Influential Democrats Appear to Endorse the ‘AEGIS Option’ for Quickly Defending America

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times ‘buries the Lede’

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s New York Times reported what can only be described as a tectonic shift in the missile defense debate: Two of the Nation’s most prominent Democrat figures on matters of national security, the ranking minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, and former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry have apparently endorsed the idea of using sea-based missile defenses deployed aboard the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense ships to protect the United States against ballistic missile attack.

Characteristically,¹ the Times put a very different spin on its story. It buried what should have been the “lede”– namely, the Biden-Perry endorsements of sea-based missile defenses — in a story about bipartisan calls to defer a “political” Clinton decision next summer, a decision expected to approve the deployment of a limited, ground-based missile defense system in Alaska. The article was headlined “Biden Joins G.O.P. in Call for Delay in Missile Defense Plan,” and fed the impression that there is now widespread sentiment that no need exists for prompt action on defending America.

Mirabile Dictu

The real news was very different. According to the Times, in a speech at Stanford University on 8 March, Sen. Biden “said an Aegis sea-based system with missiles based off the North Korean coast would let the United States intercept the [North Korean] missiles in their ascents….[Mr.] Perry was in the audience….In congressional testimony, [he has] favored the sea-based system off North Korea.”

If these statements accurately portray the current thinking of Messrs. Biden and Perry, they are but the latest evidence that the convergence of two forces is leading inexorably to a national decision promptly to deploy sea-based missile defenses:

• First, the threat of missile attack is now unacceptably high. Last week, China issued an explicit threat to attack the United States with long-range, nuclear missiles if America interfered in any future PRC military action against Taiwan. North Korea is continuing to blackmail this country, now using the threat of merely testing an intercontinental ballistic to extract strategic, political and economic concessions from the Clinton-Gore Administration. Sales by both of these nations — and Russia — to other, “rogue” states is intensifying dangerous proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. And
• Second, the feasibility of providing effective, global and near-term missile defenses is no longer seriously disputed. In its 28 February editions, the Washington Post reported that the Nation’s top sailor, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson, recently wrote Secretary of Defense William Cohen urging that, in light of the emerging missile threats, modified Navy Aegis fleet air defense ships should be integrated into plans for defending the United States against these dangers.

  What is more, a Pentagon study that will be provided to Congress on 15 March reportedly concludes that “There is no technical reason preventing the evolution of the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) [system] to a National Missile Defense (NMD) role….Analysis to date suggests that ship-based support for NMD is technically feasible….There are significant advantages in overall NMD system performance, readiness and effectiveness by adding Naval ships adapted to the NMD mission.”

  Even the Defense Department’s top weapons evaluator, the Director of Test and Evaluation Philip Coyle, is said to have advised Congress in a recently submitted report that “the technology to complete the NTW Block II [i.e., a version that could be optimized for global missile defense] development exists now.”

Do Biden and Perry Support a Near-term, Global Sea-based Defense?

In fairness, it is unclear from the article in the Times — and could not be determined at this writing — whether Senator Biden and Secretary Perry fully comprehend the potential enormity of their statements. After all, the junior Senator from Delaware is arguably the Senate’s most unalloyed (and, frankly, uncritical) champion of arms control. Yet, he reportedly said at Stanford that “Such a [sea-based missile defense] system would not endanger the whole fabric of arms control or threaten non-proliferation safeguards the way that a national missile defense [by which he evidently means a land-based NMD].”

This could mean one of two things: 1) Sen. Biden has reached the correct conclusion and recognizes that defending Americans against ballistic missile threats from China, North Korea and other rogue states need not “endanger the whole fabric of arms control or threaten non-proliferation safeguards.”

This conclusion does contradict, however, the notion that the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty — signed in 1972 with a country that went out of business nine years ago and which explicitly bans, among other things, sea-based missile defenses of the United States — is the “cornerstone of strategic stability.” According to this thesis, America cannot be protected against ballistic missile attack from the sea or otherwise without Russia’s permission. If Senator Biden has adjusted his view on this score, the planet has not seen such a tectonic shift since the continental drift.

Alternatively, 2) Sen. Biden — and for that matter Secretary Perry — may be saying that they would support the deployment of a sea-based missile defense off the coast of North Korea provided the system so deployed was compliant with the ABM Treaty. This would mean that it would be artificially dumbed-down so as to ensure that it could be used to shoot down North Korean ballistic missiles headed to Japan or South Korea, but not to the United States. This so-called “theater” missile defense would provide protection to America’s forces and allies overseas, but not to its people and territory here at home. The absurdity of imposing such a limitation when the U.S. itself is increasingly in the cross-hairs of foreign missileers, not just targets closer at hand to them, is self-evident.

The Bottom Line

It can only be hoped that leading Democrats like Sen. Biden and Secretary Perry have, in fact, joined the growing consensus that we have no choice but to deploy sea-based missile defenses as soon possible and that this can be done without unacceptable costs in terms of “strategic stability” or our relations with Russia. If so, they should lend their voices to an effort to dissuade President Clinton not from deferring a decision to deploy anti-missile protection for the American people at the earliest possible moment. Rather, Mr. Clinton should be encouraged to do so, at once and from the sea.

Where dissuasion is needed, however, is in urging the Clinton-Gore Administration to forego any further effort to negotiate with the Russians a deal that would effectively foreclose the option of deploying sea-based missile defenses that the country requires today, to say nothing of the more comprehensive space-based, mobile land-based or multiple ground-based anti-missile systems it may require down the road.

²See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Much Ado About Not Much? N.Y. Times’ Latest Salvo in Attack on Missile Defense Seems Irrelevant to Present Program (No. 00-D 21, 8 March 2000); ‘There You Go Again’ Tim Weiner’s Dubious Opinions Passed Off As ‘News’ (No. 96-D 106, 29 October 1996); and All the ‘News’ that Fits the Times’ Political Agenda: Latest Assault on SDI Unfounded, Indefensible (No. 93-D 70, 18 August 1993).