that might fly at the edge of space to
quickly reach remote land targets. "We have a huge equity in orbit," Ryan told reporters. "Wherever commerce
has gone and our national interests have gone, so have gone our forces. On
land, sea and in the air we tended to exploit the realm that we were dependent upon. "It (space satellites) is
one of our asymmetrical advantages of this nation (for) intelligence, communications, reconnaissance, weather,
navigation. We depend upon the integration of those things in orbit with what we do in the atmosphere and what
we do on the ground," he said. "To the extent that should we lose them, it would be a huge blow."
The general stressed that such assets had to be protected from electronic interference or outright destruction.
"I think that we have in some way be able to protect those assets, at least defensively," Ryan said. "And that leads
you to the thought that if you are going to be up there trying to protect them defensively, where do you cross the
line on offensive operations?"
|
Bush said that acquiring a ballistic missile defense system is "America's most pressing national security challenge.
Outmoded arms control treaties must not compromise America's security." The threats of the Cold
War decades have been replaced "by a world in which threats come from rogue states bent on acquiring
weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, threats as unconventional as they are unpredictable," Bush said in his
budget plan. 
bio budget
If you stopped worrying about the bomb when the cold war ended, you were probably surprised to learn that two of
the hot-button issues of the eighties, arms control and missile defense, will top the agenda at the Clinton/Putin
summit on June 4-5. A central issue in Moscow will be how to reconcile Russian President Vladimir Putin's
proposal for deep cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals with the Clinton Administration's fixation on developing
a National Missile Defense (NMD) system.
The Baroness
Lockheed Martin has not neglected the presidential candidates. On the Republican side, Lockheed Martin vice
president Bruce Jackson, who served as chairman of the US Committee to Expand NATO, was overheard by one
of the authors at an industry gathering last year bragging about how the industry's troubles will be over if GWBush
is elected, since Jackson would be personally writing the defense plank of the Republican platform. And Loral CEO
Bernard Schwartz, who has longstanding ties to Lockheed Martin dating from when Lockheed absorbed Loral's
defense unit in 1996, was the top individual donor of soft money to the Democratic Party in the 1996 presidential
cycle; Loral employees gave $601,000 to Democratic Party committees. Schwartz has nearly doubled that amount
in the run-up to the November 2000 elections, with $1.1 million in soft-money contributions to Democratic
committees to date. He was briefly in the spotlight last year when he was accused of lobbying the Clinton
Administration to ease the standards for the export of satellite technology to China.
