Some Future Kosovo

The Wall Street Journal, 29 March 1999

Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic has the technology to build a modern air defense, and the
brutality to conduct what increasingly looks like genocide in Kosovo. It seems, thankfully, that he
does not have advanced missile and nuclear programs. The North Koreans and Iraqis, among
others, do.

With overwhelming votes in the Congress and the White House dropping its veto threat, it is
finally U.S. policy to defend itself from ballistic missile attack. The next question is how best to
do it.

This is by no means an easy task — experts rightly warn of the difficulty of hitting a bullet with
a
bullet — but it is made impossible by the existence of the ABM Treaty, which puts insurmountable
restrictions on research and development and forbids deployment. So long as the U.S. adheres to
the treaty, there is no way it can defend the nation from missile attack.

Even the architect of the 1972 treaty, Henry Kissinger, calls it “morally indefensible.” At a
Heritage Foundation conference on national missile defense last week, he said, “I do not believe
that the ABM Treaty, which is the product of a two-polar world, should be the starting point for
the development of a national missile defense.”

The race to build a national missile defense is in some real sense a race against time.
Two-dozen
countries already have or are building ballistic missiles and there’s a burgeoning export trade, not
to mention spy trade, in missile parts. As the Rumsfeld Commission pointed out, we’re likely to
have little warning of an attack; it’s an easy matter for a determined missile-maker to conceal his
work from U.S. satellites and intelligence.

One of the first objectives, then, is speed. Get something up there fast — before a Saddam
Hussein
or Kim Jong-Il decides to test his missiles on Los Angeles. Toward that end, Heritage has just
released a proposal on how to cobble together quickly a national missile defense system using
components that already exist or are in the works. The Heritage commission was headed by
Henry Cooper Jr., former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, and studded
with other retired military and Defense Department officials.

The proposal consists of two essential parts: First it would upgrade the Navy’s existing theater
missile defense system, Navy Theater Wide, which is deployed on 22 Aegis cruisers already
patrolling the nation’s oceans and intended for the defense of American troops and allies. Placed
offshore of the U.S., the Aegis ships could launch interceptors to shoot down ballistic missiles (or
cruise missiles) heading for American targets.

That is, they could if we got out of the ABM Treaty. Navy Theater Wide has long been
dumbed
down to comply with the treaty. The missile interceptors aren’t as fast as they could be, and Aegis
ships are forbidden from “talking” to one another and sharing information.

Second, the Heritage proposal would build a series of space-based sensor satellites to detect
and
track enemy missiles and relay that information to the interceptors on board the Aegis cruisers.
This would allow an Aegis ship to launch interceptors as soon as an enemy missile was launched
with the goal of shooting it down while it’s still in the boost phase — before it could release decoy
bomblets.

Space-based sensor satellites are already under development by the Air Force, but the ABM
Treaty forbids their use in communicating any information to the Aegis cruisers, which must rely
instead on low-level radar. This is a crippling restriction. As things stand now, an Aegis cruiser
stationed in the Sea of Japan could “see” a North Korean missile launched at nearby Japan, but
one launched at the U.S. would be too high for its radar. There goes Anchorage.

The Pentagon also examined “the Aegis option” in a classified report that it finished last May.
The
unclassified version still hasn’t been released, but Rear Admiral Rodney Rempt previewed it in a
Senate hearing last month. Navy Theater Wide, he said, “when employed with the same sensors as
planned for the land-based NMD architecture, could provide protection to the U.S. against
attacks by unsophisticated Third World threats.” The two reports have differences of opinion as
to cost and timing, but both agree on the essential point: It would work.

Ultimately, an effective national missile defense will surely be a “layered” defense: on land, on
sea
and in space. The Heritage commission has made a strong case for deploying the Aegis option
first, but that doesn’t mean forgoing research into other systems. The Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization’s current research into a ground-based defense is extremely useful. It would,
however, be a mistake to think that any ground-based system could do the job alone, as the
Administration apparently hopes, even if it could get the Russians to agree to amend the ABM
Treaty to allow deployment at two sites instead of one.

At last week’s conference, Dr. Kissinger said, “I cannot imagine what an American President
would say to the American public if there was an attack and he had done nothing to prevent it.” If
the U.S. doesn’t renounce this treaty, a President may yet get that awful assignment in some
future Kosovo.