An Effective Antimissile Strategy

By JON KYL
Wall Street Journal, 22 May 1997

There may yet be hope for defending our borders. Within the past two weeks, the Clinton administration has been forced to admit what those committed to ending our national vulnerability to ballistic missile attack have known all along: The president’s attempt to develop effective defenses in three years and have them ready for deployment in an additional three years–the so-called “Three-Plus-Three” plan–has no chance of living up to its name.

Instead, published planning documents approved by Secretary of Defense William Cohen indicate that it will probably take at least four years to develop the defensive system, to be deployed at a single site in Grand Forks, N.D. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Kaminski testified to Congress last week that “the earliest possible deployment” of such a capability may well occur after 2006.

No Use at All
Worst of all, even to achieve this modest program–its 20 interceptors are forecast to be able to deal with attacks involving only a handful of incoming missiles and to be of no use at all if the attack is aimed at places like Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, or Pearl Harbor, Hawaii–would probably cost at least $20 billion. The administration now acknowledges that just getting the program through the development phase would run $1 billion to $2 billion more than has been budgeted. None of the funds required for fielding this “Three-Plus-Three”–or, more precisely, “Four-Plus-?”–system have been provided for in out-year Clinton budget plans.

These revelations represent both a challenge and an opportunity for proponents of effective antimissile protection for the American people and their forces and allies abroad. They are a challenge because Mr. Clinton would have us choose between either pouring a great deal more money into the least strategically justifiable missile defense option, or rejecting his request. Of course, were Congress to continue to fund the Clinton system but not at the increased amounts, the president could declare that he is no longer to blame for America’s yawning vulnerability to missile attack–that it’s the fault of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Fortunately, this situation also presents Congress with an important opportunity. It can adopt a totally different missile defense option–one that would, within three years, be able to begin providing effective defenses against short-range missile attack and some initial protection of our own country against longer-range missiles. Even the notoriously skeptical Congressional Budget Office estimates that the first 650 interceptors could be brought on-line for as little as $5 billion.

Such an option is available because the U.S. has already invested nearly $50 billion in the launchers, missiles, sensors, communications equipment and personnel that would be required to deploy such a system. What is more, this deployment would take place not in North Dakota but where we’d need ballistic missiles intercepted, namely as close to their launching point and as far from their targets as possible. This is a particular priority for missiles loaded with chemical, biological or radiological materials.

What system could conceivably have so many desirable attributes? The answer: The U.S. Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense program. As a result of the outlays made to acquire and operate scores of Aegis ships over the past three decades, the U.S. now has in place much of the infrastructure necessary to begin providing global antimissile defenses. And it can do so for a fraction of the cost of the administration’s other alternatives.

As with any military system, orderly product-improvement programs should be pursued to expand the defended “footprint” of sea-based antimissile systems. For example, space-based sensors should be added as soon as possible in order further to enhance the performance of Navy missile defenses–and that of all other U.S. antimissile programs. If, as seems likely, the threat continues to grow, more-comprehensive global defenses can be achieved by complementing the Navy’s systems with the deployment of effective space-based weapons.

But the most important point is that we have what we need to end our recklessly irresponsible vulnerability to ballistic missile attack. The routine, world-wide deployment of our Aegis ships also allows us to offer robust protection to friends and allies who face even more acute threats than we do from the thousands of ballistic missiles now in service in more than a score of countries.

Such protection can be maximized by collaboration with allied navies and command authorities. Japan, whose home islands can be targeted by a newly introduced North Korean missile, has its own Aegis cruisers; it would be a logical candidate to share in the funding and benefits of a common defensive approach.

There is, importantly, fresh evidence that the American people are eager to have missile defenses that will be far more readily available and more competent than Mr. Clinton’s will-o’-the-wisp “Four-Plus-?” system. On May 11, the Alaska Legislature adopted a resolution urging the federal government “to take necessary measures to ensure that Alaska is protected against foreseeable threats, nuclear and otherwise, posed by foreign aggressors, including deployment of a ballistic missile defense system to protect Alaska.” Naturally, Alaska’s residents want–as we all do–a defense that is technologically feasible and affordable. Evolutionary sea-based defenses, an early version of which conducted a successful intercept of a short-range ballistic missile two months ago, meet both of these tests.

The Alaskans also formally conveyed to the president their expectation “that Alaska’s safety and security take priority over any international treaty or obligation.” Which brings us to the one argument the Clinton administration can offer against the sea-based national missile defense option: The 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty prohibits sea-based antimissile protection for the American people (“strategic” defenses). And President Clinton–who insists that this treaty is “the cornerstone of strategic stability”–is trying to expand its scope in ways that will even inhibit, and possibly preclude, effective naval missile defenses for our forces and allies abroad (“theater” defenses).

Last week, the U.S. Senate signaled that it is prepared, finally, to challenge Mr. Clinton’s determined subordination of missile defenses to a clearly outdated arms control treaty. My colleagues and I voted unanimously to require the submission for our advice and consent of a memorandum of understanding intended to designate Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus as successors to America’s original ABM Treaty partner, the Soviet Union. In so doing, we have set the stage for what may be the most important national security debate in a generation.

No Legal Basis
After all, if the Senate rejects ratification of the multilateralization memorandum of understanding, there will be no recognized successor to the nation that disappeared nearly eight years ago. It seems a pretty straightforward proposition: No treaty partner, no treaty. And it follows, in the absence of the ABM Treaty, there would no longer be a legal basis for preventing the U.S. from protecting against a danger that is dramatically different in kind and quantity from that of 1972–a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union had a monopoly on ballistic missile threats to America and its allies.

The time has come to articulate a clear alternative vision for protecting America and others around the word to that offered by Clinton’s incredible shrinking “Three-Plus-Three” program and an ABM Treaty that makes it practically impossible to have a defense that defends. The place to start is by exercising the sea-based national missile defense option.

Mr. Kyl, a Republican from Arizona, is a member of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.