So There Is A Missile Threat, After All: Clinton Pentagon Confirms Rumsfeld Commission’s Central Finding

(Washington, D.C.): Last Friday, top uniformed and civilian Pentagon officials made
something
of a spectacle of themselves on Capitol Hill.

It’s not just that the officials — Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre,
Vice Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Ralston and Lieutenant General Lester
Lyles, the Director of
the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization — were forced to admit to members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee that they could no longer sustain the central tenet of the
Administration’s resistance to the prompt deployment of missile defenses: The ballistic
missile
threat from a rogue state like North Korea is now recognized as likely to emerge
before the
U.S. can deploy effective anti-missile systems to defeat it.

Nor was the spectacle primarily a function of this hearing’s juxtaposition with one the
Committee
had held three days before.⁽¹⁾ On the
earlier occasion, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and each of the four Service Chiefs hewed to the old party line. They parroted the
JCS’s position laid out in an August 24 letter from their chairman, General Hugh Shelton, to the
chairman of the Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, Senator Jim Inhofe (Republican of
Oklahoma): “We remain confident that the intelligence community can provide the
necessary warning of the indigenous development and deployment by a rogue state of an
ICBM threat to the United States.”

In particular, the JCS dismissed as “an unlikely development” a key conclusion of the
blue-ribbon,
congressionally mandated commission led by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —
namely, the prospect that “through unconventional, high-risk development programs and foreign
assistance, rogue nations could acquire an ICBM capability in a short time and that the
intelligence community may not detect it.”⁽²⁾

See Some Evil, After All

Then on 2 October, Secretary Hamre and the generals accompanying him were obliged to
acknowledge that they and the intelligence community had in fact been surprised by
North
Korea’s test on August 30^th of a third-stage on its Taepo Dong 1 missile.
Indeed, this
demonstration of the inherent capability to manufacture intercontinental-range ballistic missiles
came along years before it had been expected by the Clinton team. It
happened to validate,
however, the Rumsfeld Commission’s warning that the United States was likely to have
“little or no warning” of a ballistic missile threat from the likes of North Korea, Iran and
Iraq.

General Shelton and Company owe Secretary Rumsfeld and his colleagues an apology — just
as
the Nation owes the Commission a debt of gratitude for helping to shatter the Administration’s
cognitive dissonance about the escalating missile threat.

Fall Back to New Frauds

The real spectacle, though, came when the Defense Department witnesses
proceeded to assure
Senators of two propositions that make the systematic underestimation of the threat pale by
comparison. First, they asserted that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is in no way
interfering with the United States’ pursuit of effective missile defenses. And second, they
claimed that their work on such defenses is proceeding as quickly as possible.

The AEGIS Option Is Not Adequately Funded

The one exception Messrs. Hamre, Ralston and Lyles mentioned in the latter connection
was the Navy’s “AEGIS Option”: an evolution of the fleet air defense system
that is operational
on the world’s oceans, thanks to an investment of some $50 billion to date, so as to permit it to
shoot down ballistic missiles. They confirmed that this promising program was not
receiving
the funds it needs to proceed as quickly as technology would permit. href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

Unfortunately, to correct this shortfall, the Pentagon is actively considering terminating
(either
formally or de facto) the Army’s important Theater High Altitude Area
Defense (THAAD)
program. Were such an ill-advised step to be taken, it would offer proof positive of the adage
that two wrongs do not make a right.⁽⁴⁾

The ABM Treaty is Impeding Sea-Based Missile Defenses

The Defense Department representatives went on to perpetrate another spectacular
fraud.
None mentioned that the AEGIS Option is a case in point of how the ABM Treaty is, in fact,
preventing effective anti-missile systems from being developed and deployed as soon as possible.

If the dead hand of this 26-year-old accord — with a country that no longer exists — were not
still
governing the Clinton policy toward missile defense, there is little doubt as to what would
currently be happening: The Nation would be rapidly evolving its AEGIS infrastructure
so
as to put into place within a few years a competent, world-wide defense against shorter-range
missiles (currently threatening our forces and friends overseas). Absent the ABM
Treaty, moreover, this program would also afford the beginnings of a missile protection
for
Americans here at home for a price tag estimated to total (thanks to the sunk costs) just
$2-3
billion, spent out over the next five years.

The Bottom Line

At this writing, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and General Shelton are about to appear
before the Armed Services Committee. Given the velocity with which these sessions are
producing dramatic changes in Administration positions, perhaps these witnesses will
reveal
that the truth is breaking out not only with respect to the threat, but also with regard
to
what can be done about it.

Under no circumstances should the witnesses be allowed further to insult Senators’
intelligence by promoting the absurd argument that a limited national missile defense
system that literally has to be built from the ground up can be brought on-line faster and
cheaper than one that is largely operational, apart from some relatively minor hardware
and software changes. This defies common sense. So does the line that the ABM Treaty —
which nominally permits the former and explicitly prohibits the latter, sea-based anti-missile
program — is having no impact on the effort to defend America against missile
attack.

Whether the truth on these fronts actually emerges from the Cohen-Shelton hearing or at
some
future event, one thing seems clear: It will become harder and harder to lie to the American
people about their vulnerability to ballistic missile attack and about the availability of near-term,
affordable options for reducing that vulnerability, provided the ABM Treaty is no longer allowed
to be an impediment to bringing defenses on-line. Hats off to Don Rumsfeld and his team for
creating conditions under which such momentous changes may yet result in the deployment of
missile defenses before they are needed, rather than afterwards. href=”#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾

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1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Wanted: An End to the ‘Hollow’ Military — and A
‘Feasible,’ ‘Practical’ Missile Defense (No. 98-D
167, 29 September 1998).

2. In his own testimony before the Armed Services Committee on 24
September, Secretary
Rumsfeld scathingly dissected this statement, demonstrating the wishful thinking inherent in
General Shelton’s position. For a precis of this analysis, see Wanted: An End to
the ‘Hollow’
Military — and A ‘Feasible,’ ‘Practical’ Missile Defense ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_167″>No. 98-D 167, 29 September 1998).

3. See (No. 98-D 167, 29 September
1998).

4. See Only the Clinton Team Could Respond to
North Korean, Other Emerging Missile
Threats by Canceling Near-Term T.H.A.A.D. (No.
98-D 159, 3 September 1998).

5. The Center for Security Policy will do its part to celebrate
Secretary Rumsfeld’s immense
contributions by conferring upon him its prestigious “Keeper of the Flame” award at a black-tie
dinner in Washington tomorrow night.