Patriot Success May Loosen ABM Grip

BY: Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Defense News , April 15, 1991

If any proof were needed that the Patriot missile system’s dramatic success in the war with Iraq has changed fundamentally the political prospects for the Strategic Defense Initiative, it has been supplied by a most unlikely — and probably unwitting — source.

Harold Brown, the former secretary of defense and elder statesman of left-of-center elements of the national security community, tries to argue in a recent article published in The Washington Post entitled, "Yes to Patriot, No to SDI," that the demonstrated utility of this modest anti-tactical ballistic missile interceptor is virtually irrelevant to the debate over strategic defenses.

Instead, Brown manfully maintains that the United States continues to be well served by a posture of assured vulnerability imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that bans effective nationwide defenses.

Brown’s zealotry on this point is not surprising. He was one of the drafters of the ABM accord with the Soviet Union and has been among its principal advocates for nearly two decades. What is striking, however, is the extent to which, in spite of himself, Brown has been compelled to acknowledge that using active defenses to counter missile attacks actually is a good idea.

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 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.

Obviously uncomfortable with this apostasy, the former defense secretary contends that what is true of theater missile defenses is not true of strategic missile defenses. In so doing, he strives to find some basis other than the ABM Treaty — which allows the former but effectively precludes the latter — to justify his bottom-line conclusion that it is a good idea to defend Americans abroad and their foreign hosts, but that Americans at home must remain unprotected against ballistic missile attack.

Unfortunately for Brown, it is difficult to find technical grounds for this argument. For example, the distinction between theater missiles that is permissible to defend against, and strategic missiles it is not, has never been clear cut. In fact, some of the medium-range ballistic missiles now entering Third World arsenals (for example, the Chinese CSS-2s deployed in Saudi Arabia) can fly farther and faster than so-called strategic sea-launched weapons in the U.S. and Soviet inventories when the ABM Treaty went into force in 1972.

The United States has, characteristically, responded to this ambiguity by exercising immense, unilateral restraint. For example, the Scud-busting Patriot air defense system was given a far more limited antimissile capability than it could have had, to avoid concerns in Congress and the arms control community over U.S. compliance problems with the ABM Treaty. (Interestingly, the Soviets have shown no such sensibilities in widely deploying an extremely high-performance interceptor, the SA-12, with the inherent ability to intercept at least some strategic missiles.)

Ironically, in pointing out the Patriots’ limitations and in trivializing their success in the gulf war by emphasizing the obsolescence of the aged Iraqi Scud missiles, Brown has undermined his own argument. Truth be told, it is the limitations imposed by the ABM Treaty on development, testing and deployment of advanced defenses rather than insurmountable technical obstacles that currently inhibit U.S. capabilities to defeat ballistic missile threats more formidable than the Scud.

It is fealty to the ABM Treaty, not considerations of military or cost-effectiveness, that prompt Brown to propose the most inefficient, environmentally intrusive, expensive and strategically dubious approach to worldwide theater defenses: a series of ground-based interceptors and radars. Even if a less constraining treaty standard was applied, it simply makes no sense to pursue an approach to defending individual theaters around the world that fails to take advantage of the synergy only a truly global system can provide.

In contrast, by deploying orbiting interceptors in space, systems with considerable capability to intercept shorter-range and depressed trajectory submarine-launched missiles, one need not worry about correctly anticipating where defenses will be needed and securing the necessary permission and funding to place them there. Moreover, such defenses can be given the capability to intercept missiles early in their trajectory before they disperse multiple warheads or decoys.

As Brown well knows, one of the most effective arguments against past U.S. investments in ground-based defenses has been their susceptibility to being overwhelmed or defeated by such devices. It is predictable that such an argument will be heard anew if Brown and company continue to stymie development and deployment of space-based defensive systems.

Should the United States choose, on the other hand, to acquire a capability for theater defense that Brown appears to support, but do so by fielding space-based interceptors that he does not, it will automatically gain one additional benefit: the ability to provide an effective defense of the entire nation against limited ballistic missile attacks from Third World countries or larger-scale, unauthorized or accidental Soviet launches.

The real impediment that stands in the way of obtaining such a space-based defense is not, as Brown suggests, the absence of appropriate technology or the danger that the Soviets might be prompted to amass still more overkill. Instead, a misguided attachment to the ABM Treaty is preventing the people of the United States from having at least the safety from ballistic missile attack enjoyed by their counterparts in Tel Aviv and Riyadh.

It is past time that this obstacle is removed. Congress should swiftly act to set aside the theology of perpetual vulnerability, and the treaty that codifies its tenets, by mandating rapid deployment of an effective, global strategic defense system.