Mirabile Dictu: Even the Clinton Pentagon Now Recognizes the Necessity for the ‘Aegis Option’ to Defend America

Is the Navy Really the Problem?

(Washington, D.C.): The Clinton Defense Department has begun to say what its White
House
political commissars have, heretofore, deemed to be unsayable: The American people
can
effectively and efficiently be defended against ballistic missile attack from the sea. In
so
doing, key elements of the Administration seem to be inexorably embracing the logic that a
compelling programmatic approach to missile defense must not be foreclosed simply because it
violates provisions of an outdated and increasingly dangerous arms control treaty.

Courageous Endorsements

According to Defense News, the Pentagon advised the Congress on 10 August in
an unclassified
summary of a classified report on the “Utility of Sea-Based Assets to National Missile Defense”
that: “There are no technical obstacles that would preclude evolution of the Navy’s
theater
anti-missile system, Navy Theater Wide (NTW), from assuming a National Missile Defense
(NMD) role at some future point.” The trade publication also said the study noted that,
“Having
NMD interceptors at sea…has the advantage of allowing forward-deployed ships to engage
enemy missiles much earlier in flight than any land-based interceptor.”

Then last week, Dr. Hans Mark — the highly respected scientist whose
public service has
included stints as Secretary of the Air Force and NASA Deputy Director and who currently is the
Director of Defense Research and Engineering — declared his personal support
for the
“AEGIS Option” for defending America. Aerospace Daily reported yesterday about
Dr. Mark’s
remarks before a missile defense conference in Huntsville, Alabama earlier this week:

The U.S. Navy’s AEGIS ships would give warfighters a significant edge in the
ballistic missile defense mission, said Hans Mark….Conversion of the ships with the
proper missiles and launchers to defend against ballistic missile attacks is a “major
advantage,” Mark said at a conference here. The ships and trained people are
available, and can be deployed anywhere to combat a threat, he said.

“In the case of the Navy, we really have to think about what kinds of systems we
want to put on these ships,” Mark said. More than 50 AEGIS ships with
numerous missile launchers could be converted for missile defense. “The
question is, can we convert enough of them to ballistic missile defense missions
to be a useful weapon system,” Mark said.

Some of these questions have apparently been addressed in the Defense Department’s
report to Congress. For example, Defense News describes one of the study’s
findings to be that:

“Linking the [NTW] Block II interceptor into the network of sensors planned for
NMD, including the Space Based Infrared-Low satellites and Space Based Infrared-High
(SBIRS-Low and -High) satellites, could provide defense of the United States
from missile attacks by North Korea and other rogue nations, according to the
report….The costs of integrating Navy Theater Wide Block II interceptors with the
NMD sensor network might total $500 million, according to the report. Subsequent
costs of equipping the fleet to be compatible with the sensor network are not tallied,
“but [are] not expected to be very significant.”

Turn the Navy Loose

Curiously, according to Aerospace Daily, Dr. Mark told the Huntsville audience
that “the Navy
isn’t sold on the ballistic missile defense mission. ‘I don’t think we have the Navy persuaded yet
that that is an important [mission], but it is,’ he said.”

Dr. Mark is a seasoned political hand, as well as an accomplished expert on technology
matters.
Surely, therefore, he must know that — far from being unpersuaded about the importance of
defending America from the sea — the U.S. Navy at the senior-most levels is convinced of the
need for and prepared to support such a step.

The problem, instead, is that the Navy’s leadership is justifiably leery of running
afoul of the
arms control mafia, inside and outside of the Clinton Administration. After all, these
zealots’ monomaniacal determination to perpetuate the obsolete and expired 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty ¹ has repeatedly proven a mortal peril to
defense programs, budgets and careers.
In the face of such a prospect, the normal bureaucratic impulses to protect existing
constituencies, capabilities and missions against the encroachment of new ones that might
compete for resources or priority operates to the detriment of overt support for the AEGIS
Option.

The Bottom Line

To be sure, the official line from the Clinton Pentagon remains that land-based anti-missile
systems are an essential ingredient of any robust National Missile Defense system. It is
certainly the case that sea-based defenses are unlikely to be able to provide comprehensive
protection against large or technologically sophisticated ballistic missile attacks without
augmentation by ground- or space-based sensors and/or kill-mechanisms.

Still, the recent declarations add further urgency to congressional initiatives like that
sponsored
by Rep. David Vitter (R-LA) and some fifty-eight other legislators which
would accelerate the
incorporation of improvements needed to give the Navy Theater Wide anti-missile system the
capability to shoot down at a minimum ballistic missiles like those being developed by North
Korea. ² They also demonstrate the utter folly of
President Clinton’s efforts to negotiate
changes to the ABM Treaty with a view to resuscitating it and, thereby, diminishing the
prospects for near-term U.S. missile defenses — whether at sea or anyplace else.

¹ The fact that the ABM Treaty lapsed in 1991 when the other party,
the Soviet Union, became
extinct is conclusively established in a legal analysis prepared by former Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and former Justice Department attorney George Miron.
This study, which was sponsored by the Center for Security Policy, found that the U.S. is not,
consequently, legally obliged to observe the Treaty’s prohibitions — for example, on the
development and deployment of sea-based anti-missile defenses. See Definitive
Study Shows
Russians Have No Veto Over Defending U.S. (No. 99-P
11, 22 January 1999).

² See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
THAAD’s Second Successful Intercept Confounds
the Skeptics, Argues for Program Acceleration (No.
99-D 87, 2 August 1999).