Despite Purported Addition of ‘Out-Year’ Dollars, Clinton Still Balks at Deployment of Needed Missile Defenses

(Washington, D.C.): There he goes again. Yesterday’s New York Times
revealed that President
Clinton has decided to “pledge about $7 billion over the next six years to build a limited [national]
missile defense system.” The article hastens to add, however, that “he will leave a final decision
on whether to build it until later.” In other words, the President wants to take credit for
doing
something about the Nation’s vulnerability to ballistic missile attack without actually doing
anything to mitigate it.

Sound familiar? In fact, the Clinton announcement concerning missile defenses fits the profile
of a
classic Dick Morris-style political “triangulation” maneuver. As the
Times article reported:

“…[Executive branch] officials said the decision to set aside money in the Pentagon’s
budget now was meant to underscore the Administration’s political commitment to the
idea and to head off growing criticism from Republicans in Congress that Mr. Clinton
was not doing enough to defend the Nation from a missile strike.” (Emphasis added.)

Threat? Oh, Yes, the Threat

Not until the end of the New York Times report is there mention of the fact that
the danger of
such a strike is growing to the point where deployment of a missile defense is necessary.
The article says:

“Other [officials] said the White House and Pentagon had concluded that the threat
from intercontinental missiles from hostile nations was growing, noting North Korea’s
test of a three-stage missile on 31 August. Although Mr. Clinton and his aides have
not made a decision, one senior Administration official said, ‘They’re getting close.'”

Gen. Shelton: ‘What, Me Worry?’

In fact, earlier this week the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh
Shelton, in
testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee once again displayed the
Administration’s insouciance about the threat of missile attack. This appearance follows a famous
one before the Committee on 29 September 1998 — in which Gen. Shelton and his fellow Chiefs
were severely upbraided by Senators of both parties over their failure of leadership concerning the
Nation’s preparedness for conflict. 1

In particular, General Shelton was taken to task for his assertion in a 24 August letter to the
then-chairman of the Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, Senator Jim Inhofe
(R-OK), in which
he declared: “We remain confident that the intelligence community can provide the necessary
warning of the indigenous development and deployment by a rogue state of an ICBM threat to the
United States.”

On that occasion, the JCS notoriously insisted on characterizing as “an unlikely development”
a
key conclusion of the blue-ribbon, congressionally mandated commission led by former
Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 2 — namely, the
prospect that “through unconventional, high-risk
development programs and foreign assistance, rogue nations could acquire an ICBM capability in
a short time and that the intelligence community may not detect it.”

Three days later, however, the Armed Services Committee took testimony from
Deputy
Secretary of Defense John Hamre, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Joseph
Ralston and Lieutenant General Lester Lyles, the Director of the Ballistic
Missile Defense
Organization. These senior officials were forced to admit that they could no longer
sustain the
central tenet of the Administration’s resistance to the prompt deployment of missile defenses:
The ballistic missile threat from a rogue state like North Korea is now recognized as likely to
emerge before the U.S. can deploy effective anti-missile systems to defeat it. 3

This week, though, Gen. Shelton was back to describing the threat as a future
problem. In
Tuesday’s hearing, he declared that the decision about investing funds to deploy missile defenses
would depend on “Whether or not the threat, when measured against all the other threats that we
face, justifies the expenditure of that type of money for that particular system at the time when the
technology will allow us to field it.”

More Smoke & Mirrors

If there were any lingering doubt that the Clinton Administration’s missile defense
announcement
amounts to a political gambit, it should be dispelled by the fact that whatever funds it
earmarks
for “deployment” of a National Missile Defense will appear in the Pentagon’s “out-year”
budgets. Like desert mirages, such allocations have a funny way of disappearing as the
out-years
become the current budget year. The phenomenon is much in evidence in President
Clinton’s
announcement last Saturday that he would be adding $110 billion to the defense budget — the vast
majority of any new money coming far in the out-years and after (under the most optimistic
scenario) he leaves office.

More to the point, the program that the Administration wants us to believe it is
committed
to deploying at some future point remains a less flexible, less effective, less near-term
and far
more expensive approach to defending the United States against ballistic missile attack
than an alternative recommendation by another blue-ribbon commission — the Heritage
Foundation’s Missile Defense Study Team (Team B) — which could promptly begin
deployment. 4 Thanks to the fact that the taxpayer has
already invested some $50 billion in the
U.S. Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system, essentially the entire infrastructure needed
to
begin defending the American people — as well as their forces and allies overseas —
against
missile strikes is in hand. For what the Navy has confirmed would be an
additional investment
of just $2-3 billion total spent over the next five-years, the Nation could start to field
sea-based
missile defenses that meet what the Joint Chiefs have described as their two requirements: a
system that is technically “feasible” and “practical” (read, affordable).

The Bottom Line

The American people should be under no illusion: The Clinton Administration remains
determined to defer any decision to deploy the defenses needed to protect the Nation, its citizens
and territory against the growing danger of ballistic missile attack. In the continuing absence of
presidential leadership and in the face of an increasing threat, the 106^th
Congress must move
with dispatch to make it the policy of the United States government to deploy defenses
against missile attack as soon as technologically possible. 5

1See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Wanted: An End to the ‘Hollow’ Military — and a
‘Feasible,’ ‘Practical’ Missile Defense (No. 98-D
167, 29 September 1998).

2See Critical Mass # 2: Senator Lott, Rumsfeld
Commission Add Fresh Impetus to Case for
Beginning Deployment of Missile Defenses ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_133″>No. 98-D 133, 15 July 1998) and Wall Street
Journal Lauds Rumsfeld Commission Warning on Missile Threat; Reiterates Call for Aegis
Option in Response (No. 98-P 134, 16 July
1998).

3See So There is a Missile Threat, After All: Clinton
Pentagon Confirms Rumsfeld
Commission’s Central Finding (No. 98-D
169, 6 October 1998).

4The Heritage Foundation’s study can be accessed via the world
wide web at the following
address: href=”https://www.heritage.org/nationalsecurity/teamb”>www.heritage.org/nationalsecurity/teamb.

5 See Senate Should Vote to Defend America ‘As
Soon As Technologically Possible’ (No. 98-D
79, 6 May 1998), Shame, Shame: By One Vote, Minority of Senators
Perpetuate America’s
Vulnerability to Missile Attack (No. 98-D
84, 14 May 1998) and Shame, Shame Redux: As
Clinton Presidency Melts Down, 41 Democrats Continue Filibuster of Bill to Defend
America
(No. 98-D 160, 9 September 1998).