Wanted: An End to the ‘Hollow’ Military —
and A ‘Feasible,’ ‘Practical’ Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): At a tempestuous hearing today, the Senate Armed Services Committee
heard the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and each of the four Service chiefs say the
unsayable: Thanks to nearly fifteen years of declining defense budgets (measured in real terms),
to sustained and exceedingly high operational tempos and to the attendant wearing-out of materiel
and hemorrhage of talented personnel, the U.S. armed forces are being hollowed
out.

In testimony that was provided too late to influence the Fiscal Year 1999 defense legislation
— a
point that greatly angered Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Bob Smith (R-NH), Dirk Kempthorne
(R-ID) and others — the JCS Chairman, Gen. Hugh Shelton (USA), and the
Army and Air Force
chiefs of staff (Gen. Dennis Reimer and Michael Ryan,
respectively), the Navy Chief of Naval
Operations (Adm. Jay Johnston) and the Marine Corps Commandant
(Gen. Charles Krulak) —
painted a desperate picture. To any layman, the symptoms they described (notably:
cannibalization of equipment to keep a fraction of the inventory combat ready; obsolescent
weapons; excessive “cross-decking” between incoming and outgoing ships; long-deferred
maintenance and modernization; and serious shortfalls in pilots and other skilled troops — and
acute difficulties in recruiting educated, motivated replacements) are all too reminiscent of what,
in 1979, then-Army Chief of Staff Edward “Shy” Meyer famously dubbed the “hollow”
military.

This ominous state of affairs is hardly surprising. As former Secretary of Defense
James
Schlesinger observed in an article entitled “Raise the Anchor or Lower the Ship” which
appears
in the Fall 1998 edition of The National Interest: “The United States now
spends just over $40
billion a year on procurement. Yet depreciation on our military equipment (at replacement
costs) runs to over $100 billion per year.” (Emphasis added.)

The problem is, of course, larger than a military procurement underfunded by some $60
billion per
year. As Dr. Schlesinger put it:

“Currently, the United States spends barely more than 3 percent of its gross domestic
product on defense. There is no way that the United States can sustain over time the
forces that the Clinton Administration states to be essential — or the foreign policy that
those forces support — on 3 percent GDP. That is not a matter of analysis; it is simple
arithmetic. To continue to fulfill our present commitments and to re-equip the
approved force levels for the more challenging years of the next century would
require roughly 4 percent of the GDP.” (Emphasis added.)

Defending America Against Missile Attack

Arguably, there is no more dramatic example of the grievousness of the shortfall
between
the U.S. military’s capabilities and what will be required of it in the future (and perhaps
the very near future, at that) — than the absence of any deployed national missile
defense
capabilities. This matter was pointedly addressed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in
today’s
hearing with rather interesting results.

In particular, Senator Smith of New Hampshire asked the JCS whether they had any objection
to
the Senate debating legislation that would make it the policy of the U.S. government to deploy
effective national missile defenses as soon as technologically possible. This question was
prompted, in part, by the way in which the Armed Services Committee’s ranking minority
member, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) recently and shamelessly utilized a letter sent on
24 August
1998 by Gen. Shelton to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) to justify Sen. Levin’s filibuster of a motion
to proceed to Senate consideration of S.1873, the bipartisan “American Missile Protection Act of
1998.”⁽¹⁾ None of the Chiefs expressed any
opposition to the Senate acting on such a
measure.

For that matter, each of the Joint Chiefs expressed his support for deploying
effective
national missile defenses. They each, more or less, stipulated, however, that there were
three
important conditions that had to be met before such a deployment was warranted: the emergence
of a credible threat and the availability of technology that would permit a “feasible” and
“practical” anti-missile system to be deployed.

Rumsfeld: ‘There is a Threat’

As it happens, on 24 September 1998, the Armed Services Committee took testimony from
another former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,⁽²⁾
who chaired the congressionally
chartered, blue-ribbon Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. On
that occasion, Sen. Inhofe asked Secretary Rumsfeld to react to Gen. Shelton’s correspondence.
The following were among the highlights of Chairman Rumsfeld’s point-by-point rebuttal of the
effort by the JCS Chairman to pooh-pooh the principal conclusion of this bipartisan panel:
We
now are likely to have “little or no-warning” of ballistic missile threats to the United
States.

• “[General Shelton’s letter] says ‘After carefully considering the report, we remain confident
  that the intelligence community can provide the necessary warning of indigenous development
  and deployment by a rogue state of an ICBM threat to the United States.’

“We [the Rumsfeld Commissioners] don’t disagree with that. That is to say, if there
were such a thing as an indigenous development program, we probably would be able
to track it, and provide adequate warning. The problem with it is, an indigenous
development program doesn’t exist. What is stated here, is an illogical
premise.
And you can proceed perfectly logically, to an illogical conclusion. And that’s
where that would take you.”

• “Next section. It says…that the Commission points out 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. We view this
  as an unlikely development.’

“We do not view it as unlikely. We view it as a
fact. It’s all happened. First of all,
‘unconventional development program,’ is what all those countries are doing, if we’re
what is conventional. No country is going to do what we did. We had totally different
interests in accuracies, and survivability, and in volumes.”

• “[Next, Gen. Shelton used the terms] ‘high-risk development programs.’ [The rogue states]
  couldn’t care less about safety. Naturally it’s high risk. To characterize it as
  high risk,
  and therefore it doesn’t exist as a threat, would be wrong.”
• “[Next, the General’s letter] says, ‘and foreign assistance.’ Well, of course there’s
  foreign
  assistance. It’s happening every day, it’s happening as we sit here.”
• “[Chairman Shelton acknowledges that] ‘Rogue nations could acquire an ICBM capability.’
  They ARE acquiring an ICBM capability. So, I underline: We [i.e.,
  the Rumsfeld
  Commissioners] do not view it as unlikely. We view it as a fact of life that’s happening
  all across the globe.”

In light of this evidence, the Chiefs’ recommendation that action in response to the missile
threat be further deferred is as absurd as would have been the guidance at Bunker Hill in 1776 to
wait until you see the whites of their eyes before arranging to procure muskets.

There Is a Way to Get ‘Feasible’ and ‘Practical’ Missile Defenses —
the AEGIS Option

As the attached article by the Center for Security Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney,
Jr. —
which appears in the October 1998, 125^th anniversary edition of the U.S. Naval
Institute’s
Proceedings Magazine — makes clear the United States has at hand an option for
acquiring anti-missile defenses in the near-term. Thanks to the fact that the taxpayer has already
invested some
$50 billion in the U.S. Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system, essentially the entire
infrastructure needed to begin defending the American people, as well as their forces and
allies overseas, against missile attack is in hand. For what the Navy has
confirmed would be
an additional investment of just $2-3 billion total spent over the
next five-years, the Nation
could start to field sea-based missile defenses that are clearly technically “feasible” and eminently
affordable (read, “practical”).

In recent days, members of the Israeli Knesset and the Japanese
government (which has four of
its own AEGIS ships built under license from the United States) have underscored just how
feasible and practical they regard this option to be — and just how significant would be the
contribution made by such a sea-based missile defense system to the security of their respective
countries.⁽³⁾

The Bottom Line

In light of today’s hearing, there should no longer be any excuse for taking the steps necessary
to
increase the funding available to the Defense Department and to bring the AEGIS Option for
missile defense on-line as soon as possible. The former has now been explicitly endorsed (at
some, as yet undetermined level of funding) by President Clinton for action in an emergency
FY1999 supplemental appropriation.

Importantly, one of the most thoughtful leaders on national security issues in the Congress,
Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), has on 23 September 1998 written the Chairmen of
the Senate and
House Appropriations Committees — Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and
Representative Bob
Livingston (R-LA) — respectively, in connection with the latter initiative. Sen. Kyl has
urged his
colleagues to include in that supplemental an additional $250 million for the purpose of
making technological progress — not funding — the pacing item in readying sea-based
anti-missile capabilities for deployment aboard AEGIS cruisers. Sen. Kyl also makes
the sensible
suggestion that $169 million be included in this measure for the purchase of a third
battery
of U.S.-Israeli Arrow missile defenses to help protect the Jewish State — a country that
experienced a nearly fatal surprise attack on Yom Kippur twenty-five years ago and may be in
even greater danger of one delivered by missiles in the days ahead.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Shame, Shame Redux: As Clinton Presidency Melts
Down, 41 Democrats Continue Filibuster of Bill to Defend America ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_160″>No. 98-D 160, 9
September 1998).

2. On 7 October 1998, Secretary Rumsfeld will receive the Center
for Security Policy’s
prestigious “Keeper of the Flame” award in recognition of his lifetime of accomplishments on
behalf of the national interest, as well as his most recent and particularly laudatory service as
chairman of the Rumsfeld Commission. For more information about this extraordinary event —
which will also mark the CSP’s 10^th year of operations — please contact the Center.

3. See Critical Mass #4: Emerging Missile Threat
Concentrates the Minds of U.S. Allies;
Japanese Admiral Urges End to ABM Treaty (No.
98-D 163, 15 September 1998).