Congress Forgets the Meaning of Defense

By MALCOLM WALLOP
The Wall Street Journal, August 2, 1990

At the 1987 Washington summit, Soviet spokesman Georgi Arbatov posed a rhetorical
question: “What will you do when we deny you an enemy?.” Three years later U.S.
policymakers seem to believe they are now confronting that problem.

Several weeks ago the Senate Armed Services Committee completed work on a major
defense bill that cancels or severely cripples a number of important strategic programs. On
Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee marked up a defense bill that could do
yet more damage to national security. The trouble here is that no one is asking whether the
Soviets are merely denying us the perception of an enemy. The Soviets may even be doing
so in order to undermine the American consensus for a strong defense. Soviet success in
any case shows that lawmakers’ will to believe in Mikhail Gorbachev’s benign intentions is
too strong.

The U.S. Defense Department is, of course, certainly not entitled to a blank check.
Reasonable cuts in defense spending are the necessary response to the world’s changing
military and political situation, and to our own deficit woes. But the Pentagon is not a cash
cow to be milked to nourish a bloated welfare state. Its mission is to safeguard our
freedom by keeping our military forces strong and ready.

Military Unpreparedness

Take a look at history. Every time the U.S. has embarked on a drastic unilateral
reduction in military capability for a short-term gain, the ultimate result has been a high
cost — in American blood as well as treasure.

We were woefully unprepared when we entered World War I. Recruits drilled with
broomsticks instead of rifles, and the U.S. had to borrow artillery, tanks and aircraft from
the French and British. In the 1930s, isolationism gave us a weak military. With Pearl
Harbor, we learned the cost. U.S. submarines went to war with torpedoes that would not
explode on contact. Our aviators and their obsolete aircraft were shot down in scores by
Japanese pilots flying modern Zeros. After World War II, the lesson repeated itself. The
U.S. demobilized precipitously and announced that it had no security interest in East Asia.
The result was the North Korean invasion of South Korea 40 years ago this summer, and
the death of 50,000 Americans.

Congress today is overlooking the high price of unpreparedness in its zeal to spend the
peace dividend — before there is a dividend, and before there is true and certain peace.

The defense legislation pending in the House would terminate the B-2 Stealth bomber
program and stall the modernization of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The legislation in
the Senate also stops modernization of ICBMs. There is no strategic rationale for these
steps. The process that produced the legislation was not a thoughtful exercise in defense
policy analysis, but an accountant’s exercise. The very term “peace dividend” is the
language of accountants. So it should come as no surprise that Congress is acting with
little consideration of specific threats, strategic imperatives or military requirements. The
result is strategy made by bookkeepers.

The most glaring example of the triumph of short-term politics over sound defense
policy is the attitude toward strategic programs, space and the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Even though the Warsaw Pact may no longer pose the threat of conventional war for
NATO, the Soviet threat at the strategic end of the warfare spectrum remains real. The
Soviets are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenal. Their military space program
and their own “Star Wars” plans continue unabated.

Yet in Washington, the committee mark-up sessions and the legislation that followed
showed no concern over the use of nuclear power for diplomatic leverage or blackmail.
The sessions have ignored the possibility that the Soviets are merely following one of their
old military doctrines: “victory without war.” One way to explain American failure to aid
Lithuania’s freedom struggle — morally or financially — is that the U.S. is already
intimidated by the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, has made many speeches and issued many statements explaining the
Senate bill’s strategy, but not one discusses the critical importance of space to U.S.
security and prosperity — an astonishing omission for any strategy that claims to “look
forward, not backward.”

In a trip to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in February. President Bush said,
“In the 1990s, strategic defense makes more sense than ever before.” But the Senate
Armed Services Committee authorized nearly a billion dollars less than the president’s SDI
request. The House Armed Services Committee proposes to cut SDI by nearly $2 billion.
When the two chambers split the difference, the result could be a major reduction in SDI
funding, an actual decline in real dollars, not merely a cut in the planned increase.

There are worse prospects for SDI than reduced funding. Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D.,
N.M.) and Sen. Richard Shelby (D., Ala.) intend to offer an amendment to the Senate
defense bill that would radically restructure SDI. This comes at the moment when the
program stands on the threshold of producing concrete benefits. By cutting $400 million
from Phase 1 of SDI and “brilliant pebbles,” the most promising near term technology, the
amendment would foreclose the deployment an actual defense system, and steer SDI
toward long-term open ended research. The Senators would sacrifice the Defense
Department’s freedom to manage the program efficiently, and allocate the bulk of funds to
established interests — interests not coincidentally located in New Mexico and Alabama.

Sen. Nunn has predicted that a “broad national debate” on strategic defense will result
from this amendment. He’s quite right. The American people will have the chance to
decide whether they want SDI to become a technological welfare program or whether they
went to get any return — in the form of an actual defense — from the six years and nearly
$20 billion invested in SDI. They must decide through their elected representatives
whether to ensure by law that SDI will never produce any real security and will instead
become merely another expensive entitlement program.

Ironically, scientists and engineers working on SDI don’t favor pure research either.
They, too, hope for a usable product. In a recent report for the Strategic Defense Initiative
Organization, leading scientists from both Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratories agree that “Brilliant Pebbles offers effective and survivable space based
means for addressing near and long-term missile threats in the boost phase.”

Building on the steady and dramatic technical progress to date, and under the Strategic
Defense Initiative Organization’s new director Henry Cooper, there is the real possibility
that SDI funds will be spent to build the protection that the American people think they
have been paying for all along — unless Congress passes the Bingaman-Shelby Amendment
into law.

If we turn our backs on SDI, we’re not just rejecting the option of defense against
ballistic missiles. SDI also means progress in the critical arena of space. It is significant that
the Senate defense bill would also terminate the MILSTAR space-based command and
control program, and that Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) want
to kill off our anti-satellite capability as well.

As long as there is conflict between competing interests and ideologies, space will not
be exempt from it. Indeed, we are entering an era when space control is becoming the
crucial military leverage, and may determine the course of future conflicts — without a shot
ever being fired by terrestrial forces.

Military forces have historically opened the way into new frontiers of human endeavor,
whether it was navies opening up the high seas, or, as in our own history, the Army
exploring the new Western frontier, and providing security for settlers, homesteader and
railroads.

pattern. The military’s initial investment and sustained operations in space will push
technology forward, bring down the cost of launching and keeping platforms in orbit, and
provide the nucleus of future settlements and commercial ventures. As in the past “trade
will follow the flag.”

Via SDI to Space

The first step toward the essential mastery of space is SDI, the greatest technical and
strategic innovation of the past quarter century. A strategic defense system will greatly
reduce the military utility or blackmail potential of nuclear armed ballistic missiles. But
SDI will give us more than just a missile defense. It will also lead the way to U.S.
dominance in the ultimate high ground of space, and the “high seas” of the future.

The list of civil and commercial as well as military benefits to be gained from space is
endless. But the investments will be, shall we say, astronomical. Can we expect businesses
to risk huge investments in space unless their security is reasonably assured, unless U.S.
interests in space can be defended as they are on the earth’s surface? If congressional
leaders, especially leaders of the armed services committees, allow Congress to forestall
the immeasurable advantages of a space-based strategic defense, then their pretensions to
the role of strategist ring hollow.

As Congress takes up action on the defense bill, the American people need to remind
their representatives that American moral strength, political resolve, military capability and
technical prowess over the past 40 years have brought us to the threshold of victory. When
we are so close to seeing the end of Soviet imperialism, the dividend ought to be more
than a transitory or illusory peace. By our continued resolve, peace, when it comes, will be
genuine and lasting.

Sen. Wallop (R., Wyo. ) is a member of the Armed Services Committee.