‘B-S’ PATROL #4: BUMPERS-SASSER RELIANCE ON CBO’S ‘BUM DOPE’ JEOPARDIZES STRATEGIC DEFENSE, NATIONAL SECURITY

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate
Appropriations Defense Subcommittee will
shortly act upon a proposal by Sens. Dale
Bumpers (D-AR) and Jim Sasser (D-TN) to
reduce the funds available in FY1993 for
strategic defense from the $5.4 billion
level sought by President Bush to $3.8
billion — or less. By so doing, the
sponsors expect to make the Senate Armed
Services Committee and its authorization
process irrelevant as they seek to deny
the country effective protection against
ballistic missile attack.

It seems reasonable to expect that in
subcommittee deliberations, Sens. Bumpers
and Sasser will rely heavily upon a new
Congressional Budget Office analysis of
the program — just as they did on 7
August when they urged the full U.S.
Senate to cut the Global Protection
Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) program
to a mere $3.3 billion. This analysis,
entitled “Answers to Questions About
Concurrency and Cost Growth in SDI,”
was released just in time to be employed
in the Senate floor debate and to
minimize the opportunity for critical
review of its contents.

Last month, the Senators maintained with
straight faces that CBO had
determined that deployment of a single
strategic anti-missile site could be
accomplished with less money than SDIO
anticipated and that the reduced funding
level would alleviate risks in the
program. On the face of it, such a
conclusion is laughable. In
fact, the CBO report is a political
document not a serious, rigorous and
informed analysis of either the
technology being pursued by the Strategic
Defense Initiative, the risks inherent in
thepresent schedule or the impact of
reduction in available funding on program
cost or risk.

CBO’s recommendations would, however,
do what their Senatorial sponsors desire
— which is not to streamline and improve
the strategic defense deployment program.
Instead, the $3.3 billion funding
level recommended by the CBO would have
the effect of stretching out the program
indefinitely, greatly aggravating already
acute funding shortfalls and exacerbating
technical risks and leaving no viable
program except theater missile defenses.
In the words of Ambassador Henry Cooper,
director of the Strategic Defense
Initiative Organization (SDIO), the
Bumpers-Sasser plan “is no serious
acquisition program at all.”

The CBO Report: Garbage In,
Garbage Out

The issue with which the CBO report
purports to concern itself is how best to
reduce the level of technical risk and
“concurrency” associated with
the initial deployment of strategic
defensive systems. The CBO so badly
misconstrues the Administration’s
deployment strategy, however, that its
conclusions are meaningless — and
seriously misleading. Among the report’s
flaws are the following:

• Inaccurate Definition:
  To suit its conclusion that the
  Administration’s plan involves
  “high concurrency,” the
  CBO created its own definition of
  concurrency — one employed by
  neither the authorizing
  committees nor the Department of
  Defense. According to the report,
  a program is concurrent if any
  hardware is bought before testing
  is finished. This is, in the
  words of Sen. Malcolm Wallop
  (R-WY), a “foxy
  definition” that would
  render virtually all weapons
  programs concurrent to a large
  degree.

According to Amb. Cooper, the CBO
approach is a “basically
dishonest” way of defining
concurrency. To characterize
operational prototype
missiles — being developed under
a concept known as the User
Operational Evaluation System
(UOES) so as to afford, if
necessary, a limited contingency
defensive capability — as “production
hardware” is, he put
it, “absolutely
outrageous.”

• Dubious Assertion:
  The CBO report is predicated upon
  the assumption that concurrency
  is undesirable and to be eschewed
  to the maximum degree possible.
  In fact, where vital national
  security interests are at stake,
  a great degree of concurrency is
  routinely accepted. For example,
  in the Manhattan Project and in
  the development of ICBMs,
  ballistic missile submarines and
  reconnaissance aircraft like the
  U-2 and SR-71, the risks
  associated with concurrency were
  deemed trivial compared to the
  risks of leaving the United
  States without the required
  capability. Such a judgment is
  surely no less true than with
  respect to the need to eliminate
  America’s present, absolute
  vulnerability to ballistic
  missile attack.

Concurrency in the form of
operational use of prototypical
hardware can also be of
considerable benefit to the
quality of production items.
Significant improvements in the
JSTARS radar aircraft and the PAC
II Patriot missile, for example,
were possible because of
technical knowledge gained during
their use in the Gulf War, before
testing had been completed.
Interestingly — even as it cites
concerns about concurrency to
build its case against the UOES
approach — CBO
acknowledges that there is
“no strong relationship
between concurrency and the two
measures associated with the
success or failure of weapon
programs: cost and schedule
delay.”

• Mischaracterization of
  the SDI Program Schedule:
  At one point, the CBO report
  states that it is not clear when
  production begins in the
  Administration’s baseline
  program. In fact, SDIO’s June
  1992 report to Congress
  specifically states that production
  is slated to begin in 2002
  — irrespective of whether a
  decision is made to field
  pre-production prototypical
  hardware. Such a schedule
  would make the Bush
  Administration’s plan a “low
  concurrency” program even by
  CBO’s own, unduly stringent
  definition.

Interestingly, in its report
accompanying the FY’93 Defense
authorization act, the
Senate Armed Services Committee
found that SDIO had produced a
“low-moderate risk
strategy” for GPALS
involving “low-moderate
concurrency.”

• Flim-flam on Risk:
  The CBO report contends that
  funds earmarked for
  risk-mitigation elements of the
  Pentagon’s program can be safely
  reduced — making possible
  considerable savings. This step
  is justified, according to its
  analysis, on the grounds that
  these efforts are unnecessary if
  production is made less
  concurrent.

Since the Congressional Budget
Office’s recommendation (i.e., to
cancel the UOES contingency
deployment option) would not
alter the pace at which production
of operational systems proceeds,
it is far from clear just how the
risk associated with such an
operational deployment would be
appreciably reduced. What is
more, insofar as the true
risk under the CBO-Bumpers-Sasser
approach — namely, that the
nation will remain absolutely
exposed to ballistic missile
attack until that deployment
begins — will be greatly
exacerbated if the UOES option is
cancelled, it is
preposterous to claim that the
net effect of CBO’s
recommendations would be to
reduce the riskiness associated
with the GPALS acquisition
strategy.

• Phony Cost Estimates:
  There are gross — and largely
  unexplained and unjustified —
  discrepancies between the cost
  projections used in the CBO
  report and those presented on
  behalf of the Defense Department
  in SDIO’s June 1992 report to
  Congress. For example, CBO’s
  estimate of the price tag for the
  Limited Defense System program
  element is almost $900 million
  higher than SDIO’s; similarly,
  CBO assesses the cost of the
  Other Follow-on and Research and
  Support elements to be over $400
  million more than the Pentagon
  does.

The true purpose of the CBO analysis
— namely, to strengthen the hands of
those bent on blocking the deployment of
even modest U.S. strategic defenses — is
evident in the criticism leveled at the
UOES option. The acquisition
strategy proposed by the Defense
Department and approved by the Senate
Armed Services Committee makes no
decision on proceeding with the UOES
option; the Administration’s plan does
not envision taking that step until 1997
at the earliest.

Should that option be foreclosed,
however — as CBO and the Bumpers-Sasser
amendment prefer — the people
and territory of the United States will
remain absolutely vulnerable to missile
attack until at least the year 2002,
long after potential adversaries may
obtain long-range ballistic missiles.<a
href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
Even if there were great risk
associated with the UOES approach,
the dangers of such a strategic posture
would argue for accepting it. Since
the UOES program actually entails neither
great risk nor undue concurrency,
however, the acquisition strategy of
which it is a key part should be approved
without further ado or congressional
second-guessing.

Overtaken by Events

Yet another flaw in the CBO report is
its repeated invoking of criticism once
expressed about the SDI program by the
head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program
Analysis and Evaluation, David Chu. In a
memo written in May 1992 and leaked to
the press in June, Chu claimed that the
GPALS program as envisioned at the time
had too much concurrency and should be
stretched out.

Subsequently, Chu — and all
other DoD officials charged with
oversight of the SDI acquisition program
— concurred in the strategy,
developmental and procurement milestones,
assessment of risk and projections of
costs outlined in the Pentagon’s
Junereport to Congress. That report
explicitly endorsed the need for $5.4
billion in FY1993 funds.

The CBO report nonetheless stated that
the $3.3 billion funding level would
support “Dr. Chu’s preferred
approach.” Amb. Cooper has called
that contention “naive and grossly
misleading.” He suggested that,
unlike his own program, the CBO
proposal would never pass muster with the
Program Analysis and Evaluation
organization. In remarks last week
at the Heritage Foundation, Amb. Cooper
went so far as to recommend that another
congressional watchdog agency — the
Government Accounting Office — be tasked
to evaluate the methodology and accuracy
of the CBO analysis.

The Predictable Result of
Severe Cuts: Serious Delays, Undue Risk

The certain effect of the reductions
suggested by the CBO and included in the
Bumpers-Sasser amendment in the name of
reducing concurrency and risk would be
exactly the opposite. There is no basis
for CBO’s contention that the $3.3
billion figure would preserve the 2002
initial operational capability. As Amb.
Cooper noted:

“The CBO-suggested cuts
would clearly turn it into a high
risk program. In my judgement, it
would destroy our ability to
mitigate risk in meeting any
pre-assigned schedule….It is a
guaranteed recipe for failure. To
support it is to support no
active defense for the American
people.”

In response to the idea that reducing
funds will mitigate program risk, Sen.
Wallop — a distinguished member of the
Center for Security Policy’s Board of
Advisors — observed during debate last
month on the Bumpers-Sasser amendment
that:

“Whatever risk remains in
this program can be safely
managed, but only if Congress
holds up its end of the deal….If
we do not provide adequate
funding, the inadequate
funding itself will become
the main source of the risk which
so concerns some.”

The Bottom Line

The
Center for Security Policy wholeheartedly
agrees with Sen. Wallop that the
Congressional Budget Office has been
reduced to “a biased partisan
joke.” This reality is amply borne
out by the organization’s unprofessional
and seriously flawed 7 August report —
and the unseemly way in which it was
calculatedly injected at the last moment
into a debate on a momentous national
policy issue.

To the extent that its analysis
contributes to further delay and
discombobulation in the effort to protect
the country against ballistic missile
strikes, CBO has profoundly disserved the
Congress and the American people. The
Center strongly urges members of the
United States Senate to stay the
course they adopted just a year ago
in enacting the Missile Defense Act of
1991. Only by bringing effective
defenses to bear as quickly as possible,
and accepting whatever concurrency is
necessary, can the real risk —
that of thousands or even millions of
Americans being destroyed by
missile-delivered nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons — be minimized.

– 30 –

1. See
in this regard the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled, “‘B-S’
Patrol: Sens. Bumpers and Sasser Wish
Away Ballistic Missile Threat, Propose to
Leave U.S. Vulnerable to It,”
(No. 92-D 101,
29 August 1992).