5.16.18
Landing Zone | By Alan W. Dowd
Funding for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) got a major
boost in the recent budget back-and-forth, jumping to $11.5 billionfor FY2018—a 40-percent increase
over FY2017. With a paranoid Pyongyang and a terrorist Tehran testing longer-range
missiles, let’s hope the renewed interest in, and resources for, missile
defense are not a case of too little too late.
Before digging into the worrisome developments in Iran and
North Korea, it’s worth spending a moment on some good news related to missile defense.
In April, MDA officials confirmedthat F-35s, with their sophisticated array of sensors and communications
capabilities, will be able to detect, track and engage ballistic missile
threats in the coming years. One official calls this “a game changer.”
Also in April, the Army’s main missile defense
systems—the Patriot system and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD)
system—“exchanged messages through tactical data links and verified
interoperability,” MDA reports.
This is a key step toward integrating the two systems; the Army plans to have a
seamless Patriot-THAAD architecture by 2020.
With a
wary eye on North Korea, South Korea’s government allowed the deployment of a
THAAD battery in summer 2017.
In
December 2017, Japan’s
cabinet approved construction of two Aegis Ashore batteries (a land-based variant of the ship-based
Aegis anti-missile system). Aegis Ashore will add a
third layer to Japan’s missile defense system, which currently
includes ship-based Aegis assets and land-based Patriot PAC-3s.
Related, Defense Secretary James Mattisrecently confirmed
that the Pentagon, is “looking at Aegis Ashore to protect our Pacific
areas.” Plus, an Aegis Ashore battery was activated in Romania in
2016; another is scheduled to come online in Poland in 2020.
Over in Iran’s
neighborhood,the U.S. opened its first military base on Israeli soil late last year. The base, located on the grounds of an Israeli air force
facility, is expressly for “operating a missile-defense system,” Real Clear
Defense reports.
Here at home, this year’s new stream of funding will speed
deployment of additional ground-based interceptors (GBI) in Alaska and
California, building the U.S. GBI arsenal to 64 by 2023. (There are currently 44 GBIs emplaced at Fort Greely, Alaska,
and Vandenberg AFB, Calif.)
In addition, there
are 33 Aegis ballistic missile defense warships in the U.S. fleet. There are six active THAAD batteries sprinkled across U.S. territories, the UAE and South
Korea. And there are 19
nations, along with the NATO alliance, collaborating with the U.S. on missile
defense. This international missile defense coalition spans four continents.
Underpinning all of this is a renewed commitment to missile
defense among policymakers.
President Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy commits
his administration to “deploying a
layered missile defense system focused
on North Korea and Iran to defend our homeland against missile attacks.”
Toward that end, Mattis ordered the Pentagon to conduct a Missile Defense Review (the findings are
expected sometime this month). Related, missile defense is one of the
Pentagon’s priority funding areas for FY2019. Next year’s budget request, according to Mattis, features “investments
in space and cyber, nuclear-deterrent forces, missile defense, advanced
autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and professional military
education.”
Several Pentagon
leaders are eager to move missile defense forward in its evolution. James Anderson, the new assistant
secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities, is a long-time advocate for missile defenses. As Defense News notes, Anderson, an academic from
the Marine Corps University, “literally wrote the book on missile defense.”
It’s titled “America at Risk: The Citizen’s Guide to Missile Defense.”
Michael Griffin, the former NASA
administrator who is now undersecretary of defense for research
and engineering, has expressed support for developing airborne
boost-phase missile defenses, perhaps to include lasers. “It was feasible many
years ago,” he explains. “What we have lacked in the missile defense arena until recently was the
will, not the technology, not the means.” He argues that the Pentagon and industry partners need to look at “technologies that
were pioneered in the 1980s and the early 1990s and now stand available for
renewed effort,” such as “directed energy” weapons based in space.
Related, MDA director Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves says it may be
time to “move the sensor architecture to space and use that advantage of space
in coordination with our ground assets to relieve the gaps” in America’s
ability to track hostile missile launches.
Finally, missile
defense has gained bipartisan support in Congress. For example, Senate Minority
Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y, has urged the Pentagon to
consider New York as a possible third site for the GBI system (along with
existing sites in California and Alaska).
Threats
The reason for
this renewed commitment to missile defense is the nature of today’s missile
threats. Three decades ago, there were nine countries that fielded ballistic
missiles. Today, there are 31.
Several of these
missile-wielding countries are unfriendly (Iran and North Korea) or
unstable (Pakistan and Egypt) or under internal threat (Saudi Arabia) or
all of the above (Syria). Some missile threats aren’t even countries: Hezbollah
has a massive arsenal of rockets and missiles, and an Australian man was arrested in 2017 for helping ISIS “develop…long-range
guided missile capabilities.”
Because of the
nature of their regimes, North Korea and Iran are perhaps the most
worrisome of the world’s missile threats. To be sure, other regimes have
larger, more lethal arsenals (China and Russia), but those other regimes are
rational and relatively stable, which means the old rules of deterrence apply.
That may not be the case with Iran and North Korea, which is why the deployment
of missile defenses is so important.
According to MDA, North Korea “has
conducted an unprecedented level of nuclear tests and ballistic missile
launches since 2016, including its fourth and fifth nuclear tests, as well as
its short-range, medium-range, intermediate-range, long-range and submarine-launched
ballistic missile (SLBM) launches.” In addition, “North Korea is developing and
has paraded…two road-mobile ICBMs which, if successfully developed, would
likely be capable of reaching much of the continental United States.”
Indeed, Pentagon
officials assess North Korea’s nuclear-capable KN-08 mobile ICBM system to be operational. That would bring all of Alaska, Hawaii and the western part of the
continental U.S. in range. In mid-2017, North Korea test-fired what
appears to be a full-fledged ICBM. Around that same time, U.S. intelligence agencies reported that
Pyongyang has produced as many as 60 nuclear warheads. All of this raises the specter of nuclear blackmail, widespread nuclear
proliferation, EMP attack and nuclear attack.
In 2015 and again
in 2016, Iran tested missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons—in
violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
MDA reports that Iran has the “means and motivation to
develop longer-range missiles, including ICBMs. In April 2016 Iran launched the
Simorgh space launch vehicle (SLV), which could be capable of intercontinental
ballistic missile ranges if configured as such. Iran may be able to deploy an
operational ICBM by 2020.”
In
fact, in July 2017, Iran launched a rocket capable of delivering satellites
into orbit, prompting the United States, Britain, France and
Germany to declare that such rockets “are closely related to those of ballistic missiles, in
particular to those of an intercontinental ballistic missile.”
These are regimes,
it pays to recall, that normalize terrorism into basic government functions,
threaten to wipe neighboring countries off the face of the earth and are serial
violators of international nuclear agreements.
Missile defenses
should not and cannot be the only means of trying to protect America from the
mushrooming missile threat. Diplomacy and treaty enforcement, nonproliferation
regimes, deterrence, “left of launch” strategies, hardening of vulnerabilities,
counterproliferation capabilities, and cyber-weapons and other non-kinetic
tools all must be brought to bear as well. However, since treaties are only as good as
the character of the governments that sign them, since irrational regimes may
very well be immune from deterrence, since counterproliferation via preemptive
military action is a high-risk proposition (as the Bush 43 administration
learned in Iraq), and since counterproliferation via third parties leaves much
to chance and mischief (as the Obama administration learned in Syria), robust
and ready missile defenses must be part of the answer to the missile threat. Like an insurance policy for home or
health, America needs to invest in missile defense in order to prepare for—and
survive—the worst.
Without question,
fielding a defense against missile attack—like all forms of national
defense—costs money. Critics always latch on to the system’s costs as reason to
downgrade or kill missile defense. However, building a shield against
accidental missile launches and missile-armed madmen is not the cause of our
fiscal woes. Between FY1985 and FY2017, the U.S.
invested a total of $189 billion on missile defense development at MDA. Spread
over 33 years, that translates into $5.7 billion annually. In comparison to the
Pentagon’s budget or the size of big-ticket social programs or the overall
federal budget, the amount invested in missile defense is a rounding error.
Moreover, if an
American city is ever maimed by missile attack—whether accidental or
intentional—the question policymakers will have to answer is not Why did you spend so much? but rather Why didn’t you do more to protect us?