Get On With It: Time To Deploy Sea-Based Missile Defenses

Last week, the Pentagon demonstrated for the third time in a row the inherent feasibility of recommendations insistently advanced over the past seven years by organizations like the Center for Security Policy, High Frontier and the Heritage Foundation: The U.S. Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense system can be rapidly and effectively adapted to perform ant-ballistic missile missions from the sea. This step is already long-overdue and the unnecessary delays in developing, testing and deploying the appropriate modifications to Aegis cruisers and destroyers has left the United States needlessly — and dangerously — vulnerable to missile attack.

As Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. observed in a column distributed by National Review Online on Monday, the urgency with which such deployments must be undertaken has grown as awareness spreads of a heretofore under-appreciated danger: the threat of short-range missiles launched from ships off the U.S. coasts.

In a recent press release, High Frontier Chairman Henry F. Cooper, a former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative under President George H.W. Bush and long-time member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council, called attention to a comment about this threat made on 16 September by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: "Countries have placed ballistic missiles in ships – dime a dozen – all over the world. At any given time, there’s any number off our coasts – coming, going. On transporter erector-launchers, they simply erect it, fire off a ballistic missile, put it down, cover it up. Their radar signature’s not any different than 50 others in close proximity."

Secretary Rumsfeld understands better than practically anybody else the need urgently to provide defenses against ballistic missile threats. He has been explicitly charged by President Bush with doing so "at the earliest possible time." With the latest developments in the Navy’s test program, the way to do so — first, from the sea — is now clear and must be adopted, funded (according to Amb. Cooper, "60 existing Standard Missile II Block IV air defense interceptors can be given a rudimentary boost-phase intercept capability within a year for $100-200 million") and brought on line without further, potentially dangerous ado.

MISSILE MILESTONE

by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

National Review, 25 November 2002

November 21, 2002 is likely to be remembered by the national security community not only as the day the U.S. Navy successfully intercepted a ballistic missile target in its "ascent" phase. That date in history may also be recalled as the beginning of a fundamental – and enormously consequential – sea change in the way the Bush administration thinks about, and performs, missile defense.

The test involved the third straight intercept by a SM 3 missile launched from a cruiser, the U.S.S. Lake Erie, equipped with the Aegis fleet air defense system. As in the previous two events, the Navy shot down an Aries rocket simulating a Scud class short to medium range missile. Such weapons were used by Saddam Hussein in 1991 to attack U.S. and allied targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; one of these caused the largest single loss of American lives in Operation Desert Storm. There is reason to be concerned that Saddam still has a small number of such missiles, perhaps equipped with chemical or biological weapons, and may use them in the event hostilities with Iraq resume.

Another frightening possibility was noted recently by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. At a Washington symposium on October 24, Donald Rumsfeld’s influential second in command asked rhetorically:

What is to stop [rogue states] from launching shorter range ballistic missiles that they already possess today from cargo ships near our shores, perhaps using non state terrorist surrogates to attack without fingerprints. It’s not a far fetched threat. The United States test launched a captured German V 2 rocket from the deck of a ship in 1947. And recently we have observed indications of an outlaw state attempting to do the same thing with a short range ballistic missile from a ship.

Were this capacity realized by such a state, it might be able to attack the U.S. without having to invest the significant time and resources necessary for developing a long range missile capability. Until now, there has been nothing in place that we could use to prevent such an attack.

That intolerable situation began to change last week. Two previous Aegis/SM 3 tests demonstrated the Navy’s ability to use now available sea based defense technologies to shoot down enemy missiles later in their flight. The intercept above the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, however, proves that such technologies can also be used to destroy ballistic missiles as they are rising.

The ability to perform such a feat means that, if necessary, it will be possible to try to intercept an attacking missile at several points along its trajectory. This "layered" defense greatly increases the probability of protecting large areas against missile strikes. What is more, the inherent mobility of the Navy’s Aegis cruisers and destroyers – of which there are now more than 60 in the fleet – offers the possibility of affording antimissile defenses not only to the territory of the United States but to our allies and American forces overseas, as well.

In fact, the Pentagon is reportedly going to deploy an Aegis ship to the waters off Israel in the near future. Apparently, the idea will be to exercise its radar with Israel’s indigenous missile defense capabilities – adding additional test data to a similar U.S. experiment conducted last month while potentially considerably augmenting Israel’s antimissile protection.

If the ship had SM 3s aboard, it might be able actually to help shoot down any ballistic missiles launched at Israel. Such a deployment could, moreover, prove a valuable model for American cooperation with other allies, especially those in Europe and Japan who have either Aegis ships of their own or ones whose systems can be operated in a collaborative fashion.

Best of all, thanks to the enormous investment the U.S. Navy and its counterparts have made in the ships, sensors, communication gear, and other infrastructure needed for sea based missile defenses, the costs of putting such a capability in place are a fraction of those associated with other alternatives. There will surely continue to be a need over time for at least some of those alternatives – particularly space based antimissile sensors and weapons. But the immediate commencement of deployment of limited missile defenses at sea offers a way to buy the nation time to begin to address the current threat, while evolving, improving, and augmenting the systems first deployed on an emergency basis.

In recent months, the Bush administration has rightly shown growing confidence in the Navy’s ability to make a real contribution from the sea to the security of our homeland and other priority areas targeted for ballistic missile attack. The successful November 21 test was a giant leap forward in this mission.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan Defense Department veteran, is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy.