Going, Going, Gone: Clinton/Aspin Condemn Nation To Permanent Vulnerability To Missile Strikes

With yesterday’s announcement by Secretary of Defense Les Aspin of "the end of the ‘Star Wars’ era," another historic milestone has been reached: The Clinton Administration has set the stage for the end of any sustained effort to defend the United States against ballistic missile attack.

This ominous outcome is foreshadowed by the announced reorientation of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program designed first and foremost to protect the American homeland and people to a theater missile defense program. The latter is exceedingly unlikely to result in the widespread deployment of even its top priority (namely, effective protection against short-range missile attacks) let alone its secondary priority (a modest defense of the continental United States against limited attacks). Such a reorganization — which was telegraphed when the Administration unveiled its FY1994 budget submission in February which cut $2.8 billion from SDI accounts — was pointedly underscored in the decision revealed yesterday to drop the term "strategic" from the program’s title.

Red Meat for Congressional Critics

Worse yet, the Administration is inviting further cuts at the hands of congressional critics by devolving responsibility for overseeing this program from the Secretary of Defense to a lieutenant two rungs down the chain of command, Undersecretary of Defense John Deutch. While Secretary Aspin maintains this reflects the decision to move from research and development to procurement of weapons systems (which would be welcome), the bureaucratic and political reality is very different: this action will greatly reinforce the already powerful tendency in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill to regard the SDI as a slush fund to be raided at will for other spending priorities.

Uncertainty about the out-years funding profile for the ballistic missile defense effort — ostensibly because the "bottom-up review" now being conducted by the Pentagon for FY1995 and beyond is not completed — compounds this danger. Evident indecision about the program’s future budgetary needs virtually ensures that there will be little or no program left to fund in the years ahead.

For example, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House Government Operations Committee and a strenuous opponent of strategic defenses, has responded to the changes announced yesterday by calling for the disbanding of the SDI program altogether. For their part, supporters of strategic defenses — already alienated by the Administration’s programmatic reductions in the SDI account — may balk at voting for what remains, which they could justifiably perceive to amount to a further, frittering away of defense resources on research and development that will never see deployment.

When all is said and done, it strains credulity that the Clinton Administration will be able — even if it were really determined to do so (which seems doubtful) — to muster congressional majorities behind a ballistic missile defense program whose stated purpose is to provide better protection to U.S. allies than will be available to the American people.

First Principles

The Center for Security Policy strongly disagrees with the steps announced by Secretary Aspin yesterday. It continues to believe that:

• The United States and its interests will be increasingly at risk from ballistic missile attack.

 

• It is eminently desirable — if not strategically essential — to take steps that may deter nations from acquiring such threatening ballistic missile capabilities, rather than trying to neutralize them after such capabilities are acquired.

 

• The United States is obliged by economic realities and plain common sense to utilize technologies now in hand that would permit such a defense and such a deterrence option on a global basis and at the lowest possible cost — namely, space-based interceptor and sensor technologies derided as "Star Wars" by the Clinton Administration and virtually defunded by its FY94 budget.

 

• The unstated, but operative, reason for the Clinton/Aspin antipathy to strategic defenses in general and space-based defenses in particular — namely, an undue attachment to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty — is misplaced and insupportable under present and prospective world conditions.

The Bottom Line

Such considerations argue for an invigorated strategic defense program aimed at deploying such space-based defenses at the earliest possible time. As Rep. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s Board of Advisors, said in reaction to yesterday’s announcement: "The real tragedy of the redirection is in destroying the space-based defenses. It is a fundamental mistake." If the Administration continues to fail to provide the leadership, vision and political muscle necessary to bring about such a program, it will not be able to escape responsibility should foreign powers elect to exploit the nation’s continuing and abject vulnerability to ballistic missile attack.