The Nation’s Top Sailor Endorses a Near-term Approach to Missile Defense: The ‘AEGIS Option’

(Washington, D.C.): In a development that promises to transform the debate over deployment of national missile defenses, the Navy’s senior officer has urged that President Clinton’s plan to pursue only fixed, land-based interceptors for protection of the American homeland be altered to incorporate sea-based anti-missile capabilities.

According to today’s Washington Post, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jay Johnson, wrote a memorandum to Secretary of Defense William Cohen last week confirming a reality long evident to leading legislators (such as Senators Jon Kyl, Jim Inhofe and Kay Bailey Hutchison and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Floyd Spence) and institutions like the Center for Security Policy, the Heritage Foundation and High Frontier: Adapting the Navy’s existing infrastructure of AEGIS fleet air defense ships to give them the capacity to intercept long-range ballistic missiles is a “no-brainer.” In this fashion, the Nation may be able to deploy competent protection for both its forces and allies overseas and for its people here at home far faster and at lower cost than would otherwise be possible.¹

As the Post article makes clear, the only real impediment to such a commonsensical step is the Clinton Administration’s determination to abide by and resuscitate the obsolete — and increasingly dangerous — 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. It took commendable courage, and a professional military officer’s commitment to country over politics, for Admiral Johnson to assert that a failure to include the Navy in the national missile defense architecture “would not be in the best long-term interests of our country.”

The very fact that the most capable near-term system for defending the United States against missile attack is deemed to be illegal — a position sure to be incorporated into the new anti-anti-missile defense treaty President Clinton is trying to negotiate with Russia pursuant to a “Grand Compromise”² — underscores the need to dispense with further U.S. adherence to the original, expired accord, to say nothing of the necessity to eschew any new agreement that would compound the ABM Treaty’s pernicious effects.

The Bottom Line

The AEGIS Option has previously been endorsed by Republican presidential hopefuls Governor George Bush and Senator John McCain. Like the CNO, these would-be commanders-in-chief appear to appreciate that the American people are entitled to protection against the growing danger of ballistic missile attack at the earliest possible moment. Indeed, with Mr. Clinton’s signature of the Missile Defense Act of 1999, that requirement is the law of the land.

Now, the American people are being offered a choice — a sea-based missile defense that can, with the proper priority and streamlined procurement process, be available before 2005, the earliest possible initial operational capability for the limited land-based program favored by President Clinton. Let the electorate decide which approach they favor.

¹For a detailed breakout of the cost estimates, see a “Strategic Issues Policy Brief” issued today by High Frontier’s Chairman, Amb. Henry Cooper, the former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization which can be accessed via www.highfrontier.org.

²See Center Decision Brief entitled Beware of the ‘Grand Compromise’: Arms Control Deal Threatens Effective U.S. Missile Defenses, Nuclear Deterrence (No. 00-D 06, 17 January 2000).