NOW HEAR THIS: OP ED’S REBUT HAROLD BROWN, URGE END TO POLICY OF ASSURED VULNERABILITY

(Washington, D.C.): On the eve of today’s hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerning strategic defense and the ABM Treaty, two op.ed. articles appeared in influential publications sharply assailing former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown — one of the leading critics of the former and foremost apologists for the latter.

On 15 April 1991, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., director of the Center for Security Policy, published an article in Defense News entitled "Patriot Success May Loosen ABM Grip." Yesterday, Gary Hoitsma, a former Reagan Administration official, published an op.ed., entitled "Yes on SDI Too" in the Washington Post. (Copies are attached.) Both responded critically to an article by Brown which appeared in the Post on 27 March 1991 whose absurd premise was captured in its title: "Yes to Patriot, No to SDI."

Gaffney and Hoitsma address serious flaws in the arguments Brown uses to support his dubious thesis that finite U.S. resources can usefully be expended on defenses provided they are more technologically limited than we are capable of making them and, even then, only if they are used to defend allied territory and Americans overseas. Both conclude that Brown is determined to deny the United States, its people and national assets, a level of protection comparable to that he is prepared to have us offer to others. This viewpoint has more to do with Brown’s attachment to a peculiar and outdated strategic theory, which holds that assured vulnerability is an unalterable precondition for stability and which was codified in an arms control agreement he helped to negotiate nearly twenty years ago, than with the various technical or other explanations he offers.

Gaffney observes: "Like it or not, by accepting the utility and desirability of Patriot-style ground-based theater missile defenses, Dr. Brown has committed a shocking blasphemy against the theology of assured vulnerability: He has admitted, albeit selectively, that it is better to be defended than not to be, that it is better to have an imperfect defense than no defense at all."

Hoitsma notes: "…Where does Brown leave us? Right where we are and have been: absolutely, completely and perpetually vulnerable to ballistic missile attack. He wants us to reign in our advancing technology so that we make no use, or even tests, of promising space-based assets. He recommends that we keep everything we do on the ground, in research only; that we build a few more Patriots to send overseas to protect our forward deployed forces; but that we be sure to keep our U.S. mainland vulnerable."

The Center for Security Policy believes that — particularly in the aftermath of the war with Iraq (and its attendant lessons about the growing danger of ballistic missile proliferation) — the U.S. government must reject once and for all the contortionist logic of Harold Brown and other proponents of the ABM Treaty. Instead, the United States should say "Yes to Strategic Defense, No to Vulnerability."