Washington Post Misrepresents ‘Aegis Option’; New Study Says Sea-Based Missile Defenses Could be Effective, Affordable

Debate Must Be Joined in Congress

(Washington, D.C.): In today’s editions, the Washington Post parrots the Clinton
Administration’s party line on the impossibility of providing from the sea the flexible, near-term
and affordable anti-missile protection required by the American people, as well U.S. forces and
allies overseas. Fortunately, this contention is being powerfully rebutted by a new study,
prepared by a blue-ribbon Commission on Missile Defense 1
sponsored by the Heritage
Foundation and scheduled to be released next week.

This latest in a series of three Heritage studies 2 bears
out what common sense suggests: Far and
away the fastest, most efficient and most cost-effective way to provide wide area missile
defenses is by adapting the Navy’s existing $50+ billion investment in the AEGIS fleet air
defense system to give it anti-ballistic missile capabilities. Congress must get to the
bottom of
this disagreement as soon as possible.

The Gospel According to Lyles

The Post reports, however, that this conclusion — which was advanced by the
Heritage
Foundation’s Commission on Missile Defense (also known as “Team B”) in 1995 and 1996 — was
rejected in a recent interview with the Director of the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization (BMDO), Lieutenant General Lester Lyles. The arguments Gen.
Lyles is
advancing appear to be not only an attempt to defuse growing interest in the AEGIS Option on
Capital Hill but a preemptive strike against its affirmation in the Foundation’s new study entitled,
“Defending America: A Plan to Meet the Urgent Missile Threat.”

Regrettably, the American people have thus far been denied an opportunity to examine the
assumptions and analysis upon which Gen. Lyles is relying since they are contained in a Pentagon
study that was first requested by Congress in 1997, was belatedly submitted to Capitol Hill last
June in a classified form but inexplicably still remains unavailable in an unclassified version.
Since
Gen. Lyles’ conclusions fly in the face of reality, it appears that the Administration may
once again be manipulating the facts to suit its political purposes and shrouding their
distortions behind an unwarranted curtain of secrecy to deflect deserved criticism. 3

Item: Lyles Misses Strategy of Deploying Limited Defense, First,
Comprehensive
Protection, In Due Course

In his criticism of the AEGIS Option as a system incapable of providing a
perfect defense
of the United States, Gen. Lyles misrepresents the Commission on Missile Defense’s repeated
recommendation for a two-phased program to defend America from missile attack. “Team B” has
consistently described the first phase, involving sea-based missile defenses, as a program aimed at
giving American troops and overseas allies — and the American people — as much effective
protection as could be obtained as quickly as possible. The second phase, to be deployed as soon
as the technology was available, would involve a system based on the boost-phase intercept
capabilities of space-based interceptors and lasers. It would be designed to complement the
ever-improving capabilities of AEGIS missile defenses and produce a truly robust national, indeed
global, protective capability.

Item: Gen. Lyles Ignores the Benefits of Leveraging Existing Systems

Much of the $19 billion cost Gen. Lyles assigns to the AEGIS Option — in contrast to
the
$2-3 billion estimated by the Heritage Commission — arises from the charges associated with
fielding the latest missile interceptors, without which, the Pentagon report concludes, the Aegis
system “would have no useful capability against [ICBMs] or [SLBMs].” This finding neglects the
fact that the missile interceptor now being tested by the Navy for its next generation air defense
system , the SM-2 Block IV Standard missile, is already slated for purchase by the Navy and will
shortly be entering service in the fleet.

While the costs associated with modifying these SM-2 Block IV’s to make them into what the
Navy is calling the SM-3s for the ballistic missile defense mission can be assigned against the
AEGIS Option — as “Team B” has assiduously done in its estimates, the procurement of the
interceptors themselves should not be, and has not been, included in such cost estimates. Neither,
for that matter, should the costs be included of far more capable Standard Missiles that might be
introduced in an optimized “National Missile Defense” program (the size and capability of which
may depend upon the success of the space-based missile defense programs envisioned in the
Heritage Commission’s second phase).

Item: Gen. Lyles Refuses to Credit the AEGIS Option for the Existing
Navy
Infrastructure

The Post reports the Pentagon’s contention that “A major part of the
high-cost of a
nationwide sea-based system arises from the need to build three new Aegis-type
vessels so there
can be ship rotation.” (Emphasis added.) The fact of the matter is that, thanks to the more than
$50 billion already invested in the AEGIS system, the United States has 60 such vessels at sea
today. Given the emergency nature of the threat, Team B called for using the Navy that we
currently have to begin defending America against ballistic missile attack. Over time, it may be
desirable to have additional AEGIS platforms — indeed, a compelling case can be made for having
substantially more such ships and other combatant vessels to meet the Navy’s world-wide
responsibilities quite apart from the missile defense mission. 4 But initial estimates of the cost to
deploy a near-term, limited capability do not need to include the purchase price of new ships.

Item: Gen. Lyles Cannot Contemplate an End to the Restraints Imposed
by the
1972 ABM Treaty

Perhaps the principal limiting factor cited by Lt. Gen. Lyles is the AEGIS’s present
reliance
on the SPY-1 radars on board the AEGIS platforms. The limitations of these radars — limitations
deliberately designed so as to ensure that the AEGIS system would not be able to violate the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) — severely restricts the performance of the ship’s interceptors
in an anti-missile mode. As the Post put it: “Because its radars to detect missile
launches are
aboard Navy cruisers and destroyers, the system must be provided ‘sufficient warning of the
impending attack to deploy within a few hundred kilometers of the threat launch location or the
specific area to be defended.'”

In fact, the Heritage Commission urges the U.S. to make use of all available
sensors — including
sea-based, ground-based, airborne and space-based assets — so as to maximize the performance of
the AEGIS system in tracking, targeting and destroying ballistic missiles at greater ranges than a
few hundred kilometers. The necessary battle management and command and control capabilities
needed to gather and disseminate such information in real-time to AEGIS cruisers and destroyers
currently strategically located in the Persian Gulf, Sea of Japan, eastern Mediterranean, etc. are
already under development and budgeted for by the Navy. All that is required to fully exploit
these capabilities and those of the AEGIS option as a whole, is to stop observing the lapsed ABM
Treaty. 5

The Bottom Line

Interestingly, the Washington Post fails to report that the unclassified portions of
Gen. Lyles’
classified Pentagon report that have been made public conclude that:

“A combined sea- and land-based National Missile Defense architecture would
provide more operational flexibility and robustness than a land-only system. The
integrated sea- and land-based architecture could provide enhanced protection of the
U.S. by eliminating the need for vulnerable, forward land-based radars; provide higher
kill probability through earlier engagement of the threat; and reduce the impact of
potential single system failures. It could also provide the flexibility to reconfigure the
defensive deployment in response to particular threats [e.g., North Korea], and could a
hedge against threat tactics such as severely depressed trajectories. This integrated
(combined sea-and-land) architecture could also give the defense planner an alternative
to multiple land-based sites as a means to reduce the interceptor fly-out velocity, and
hence the technical and engineering risk to the NMD development program.”

The fact of the matter is that if, God forbid, someone decides to take advantage of the
United States’ current, abject vulnerability to missile attack and destroys an American city, there
is little doubt that — at that point — there will no longer be any further debate about getting
missile defenses deployed in order to prevent such an attack from ever happening again. Then,
the decision will clearly be made to put missile defenses in place at the earliest possible moment
and the logic of using existing assets for that purpose will become irresistible. The AEGIS Option
will be exercised and every other available technology will be brought to bear as soon as possible.
The ABM Treaty will be recognized for what it is — a dangerous and obsolete accord that has
long since outlived its usefulness, as well as its legal standing. Why on earth would we
wait for
that day, when taking these steps now might prevent it from coming to pass?

1The Commission’s current members are: Ambassador Henry
Cooper (Chairman); Lt. General
James A. Abramson (USAF, Ret.); Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.; William R. Graham; Dr. Michael Griffin;
General Charles Horner (USAF, Ret.); Hon. Fred Ikl; Sven F. Kraemer; William
Schneider;
General Bernard Schriever (USAF, Ret.); Dr. William R. Van Cleave; Malcolm Wallop; Vin
Weber; Vice Admiral J.D. Williams (USN, Ret.) The Heritage Foundations editors of the 1999
study are Dr. Kim R. Holmes, Thomas G. Moore and Janice A. Smith.

2 See “Defending America: A Near- and Long-term Plan to Deploy
Missile Defenses,” The
Heritage Foundation, 1995; and “Defending America: Ending America’s Vulnerability to
Ballistic Missiles,” The Heritage Foundation, 1996. The Heritage Foundation’s studies can be accessed via the World
Wide Web at the following
address: www.heritage.org/missile_defense.

3 For an example of an earlier instance of such politicization, see the
Center’s Decision Briefs
entitled It Walks Like a Duck…: Questions Persist That Clinton C.I.A.’s Missile
Threat
Estimate Was Politically Motivated (No. 96-D
122, 4 December 1996) and Critical Mass #2:
Senator Lott, Rumsfeld Commission Add Fresh Impetus to Case for Beginning Deployment of
Missiles Defenses (No. 98-D 133, 15 July
1998).

4 See Center Roundtable Shows Need For Increase in
Navy Budget (No. 98-P 113, 17 June
1998).

5 See Message to Albright, Primakov: New Legal
Analysis Establishes That The A.B.M.
Treaty Died with the U.S.S.R. (No. 99-P 11, 22
January 1999).