Let Chiefs Lead on Missile Defense

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
DefenseNews, 17 April 2000

There is a lot of talk at the moment about the importance of testing various U.S. anti-missile systems to ensure they work properly and will provide ever-more-urgently needed protection against emerging ballistic missile threats. Such steps are, of course, essential and should be conducted as aggressively as possible.

There is, however, another test that may prove even more decisive to the prospects for providing the American people with the sort of protection they expect and deserve: Will the four uniformed leaders of the Nation’s armed forces be allowed to play a substantive and influential role in decisions that appear likely to preclude the development and deployment of effective national missile defenses?

Specifically, the U.S. Administration is anxious to conclude with the Russian President Vladimir Putin what one senior official once called “the Grand Compromise.”

The centerpiece of this deal would be a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It is expected to radically reduce the number of nuclear delivery vehicles and, for the first time, deployed warheads — perhaps to less than 1500 weapons — in the U.S. and Russian arsenals.

Insuperable verification problems and an unbroken record of Soviet/Russian cheating on previous arms control accords mean that, as a practical matter, the accord would eviscerate the American nuclear deterrent while doing little more to the Kremlin’s arsenal than what budgetary pressures are already forcing.

The American people will be told that the compromise achieves Russian agreement to a national missile defense deployment of between 20 and 100 missile interceptors at a site to be built in Alaska.

To assure the Russians that this initiative would only modify, not imperil, the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty signed in 1972, however, the Administration intends to reaffirm in a new agreement the earlier accord’s bans on sea-, air-, mobile ground- and space-based missile defenses of the territory of the United States.

There is a major problem with this scheme. If the objective is to provide a real defense against the kinds of ballistic missile threats the United States is likely to face in the future from rogue states like North Korea, Iran and Iraq, to say nothing of Communist China, the sort of exceedingly limited anti-missile system permitted by the “Grand Compromise” would be clearly inadequate.

On March 30, the Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish (USAF), said the United States would need a layered type of defense across a broad front to address an evolving missile threat.

He observed that this will require over time of a range of systems — including some deployed in ways impermissible under the original ABM Treaty or the sort of successor accord being sought by the Clinton-Gore Administration.

Specifically, in remarks at a breakfast meeting co-sponsored by the National Defense University Foundation and the National Defense Industrial Association, Kadish observed that the inherent mobility of naval systems, in concert with ground-based Army systems, makes a lot of sense from a theater or national missile defense perspective.

He also emphasized the need for boost-phase defenses, for which sea-, air- and space-based weapons will be necessary.

In addition, there is a growing sense on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the Nation cannot afford to wait until 2005 to field even limited anti-missile systems.

One service leader, Admiral Jay Johnson, chief of naval operations, put Secretary of Defense William Cohen on notice last February when he suggested “that Navy ships should provide a significant portion of our nation’s strategic defense and recommend[ing] that [the] Navy be included in both the policy and architectural frameworks of a national missile defense system.”

It stands to reason that, if the political will, streamlined management and necessary resources are brought to bear, the Navy’s existing Aegis fleet air defense infrastructure would be able to provide at least some anti-missile protection for the American people — as well as for their forces and allies overseas — well before 2005.

For near-term sea-based or more comprehensive territorial missile defenses, however, the sort of arms control deal fancied by President Clinton must not be consummated.

At this writing, it is not clear that the Russians will accept it.

But even if they do, the “Grand Compromise” should be unacceptable to those who bear, first and foremost, the responsibility for assuring the common defense — the Nation’s military leadership.

There are two recent, contrasting examples of how that leadership can operate on controversial arms control agreements.

In 1996, President Clinton decided to agree to a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that entailed a permanent, zero-yield prohibition on all nuclear tests. According to James Schlesinger, former defense secretary and energy secretary, the service chiefs were not specifically polled before-the-fact on the question of whether they would support such a treaty — an example of the perverse effect of the Goldwater-Nicholls Act in downgrading the role of service chiefs.

The sole military inputs apparently came from the then-Chairman and Vice Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals John Shalikashvili and Joseph Ralston, respectively.

Fortunately for the country, a majority of the U.S. Senate subsequently rejected this accord as unverifiable, unenforceable and inconsistent with the need to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent.

By contrast, in July 1997, every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and every one of the regional commanders-in-chief registered in writing their opposition to a legislative initiative that would have banned the use of anti-personnel landmines (APLs) by the U.S. military.

This extraordinary action set the stage for the military’s ultimately successful effort to dissuade the Administration from signing the 1997 Ottawa Convention prohibiting the production, stockpiling and use of APLs, yet another hopelessly unverifiable and ill-advised arms control initiative.

It is vitally important to the future U.S. security that the uniformed chiefs of the Nation’s armed forces meet the test of leadership on the question of assuring effective, layered national missile defenses as they did in the landmine dispute.

Despite the political pressure to do otherwise, they must ensure that technical options necessary to ensure that effective anti-missile systems are deployed as quickly and as efficiently as possible are not foreclosed by yet another defective arms control accord