Missile Defense: Cheap at Twice the Price

(Washington, D.C.): In the face of confirmation from even the Clinton Administration that the threat of ballistic missile attack is sufficiently grave as to justify the deployment of at least limited anti-missile defenses, opponents of such a deployment are scrambling to shore up their positions. The latest straw at which they are grasping is a new Congressional Budget Office study that asserts the total price tag, over fifteen years, for the Clinton Administration’s ground-based missile defense system could be as high as $60 billion.

The fact is that the CBO figure include projected costs for upgrades to the initial system that the Administration has yet to define, let alone propose. What is more, the very fact that the costs CBO anticipates would be spread out over fifteen years — during which time defense budgets may total as much as $4.5 trillion. Consequently, even if the current CBO estimates are correct, the annual outlay for this expanded (but still “limited”) national missile defense system would be less than 1% of then-year budgets. At that rate, a missile defense capable of sparing even a single American city from attack by missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction, to say nothing of perhaps all of them, would be cheap at twice the CBO’s price.

If cost were really the issue, though, it would argue not for scrapping the putative Clinton-Gore plan but for pursuing more aggressively other missile defense systems that might be able to provide as much (if not better) missile coverage, more flexibly, more quickly and at significantly less cost. Such a system would involve adapting the U.S. Navy’s existing $50-plus billion AEGIS fleet air defense infrastructure.

A study completed last year by the blue-ribbon Commission on Missile Defense, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, chaired by President Bush’s Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, Ambassador Henry Cooper, has claimed since 1995 that the Navy’s AEGIS cruisers could be given NMD capability within four years for less than $3 billion above the amount already programmed for the Administration’s missile defense programs. The Administration has repeatedly studied this proposal since then. Without exception, those studies have recognized that the AEGIS Option could make a valuable contribution to meeting the Nation’s missile defense requirements.

The latest of these reports was due to be submitted to the Congress by the Pentagon on 15 March 2000. Although the study was reportedly completed by the Navy and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in time to meet that deadline, officials in the White House and Office of the Secretary of Defense apparently thought it would be unhelpful to have a study confirming the value of sea-based defenses arriving on Capitol Hill just as the Administration was trying to cut a deal permanently precluding that option. To their credit, twenty-seven members of the House Representatives have recently written Secretary of Defense William Cohen(1) demanding that the overdue report be released forthwith.

The Bottom Line

Armed with this fresh evidence of the folly of the Clinton-Gore approach to strategic arms control, the vehemence of congressional opposition to the so-called “Grand Compromise” now being negotiated with Vladimir Putin’s government can only intensify. And, as a letter dated 17 April(2) from twenty-five of the most influential members of the U.S. Senate to President Clinton makes clear, the opposition is already sufficiently high as to make such a deal Dead on Arrival:

“[I]n our judgement, any agreement along the lines you have proposed to Russia would have little hope of gaining Senate consent to ratification….The single-site, 100 interceptor system deployed in Alaska…cannot effectively protect the United States. More than a single site is necessary to defend against anticipated threats.”

In the end, the most effective and most cost-effective missile defense system will be layered, with land-, sea-, space- and air-based components — a point made recently by Clinton’s own Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish. Every effort should now be made to get started with what can be brought to bear most readily and at least cost — the AEGIS Option.