SMOKE AND MIRRORS: EVEN BY CLINTON STANDARDS, THE PRESIDENT’S MISREPRESENTATIONS ON MISSILE DEFENSE ARE SCANDALOUS

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, President Clinton used the
occasion of a commencement address to the U.S. Coast Guard
Academy to tout his purported foreign policy successes and to
inveigh against the growing demand for effective anti-missile
protection for the American people. So disingenuous and
irresponsible are his statements in this regard that they demand
a point-by-point rebuttal.

• “…There are no Russian missiles pointed at
  our cities or our citizens.” House Speaker
  Newt Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey, Majority Whip
  Tom Delay and House Republican Conference Committee
  Chairman John Boehner felt constrained to write the
  President in response to this statement:

“We believe this claim distorts the truth,
misrepresents the facts and, sadly, is a terribly
misleading statement to make to the American people.

“Serious Russian and American experts
overwhelmingly hold that the detargeting provisions
contained in the [14 January 1994 Moscow Declaration]
are non-binding, unverifiable, and militarily
inconsequential. We believe your continued use of
this claim dramatically overstates the strategic and
military significance of the detargeting agreement.
You are well aware the agreement only affects part of
the missile forces on both sides and the time
required to reprogram target coordinates is about 10
seconds for U.S. forces and perhaps 30 to 60 seconds
for Russian forces.

“We strongly encourage you in the future to
be absolutely candid with the American people on this
vital security issue. When making your claim you have
a moral obligation to explain to our citizens that we
can not independently verify these missiles are
detargeted; it is likely U.S. target coordinates are
still stored locally in Russian computers; and
retargeting can take place on incredibly short
notice. To do anything less would be to lull the
American people into a false sense of security.”

What is more, if Moscow acts on its previously stated
intention to sell ballistic missiles under the guise of
“space launch vehicles,” Russian missiles
undoubtedly will be “pointed at our cities
and our citizens.” Incredible as it may seem, such
transfers have actually been legitimized by an amendment
to the START I Treaty negotiated by the Clinton
Administration without the advice and consent of the
United States Senate.

• “…We’re spending $3 billion a year on a
  strong, sensible national missile defense program based
  on real threats and pragmatic responses.”
  In fact, there is nothing strong, sensible or realistic
  about the missile defense plans of this Administration.
  To the contrary, the Clinton team seems intent on weakening
  promising missile defense programs currently under
  development.

After his recent summit with Boris Yeltsin, Mr.
Clinton boasted that American and Russian negotiators
would by 15 June have a deal ready that would have the
effect of expanding the scope of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile (ABM) Treaty by imposing limits on performance
characteristics of theater missile defense systems. Such
an agreement — which would extend what amounts to a
Russian veto over American missile defense programs even
to theater anti-missile systems — would almost
surely preclude the development of promising missile
defense systems such as the Navy’s AEGIS-based Wide Area
Defense program.

The truth is that the Administration has no
plans at the moment to deploy any national
missile defense. As for the $3 billion the
President referred to, these funds will probably wind up
added to the tally that Mr. Clinton and his fellow
anti-SDI partisans cynically claim has been spent on
missile defense with nothing to show for it —
ignoring the fact that such funds could have
produced a deployed, effective missile defense if only
the will to do so had been present.

• “Our first priority is to defend against
  existing or near-term threats, like short- and
  medium-range missile attacks on our troops in the field
  or our allies. And we are, with upgraded Patriot
  missiles, the Navy Lower and Upper-Tier and the Army
  THAAD.” The truth is that such theater
  missile defenses do not seem to be a very high priority
  for the Clinton Administration.

In December 1995, General Gary Luck
— the four-star commander of the 37,000 U.S. troops on
the ever-more-unstable Korean peninsula — made an urgent
request for a deployment of two THAAD batteries to
protect his troops from the increasing North Korean
missile threat. His request was denied.
What is more, the Clinton Administration has deliberately
refused to comply with statutory direction contained in
the Fiscal Year 1996 Defense Authorization Act to the
effect that the THAAD and Upper Tier (a.k.a. Wide Area
Defense) programs must be accelerated. Instead, the
necessary funding has been stretched-out by several
years, with an attendant delay in key development and
deployment milestones.

• “The possibility of a long-range missile
  attack on American soil by a rogue state is more than a
  decade away.” Mr. Clinton was referring
  here to a recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
  that claims that there will be no indigenously
  developed intercontinental-range ballistic missile
  threat to the continental U.S. from rogue
  nations for at least fifteen years. The artificially
  restrictive assumptions permit a completely misleading
  conclusion. Suspicions that the impetus for such
  manipulation was politically inspired seem to
  have been borne out by a senior Clinton Administration
  official — National Security Council staff member Robert
  Bell — who, on 8 May declared to a Washington audience:

“…Why fifteen years? ….What the analysts
did was to say, ‘Let’s take a time frame and look at
it, and see what we think could occur between now and
then.’ And the question was what time frame to pick,
recognizing that it’s ultimately an arbitrary
decision. If you picked ten years, you’re
not helping the policy or acquisition communities,
because the life cycle, as you know, for an
acquisition program, is on the order of twelve to
fifteen years.” (Emphasis added)

Of course, politicization is not the only problem with
this threat assessment. The NIE’s assumptions left out
the inconvenient fact that Hawaii and Alaska are part of
the United States. Unfortunately, they are also much
closer to North Korea, which is actively developing
ballistic missiles that could shortly threaten these two
states. Neither did the NIE take into account that rogue
states have the option of seeking help from other
nations, such as Russia and China, in developing advanced
ballistic missile technology. In fact, a rogue nation
such as Iraq, with a fresh infusion of cash from the
renewed oil sales now being allowed by the UN, could
purchase an ICBM from Russia — becoming a threat to the
United States virtually overnight.

Even if such rogue state threats were not a distinct
possibility in the near-term, there is another reason for
believing that long-range ballistic missiles pose a
present and growing danger to the United States: A nation
that already has deployed ballistic missiles of
sufficient range and accuracy to reach treats were not a
distinct possibility in the near-term, there is another
reason for believing that long-range ballistic missiles
pose a present and growing danger to the United States: A
nation that already has deployed ballistic
missiles of sufficient range and accuracy to reach this
country — communist China — communicated to the highest
levels of our government in January the threat of
devastating attacks against Los Angeles. And even the
Clinton Administration’s politicized Defense Intelligence
Agency acknowledges that the menace from China will grow
considerably if it succeeds in acquiring SS-18 technology
from Russia and/or Ukraine.

• “To prevent [the possibility of a missile
  attack on American soil], we are committed to developing
  by the year 2000 a defensive system that could be
  deployed by 2003 — well before the threat becomes
  real.” As the foregoing facts make clear,
  there is little reason to believe that the Clinton
  Administration actually will decide three years from now
  — or ever — to deploy missile defenses for the American
  people. As an article published in this week’s New
  Republic by the Center for Security Policy’s
  director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., makes clear, the reason
  for that unhappy reality is not because the
  threat is not real and not because the necessary
  technology is unavailable. The real reason is
  because the Administration is committed to an
  Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that prohibits effective
  missile defense of the United States.
• “[The Defend America Act] would force us to
  choose now a costly missile defense system that could be
  obsolete tomorrow. The Congressional Budget Office
  estimates that this cost will be between $30 and $60
  billion.” In fact, the Defend America Act
  does not “force” the United States government
  to choose any particular system, leaving the decision
  about how best to go about providing effective U.S.
  national anti-missile protection to the Secretary of
  Defense.

It is true that a national anti-missile system
comprised of ground- and space-based weapons would become
quite costly. This, however, is not the most promising —
or cost-effective — route to defending America. A newly
released report⁽¹⁾
by the Heritage Foundation’s blue-ribbon Missile Defense
Study Team (“Team B”) establishes that
effective near-term defenses can be acquired for vastly
smaller sums than the $30-60 billion quoted by the
President. Specifically, an early, global anti-missile
capability can be put into place for as little as $2-3
billion spent over the next five years, thanks to an
investment of nearly $50 billion already made in the U.S.
Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system. This sum would
allow the first of 22 cruisers and 650 modified
interceptor missiles to come on-line in just three
years. It is simply untenable to claim that
robust protection against the sorts of small-size
ballistic missile attacks likely to confront the United
States in the near-term is unaffordable.

• “[The Defend America Act] would violate the
  arms control agreements that we have made and these
  agreements make us more secure the terms of the ABM
  Treaty (Article XV) to withdraw from it on six-months
  notice. Doing so would not be a “violation.”

If
anything, an American decision to exercise this right is
likely to prompt the Russians to think more
constructively than they have over the past thirteen
years — when they have been accorded a de facto
veto over U.S. missile defense programs — about new
arrangements that could produce, literally, a modus
vivendi pursuant to which America and Russia could
base their security upon the concept of mutual survival
rather than that of mutual destruction.

The Bottom Line

President Clinton’s speech to the Coast Guard Academy did at
least accomplish one thing. It made clear to everyone that the
United States is currently unprotected against even a single
ballistic missile — a state of affairs with which Mr. Clinton is
comfortable and from which he will not depart willingly for the
foreseeable future. In so doing, he has helped frame the single
most important national security issue for the November
elections: Will the next President of the United States
be a man who is determined to perpetuate America’s vulnerability
to missile attack or one committed to ending it at the earliest
possible moment?

1. This report is entitled Defending
America: Ending America’s Vulnerability to Ballistic Missiles.