‘B-S’ PATROL #5 ‘YOU’RE NO JOHN KENNEDY’ — FLIP-FLOPS BY SWING SENATORS ON SDI AREN’T EXACTLY PROFILES IN COURAGE

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate is
expected today to complete consideration
of the FY1993 Defense authorization bill.
One of the first orders of business will
be whether Senators will demonstrate with
respect to one of the most important
national security issues of the day —
affording the United States protection
against ballistic missile attack — the
vision, leadership and constancy of
purpose worthy of “the world’s
greatest deliberative body.”

The test will likely come in action on
an amendment proposed by Sens. Dale
Bumpers (D-AR) and Jim Sasser (D-TN).
Bumpers-Sasser hope to impose a mortal
reduction in funding for the Strategic
Defense Initiative. The cut may be as
much as an additional $1 billion from the
level approved by the Armed Services
Committee, leaving the program just $3.3
billion or fully 37 percent below the
amount requested by the President.
Alternatively, the sponsors may modify
their amendment to mirror action taken at
their behest earlier this week by the
Senate Appropriations Committee’s Defense
Subcommittee — a reduction to $3.8
billion.

The consequences of such a low funding
level are dangerous and predictable: The
Global Protection Against Limited Strikes
(GPALS) system would be turned into a
program for theater missile defenses with
only a truncated R&D effort left over
for strategic defenses. Given
this grim prospect, the vote on the
Bumpers-Sasser amendment should be
understood as giving the Senate a clear
choice:

• Preserve the nation’s
  present, absolute
  vulnerability to ballistic
  missile attack by
  precluding relatively near-term
  anti-missile deployments and by
  leaving, as a consequence, the
  people and territory of the
  United States exposed to the
  increasing prospect of limited
  missile strikes for the
  foreseeable future; or
• Stick with the Senate’s
  action of last year which
  explicitly and by a sizeable
  margin repudiated the posture of
  “Assured Vulnerability”
  by enacting the Missile Defense
  Act of 1991. This would
  require that the United States
  continue to pursue a course
  antithetical to the
  Bumpers-Sasser approach:
  deployment of territorial
  defenses beginning in 1996 or as
  soon as possible thereafter.

Where The Key Votes Are

This momentous choice appears to rest
with a handful of Senators who voted
repeatedly during last year’s floor
debate on the Missile Defense Act to
defeat amendments that would have gutted
or seriously interfered with its thrust
— but nonetheless supported, in a test
vote on 7 August, the Bumpers-Sasser
amendment which would do the same
thing. They include: Sens.
David Boren (D-OK), Charles Robb (D-VA),
Wendell Ford (D-KY), Robert
Byrd (D-WV), Max Baucus
(D-MT), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Kent
Conrad (D-ND), Tim Wirth (D-CO) and
Charles Grassley (R-IA).

In a series of four Decision
Briefs published over the past
month, the Center for Security Policy has
assessed — and found utterly untenable
— various grounds that might be cited
for such a remarkable volte-face
in positions on the part of swing
Senators:

“The threat is
diminished with the collapse of
the Soviet Union.”
In fact — as noted in “B-S”
Patrol #1: Sens. Bumpers and
Sasser Wish Away Ballistic
Missile Treat, Propose to Leave
U.S. Vulnerable to It (<a
href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_101″>No. 92-D 101,
29 August 1992) — the chances
for accidental or unauthorized
launches from the former Soviet
Union may actually be greater
under conditions likely to emerge
if the political and economic
conditions in the nuclear-armed
successor states continue to
deteriorate.

In any case, ballistic missiles
— and the weapons of mass
destruction they might carry —
are rapidly finding their way
into dangerous hands. WITH
RESPECT TO THE THREAT, THE
SENATE’S ACTION LAST YEAR IN
ADOPTING THE MISSILE DEFENSE ACT
IS, IF ANYTHING, MORE
JUSTIFIED TODAY THAN IT WAS THEN.

“We can’t afford to
spend money on strategic defense
given the present budgetary
conditions.” As
noted in “B-S”
Patrol #2: Ideology, Not
Budgetary Conditions, Drive
Bumpers-Sasser Effort to Gut
Strategic Defense (<a
href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_105″>No. 92-D 105,
8 September 1992), Sens. Bumpers
and Sasser have seriously
degraded the quality of the
debate over the costs of the
GPALS program by: misrepresenting
what will have to be spent to
field strategic defenses;
proposing to gut the most
cost-effective of such defenses
— Brilliant Pebbles; and setting
the SDI program back on a course
Sen. Nunn has correctly described
as:

“[A] return to the
wasteful years of the
1980s when $3-4 billion
was spent each year on
SDI without any consensus
by the Congress, without
any direction, with
compromises every year
that left no direction
and nothing was really
[achieved] but endless
research.”

In fact, the costs of effective
strategic defenses are far less
than they are represented to be
by SDI’s ideologically motivated
opponents. What is more, the
costs should the United States be
unable to prevent a nuclear,
chemical or biological
weapons-bearing missile from
hitting an American city are
literally incalculably high. In
short, WITH RESPECT TO
THE COST/DEFICIT ISSUE, THE
SENATE’S ACTION LAST YEAR IN
ADOPTING THE MISSILE DEFENSE ACT
IS, IF ANYTHING, MORE
JUSTIFIED TODAY THAN IT WAS THEN.

“Deployment of SDI
is going forward too fast — and
if (for some reason) it is not,
then it doesn’t need so much
money.” As noted
in “B-S” Patrol #3:
Bumpers-Sasser Don’t Get It
— Greatest Waste Will Come from
Not Making More Haste on SDI
(No. 92-D
110, 11 September 1992), the
schedule for deployment of
strategic defenses is not nearly
as fast as it should be, given
the threat. It certainly is not
going to be accomplished on
anything like the crash
schedule the Senate mandated by
law last year.

If fully funded, the present
GPALS program does offer,
however, a very modest
contingency capability —
sufficient to permit deployment
of some operational
prototype interceptors to defend
the United States by roughly 1997
if (as seems likely) the need
arises. This is a manifestly good
thing to be able to do,
particularly if the alternative
is to have no such defenses until
well after the year 2000.

And yet, Sens. Bumpers and Sasser
would eliminate this capability
even as they further delayed the
Initial Operational Capability of
production-quality defenses. Here
too, WITH RESPECT TO THE
SCHEDULE FOR DEPLOYMENT, THE
SENATE’S ACTION LAST YEAR IN
ADOPTING THE MISSILE DEFENSE ACT
IS, IF ANYTHING, MORE
JUSTIFIED TODAY THAN IT WAS THEN.

“The Congressional
Budget Office has found problems
with the risk and concurrency
involved in the SDI program,
therefore it is no longer
supportable.” As
noted in “B-S”
Patrol #4: Bumpers-Sasser
Reliance on CBO’s ‘Bum Dope’
Jeopardizes Strategic Defense,
National Security (<a
href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_113″>No. 92-D 113,
15 September 1992), the CBO
“analysis” used to
justify Sens. Bumpers and
Sasser’s effort to redirect, slow
down and otherwise destroy the
GPALS program does not stand up
to rigorous scrutiny. CBO’s
flawed findings are predicated
upon: inaccurate definitions;
dubious assertions; serious
mischaracterizations of the SDI
program schedule; an
unconscionable flim-flam on the
question of “risk”;
phony cost estimates; and an
irresponsible misrepresentation
about the current views
of a senior Pentagon official.

Taken together, the defects in
CBO’s work are more an indictment
of the organization’s willingness
to play a highly politicized role
than a serious contribution to an
informed debate — to say nothing
of a rigorous blueprint for a
restructured SDI deployment plan.
Certainly, AS FAR AS THE
CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE’S
INPUTS ARE CONCERNED, THE
SENATE’S ACTION LAST YEAR IN
ADOPTING THE MISSILE DEFENSE ACT
IS, IF ANYTHING, MORE
JUSTIFIED TODAY THAN IT WAS THEN.

A New Red Herring — the GAO
Rolls In

Yesterday, in yet
another transparent, eleventh-hour
effort to undermine support for strategic
defenses, yet another
“congressional watchdog agency”
(in this case, the General Accounting
Office) engaged in yet another
example of politicized analysis of the
SDI program. At the request of Rep. John
Conyers (D-MI) — one of the most
partisan opponents of such defenses and
current chairman of the House Government
Operations Committee — GAO assailed DoD
for misrepresenting critical test
results. With the help of the Washington
Post‘s no-less-ideological reporter
R. Jeffrey Smith, the Conyers/GAO charges
appeared on the front page of the Post
— just as critical decisions on SDI
funding were being taken on Capitol Hill.

Under the circumstances, it should
come as no surprise that the GAO report
(entitled, “Some Claims Overstated
for Early Flight Test of
Interceptors”) — like the CBO
“analysis” before it — is
seriously flawed. And yet the following
indictment is pretty damning: First, as
the Defense Department observed
yesterday: “The issues raised in
[the GAO] report have either already been
acknowledged and corrected by SDIO, or
represent a difference of interpretation
of preliminary test data between SDIO and
GAO reviewers.” Indeed, in the words
of Ambassador Henry Cooper, director of
SDIO, “Most, if not all, of the GAO
arguments are old news, if they were ever
news at all.”

Second, the GAO did not distinguish
between the results of a test, in which
predetermined performance objectives are
expected, and the results of an
experiment, designed to gain new data
about the technology without pass-fail
criteria. By these measures, all of
SDIO’s tests and experiments provided a
tremendous amount of new data that
demonstrate the possibility of current
technology to provide militarily- and
cost-effective missile defenses.

Third, the GAO report includes a
number of outright errors. For
example, the GAO alleged that SDIO
claimed that target discrimination (i.e.,
the difficult job of distinguishing
between a real warhead and a decoy) was
accomplished in a test of the
ERIS interceptor. In fact, SDIO
never made such a claim — and
specifically warned against drawing
excessive conclusions from the highly
successful test. What is more,
in a 6 June 1991 letter (N.B. a date prior
to the point at which GAO started
its review) to a member of Congress, Amb.
Cooper stated that the destruction of the
warhead in the test did not
constitute target discrimination. The
name of the member: None other than Rep.
John Conyers.

The GAO also charged that SDIO did not
provide an accurate characterization of
the test objectives for a test of the Brilliant
Pebbles interceptor. Again, GAO
is wrong. The test objectives were
included in the Mission Experiment
Description published on 12 April 1991
and were included in a press briefing
conducted by the program manager on 18
April — information GAO should also have
had and should also have factored into
its subsequent analysis.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
believes that neither the latest
assertions about SDI test results nor the
other claims used to justify the
Bumpers-Sasser amendment can legitimately
be relied upon to protect Senators from
the charge of inconsistency and
flip-flopping on an important national
security issue. Those members of
the Senate who once voted in favor of the
Missile Defense Act and who now seem
disposed to abandon its central premise
— i.e., that the United States must
be defended against ballistic
missile attack as quickly as possible —
run the risk of being held especially
accountable in the event their
second-thoughts wind up costing the lives
of thousands, and perhaps millions,
of their constituents or countrymen.

– 30 –

1. This Decision
Brief is the fifth in a series
examining a proposal by Sens. Bumpers and
Sasser that would gut the Global
Protection Against Limited Strikes
system.