Tag Archives: Defense Budget & Expenditures

With Friends Like These….

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, President Bush’s commitment to defend the American people, their forces overseas and allies against ballistic missile attack sustained what are widely perceived to be two serious, if not fatal, body blows.

The first occurred when Secretary of State Colin Powell proved unable to get the French and German governments to agree to consensus wording in a NATO document to the effect that the Atlantic Alliance faced a common threat of ballistic missile attack. The second was the result of Senator Jim Jeffords’ defection from the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate – – a step that is expected to bring to power Democrats who also seem, to varying degrees and at varying times, to discount the danger posed by missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction.

Not So Fast

Before the obituaries are written on the centerpiece of Mr. Bush’s national security and foreign policy agenda, however, a bit of perspective is in order. If one understands the nature of the allied governments in question, their behavior is easily understood — if indefensible. And, while the hostility of the likes of incoming Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden to the deployment of missile defenses is visceral and politically ingrained, it is not universally shared by their colleagues in the Democratic caucus.

Some Friends’

It turns out that the problem with the French and Germans is not that they are so strategically incompetent as to be unable to recognize a real and growing danger from missiles capable, first and foremost, of targeting their territories. Rather, the issue is that the governments now in charge in Paris and Berlin give new meaning to the question, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

While most of our countrymen fail to appreciate it, the leaders of these and most other governments in Western Europe (with the notable exception of the newly elected Berlusconi administration in Italy, which supports missile defenses) are individuals who cut their political teeth demonstrating their opposition to U.S. military power, the NATO alliance and America more generally. Germany’s Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder and his Green Party Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, are pedigreed leftists who were active in the pro-Soviet European Left’s campaign in the early 1980s aimed at preventing the deployment of U.S. intermediate- range nuclear missiles in five allied countries. Ditto France’s Socialist premier, Lionel Jospin, and, for that matter Britain’s Tony Blair and his Foreign Minister, Robin Cook. Even the present and immediate past Secretaries General of NATO, Britain’s George Robertson and Spain’s Javier Solana respectively, were determined opponents of the U.S. leadership of the Atlantic Alliance in the face of manifest Soviet threats.

The hostility being exhibited (to varying degrees) by these allied leaders toward American leadership today on missile defense is reminiscent of another difficult moment in U.S.-European relations. In the mid-1980s, American intelligence discovered a huge missile- detection and -tracking radar being built by the Soviet Union near the Western Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk. The character, capabilities and location of this radar made it as clear-cut a violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty as the United States was ever likely to find. When I and others briefed NATO defense ministers about this discovery, however, Britain’s Michael Heseltine — then the Minister for Defense in Margaret Thatcher’s government — strenuously refused to agree that the Krasnoyarsk radar breached the ABM Treaty. Subsequently, in private conversations, he admitted the real reason: It was not that he was unpersuaded of the merits of the case but was simply determined to prevent the United States from having an excuse to pursue a President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, to which he from the political Right and virtually everyone on the European Left vehemently objected.

Meanwhile, Back at NATO Headquarters

Similar considerations are likely to be at work later this week when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addresses his counterparts at a NATO defense ministerial meeting in Brussels. Thanks to his brilliant leadership of a 1998 blue-ribbon commission on the dangers posed by ballistic missile proliferation, scarcely anyone is better equipped than Mr. Rumsfeld to elucidate the nature of the “common threat” posed to our allies and us by such weapons. Insofar as the left-wing Europeans don’t wish to be confused with the facts — any more than Michael Heseltine did a generation ago — Secretary Rumsfeld needs to make four points:

  • First, of course there is a threat. For example, Libya — a country whose megalomaniacal leader has already launched a missile aimed at a NATO installation in Italy (happily, without effect) has recently taken possession of some forty North Korean No Dong missiles, capable of ranging much of southern Europe. He is not alone, or necessarily the most dangerous of those who will brandish ever- longer-range ballistic missiles in the future.
  • Second, Secretary Rumsfeld needs to reinforce a message he first delivered in Europe last February — namely, that the decision to deploy U.S. missile defenses has already been taken. We are not going to be talked or euchred out of doing so by either friends or foes.
  • Third, the United States is going to provide such protection to its forward-deployed forces and its allies, first from the sea using existing Aegis air defense ships, and will do so at no cost to allied nations — unless they wish to contribute. If, on the other hand, allied populations really don’t wish to be defended, we can make arrangements to leave them as vulnerable as they are today.
  • And finally, the Kremlin under both the Soviet and Russian governments, has breached the ABM Treaty so comprehensively as to make the subsequently admitted Krasnoyarsk violation pale into insignificance. Indeed, that radar was but one piece of the sort of “territorial defense” against long- range ballistic missiles specifically prohibited by the ABM accord, the rest of which is now in place. NATO should be briefed on this heretofore unpublicized fact to counter persistent claims about the Treaty’s indispensability and sacrosanct nature.

The Bottom Line

These representations will also serve the Bush Administration as it seeks to regain traction on Capitol Hill. While the new Democratic leadership in the Senate will make common cause wherever possible with like-minded (though far more radical) leftists in Europe and elsewhere, at the end of the day, there are clearly Democrats with whom President Bush can work to defend America et.al., if he provides the requisite leadership. With friends like these and the common threat we face, he has no choice but to do so.

The Only Hope for Real Progress’ On Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.):In a recent, brief conversation with President Bush, the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. thanked him for his leadership on the missile defense front but warned him that he was concerned the initiative was getting away from us. He responded confidently, “Actually, we are making more progress than you might think” and cited as an example his conversation earlier that day with Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov.

Perhaps we are making considerable “progress.” There is increasing reason to believe, however, that the “progress” we are making is in the wrong direction.

Let’s Make a Deal’

This concern has only been aggravated by reports in recent days in the New York Times to the effect that Mr. Bush’s administration has decided to try to “buy” Russia’s support for his pursuit of protection against ballistic missile attack for the Nation, its forces overseas and allies. The paper actually quoted “one senior White House official” as saying “If we are going to make this work, the Russians have to agree to the plan.”

Specifically, the Bush team is said to have made an offer to share with Russia early warning information, to conduct joint anti-missile exercises and to purchase Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. A “senior administration official” told the Times: “Think of it as exercising their missile defense with ours, to see whether they could be made inter- operable. Our systems could be interconnected. It makes a lot of sense.”

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Actually, it only makes sense if you make several dubious assumptions.

  • First, you have to believe that the Russians will be more accommodating if they think the United States will only proceed with missile defenses if they approve, than would be the case if the Kremlin knows it has no say in the matter. In fact, for most of the past seventeen years, successive American administrations have tried unsuccessfully to persuade Moscow to accede to U.S. anti-missile deployments. This experience suggests that, if in the future as in the past, we accord Russia a de facto veto over our missile defense programs, they will happily exercise it.

    As the New York Times noted: “The evolving strategy is in strong contrast to that of the administration’s early weeks, when Mr. Bush and his national security aides said they were preparing to speed ahead alone to undo the [1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty.” In fact, the first approach was the right one. The only hope for making the Russians (and, for that matter, our allies) tractable is to persuade them that the United States is going to do whatever is required to defend itself, whether others concur or not.

  • Second, you have to think that collaboration with the Russians on missile defense systems will not result in the compromise of U.S. anti-missile technologies. In fact, at the very least, the Kremlin will use any insights garnered from joint exercises and missile-sharing programs to improve the ability of their ballistic missiles to overcome such defenses. We may or may not worry about improved penetration capabilities being in Russian hands. We cannot ignore, however, the virtual certainty that these capabilities will be shared in short order with the many countries Moscow views as clients — from China to Iran, from North Korea to Libya — to whom it is feverishly proliferating its missile technologies.
  • Third, you have to believe that American military officers and defense-minded congressional leaders already anxious about the adequacy of Bush Administration spending on the promised rebuilding of the military will be happier if money is being spent buying Russian hardware than U.S. equipment. This is all the less likely if reports in today’s Washington Times prove correct, namely that the lion’s share of the projected infusion of some $30 billion in additional funding for the Pentagon is earmarked for necessary improvements in medical care and housing for the armed forces — leaving practically nothing for needed procurement of modern weapons.

    Even if the acquisition of Russian S-300 missiles at the cost of untold millions of dollars made strategic sense, such investments will face tough sledding at home to the extent that they come at the expense of the production of domestic anti-missile systems, to say nothing of ships, planes and armored vehicles that enjoy higher priority among the JCS and in some quarters on Capitol Hill.

  • Fourth, you have to ignore the fact that the Russians already have a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack. Their S-300s are upgraded versions of the nuclear-capable SA-10 surface-to-air missiles, thousands of which have been deployed across the former Soviet Union. When integrated with many older SA-5 SAMs, a number of large missile-detection and -tracking radars and an up-to- date ABM complex around Moscow, the Kremlin is in the enviable position of denouncing our prospective national missile defense system while preserving (in fact, while modernizing) its own extant one.
  • Finally, you have to assume that the new Democratic leadership of the Senate will be more willing to support the President’s missile defense program if given an opportunity to slow, encumber or otherwise derail it. There is no evidence to support this thesis. To the contrary, Senators Tom Daschle, Carl Levin and Joe Biden — the new Majority Leader and the presumptive chairmen of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively — have been vocal opponents of efforts to defend America against missile attack since long before Mr. Bush came to town. All they need do to prevail now is to maintain the status quo of no anti-missile deployments and they will seize any chance afforded them to do just that.

The Bottom Line

In short, President Bush has a choice to make. He can make further “progress” on missile defense by heeding the advice and respecting the sensibilities of those who have kept this nation defenseless against missile attack to this point. Or he can make the only kind of progress that matters — by initiating deployments forthwith, first from the sea (as he intimated in his address last Friday at Annapolis was his intention), and pursuing thereafter whatever cooperation makes sense with the Russians and whatever dialogue is constructive with the allies and congressional Democrats.

The difference between the two approaches may determine whether the United States deploys effective anti-missile systems before we need them, or only after we do.

Changed Circumstances in Senate Require Bush to Move Now on Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Senator Jim Jeffords’ departure from the Republican caucus may have one therapeutic repercussion: The Bush Administration will have an incentive to act with dispatch on its top national security priority — defending the United States, its forces overseas and its allies against ballistic missile attack.

As the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., notes in a column published today in National Review Online, changes in the Senate leadership — notably the expected passing of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee’s gavels to, respectively, Senators Joseph Biden and Carl Levin — make it imperative that President Bush remove his missile defense initiative from the death-of-a-thousand-cuts fate that awaits should it continue to be pursued in a business-as-usual fashion. The time has come for real presidential leadership. The way to do it is described below.

Boost Phase

By Frank J.Gaffney, Jr.

National Review Online, 24 May 2001

The defection of Sen. Jim Jeffords from the Republican party spells trouble for most of President Bush’s agenda. That is particularly true in one area: His commitment to defend the American people, their forces, and allies overseas against ballistic-missile attack.

The immediate problem is that Senators Jesse Helms and John Warner will, respectively, turn over the gavels of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees to their Democratic counterparts, Senators Joseph Biden and Carl Levin. That transfer of power means that Mr. Bush will no longer be able to count on two pivotal committees being led by legislators who share his sense of urgency about ending America’s present, absolute vulnerability to missile strikes. Now, these committees will fall into the hands of senators who have been the most indefatigable and effective opponents of previous efforts aimed at ending that vulnerability.

Left to their own devices, Messrs. Biden and Levin will do everything in their power to preserve the status quo. In Washington, few things are easier than resisting change. And what President Bush is proposing to do end the impediment to the deployment of effective missile defenses posed by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed in 1972 with the Soviet Union, and initiate deployments impermissible under that accord will require him to overcome immense inertia.

Even before they became chairmen, both senators impeded the confirmation of some of President Bush’s appointees who will be responsible for missile defense and arms-control policy in the State and Defense Departments. Once they assume their chairmanships, it is a safe bet that they and their staffs will work assiduously to interfere with the Bush administration’s missile-defense policies and programs as well.

If the President is serious about deploying effective missile defenses, he will not be able to get there by accommodating, appeasing, or trying to compromise with the likes of Senators Biden and Levin. Adopting such an approach (as is so often the case with conventional opinion) is wrong. These legislators share an ideological commitment to the ABM Treaty and the arms-control house of cards built upon it. They may, for tactical reasons, choose to conceal their antipathy to anti-missile programs at variance with that accord, but they will never willingly agree to approve or otherwise legitimize such programs.

Instead, Mr. Bush’s only hope of realizing his goal of defending America against missile attack is to throw down the gauntlet. As William Kristol put it in an op-ed article in today’s Washington Post: “Bush will have no choice but to follow Reagan’s example. He will have to show that on a few key issues he can use the bully pulpit to strike fear into Democratic hearts. Any successful president needs to be not just liked but also feared.”

Here are the steps Mr. Bush should take at once to provide the needed leadership on missile defense and to minimize the chances that he will be thwarted at every turn by the likes of Messrs. Biden and Levin:

1. Mr. Bush should announce that the United States believes that the missile threat now justifies the immediate, emergency deployment of anti-missile capabilities. The emergency arises from missile developments in Iran, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and China (both vis-a-vis Taiwan and the United States). During recently completed consultations with many nations, his representatives made clear our view on this score and served notice that the president was determined to respond appropriately.

2. As a practical matter, an immediate deployment can only take place at the moment by using the Navy’s Aegis air-defense ships. While the existing Aegis system would have very limited ability to shoot down long-range ballistic missiles, the presence of an American missile defense of even uncertain effectiveness may help dissuade nations contemplating attacks and comfort coalition partners, other allies, and U.S. personnel sent into harm’s way who have reason to fear those attacks. A similar strategic benefit materialized when Patriot air defenses of unknown quality as anti-missile systems were dispatched to the Persian Gulf and Israel at the time of Operation Desert Shield.

3. What is more, six months from now given the appropriate presidential priority and a minimal increase in resources the Navy could introduce several low-cost improvements to the performance of the existing Aegis radar and missile systems so as to increase significantly their probability-of-kill under specified circumstances.

4. Accordingly, the president should immediately announce that, henceforth, Aegis ships equipped with existing Standard Missile II Block IV missiles will be tasked to provide whatever anti-missile protection they can to U.S. forces and allies and to the American people at home. The president has the authority to depart from the ABM Treaty which prohibits the United States from defending its territory against ballistic-missile attack without congressional assent. And, thanks to the negligible marginal costs associated with the first of these initiatives, he can act without having to seek additional funding from Congress.

5. Having set in train his defensive program, Mr. Bush can go to the American people and elicit their support for the next steps initially, the relatively low-cost upgrades to the Aegis system and then, as needed, other complementary and cost-effective anti-missile systems (the most attractive option being space-based defenses). In this fashion, the president has a chance to present Senators Biden and Levin with a fait accompli that will be much more difficult to oppose, let alone undo, than would be the sort of “business-as-usual” approach driven by budget timelines and processes. The latter are mortally susceptible to behind-the-scenes sabotaging at which veteran lawmakers like Joe Biden and Carl Levin are past masters.

As it happens, there will probably be no better time to launch Mr. Bush’s missile-defense initiative than in the midst of the hoopla over the summer’s newest blockbuster movie, Pearl Harbor. After all, the American people have rarely had more occasion to focus on the ineluctable fact that surprise attacks, like that on Oahu, are by definition surprises. With that reminder, President Bush should have to do little more than establish his determination not to leave our nation vulnerable to a future Pearl Harbor one that, if conducted by weapons of mass destruction and delivered via long-range ballistic missiles, could make the destruction on U.S. soil and loss of American lives inflicted by Japan in 1941 pale by comparison.

Pearl Harbor, All Over Again

(Washington, D.C.): Hooray for Hollywood! This year Tinsel Town will mark Memorial Day with a blockbuster designed to help all of us remember an event Franklin Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy.”

Coming at this juncture, however, “Pearl Harbor” The Movie, promises to be far more than diverting summer entertainment. It may prove a real public service — provided it serves to counteract the failure of America’s intellectual elite to recall, if not the Japanese surprise attack on the United States’ premier naval facility in December 1941, then the valuable lessons to be learned from that military disaster.

‘What, Me Worry?’

As it happens, certain politicians, pundits and editorial writers are now assuring the American people that we need not fear a surprise attack against this country. They aver that we can safely perpetuate our present unpreparedness, even though a growing number of dangerous nations are acquiring long-range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — a combination with the potential to cause devastation in this country that would make the tragic loss of some 2,000 lives at Pearl Harbor look like a day at the beach.

Some “experts” blithely dismiss President Bush’s determination to build an effective U.S. anti-missile system on the grounds that no nation would dare to attack the United States with weapons like ballistic missiles that leave a “return address.” Such attacks are unlikely, they say, because they would invite an assured retaliation from this country so destructive as to make the initial strike suicidal for the attacker.

Presumably, the film due to be released this Friday will share with the American viewing public the warning given to the Japanese high command by Admiral Yamamoto — the brilliant strategist who planned and executed the attack on Oahu. He told them that, apart from the unlikely prospect that the United States would be so demoralized at the loss of its Pacific fleet that it would sue for peace on Imperial Japan’s terms, the ultimate result would be eventual and certain defeat for the land of the Rising Sun.

In the event, while the decision to inflict mortal harm on the U.S. in 1941 may have made no sense to us, another nation — for its own reasons — decided to undertake it. The attack on Pearl Harbor proved to be, as Yamamoto predicted, an act of suicide for most of the leaders of the Japanese empire, as well as one of premeditated homicide for millions of others throughout the Pacific and Asian mainland.

What ‘Forward Engagement’ Requires

The case for missile defense today is made even stronger by the fact that ballistic missiles offer nations like North Korea, Iran or Libya another option. What if such a rogue state chose merely to threaten the launch of WMD-equipped ballistic missiles in order to dissuade an undefended United States from resisting its acts of local aggression?

We should recall that it was a near-run thing when George Bush senior decided to ask Congress for permission to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Even in the absence of a proven Iraqi capability to inflict mass destruction at will on the United States, the vote in the Senate was extremely close. Would we have gone forward with the build-up to Operation Desert Storm — let alone the Gulf War itself — if Washington, New York or some other place in America could have been credibly threatened with annihilation?

Certainly, as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has repeatedly pointed out, we could not have counted on our allies to participate in the Grand Coalition if their capitals had been in the cross-hairs. Now that many of them are coming within range of Iranian and Libyan missiles, alliance solidarity in future collective defense actions cannot be reliably assumed.

This reality makes all the more ironic — indeed, Orwellian — the title chosen for a new organization reportedly being formed to fight the Bush missile defense initiative. According to Sunday’s Washington Post, “nearly 100 Democratic experts on defense and foreign policy have formed a group called Americans for Forward Engagement.” Their first priority apparently is to help fellow partisans in Congress to block the deployment of effective anti-missile systems.

How, one might ask, will the United States be able to perform “forward engagement” if neither its own troops nor its allies are defended against extant, let alone emerging, missile threats? Under what circumstances will the American people be willing to engage on behalf of their own interests (let alone distant allies’) overseas if, by so doing, they invite mega-Pearl Harbor attacks against their families and communities at home, from even Third World countries?

The Bottom Line

The truth of the matter is that the “usual suspects” opposed to missile defense — the Clinton team that wasted eight years and billions of dollars that could and should have been used to develop and deploy needed anti-missile systems and their friends in academe, arms control activist cells, the press and foreign capitals — think the only forms of “engagement” that serve U.S. interests are trade and disarmament agreements. Most no longer admit they oppose missile defenses; it turns out, for good reason, that that is an untenable position politically. Instead, they conjur up misleading and disingenuous reasons for opposing anti-missile defenses, excuses that they hope will attract more popular support from a public duped by false claims that defenses can’t work, are unaffordable or will actually reduce our security.

If, as must be hoped, “Pearl Harbor” serves to remind the American people about the abiding dangers of surprise attack and the costs of unpreparedness, the critics of missile defense should be put on notice: It is irresponsible to persist in policies that effectively ignore emerging threats and condemn this country to a posture of vulnerability — a posture that may in the future insidiously distort U.S. security policies and/or cost the lives of many of our countrymen. Should such possibilities eventuate, moreover, those responsible must be expect to be judged even more harshly than were those held accountable for the disaster at Pearl Harbor. After all, the former will have known about, yet forgotten, the lessons of that first Day of Infamy.

The Real Debate’ About Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): It was one of the more memorable examples of the phenomenon of “damning with faint praise.” Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle was talking about George W. Bush’s speech to the National Defense University, in which the President forcefully laid out his arguments for defending the United States, its troops and allies against ballistic missile attack and launched international consultations to help sell his vision.

Senator Daschle said that Mr. Bush has begun “one of the most important and consequential debates we will see in our lifetime.” What he really meant, though, was that the President is making grave mistake and that he and other opponents of missile defense intend to prevent W. from perpetrating it on the rest of us.

What, Me Oppose Missile Defense?

To be sure, Mr. Daschle will likely take exception to being called an opponent of missile defense. In so doing, however, he will underscore the disingenuousness of the debate he intends to make among the “most important and consequential” of the present era.

Specifically, what those like Tom Daschle and his comrades (notably, liberal Democrats like Senators Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd and John Kerry and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt) mean when they say they support missile defenses is that they don’t — except under circumstances calculated to render such support meaningless.

Specifically, such critics tend to assert that: 1) Any U.S. anti-missile system must meet some ill-defined but very exacting performance standard, yet not be so capable as to prevent Russia or even China from being able to threaten to destroy this country. 2) It must not cost too much to deploy, although how much would be acceptable is rarely spelled out. And, perhaps most importantly, 3) the United States must not proceed “unilaterally.”

Let’s examine each of these conditions in turn.

We Can Do It: First, it is a safe bet that the United States can produce the technology needed for a reliable territorial anti-ballistic missile system (for more on this important capability, see the op-ed article by Center for Security Policy National Security Advisory Council member, Ambassador Henry Cooper, from today’s Wall Street Journal). But it can only do so if we stop trying to develop such technology within the limitations imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that explicitly forbids us from having that capability – – an idea the critics abhor.

Think about it. Does anyone really believe the U.S. could have gotten men safely to the moon and back using 1960s technology — arguably a much more difficult proposition than hitting a small number of missiles or warheads with 21st Century equipment and know-how — if we had we tried to do it while observing a treaty banning lunar exploration? Once President Bush affirms that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is no longer consistent with the United States’ “supreme interests” and exercises our undisputed right therefore to withdraw from that accord, the decks will be cleared for rapid fielding of competent defenses.

We Can Afford It: Second, the costs of such a missile defense will obviously be a function of the sort of system or, more likely, the layers of anti-missile capabilities chosen for deployment. As it happens, the approach pursued half-heartedly by the Clinton Administration was one of the most expensive and least capable options. Far more effective, global protection could be acquired for considerably less if the Navy’s existing investment in Aegis fleet air defense ships is utilized as the basic infrastructure for near-term defenses while space-based sensors and weapons are brought on-line. These systems are not compatible with the ABM Treaty though, and thus are non-starters for many of the critics of missile defense.

We Must Be Prepared to Lead: The real Catch-22, though, is the line that the United States can only go forward if our allies and potential adversaries agree. After all, in the event President Bush allowed the left-wing governments running virtually every allied government at the moment to make the call, few (if any) would give their blessing. For them, arms control treaties are sacred writ or, in the case of the ABM Treaty, “the cornerstone of strategic stability.” What is more, most of them (especially the French) foolishly believe it to be in their nations’ interests for the United States to be hobbled militarily.

The allies are rapid supporters of missile defenses though when compared to one-time and potentially future foes like the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans. They very much fancy the American vulnerability that gives their missile threats strategic and commercial value. As long as they think they can exercise a veto, they will try to do so. Those who would make our defenses contingent upon blessings from these quarters, should be seen for what they are: inveterate opponents of U.S. missile defenses who prefer not to be identified as such.

The Bottom Line

As a result, the challenge for Mr. Bush will be not merely to advocate a technically viable and affordable anti-missile system worthy of broad support at home and abroad. Increasingly, he must also make the case for U.S. leadership at a time when it is being vilified as “unilateralism.” He must unapologetically extol American exceptionalism at a moment when the Nation is under growing pressure to conform to the lowest-common-denominator served up by the so-called “international community.”

The reality is that American sovereignty and security cannot be safely entrusted to those who do not have this country’s best interests at heart and/or who labor under delusions about the consistency of world governance and international norms. The latter group’s nostrums are all the more untenable insofar as these arrangements are increasingly being defined by whatever terms are agreeable to the likes of Muamar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein and their patrons. For evidence of this phenomenon, one need look no further than the absurd outcome of last week’s vote on membership for the UN Human Rights Commission — which seated Sudan, Cuba, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Russia and China while unseating the United States.

The emissaries Mr. Bush has fanning out around the world this week to explain and promote his visionary “framework” must establish America’s determination to defend its people, troops and allies, come what may. We can always make arrangements not to protect nations that decline to have our help. But we can no longer afford to allow their opposition to prevent us from taking the steps with respect to the ABM Treaty and the development and deployment of affordable, effective missile defenses that are so clearly needed in today’s world — and tomorrow’s.

Memo to the President: Your Legacy Must Be to Restore America’s Military

(Washington, D.C.):The Center for Security Policy presented novelist and essayist Mark Helprin its first “Mightier Pen” award on 18 April, in the company of nearly 150 past and present security policy-practitioners, senior congressional staff members and journalists. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz presented Mr. Helprin with the award, which recognized the enormous contribution his published writings have made to the public’s appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and military strength as an indispensable ingredient in promoting international peace.

As the following column, based on his acceptance speech at the Center event, attests, Helprin’s work indeed embodies the spirit of the “Mightier Pen.” His spirited and moving call for a restoration of America’s military power is, rightly, based not on a desire for war, but rather for the strength that will ensure the Nation’s ability to deter war into the turbulent future.

The Fire Next Time

By Mark Helprin

The Wall Street Journal, 24 April 2001

From Alexandria in July of 1941, Randolph Churchill reported to his father as the British waited for Rommel to attack upon Egypt. In the midst of a peril that famously concentrated mind and spirit, he wrote, “You can see generals wandering around GHQ looking for bits of string.”

Apparently these generals were not, like their prime minister, devoted to Napoleon’s maxim, “Frappez la masse, et le reste vient par surcroit ,” which, vis-a-vis strategic or other problems, bids one to concentrate upon the essence, with assurance that all else will follow in train, even bits of string.

Consensus Destroyed

Those with more than a superficial view of American national security, who would defend and preserve it from the fire next time, have by necessity divided their forces in advocacy of its various elements, but they have neglected its essence. For the cardinal issue of national security is not China, is not Russia, is not weapons of mass destruction, or missile defense, the revolution in military affairs, terrorism, training, or readiness. It is, rather, that the general consensus in regard to defense since Pearl Harbor — that doing too much is more prudent than doing too little — has been destroyed. The last time we devoted a lesser proportion of our resources to defense, we were well protected by the oceans, in the midst of a depression, and without major international responsibilities, and even then it was a dereliction of duty.

The destruction is so influential that traditional supporters of high defense spending, bent to the will of their detractors, shrink from argument, choosing rather to negotiate among themselves so as to prepare painstakingly crafted instruments of surrender.

A leader of defense reform, whose life mission is to defend the United States, writes to me: “Please do not quote me under any circumstances by name. . . . Bush has no chance of winning the argument that more money must be spent on defense. Very few Americans feel that more money needs to be spent on defense and they are right. The amount of money being spent is already more than sufficient.”

More than sufficient to fight China? It is hard to think of anything less appealing than war with China, but if we don’t want that we must be able to deter China, and to deter China we must have the ability to fight China. More than sufficient to deal with simultaneous invasions of Kuwait, South Korea, and Taiwan? More than sufficient to stop even one incoming ballistic missile? Not yet, not now, and, until we spend the money, not ever.

For someone of the all-too-common opinion that a strong defense is the cause of war, a favorite trick is to advance a wholesale revision of strategy, so that he may accomplish his depredations while looking like a reformer. This pattern is followed instinctively by the French when they are in alliance and by the left when it is trapped within the democratic order. But to do so one need be neither French nor on the left.

Neville Chamberlain, who was neither, starved the army and navy on the theory that the revolution in military affairs of his time made the only defense feasible that of a “Fortress Britain” protected by the Royal Air Force — and then failed in building up the air force. Bill Clinton, who is not French, and who came into office calling for the discontinuance of heavy echelons in favor of power projection, simultaneously pressed for a severe reduction in aircraft carriers, the sine qua non of power projection. Later, he and his strategical toadies embraced the revolution in military affairs not for its virtues but because even the Clinton-ravished military “may be unaffordable,” and “advanced technology offers much greater military efficiency.”

This potential efficiency is largely unfamiliar to the general public. For example, current miniaturized weapons may seem elephantine after advances in extreme ultraviolet lithography equip guidance and control systems with circuitry not .25 microns but .007 microns wide, a 35-fold reduction that will make possible the robotization of arms, from terminally guided and target-identifying bullets to autonomous tank killers that fly hundreds of miles, burrow into the ground, and sleep like locusts until they are awakened by the seismic signature of enemy armor.

Lead-magnesium-niobate transducers in broadband sonars are likely to make the seas perfectly transparent, eliminating for the first time the presumed invulnerability of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the anchor of strategic nuclear stability. The steady perfection of missile guidance has long made nearly everything the left says about nuclear disarmament disingenuous or uninformed, and the advent of metastable explosives creates the prospect of a single B-1 bomber carrying the non-nuclear weapons load of 450 B-17s, the equivalent of 26,800 100-pound bombs. Someday, we will have these things, or, if we abstain, our potential enemies will have them and we will not.

To field them will be more expensive than fielding less miraculous weapons, which cannot simply be abandoned lest an enemy exploit the transition, and which will remain as indispensable as the rifleman holding his ground, because the nature of war is counter-miraculous. And yet, when the revolution in military affairs is still mainly academic, we have cut recklessly into the staple forces.

God save the American soldier from those who believe that his life can be protected and his mission accomplished on the cheap. For what they perceive as extravagance is always less costly in lives and treasure than the long drawn-out wars it deters altogether or shortens with quick victories. In the name of their misplaced frugality we have transformed our richly competitive process of acquiring weapons into the single-supplier model of the command economies that we defeated in the Cold War, largely with the superior weapons that the idea of free and competitive markets allowed us to produce.

Though initially more expensive, producing half a dozen different combat aircraft and seeing which are best is better than decreeing that one will do the job and praying that it may. Among other things, strike aircraft have many different roles, and relying upon just one would be the same sort of economy as having Clark Gable play both Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.

Having relinquished or abandoned many foreign bases, the United States requires its warships to go quickly from place to place so as to compensate for their inadequate number, and has built them light using a lot of aluminum, which, because it can burn in air at 3,000 degrees Celsius, is used in incendiary bombs and blast furnaces. (Join the navy and see the world. You won’t need to bring a toaster.)

And aluminum or not, there are too few ships. During the EP-3 incident various pinheads furthered the impression of an American naval cordon off the Chinese coast. Though in 1944 the navy kept 17 major carriers in the central Pacific alone, not long ago its assets were so attenuated by the destruction of a few Yugos disguised as tanks that for three months there was not in the vast western Pacific even a single American aircraft carrier.

What remains of the order of battle is crippled by a lack of the unglamorous, costly supports that are the first to go when there isn’t enough money. Consider the floating dry dock. By putting ships back into action with minimal transit time, floating dry docks are force preservers and multipliers. In 1972, the United States had 94. Now it has 14. Though history is bitter and clear, this kind of mistake persists.

Had the allies of World War II been prepared with a sufficient number of so pedestrian a thing as landing craft, the war might have been cheated of a year and a half and many millions of lives. In 1940, the French army disposed of 530 artillery pieces, 830 antitank guns, and 235 (almost half) of its best tanks, because in 1940 the French did not think much of the Wehrmacht — until May.

How shall the United States avoid similar misjudgments? Who shall stand against the common wisdom when it is wrong about deterrence, wrong about the causes of war, wrong about the state of the world, wrong about the ambitions of ascendant nations, wrong about history, and wrong about human nature?

The Prudent Course

In the defense of the United States, doing too much is more prudent than doing too little. Though many in Congress argue this and argue it well, Congress will not follow one of its own. Though the president’s appointees also argue it well, the public will wait only upon the president himself. Only he can sway a timid Congress, clear the way for his appointees, and move the country toward the restoration of its military power.

The president himself must make the argument, or all else is in vain. If he is unwilling to risk his political capital and his presidency to undo the damage of the past eight years, then in the fire next time his name will be linked with that of his predecessor, and there it will stay forever.

Mr. Helprin, a Journal contributing editor, is a novelist.

Accept No Substitutes on the Aegis Sale to Taiwan

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow is D-Day for Taiwan — the day the Bush Administration advises our democratic friends on Formosa whether it has decided to approve their request for four Aegis air- and missile-defense ships needed to protect the island against the large and growing threat posed by Communist China. Unfortunately, according to press leaks to the Wall Street Journal, the answer appears to be a “Maybe.”

The Journal reports that “a senior official familiar with the [internal U.S.] deliberations” told it that the leading option would be to forego the Aegis sale if “China cuts back the number of missiles pointed at the island.” This idea tracks with a suggestion made several weeks ago by the United States Pacific Command — whose commander (known by the acronym of his title, CINCPAC) once made clear his attitude towards Free China in an off-color, but revealing, comment to congressional staffers. He told them that Taiwan is “the turd in the punchbowl of U.S.-China relations.”

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

The Bush team should be under no illusion: The CINCPAC proposal is a non-starter. Not only are the Chinese — who strenuously oppose the U.S. sale of Aegis ships to Taiwan — unlikely to play along. Even if they were to do so, the idea would be unworkable and undesirable from the U.S. and Taiwanese points of view. Consider just a few of the problems inherent in such an approach:

What Baseline? First, the United States cannot be absolutely sure how many missiles Beijing has pointed at Taiwan right now. Intelligence reports suggest that there may currently be as many as 300 of them. Is that correct? Or have the Chinese successfully concealed some of their missile deployments? Given the great lengths to which the People’s Liberation Army goes to prevent us from correctly assessing their present and emerging order of battle (their deliberate take-down of our EP-3 is but the most recent and egregious example of their concealment and deception program), it would be an act of considerable hubris to believe we can and will know precisely what the PLA is doing.

Alternatively, can we be sure that other, longer-range missiles in the PRC’s inventory are not also targeted on Taiwan? If that is not the case today, in the exceedingly unlikely event China were actually to agree to relocate some of its shorter-range missiles away from locations where they could reach Taiwan, would other weapons be reassigned to cover the original targets? Would we have any inkling that the threat was thus being maintained, if not exacerbated?

See No Evil: Second, assuming we did have some way of knowing with confidence precisely how much of a capability to attack and destroy Taiwan Beijing was maintaining at any given time, there is the matter of what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Policy-makers who don’t want to be confronted with evidence that their policies are not working out make little secret of their preferences. Bill Clinton once notoriously admitted to engaging in a practice he called “fudging” the facts. For his part, Al Gore rejected an unwelcome intelligence finding that his favorite Russian interlocutor, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was thoroughly corrupt by scrawling a “barnyard epithet” across it.

Giving the Bush team the benefit of the doubt, let’s just say they wouldn’t behave so irresponsibly as to discourage the intelligence community from speaking truth to power. Our cumulative experience with arms control agreements nonetheless suggests that there is a powerful tendency within the intelligence community to find only ambiguity when reasonable clarity might entail undesirable repercussions. A case in point has been the systematic failure by the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge that first the Soviet Union and then Russia built and operated a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack impermissible under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Here’s how it would work in the current context: Analysts at the CIA or other parts of the intelligence community tasked with monitoring Chinese missilery within range of Taiwan would surely find ample grounds in the aforementioned uncertainties to avoid any conclusion or finding that would trigger Aegis deployments. As a result, the U.S. commitment to provide Taiwan with the defense the Bush Pentagon has confirmed it needs would never become operational.]

Picking Up Where Clinton Left Off? Finally, there is no getting around the fact that the Aegis component of the present arms package is the litmus test for the Bush policy towards China. Beijing has made blocking the Aegis sale the object of its most virulent criticism. The PRC’s allies in U.S. business and academic circles have, as usual, rallied to its side, arguing that the sale would be far too provocative [(although, interestingly, the ultimate “Friend of China,” Henry Kissinger has reportedly made known in private his view that the United States should sell Aegis ships to Taiwan.)] For these reasons, among others, the Administration was apparently inclined before the EP-3 episode to give Taiwan other weapon systems — including four, less-capable Kidd-class destroyers — but to turn down the Aegis sale.

The Bottom Line

China’s belligerence in taking down and holding our surveillance aircraft and the U.S. expression of regret required to extract our service personnel held hostage by the PRC have, however, indisputably changed the circumstances under which the Bush decision on the Taiwan arms package will be perceived in Beijing and in the region. Should the flagship (literally) element of that package — the sea- based air- and missile-defense systems Taipei urgently requires — now be stripped from it, or made subject to some specious Chinese missile movements, it will be seen as evidence that the U.S. practice of accommodating the PRC has not changed, even if the occupant of the White House has.

Until such time as the United States can construct and turn over Aegis ships ordered by Taiwan, it should provide her friends there not only with Patriot anti-missile systems, diesel submarines and other elements of the requested arms package. America should also immediately begin to equip and assign her own fleet of Aegis ships to provide interim anti-air and -missile protection to the people of Taiwan — as well as those of Israel, Japan, Europe, South Korea and those here at home.

Irreconcilable Differences: There Can Be No Effective Missile Defenses Within The A.B.M. Treaty

(Washington, D.C.): The Bush-Cheney Administration is expected shortly to complete its deliberations about how to proceed with the missile defense program President Bush has repeatedly promised to deploy “at the earliest possible time.” One decision should already be clear: The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is incompatible with the deployment of effective anti-missile defenses. This is not an accident; the Treaty was supposed to prohibit territorial defenses against long-range ballistic missile attack and that is precisely what it does.

There are those, however, who would have us believe that further negotiations leading to amendments to the ABM Treaty would make it possible to field competent anti-missile protection for the United States without having to eliminate what the Clinton-Gore Administration insisted was the “cornerstone of strategic stability.” As Sven Kraemer — one of the Nation’s preeminent security policy practitioners and a founding member of the CSP National Security Advisory Council — wrote last week in a two-part series in the Washington Times — renegotiating this accord would be a “fool’s quest with deadly consequences.” The reality is that the ABM Treaty simply cannot be “fixed” and attempts to try to do so will inevitably have the effect of encumbering, delaying and dumbing-down whatever missile defense President Bush elects to deploy.

Excerpts of:

“ABM Treaty modification trap” and “New U.S. missile defense strategy”

by Sven Kraemer

The Washington Times, 8 & 9 April 2001

Current proposals for Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty “modification talks” promoted by Russia, China, and Treaty diehards in the Congress, are a fools quest with deadly consequences.

They flow from the Clinton administration myth that the 1972 Treaty, which is based on the Cold War Concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and bans national ballistic missile defenses, is somehow the “cornerstone of strategic stability” and a “viable” foundation of arms control. This myth and pressure for such talks are now the chief obstacles to effective U.S. missile defenses.
* * *

During the Cold War, the signing of the Nixon-Brezhnev ABM Treaty in 1972 was hailed as assuring missile peace in our time but was quickly followed by an unprecedented Soviet arms buildup (28 strategic programs), treaty violations (SALT, ABM, “Detente” Principles), and aggressive actions in Central America, Africa, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.

Only after Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983 did the Soviet Union begin major reforms and accept his “zero option” proposal for Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) and his 50 percent cut proposal for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Russian and U.S. experts alike agree that SDI was decisive in stimulating reforms and arms reductions, ending the Cold War peacefully, and bringing Americans the trillion-dollar peace dividend which became the basis of our post-Cold War economic boom.

In the post-Cold War period, threats to the American homeland accelerated dramatically after President Clinton gutted U.S. national missile defense programs and canceled both President Bushs Global Protection System scheduled for deployment by 1996 and the U.S.-Russia talks begun in 1992 on moving from the MAD-based ABM Treaty to defense-based deterrence. Since then, U.S. vulnerability has proved an incentive for proliferation and arms buildups by hostile rogue nations and those who support them, notably Russia and China.
* * *

The Bush administration should finally and fully reject the Clinton myth that the ABM treaty is the “cornerstone of strategic stability” and a “viable” foundation for arms control. After rejecting the related treaty “modification” trap as a quagmire and fools quest that merely invites dispute, veto and delay, a new missile defense policy should focus on the following eight elements:

(1) Incremental Defense: Rather than locking into artificial two-tier theater/national defense systems, the administration should assure incremental evolutionary ballistic missile defense capabilities against the continuum of theater and strategic threats (including offshore sea-based threats) directed against our homeland and our forces and allies overseas.

(2) Sea-based Systems: The administration should conduct systematic early reviews focused on the most rapid possible deployment of the technologically most promising concepts for mobile anti-missile interceptor, radar and sensor systems, especially sea-based systems…

(3) Emergency Planning: The administration should establish highest-level national priority for the most promising national anti-missile programs, to include an emergency program for early deployment of boost-phase sea-based systems…

(4) Allies: The administration should work with our democratic allies to describe emerging threats, explain fatal ABM Treaty flaws and Treaty “modification” follies, and outline cost-effective mobile forward deployment options, particularly promising sea-based systems, in whose benefits our allies could share and in which they might participate.

(5) Rogues: The administration needs a strategy, maximally shared by our allies, to get tough with hostile states and terrorist organizations and those who support them, who are seeking to acquire advanced missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

(6) Russia and China: While leading a global charge against effective U.S. and allied missile defenses, Russia and China are the worlds key proliferators and are both investing heavily in unwarranted new offensive strategic warfare systems. With them, the administration should explain but not negotiate our counterproliferation and missile defense policies…

(7) Ending the Myth: It is time to end the ABM Treaty myth. We can declare the treaty as expired with the Soviet Union in 1991 and/or can review dangerous global proliferation developments, including Russias and Chinas roles, and cite the Treatys Article 15, Section 2, which states that: “Each party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this treaty if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests. It shall give notice of its decision to the other party six months prior to withdrawal.”

(8) The Path Ahead: In explicitly putting the ABM Treaty aside, President Bush and his team should choose the technologically most advanced options available for accelerated deployment of effective anti-missile defenses focused especially on sea-based systems with boost-phase capabilities, and we should organize for this mission as an urgent, highest-level national priority.

Needed: Adult Supervision on C.T.B.T.

(Washington, D.C.): One could be forgiven for assuming that the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by a majority of the U.S. Senate, the election of a President who campaigned on a platform noting his opposition to that accord and his appointment of a Secretary of Defense and a National Security Advisor who had publicly denounced this treaty would convey to even the most dim-witted government bureaucrats that the CTBT was a dead-letter. If so, one would be wrong. As a column published by Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. in the American Spectator Online on Monday makes clear, the arms control nomenklatura that the Bush-Cheney team has inherited from its predecessor is aggressively seeking to implement the CTBT as though the Treaty had been ratified by the Senate and endorsed by the new President.

As Mr. Gaffney reports, presumably low-level Defense Department apparatchiks are the ones responsible for circulating a directive that declares, among other things: “The new administration has not issued any specific guidance on the CTBT implementation. Until such guidance is issued, DoD will continue with ongoing implementation programs and projects.” (Emphasis added.)

Clearly, the Bush Administration must provide guidance on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty forthwith. By formally directing the Department of Defense and other agencies to cease and desist with the implementation of an accord that is neither verifiable, equitable nor consistent with U.S. national security interests, official energies and scarce taxpayer resources can be redirected to other, more useful purposes.

A Dead Clinton Treaty Given New Life

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

The American Spectator Online, 25 March 2001

In October 1999, the United States Senate did an extraordinary thing. An absolute majority of senators — far more than the 34 needed — voted to reject a major international arms control agreement: the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In so doing, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” fulfilled its constitutional role as a check-and-balance on the executive branch’s treaty-making power.
At the time and thereafter, candidate George W. Bush endorsed the majority’s view that this Clinton treaty was unverifiable, fatally flawed and incompatible with U.S. national security interests. The man he tapped to serve as his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was one of six former Pentagon chiefs who publicly urged the CTBT’s defeat. And as recently as February 22, the national security advisor to now-President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed that the President and his administration did not believe the CTBT could be verified or effective in curbing proliferation.
It is hard to believe, therefore, that what either the majority of the Senate or the President intended was for the U.S. government to proceed with the implementation of the CTBT as though it had been ratified. Yet that is precisely what holdovers from the Clinton administration and career arms control apparatchiks evidently have in mind — and will undertake to do if left to their own devices.
Such officials’ brazen contempt of Congress, their manifest disregard for constitutional processes, and their utter indifference to the express desires of the incumbent President is captured in a memorandum currently being circulated in the Department of Defense (DoD). It baldly declares that “the new administration has not issued any specific guidance on the CTBT implementation. Until such guidance is issued, DoD will continue with ongoing implementation programs and projects.”
The acronym-laced memorandum goes on to detail all the expensive ways in which such implementation will proceed. These include the following:
“The U.S. will continue its support of the implementation preparations by the Preparatory Commission (PrepCom)” that was “established on November 19, 1996 for the purpose of carrying out the necessary preparations for the effective implementation of the verification regime of the Treaty.”
“The DoD will continue to participate in all matters associated with the mandate of the PrepCom. The DoD will maintain the necessary representation needed to support ongoing actions during PrepCom Plenary sessions and send experts and advisors as needed to support the U.S. Vienna Delegation, the PrepCom, its Working Groups, and the Provisional Technical Secretariat (PTS).”
“DoD will support relevant aspects of the provisional system of verification and monitoring facilities required by the CTBT (i.e., the provisional International Monitoring System (IMS)) as these systems and facilities add value to U.S. monitoring capabilities. By the end of 4th Quarter FY02, DoD will install the full network of U.S. IMS facilities. Following installation, DoD will operate and maintain all IMS facilities in the U.S. on a continuing basis and will cooperate with the PrepCom on the certification of these facilities and ask the PTS to provide operational funding following station certification.”
“DoD will also continue to operate the prototype International Data Center (IDC) through its transition to the PrepCom in accordance with the approved transition plan. The prototype IDC will serve as an integral part of the development, deployment, and employment of U.S. monitoring capabilities. The DoD will provide a long-term sustainment program to calibrate and maintain a state of the art capability at the IDC.”
“DoD will support those activities and operations necessary to implement, verify, and comply with CTBT requirements, including the necessary long-lead items required in advance of entry into force such as: facilities, logistics; personnel, operational training, on-site inspection procedures and associated workshops, field exercises, and mock inspections.”
The memo even goes so far as to say that “the DoD will work with Congress to address concerns raised during the 1999 Senate hearings. The DoD will consider an enhanced verification regime, including additional and improved sensors and procedures, to supplement or replace the current treaty-required monitoring suite.” In other words, the Bush-Rumsfeld Defense Department will be working to encourage the Senate to view more kindly a treaty that neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Rumsfeld favors.
Obviously, there is an urgent need for adult supervision with respect to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. While the administration may wish to wait until the review of U.S. nuclear forces it has underway is completed before it takes the sorts of steps required to maintain a credible deterrent for the foreseeable future — notably, resuming limited underground nuclear testing — it should act at once to terminate the backdoor implementation of the CTBT.

The Defense We Need

(Washington, D.C.): In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspen undertook what came to be known as a Bottom-Up Review (or BUR in Pentagonese) to consider the U.S. military’s force structure and capability requirements in the post-Cold War World. The idea was that from that assessment would be derived the necessary funding profiles to pay for the building and fielding such a military. It didn’t work out that way — and there is cause for concern that a similar review being undertaken by his successor, Donald Rumsfeld, will not be allowed to follow such a logical progression either.

What happened in the Aspen BUR exercise was that the Clinton Administration characteristically did not deliver on its promise. Instead of allowing the defense budget to be derived from the projected needs of the armed forces for modern aircraft, ships, ground combat vehicles, missiles, etc., and the wherewithal to operate and sustain them, the Bottom-Up Review wound up being driven from the top-down. The Aspen Pentagon was told by the White House how much it would be able to spend and from that point on the only question was how much of what the military really required could be afforded within the mandated budget “bogey.”

Bottom-Up Goes Bust

The answer was not nearly enough. Instead of undertaking in the 1990s the sorts of long-term investments that would have permitted the “next generation” of weapon systems to replace in an orderly and cost-effective fashion those bought during the Carter and Reagan years, the Clinton-Gore team consistently failed to provide the money or the authorization required to recapitalize the force. As a result, each of the armed forces effectively wound up “skipping a generation” in the procurement of their main battle systems.

Matters were made worse by President Clinton’s proclivity to use the U.S. military intensively. As a result of years of sustained operational tempos that were, in some cases, as high or higher than those of the Vietnam War, much of the equipment currently in the Pentagon inventory is not only reaching the end of its design service life; it is proving very difficult and hugely expensive to maintain at the safety and reliability standards we expect — and that our military personnel deserve.

The New Marshall Plan’

This then is the backdrop of the new bottom-up review being undertaken for Les Aspen’s successor, Donald Rumsfeld, and the superb team he is recruiting for senior Pentagon positions. Under the leadership of the Director of Net Assessment, Dr. Andrew Marshall, the most comprehensive reevaluation of the Defense Department’s requirements in a generation is being undertaken. As predicted, at least some of the conclusions of this study seem likely to be controversial and politically charged; for example, according to press reports, a briefing to the President last week of some of the preliminary findings of this new “Marshall Plan” indicated that it would dispense with the construction of any additional large-deck aircraft carriers. Dr. Marshall’s prescriptions would also reportedly make short-range fighter aircraft and heavy armored vehicles endangered species.

Whither the Bush Team?

More important than any of Dr. Marshall’s detailed recommendations, though, is the over-arching question: Will his review (and the plans that flow from it) be allowed to conclude that the United States military requires a substantial infusion of additional funding? Or will the answer once again be dictated, not by the armed forces’ deficiencies — which have been hugely exacerbated by the past decade or so of malign neglect and overutilization — but by externally dictated budgetary direction that is woefully inadequate to the task?

At this point, the signals are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, press reports indicate that shortly after taking office, Mr. Rumsfeld sought an increase in the range of tens of billions of dollars to make up for readily identifiable shortfalls affecting near-term readiness and to begin to address longer-term modernization requirements. According to news accounts, this request was turned down. What is more, the Wall Street Journal has reported that “Pentagon officials have prepared a list of about 30 weapons programs that could be cut back or killed to produce savings of as much as $3 billion annually over the next several years.”

On the other hand, there are signs that — even though George W. Bush did not campaign on a platform of significantly increased defense spending — the President recognizes that such increases will be required starting this fiscal year, and has directed his subordinates to plan accordingly. Even if this is the case, however, it is not clear that the Bush team is fully prepared for what is needed.

Fortunately, Secretary Rumsfeld is taking advantage of the talents of Dan Goure and Jeff Ranney, two of the Nation’s most knowledgeable authorities on the condition of the military — and what it will take to fix it. They have previously concluded that as much as $100 billion more a year will be needed over and above the Clinton-Gore projections, assuming the United States will retain the kind of force structure and power-projection capabilities to which Mr. Bush’s predecessors at least paid lip-service.

There’s the rub. In the past, the driver for the military’s requirements has been the so-called two-war scenario. But the Washington Post report on Mr. Rumsfeld’s briefing to President Bush last week quotes a “Pentagon official” who says the Marshall review “basically does away’ with long-standing doctrine that the U.S. military must be prepared to fight two major wars nearly simultaneously. It is not clear, he said, whether the review will formally abandon the policy or simply ignore it.”

The Bottom Line

The principal object of U.S. defense spending, of course, is not to fight wars but to prevent wars from occurring. Successive administrations have appreciated that to do that requires the Nation to have sufficient military power not only to prevail in one conflict but to persuade all comers that it could, if necessary, fight and win a second one as well. This formula has served us well — even when it has not been fully funded. Any decision to depart from it entails real risks and should be not only carefully thought through by the Pentagon leadership and the President, but weighed and vigorously debated by the Congress.

Under no circumstances should such a decision be made first and foremost for budgetary reasons. History teaches us that it is not only more desirable but far cheaper to deter wars than it is to fight them. Let this bottom-up review be done on the basis of fully funding military requirements to deal with two, nearly-simultaneous major regional conflicts, and let the American people and their elected representatives decide whether we can afford to do any less.