Tag Archives: Defense Budget & Expenditures

Critical Mass: Getting the Bush Nuclear Review Right

(Washington, D.C.): While the Bush Administration’s pending decisions about missile defense and the size and costs of its effort to rebuild the U.S. military have been the focus of considerable attention and debate, a no-less-epochal review is underway — one that has, to date, received little public consideration.

In the course of last year’s campaign, Candidate George W. Bush expressed a willingness to consider radically and unilaterally reducing the quantity and the alert status of America’s nuclear forces — contributing to a new post-Cold War posture featuring an increasing reliance on anti-missile capabilities. As President, Mr. Bush has asked his Administration to assess the wisdom and desirability of such initiatives.

Don’ts and Do’s

If this study is done in a dispassionate and rigorous way, these are the sorts of responses he will shortly be receiving:

  • Don’t Make Unwise Deep Cuts

Extreme care should be exercised over further, deep reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons. The object of retaining a nuclear arsenal is, after all, not primarily to have sufficient means to fight an incalculably destructive war. Rather, it is to prevent one from happening. The greatest danger of all would be if the United States were to be seen to have so diminished its deterrent capabilities as to make the world “safe” for nuclear war.

  • Deterrence is not a science but an art

There is no objectively right or wrong answer as to the number of nuclear arms the United States “needs” to have; it is a question of risk. Contrary to the hoary theories of arms control, however, the risks appear greater when U.S. deterrent power is discounted than when it is overwhelming. It is, in short, infinitely better to err on the side of having too much nuclear capability than to have catalyzed, however unintentionally, circumstances in which nuclear weapons might wind up being used by having unduly diminished the credibility of one’s deterrent.

This is especially true in an international environment that is as unpredictable as the present one. We cannot say for certain Russia’s future course, but it seems unlikely that the former Soviet Union will become more benign in the years immediately ahead. For the moment, it is unable to afford large nuclear forces and would like us to agree to mirror-image the deep reductions economic considerations compel them to make. This would be a mistake; if the Kremlin reverts to form and marshals the resources to rebuild its offensive weaponry, negotiated limits will — as usual — wind up binding us, but not them.

For its part, China is determined to acquire great power status and the nuclear arms that it believes are appropriate to such a state. What is more, virtually every one of Russia and China’s allies — what we call “rogue states” they call “clients” — are bent on acquiring atomic, if not thermonuclear, capabilities and are receiving help toward that end from Moscow and/or Beijing.

While the deployment of effective American missile defenses can — and should — mitigate somewhat the dangers that such trends represent, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to make further “deep” reductions below the roughly 3500 U.S. nuclear warheads America planned to retain under the START II Treaty until such time as the beneficial effects of such anti-missile deployments are demonstrated in the diminution of proliferation and related threats to this country, her allies and interests.

  • Don’t De-Alert U.S. Nuclear Forces

The folly of unduly cutting the United States’ nuclear deterrent would be greatly exacerbated were the Nation deliberately to reduce the readiness of whatever strategic forces it decides to retain. Proponents of “de- alerting” America’s strategic missiles claim this is an appropriate and necessary response to the danger that Russian weapons might be launched accidentally or without proper authorization.

This sort of thinking is reckless in the extreme. Effectively eliminating the United States’ capability to respond with nuclear arms in a credible and prompt manner is unlikely to eliminate the problem of the Kremlin’s “loose nukes”; they are the result of systemic forces (for example, a decentralized command and control system, deteriorating conditions and morale in the Russian military, corruption, etc.), not inadequate technology.

  • Don’t Underwrite Russian Nuclear Modernization, Hare-brained U.S. Disarmament Studies

To its credit, the Bush Administration appears to be reconsidering the enormously expensive programs its predecessor established in the name of “securing” the Kremlin’s nuclear wherewithal. Rose Gottemoeller, the highly controversial Energy Department appointee who sought to fund these programs to the tune of $1.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2002, has called the Bush team’s reported plan to pare them back to “only” $800 million “a shame.” What is, in fact, truly shameful has been the lack of accountability for these initiatives that has, according to successive critical reports by the General Accounting Office, enabled the funds to be used for, among other things, subsidizing the ongoing Russian nuclear modernization program.

While the Bush Administration is at it, it should call to a halt one of Ms. Gottemoeller’s other undesirable legacies: a multi-million dollar contract now up for renewal with the National Academy of Science’s notoriously left-wing Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) for a study of how to reduce U.S. nuclear forces to just 200 warheads — a number comparable to levels Communist China hopes shortly to achieve. Since this is an outcome that would be wholly incompatible with the maintenance of a credible U.S. deterrent to say nothing of common sense, the taxpayer’s money should not be wasted on its further evaluation.

  • Do Take Seriously the Need for a Credible Deterrent over the Long-term

Finally, the Bush nuclear review must address not only the need for a credible nuclear deterrent today; it must also ensure the safety, reliability and effectiveness of America’s deterrent for the foreseeable future. This will require several politically difficult but vital steps — including, a resumption of limited, underground nuclear testing required both to continue to certify the existing stockpile and to design, develop and field the next generation of nuclear weapons upon which the Nation will depend in the decades to come. The latter could include deep penetrating warheads capable of holding at risk the underground command posts that even rogue state regimes are acquiring today and an anti-missile warhead in case hit-to-kill missile defense technologies prove unworkable.

The Bottom Line

If President Bush receives and heeds such advice from his subordinates’ nuclear review, chances are that his legacy will be one of leaving the U.S. military not only better capable of fighting the Nation’s next war, but of preventing it from happening.

CSP to The President: Cut Taxes — For a Stronger Defense’

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. sent a letter to President Bush (see attached) expressing his strong support — echoed by many in the national security community — for the President’s plan to reduce the tax burden on Americans.

In his letter, Gaffney details the dual benefit to America and Americans of a tax reduction — a necessary stimulus to the civilian economy and a concomitant boost for the Nation’s defense. After all, as Gaffney writes:

To the extent that your program of tax simplification and reductions translates into as you have put it a refund’ for every American who pays taxes, the effect will assuredly be to contribute to long-term economic growth. Such growth will, in turn, add to future federal revenues and thereby facilitate the very substantial recapitalization of the armed forces.

To be sure, the critically needed recapitalization will not come cheaply. According to the very conservative estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, the rebuilding of the military will cost, at a minimum, some $50 billion per year over the next five years. What is more, when Secretary Rumsfeld’s team completes its top-down review of the strategy and requirements of the Department of Defense, the final figure could well increase to $100 billion per year over the same five year period.

As Gaffney notes, however, even at the high-end this necessary recapitalization of the Nation’s defense capability will represent a mere four percent of the gross domestic product – – four cents on the American national dollar for national security.

To make this significant but essential investment possible, writes Gaffney, the Nation’s robust economy must be maintained and encouraged. History has proven time and again that a reduction in the overall rate of taxation actually produces more revenue to the federal government, due to the resultant increase in economic activity. It is highly encouraging, therefore, to see that President Bush — in pushing for his tax reduction agenda despite nay-saying by the usual suspects — grasps and is determined to stand by the need for tax cuts, not only to provide just relief to every American taxpayer, but to restore a strong U.S. economy, stable growth and the wherewithal necessary to rebuild America’s national defense capability.

Putin’s Lie

(Washington, D.C.): Today’s Wall Street Journal features an extraordinarily timely column by the newspaper’s highly respected Assistant Editorial Page Editor, Melanie Kirkpatrick. Thanks to Ms. Kirkpatrick, a dirty little secret is now in the public domain: Even as Russian President Vladimir Putin goes to great lengths to denounce President Bush’s commitment to defend the American people against ballistic missile attack, railing about the threat thus posed to the sacrosanct 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and seeking to divide United States from its allies, Russia is maintaining a national missile defense of its own that is clearly inconsistent with the terms of the ABM Treaty.

This revelation demands several responses: 1) President Bush should task his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board or some other independent blue-ribbon group to perform an immediate and rigorous assessment of former Defense Intelligence Officer William Lee’s work on the Soviet/Russian NMD system and the classified official analyses that have, to date, minimized its strategic capabilities and significance. 2) Present the findings of such a study to the American people and U.S. allies. And 3) end the official U.S. practice inherited by Mr. Bush of allowing the United States to be the only nation whose missile defense programs are encumbered by the outdated and increasingly dangerous ABM Treaty, thereby clearing the way for deployment as soon as possible of effective anti-missile protection for this country, as well as Russia.

Does Russia Already Have A National Missile Defense?

By Melanie Kirkpatrick

The Wall Street Journal, 6 March 2001

Bad treaties are bound to be violated.

The current flap over Russia’s underground testing in the Arctic is one example: Some U.S. intelligence officials believe Russia is detonating small nuclear blasts in violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Understanding that it was all too easy to violate, the Republican Senate was right to reject the CTBT in 1999.

But there is no better example of this treaty- violating rule than the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, subject of so much debate today. The most clear-cut violation was the Soviets’ Krasnoyarsk phased-array radar, which by the ’90s even the Russians agreed was a violation

Curiously, in all the current talk about the ABM Treaty — to withdraw or not withdraw, to amend or not amend, is it “a relic” or a “cornerstone of strategic stability” — no one seems to be talking about violations anymore. Which is why it’s a good time to take a look at the work of William T. Lee.

Mr. Lee is a retired spook, one of the guys in white hats whose unsung efforts helped the West win the Cold War. From 1951 until his retirement a few years ago, he toiled in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence organizations. His specialty was Soviet military and economic affairs.

Like Mr. Lee, the Soviet generals whose Cold War adventures he used to follow from afar are now also retired. Many are spending their golden years writing their memoirs, proud of their work in building one of history’s great military powers and, in the new openness that prevails in Russia, finally able to tell the story of their accomplishments and even brag a little.

Their reminiscences provide a stack of interesting reading material for Mr. Lee, who, in his own golden years, has plenty of time for perusing such Russian-language volumes as “The Rocket Shield of the Motherland” and “Soviet Military Might From Stalin to Gorbachev.” The writers include: G.V. Kisunko, chief designer of the Moscow ABM system; Gen. Col. Yuri Votintsev, commander of ABM and space-defense forces from 1967-85; and B.V. Bunkin, designer of the SA-5 and SA-10 surface-to-air missiles. There are many others.

Along the way, having pieced together information from memoirs and recently declassified material, Mr. Lee says he has discovered hard evidence of something the U.S. long suspected but was never able to prove: Russia already has a national missile defense. Started by the Soviets even before the ABM Treaty took effect, the original defense was pretty rough. But, as Mr. Lee says, unlike the Americans, the Soviets realized that “some defense is better than none,” and kept upgrading its NMD even after it signed the ABM Treaty. Russia has continued to modernize the NMD system over the past decade, he adds.

If true, all this would make a mockery of the ABM Treaty, which explicitly forbids the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia) from developing any national defense against ballistic missiles. It would also make a mockery of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s call for President Bush to abandon his plan to build a national missile defense. Mr. Putin can hardly denounce an American defense when Russia has one of its own.

Mr. Lee’s analysis is complex. To vastly simplify, he says he has evidence that Russia’s surface-to-air interceptor missiles (SAMs) carry nuclear warheads and therefore are capable of bringing down long- range ballistic missiles, not just aircraft and shorter- range missiles, which is their stated purpose. Russia has 8,000 of these missiles scattered around the country, and Mr. Lee says he has found numerous Russian sources that describe how successive generations of SAMs were in fact designed with the express intention of shooting down ballistic missiles, which is illegal under the treaty.

Mr. Lee also says he has evidence that Russia’s early warning radars are much more capable than the treaty permits. In addition, he says, they are illegally interlocked into a battle-management system that allows Moscow to track incoming missiles and pass the targeting data to command posts, which in turn hand the data over to the SAMs.

Krasnoyarsk, now closed, was one such radar; the only reason Moscow was caught out on it was because of its inland location, which is illegal under the treaty. It was a battle-management radar, passing along tracking and targeting information to a command-and-control system in Moscow — precisely what the radars on Russia’s periphery are doing today, Mr. Lee says. He cites the 1991 visit of an American inspection team to the Pechora radar in the Arctic Circle, when inspectors learned that the radar was passing along target-tracking information to a central command. The U.S. objected at the time but didn’t follow through to the logical conclusion: that all the radars were networked.

Mr. Lee wrote up his research in a 1997 book, “The ABM Treaty Charade” and in a series of subsequent articles in scholarly journals. Henry Cooper, former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, says of Mr. Lee: “I think he’s got a very good case.” Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan defense official, calls Mr. Lee’s work “scrupulously documented” and says that while some aspects of Mr. Lee’s analysis aren’t new, “Bill stitches it together for the first time.”

In particular, Mr. Cooper calls Mr. Lee’s evidence on the radars “pretty compelling.” This issue has been raised before, he says, “but we never got to a point that we called them on the treaty.” The Russians, he says, intentionally improved their radars, taking “advantage of the ambiguities in the treaty.” In the U.S., on the other hand, “we restrained our engineers” in order to stay within the limits imposed by the treaty. In other words, the U.S. is honest.

There are many good reasons for the U.S. to exercise its option to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, as Article XV permits. Proof of continuing violations by the Russians would surely be one of them.

Melanie Kirkpatrick is the assistant editor of the Journal’s editorial page.

Clinton Legacy Watch # 55: Self-Deterred from Defending America

(Washington, D.C.): On two separate occasions in recent weeks, top Clinton Administration officials have published op.ed. articles in the Washington Post largely echoing the strong misgivings about President Bush’s commitment to defend America against ballistic missile attack that are being heard from Moscow, Beijing and various allied capitals. Interestingly, the essays by former President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Samuel R. Berger, and former Vice President Gore’s National Security Advisor, Leon Fuerth, do less to justify continued inaction on this front than to explain why the United States has so little to show for the more than twenty billion dollars spent on missile defense during Messrs. Berger and Fuerth’s eight years in office: Neither they nor the President they served actually wanted to develop and deploy effective anti-missile systems.

Preordained’ Not to Succeed

Tellingly, Leon Fuerth exposed how this high-level predisposition translated into expensive inaction as he critiqued a study of the U.S. nuclear force posture lately commissioned by President Bush, claiming that its “outcome may well be preordained, written months ago.” In fact, the outcome of all of the Clinton-Gore Administration’s work on missile defense — from the first year when Secretary of Defense Les Aspin “took the stars out of Star Wars” by shutting down the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, to President Clinton’s decision last Fall not to initiate deployment of a limited National Missile Defense (NMD) in Alaska — was “preordained” by the deep-seated antipathy Berger and Fuerth shared with their respective bosses and other Clinton Administration officials toward anti-missile programs. For his part, Mr. Berger warned against a “bureaucratically driven technology” leading the Bush team to deploy missile defenses; in fact, such a deployment was precluded on his watch by bureaucratically impeded technology.

The policy attitudes that proved so fatal to efforts to develop and deploy effective missile defenses are much in evidence in these two articles. Unfortunately, they are rooted in a few mistaken premises:

  • Messrs. Berger and Fuerth espouse a concept of “strategic stability” involving U.S. and Russian nuclear postures inextricably tied to the bipolar, Cold War world that simply no longer exists. This suits the Kremlin, of course, which is anxious to retain the last vestiges of superpower status and which, under Vladimir Putin, rarely misses an opportunity in American elite circles and allied nations to threaten increased tensions, or worse, if the United States abandons its present posture of absolute vulnerability to missile attack.

    The truth of the matter is that Putin’s Russia is actively exacerbating the risks of our vulnerability by joining in the wholesale proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. While Berger suggests that these threats could be alleviated by “preemptively taking out any long-range missiles the other side might have,” this is hardly a formula for the strategic stability he purports to want to protect. Neither is it likely to be a reliable form of protection in light of the United States’ very limited success in finding and destroying Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles in Operation Desert Storm.

  • Messrs. Berger and Fuerth are convinced that arms control is a more certain basis for security than defenses. Specifically, their Administration viewed the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty as the “cornerstone of strategic stability.” They strove to protect it from, as Mr. Fuerth put it, “radical changes” so as to safeguard the U.S.-Russian relationship and various other strategic arms reduction accords predicated upon the ABM Treaty.

    This obsession was all the more extraordinary since it required the Clinton-Gore Administration to ignore the most radical changes of all: 1) The other party to the treaty was formally dismantled in 1991, making this sort of accord null and void under international law. 2) The international environment of today bears no resemblance to that of 1972. And 3) the Kremlin has long had a comprehensive missile defense of its territory (involving a “legal” ABM complex around Moscow and a network of large phased-array radars for missile tracking and some 10,000 anti-missile-capable, nuclear-armed surface-to- air missiles.) The truth of the matter is that the ABM Treaty is legally defunct, strategically ill-advised and inequitable in its application. We continue at our peril to remain subject to its constraints on developing and deploying effective missile defenses.

  • If Russian objections were not sufficient, the Clinton team treated the possibility that China might embark on a missile build-up if the United States deployed defenses as a showstopper. Never mind that the PRC is doing everything it can to amass more nuclear weapons and delivery systems even though there is no American missile defense. More to the point, Chinese leaders have powerfully, if unintentionally, made the case for a U.S. anti-missile system by repeatedly threatening this nation with nuclear attack in the event we interfered with Beijing’s efforts to bring Taiwan to heel.

    As long as the United States remains absolutely vulnerable to such threats, they are sure to be the shape of things to come — not only from China and Russia (assuming Putin continues his efforts to reconstitute a hostile authoritarian regime in Moscow), but from their rogue state clients. After all, under such circumstances, long-range ballistic missiles enable even poor Third World states to demand First World treatment just by having them.

    The same cannot be said of terrorism utilizing ship-, truck- or plane-borne weapons of mass destruction; to have maximum political and strategic effect, they must be used. While the threat posed by such weapons is severe and must be dealt with as effectively as we can, the reality is that the U.S. government is already doing a lot to counter such dangers. Yet, we are currently doing nothing to deploy defenses against another identified, existing and growing danger, namely, that from ballistic missiles. This is all the more outrageous insofar as the law of the land — the Missile Defense Act of 1999, signed by President Bill Clinton in July of that year — requires the government to take such a step “as soon as technologically possible.”

The Bottom Line

The Bush-Cheney Administration is to be applauded for rejecting the misconceptions that kept its predecessor from building and deploying effective, global missile defenses. The new team now needs to do just that. It should get started by adapting the Navy’s fleet of 55 Aegis air defense ships — an approach that can provide far greater protection, at substantially less cost and far faster than the ground-based missile defense system the Clinton-Gore team pretended to support but, as Messrs. Berger and Fuerth make clear, never had any intention of actually fielding.

The Marshall Plan’

(Washington, D.C.):The Bush-Cheney Administration made a lot of its supporters very nervous last week when it signaled that there would be no immediate increase in defense spending — and perhaps none for the rest of Fiscal Year 2001. After all, study after study has shown that the armed forces have been seriously underfunded and over-utilized for the past decade and Mr. Bush had made a point during the campaign of pledging to fix what is known to ail the military.

By week’s end, however, the Administration was putting out the word that the promised “help” for the men and women in uniform was on the way, after all. The new team clarified that it would not only be seeking additional sums for pay, housing and re-enlistment incentives in next year’s budget. It would also be willing to seek additional funding in the course of this fiscal year — if warranted by a fresh review of strategy and force structure that was ordered by Mr. Bush and expected to catalyze a wholesale transformation of the Defense Department.

Enter Andy Marshall

Fortunately, the task of completing such a sweeping, yet expeditious review has been given to a man who has trained for most of the past fifty years for just this moment: Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s legendary Director of Net Assessment.

Dr. Marshall is one of the unsung heroes of the Cold War. Since he joined the Defense Department in the mid-1970s, and during his prior service at the Rand Corporation, he has been the principal patron of “outside-of-the-box” thinking within the U.S. national security community. He has consistently challenged the conventional wisdom, often recognizing before the rest of the military establishment the declining utility of existing weapon systems and the need to develop and field new capabilities suited to a changing world.

Working almost entirely outside of public view, Andy Marshall has spawned not only creative ideas; he has been a mentor to a generation of first-rate strategic thinkers and sponsored some of the best security policy research at the Nation’s academic institutions. While the worst of the many Secretaries of Defense under whom he has served have ignored him and, in one case at least, tried to get rid of him by banishing him from the Pentagon, the best — including the only man to hold the position twice, Donald Rumsfeld — have prized and benefited greatly from his counsel.

Marshall Plan’ Should Include

Now, the Nation as a whole stands to be the beneficiary of Dr. Marshall’s wisdom and unsurpassed corporate memory. These are among the points we must hope his strategic review will underscore:

  • The threat from China: Few senior officials have better understood and done more to document the determination of the People’s Republic of China to anticipate and prepare itself for conflict with the United States. He grasps the danger the Chinese might pose to U.S. interests in Asia and beyond — including outer space — and his recommendations about the sizing and equipping of America’s military will surely reflect the need to be able to contend with the growing asymmetric and other threats from China.
  • The need for urgent deployments of missile defenses: Andy Marshall has long appreciated the risks associated with America’s present, absolute vulnerability to missile attack. He also understands, as Secretary Rumsfeld noted recently, that an anti-missile system need not be perfect to have strategic value. The new Marshall Plan should give urgent priority to beginning the deployment of a global missile defense, starting with the approach that promises to be the fastest, most flexible and least expensive: adaptation of the Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense ships.
  • The requirement for safe, reliable and effective nuclear forces: During his Rand years, Dr. Marshall was a specialist in nuclear weapons matters. Although it is not entirely clear at this writing whether the study President Bush has commissioned to determine the future size of the U.S. deterrent will fall within his mandate, Dr. Marshall certainly appreciates that the quantity of nuclear arms the Nation needs is only part of the calculation. Quality also matters and the arsenal must be modernized and tested if it is to remain viable for the foreseeable future.
  • “Transformation” cannot be accomplished on the cheap: President Bush clearly hopes to reconfigure the U.S. military so as to enable it to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Andy Marshall assuredly will have many ideas for doing so — some of them brilliant, many of them heretical, all of them probably controversial. Still, he would be the first to acknowledge that, even if one envisions revolutionary changes in the weapons of the future (for example, an Army built around lighter, more mobile yet more lethal weapons than main battle tanks and tracked infantry fighting vehicles or a Navy weaned from large carriers in favor of arsenal ships and submarines), the military will have to maintain and operate the preponderance of what it has for at least the next decade or so.

This is more than a matter of correcting current, egregious shortfalls in spare parts and other training- and combat-related gear. There will have to be some interim modernization since the generation of weapons Mr. Bush talked about “skipping” during the campaign was actually skipped during the last decade. Recapitalization of the armed forces must go forward apace to offset the effects of looming block obsolescence of much of the Pentagon’s hardware.

All these steps, to say nothing of the research and development and procurement costs associated with the next generation of military hardware simply cannot be paid for within existing budget limitations. What is more, the increased funding needs to start right away. It will fall to Andy Marshall to help the new Bush-Cheney team and the Nation appreciate these facts of life.

The Bottom Line

For most of the past half century, Andrew Marshall has been a man ahead of his time. Thanks to George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, his time has come.

Review, But Renew, America’s Defenses

This week’s announcement that the Bush Administration would not increase defense spending this year came as a bitter disappointment to those who expected immediate action on the Bush-Cheney campaign promise that "help is on the way" for our men and women in uniform. Instead, on the eve of his National Security Week over the next few days, the President has signaled that a "strategic review" of the condition of the military he inherited and the kinds of changes it requires would be completed before a final decision on defense spending is made. Worse yet, Administration spokesmen seemed to suggest that the there would be no supplemental funding request made for Fiscal Year 2001, even after the review is completed.

It is a reasonable move to perform a careful assessment of the full damage done in the course of eight years of misuse, underfunding and overtasking of the U.S. armed forces under the Clinton-Gore Administration. It is imperative, however, that such a review be completed as rapidly as possible, before further damage is done to readiness and morale, and that an opportunity for corrective action be afforded in the present fiscal year.

In addition to the pressing national security arguments for taking such a step, President Bush has a personal one: As the President of the Center for Security Policy, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., wrote in National Review Online yesterday, the "military coalition" of some 20 million active duty personnel and their counterparts in the reserves and National Guard; veterans; dependents; base communities; and past and present defense contractors and their union and non-union employees were crucial to the margin of victory for the Bush-Cheney ticket. They are entitled to expect Mr. Bush’s promises to be kept, especially when it is already painfully clear that additional investment in defense is going to be required this year.

 

 

Defense ‘Help’ Wanted: A Read-My-Lips Moment for Bush II?

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

National Review Online, 8 February 2001

In the course of the presidential campaign, candidates George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, their surrogates, and supporters made much of the GOP’s commitment to "rebuilding the military." While they only pledged to spend an additional $45 billion more over the next ten years than the Clinton-Gore team envisioned (about $55 billion less than the Democratic ticket promised to add), the popular perception that the Republicans were more serious about redressing the cumulative effect of years of the incumbents’ malign neglect of our armed forces could, arguably, have been determinative of the outcome in this close election.

For this reason, it came as a powerful body-blow to the armed forces and those who prize their service when the new Bush-Cheney administration began signaling this week that it would not increase the Clinton-Gore defense budget this year. Not by the promised $4.5 billion, not in a supplemental request, nada.

Were that position to stand, it would have a devastating effect on the military and the new administration. For one thing, it would ensure that there would be no immediate relief in the kinds of shortfalls that have produced headlines for months. These have included horror stories about troops that are going untrained; aircraft, ships, and other equipment that are unable to perform their peacetime missions, let alone combat operations, due to lack of spare parts and fuel; and acute shortages in critical materiel — from cruise missiles to bullets.

In an important op-ed article published in the Washington Post on December 20, two former secretaries of defense — James Schlesinger and Harold Brown — offered a sobering, bipartisan assessment of the magnitude of these problems:

"…A few weeks ago the Congressional Budget Office released a study concluding that we need to spend at least $50 billion more each year just to keep our armed forces at the present level of combat capability. According to CBO, $75 billion or more is needed to perform the sort of wholesale recapitalization of the U.S. military that has been made necessary by a decade of underfunding.

"A thorough and independent assessment by Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney indicates that it would cost roughly $100 billion more a year to ensure that the armed forces have the kind and quantity of equipment, realistic training and quality-of-life conditions that the Clinton administration has said will be required in the years ahead. The bulk of this amount (roughly 80 percent) would go toward replacement of obsolescent aircraft, ships and tanks."

The effect of a Bush-Cheney failure to provide any additional financial resources to the Pentagon — to say nothing of the large sums truly required — would be fully to implicate the new team in its predecessor’s appalling treatment of the U.S. military, and dangerously to perpetuate the armed services’ present inadequate ability to deter and, if necessary to fight, the nation’s wars.

In a way, even worse, a decision by President Bush to deny the Pentagon additional resources would devastate those in uniform and out who believed it when they were memorably told by Dick Cheney last fall that "Help is on the way." During the campaign Mr. Bush, et al. often spoke about the need to revitalize the morale and esprit de corps of the U.S. military. Few things would more powerfully reinforce the already prevalent sense in the armed forces that their service and sacrifice is cynically recognized by both political parties only when elections roll around — and systematically ignored the rest of the time. Chronic efforts to prevent the military’s votes from counting has further exacerbated the sense of alienation from civilian authorities.

Should these perceptions be validated and take hold, the consequences could be quite serious. Not only would the United States be less ready than it must be to prevent and prevail in the conflicts to come. The Republicans would also making a grave political error insofar as they are seen to be stiff-arming a core constituency — the Reagan defense coalition, for want of a better term. It behooves them to reconstitute and energize this coalition if they have any hope of holding onto the Congress in 2002 and the White House two years later.

By some estimates, the potential membership of such a coalition is vast — perhaps as many as 20 million Americans. These include: active duty personnel and their counterparts in the reserves and National Guard; veterans; dependents; base communities; and past and present defense contractors and their union and non-union employees. Then there are those untold additional millions of patriotic citizens who may not have any more direct connection to the military than a deep sense of gratitude for what servicemen and women do for us all.

Fortunately, the Bush-Cheney administration has just put out the word that it has not ruled out increasing the defense budget this year, after all. It says it is simply determined to complete a "strategic review" of the condition of the military it inherited and the kinds of changes it requires before making judgments about the size and purposes for which any defense supplemental might be sought. Sounds reasonable and certainly orderly. The only question is: Will the problems everybody knows exist right now be addressed promptly? If the review is done with dispatch and additional resources sought quickly, the obvious shortfalls, and the dispiriting effect of allowing them to be perpetuated for even one day more, should be manageable. If not, not.

Next week is National Security Week on President Bush’s calendar. It will afford him ample opportunity to showcase where he really stands on defense — and whether the promised and urgently needed "help" has actually arrived.

The President Must Quickly Demonstrate that His Commitment to Defend America is No Gambit’

Israeli Election, Defense Budget Caps Argue for Aegis Option

(Washington, D.C.): To their great credit, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have in recent weeks made clear that they are personally committed to protecting the American people against ballistic missile attack. Secretary Rumsfeld has indicated that the President perceives this as a “moral” obligation, as well as a strategic necessity. He told top officials from all over Europe and Russia over the weekend that the United States would not be diverted from this path by outdated objections like the fear that a U.S. missile defense deployment would spark an “arms races” — a construct he said was “left over from the Cold War” and “less relevant today than it was then” — or the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that he has called “ancient history.”

Specifically, Rumsfeld told the Werkunde Conference in Munich:

…The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses. These systems will be a threat to no one. These systems will be a threat to no one. That is a fact. They should be of concern to no one, save those who would threaten others.

These declarations are supremely important and thoroughly commendable. They are abso lutely necessary to the task of defending America. Surely, however, Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld appreciate that they are not, in and of themselves, sufficient.

Actions Speak Louder

If anything, the necessity promptly to begin acting on the Bush-Cheney Administration’s commitment to deploy missile defense was underscored yesterday in an editorial in the Washington Post. It effectively charged Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld with bluffing, hoping that by declaring National Missile Defense (NMD) inevitable without including specifics, the Administration will be able to “defuse a potentially divisive debate within NATO before it can get hot,” and “neutralizing an emerging Russian strategy of fomenting European opposition” to NMD.

The Post put the matter bluntly: “It is striking how little seem[s] to lie behind Mr. Rumsfeld’s opening gambit [at the Werkunde defense conference in Munich last week].” It warns that “The risk is that instead of resolving…difficult and pressing questions [like an anti-NATO European military force and increasingly costly Balkan deployments], Mr. Bush’s relations with Europe will be shaped in their opening months by a weapons system that has not yet been chosen, proven or paid for…even in the best of circumstances…won’t materialize for years.”

What Needs to be Done

The Administration simply cannot continue to allow its rhetoric to be unaccompanied by concrete actions. It will find, should it do so, that the sort of criticism evident in the Post yesterday will rapidly metastasize into emboldened opposition to doing anything about missile defense. In no time, the gridlock likely to accompany the onset of the 2002 mid-term elections will make problematic implementation of Candidate Bush’s most concrete national security promise to the American people. This could have most undesirable political — as well as strategic — repercussions in light of the findings of a poll released last week by McLaughlin & Associates.1 This sampling was but the latest confirmation that the vast majority of the American people — irrespective of race, gender, party affiliation or political orientation — want the United States to be protected against missile attack.

Accordingly, the Bush Administration should immediately accompany its rhetoric about missile defense with specific, concrete actions. As a practical matter, the only near-term step it can take in this regard is to announce that it will begin deploying in not more than six-months time, the first elements of a sea-based anti-missile system aboard existing Navy Aegis ships. By so doing, Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld can with one stroke: underscore their commitment to start addressing the problem they properly describe as intolerable (thanks to the fact that the necessary infrastructure for such a system is largely in place today); demonstrate their determination to defend our forces and allies overseas, as well as the American people (thanks to the inherent flexibility of the ships that will over time become anti-missile capable); and secure missile defenses in the most cost-effective manner possible (thanks to the investment already made in the 55-ship Aegis fleet).

The last point takes on supreme importance in light of the Administration’s ill-advised decision not to take any step in FY2001 to increase defense spending. The Aegis Option is simply the only means available at the moment by which way the Bush-Cheney team can begin doing what it correctly states is needed — namely, defending America — within existing resources, without grievously exacerbating the shortfalls already afflicting the combat readiness and esprit de corps of the U.S. military.

The Bottom Line

With yesterday’s election in Israel of Ariel Sharon, the issue of missile defense may suddenly be put into even sharper focus. If, heaven forfend, deterrence should fail and Israel’s enemies in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Libya decide to seize upon the electoral outcome in the Jewish State to initiate regional hostilities, an attack may well feature the use against Israel of deadly ballistic missiles — perhaps carrying weapons of mass destruction.

In the aftermath of such a disaster, it is clear that the United States would, among other things, undertake a crash program to put into place whatever anti-missile capabilities it can rapidly muster. Inevitably, the Aegis Option would be one of the first to be exercised. If that step would surely be taken under those circumstances, the Bush Administration has no excuse for not taking it now — especially when, by so doing, we might discourage this sort of eventuality.



1 See, the Center’s Decision Brief entitled, The American ‘Mainstream’ Wants a U.S. Missile Defense; Guess That Makes its Opponents ‘Extremists’ (No. 01-D 11, 31 January 2001).

Newsweek declares the missile defense debate Over’

Newsweek Magazine’s on-line service circulated this week a fascinating assessment of the missile defense debate by one of its most astute reporters, John Barry. His conclusion: "America is going to build a national missile defense" — and everybody who thinks otherwise better think again.

The following highlights of Mr. Barry’s analysis are particularly thoughtful. They add to the sense of inevitability about defending America, as well as her forces and allies overseas, that owes much to the "Rumsfeld effect" — the signal of serious determination conveyed by President Bush’s appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. When combined with poll data released earlier this week by McLaughlin and Associates that confirms anew the overwhelming, bipartisan popular support for U.S. missile defenses (see "The American ‘Mainstream’ Wants a U.S. Missile Defense; Guess That Makes its Opponents ‘Extremists,’" No. 01-D 11, 31 Jan. 2001), it is clear that the question is not if, but when, anti-missile systems are put into place. With proper presidential leadership, a can-do spirit and attendant budgetary priority and an innovative approach to shortening the time- lines to deployment (i.e., by modifying existing Navy Aegis fleet air defense ships to perform this new mission), the United States and her friends will not only be protected, but begin to be protected far more rapidly than many now think possible.

 

Excerpts of:

Looking Forward To NMD: America will definitely build a national missile defense. Here’s why – and what it means

By John Barry

Newsweek, 29 January 2001

World leaders – from Russian President Vladimir Putin to British Prime Minister Tony Blair – talk as if the issue is still unresolved. They act as if their arguments in Putin’s case, threats – could still have an impact. But it isn’t so. The political debate within the United States is over. Finis. America is going to build a national missile defense.

Sure, there will be shouting and even a few demonstrations by what passes for the left in the United States. The old-style arms control community will protest the abandonment of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty and prophesy a new arms race. The New York Times will follow received opinion in New York and denounce the decision. But nobody in Washington will pay the least attention. Al Gore’s lame "me too" stance on missile defense in the election campaign recognized the political reality of the matter – which is that America’s decision to deploy defenses was really made on August 31, 1998.

That was the day that North Korea test launched a Taepo Dong-1 missile which — to the surprise of America’s spooks — turned out to have a third stage. Though it didn’t succeed in launching a small satellite into orbit, as North Korea had hoped, that third stage meant that, theoretically at any rate, the Taepo Dong now had intercontinental range.

Only six weeks before, a bipartisan panel of defense heavyweights, chaired by a former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had concluded that hostile nations were working hard to develop missiles with which to threaten the U.S. and that the intelligence services were failing to keep abreast of their efforts.

The Taepo Dong third stage was thunderous proof of Rumsfeld’s verdict. Overnight, the politics of missile defense were transformed. Sceptics could, and did, claim that the Rumsfeld Commission had made "worst case" assumptions about other nations’ missile programs, whereas the intelligence community had been circulating "most likely" scenarios. But if North Korea — bankrupt, primitive, starving, isolated, paranoid North Korea — could develop something close to an ICBM, the world really was a more threatening place than it had seemed. America’s 35-year debate about the need for missile defenses was suddenly over.

So when President George W Bush and his new defense secretary, the same Donald Rumsfeld, reiterate — as both did this past week — that the U.S. is going to deploy missile defenses, listen up. They mean it.

What remains to be decided are the second-order questions: timeframe, technology, and cost. These are questions America will settle largely for itself. But what also has to be thrashed out – and here the rest of the world can and will have a voice – is the strategic context within which those defenses are deployed.

And that is why the new Administration is banging the drum so loudly so early. Behind the braggadocio is a clear-headed game-plan. President Bush’s advisers have persuaded him that Russia, China and Europe will not even start to negotiate seriously about a new strategic nuclear order – the new framework for deterrence which Bush & Co. believe is needed – unless and until the world accepts that the United States is going ahead with missile defenses no matter what.

This judgement draws heavily on the national security team’s personal experiences of the team. The National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was a mid-level bureaucrat for the outfit she now runs under the first President Bush in 1990, and worked on the then-thorny issue of German reunification. Bush pushed for a Germany whole, free and integrated into NATO from the outset. He got it. Rice has since written that she took this as a lesson to "choose goals that are optimal, even if they seem at the time politically infeasible." Rumsfeld and the new Secretary of State Colin Powell have both negotiated strategic arms agreements. Both have concluded – as have many others over the years – that the Russians will accept a deal only when they become convinced that America is ready to walk away from the table.

The frustrations of the Clinton Administration have only reinforced these views. By 1996, President Clinton had come — grudgingly and under Republican pressure — to accept the case for defense. But Clinton wanted to negotiate a deal with Moscow that through minimal amendments to the ABM treaty would allow a minimal defensive system to protect against a minimal threat. Years of intensive discussions with Moscow to this end got nowhere, even though Russian generals were privately telling their U.S. counterparts that Russia herself was worried by the prospect of missile proliferation around its southern rim.

The incoming Bush Administration does not intend to walk the same path. Instead, the new Administration’s strategy is to go ahead with the development of missile defenses and invite the Russians and the Europeans to make constructive proposals on how best to integrate these into a new strategic framework. They have, of course, their own ideas what that could be. The Bush Administration is willing to think about moving from strategic arms agreements that limit offensive weapons and ban defensive ones to a new set of mix-and-match totals where offensive and defensive capabilities are somehow reckoned together. They are more willing than Clinton was to think about taking U.S. missile forces off alert status, and they are open to other suggestions for reducing nuclear risk. They would contemplate sharing intelligence, and welcome joint efforts to counter proliferation. They may reduce the size of the U.S. strategic arsenal unilaterally, urging Russia to follow suit but not insisting on it.

The message will be: If Moscow wants to join with the U.S. in these endeavors, fine. If not, that’s Moscow’s choice. Underlying this approach are two fundamental judgements. The first is that, at this point in history, the United States holds all the high cards. The second is that there is no need for haste.

Take Russia. The Russian nuclear submarine fleet rusts at its moorings. By U.S. calculations, Russia’s strategic missiles are so antique that by 2010 or shortly thereafter Russia will likely deploy only 500-800 warheads. So Putin can spend billions of rubles he cannot afford on a new generation of strategic missiles. Or he can do a deal.

Take Beijing. China’s leaders threaten "a spiralling arms race" if the U.S. deploys missile defenses. But to what end? Traditional state-to-state deterrence theory suggests that such a buildup would cost a lot economically while buying nothing of strategic value. China would not lose a deterrent if America installed a missile defense because China does not really have a deterrent against America today, presumably because it doesn’t really think it needs one. The fact that China’s current nuclear arsenal consists of aging, static, highly vulnerable, liquid fuelled ICBMs is proof of that. Why then, Bush’s advisers ask, should Beijing choose to waste resources on a fruitless enterprise ?

Take rogue states. The virtue of missile defenses — or so the Bush team’s thinking runs — is that defenses increase the price of admission to the strategic club. Take Iraq. As the sanctions on Iraq erode, Saddam Hussein will almost certainly be able to afford a clandestine program to develop a handful of missiles with ranges sufficient to hit European capitals. If he can develop even one with a range to hit the United States, Saddam has the tools for a strategy of blackmail. Defenses, even limited defenses, thwart that scenario — though only if both sides have faith in their ability to stop the incoming missile.

Taking the Rumsfeld Effect’1 to Europe

(Washington, D.C.): Short of putting a sign outside the Pentagon saying “Under New Management,” it is hard to imagine a more dramatic indication of the change of leadership at the Defense Department than Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s first response at his first press conference on Friday.

The question came from Reuter’s Charlie Aldinger, the dean of the DoD press corps: “During your confirmation hearings, you…appeared to deride the ABM Treaty as ancient history. Are you and the United States ready to scrap that treaty, even if it means sour ties with the allies?”

Changed Circumstances

Secretary Rumsfeld answered: “I don’t think I was disparaging of the treaty. I think I compared it as being as ancient as I am….It was a long time ago that that treaty was fashioned. Technologies were notably different, the circumstances in the world were notably different. The Soviet Union, our partner in that treaty, doesn’t exist anymore. The focus that we necessarily had during the Cold War was on attempting to have a stable situation, given two nations with overwhelming nuclear capabilities. And all of that has changed.

“We’re in a very different world. The Soviet Union is gone. The principal threats facing the United States are not the fear of a strategic nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. And it strikes me that we should accept the treaty in that sense. And I…personally believe it [ought] not to inhibit a country, a president, an administration, a nation, from fashioning offensive and defensive capabilities that will provide for our security in a notably different national security environment.

“The president has not been ambiguous about this. He says he intends to deploy a missile defense capability for the country. He has concluded that it is not in our country’s interest to perpetuate vulnerability. And the Russians know, they have to know, that the kinds of capabilities that are being discussed are not capabilities that threaten them in any way. They also have to know, if they look around the globe, that there are other threats; that there are nations with increasingly capable weapons that, because of the proliferation of technologies, are posing threats not just to the United States, but to other countries in Europe and to, ultimately, Russia.

“So I think it’s something that’s manageable. I don’t know quite how it will be managed. The National Security Council will be addressing these questions in the period ahead, and certainly the treaty itself is an issue that Secretary Powell and the president and all of us will be discussing.”

This statement bespeaks not only a level of maturity and sobriety about national security that is enormously refreshing, as well as urgently needed at this juncture. It also makes clear the seriousness of purpose with which President Bush and his national security team are pursuing the deployment of ballistic missile defenses.

The Most Important Werkunde Meeting in a Generation

Secretary Rumsfeld’s comments come as he prepares to travel to Europe this week for the annual defense conclave in Munich known as Werkunde. This may be the most important of these meetings since 1983, when the NATO alliance was confronting strenuous opposition from the last KGB thug to run the Kremlin — Yuri Andropov — to the American-underwritten plan to deploy Pershing II and Ground-Launched Cruise Missiles in five West European countries.

Now, as then, the United States must provide leadership, as well the wherewithal, to help its allies meet their defense requirements and resist the combination of sticks and carrots the Russians are wielding to block the deployment of American missile defenses. Fortunately, in Donald Rumsfeld, the Nation has a man who can persuasively convey to U.S. allies that the Bush Administration’s commitment is to provide anti-missile protection to their people and territory, as well as our own. He can describe for them how this country intends promptly to deploy missile defenses in places like the Mediterranean aboard our Aegis fleet air defense ships, offering near-term protection from the emerging capabilities of countries like Libya, Iran and Iraq to deliver weapons of mass destruction to European soil via long-range ballistic missiles.

Surely some in the left-wing governments that run Europe today will continue to cavil against such a “destabilizing” initiative. But most will find it untenable to denounce the United States for coming once again to the aid of her allies when their security is threatened. A significant straw in the wind in this regard was to be found in an editorial published on January 15 by Britain’s left-of-center newspaper The Independent. It said, in part: “Fortunately for us, the Americans could only protect themselves by protecting us….The Americans may receive little gratitude for national missile defense, but yet again, they will be making a large and disinterested financial sacrifice in the cause of world peace.”

Moscow Rules

Make no mistake, the Kremlin will try to succeed in 2001 where it failed two decades ago. It will squeeze our allies in the hope of causing the new American administration to make the fatal mistake of delaying the deployment of missile defenses. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against such a deployment, causing visiting NATO Secretary General George Robertson to wring his hands and assure his host that the alliance would not let the United States do something rash.

Such fawning is all the more reprehensible in light of a reality that Putin has chosen not to acknowledge – – and that NATO and Washington have, to date, been unwilling to address: The former Soviet Union has a deployed territorial anti-ballistic missile system of its own, constructed in violation of the very ABM Treaty to which Mr. Putin and his friends aver such loyalty. As former career intelligence officer William Lee has documented, the Russian system includes not only a limited site defense around Moscow but a network of radars and some 10,000 surface-to-air missiles capable of providing considerable protection nationwide. It is undergoing further modernization even now with the construction of a new missile warning and tracking radar in Belarus. (I treat this important subject at somewhat greater length in an article on missile defense featured in the current edition of Commentary Magazine.)

The Bottom Line

For all these reasons, the new Pentagon management — and the Bush Administration more generally — must seize the day. The stakes for the West associated with once again overcoming Kremlin opposition and providing for the common defense are every bit as high as they were in the early 1980s. Now, as then, Russia will get over it once the decision is taken and the deployment begun. There is no time to waste in getting those steps accomplished.



1 The “Rumsfeld effect” is a term first coined by Robert Kagan in an op.ed. article published in the Washington Post on 19 January to describe the therapeutic effect Secretary Rumsfeld’s appointment and directness about missile defense has already begun to have in shifting European attitudes towards the inevitability, and even the desirability, of deploying anti-missile systems.

See, the Center’s Decision Brief entitled, The ‘Rumsfeld Effect’: Leadership on Missile Defense (No.01-D08, 19 January 2001).

Grasping the Importance of Space Power

(Washington, D.C.): Finally, the United States seems to be getting serious about the need for space power. For eight years, President Clinton paid lip-service to the importance of America being able to have ready and reliable access to and use of space — and the capability to deny such access and use to hostile powers. Yet, his Administration deliberately precluded the Nation from acquiring the wherewithal to do so. Within its first week in office, however, the Bush-Rumsfeld Pentagon has begun to correct this strategically foolish and potentially costly policy disconnect.

A front-page article in today’s Washington Post reveals that the Air Force recently conducted a war game focusing on military operations in space. This step comes on the heels of the release on 11 January 2001 of a blue-ribbon commission report urging the United States to acquire and exercise space power and the subsequent confirmation of its chairman, Donald Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense. The war game also appears to have validated findings and recommendations made at the Center for Security Policy’s High-level Roundtable Discussion on space power held in December (see attached).

Interestingly, Post reporter Thomas Ricks who attended part of the war game held at Schriever Air Force Base (a facility named for one of the Nation’s most visionary and accomplished space pioneers, General Bernard A. Schriever USAF [Ret.], who has long served on the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council) seems to have been surprised by the lesson of this “first major war game to focus on space as the primary theater of operations”: Notwithstanding the keening of those who oppose the “militarization of space,” U.S. control of space — far from promoting global conflict — will actually help keep the peace. As one participant in the games concluded, “Space surprised us a bit. It turns out that space gives you a lot of options before you have to go into conflict.”

Space is Playing Field For Newest War Game; Air Force Exercise Shows Shift in Focus

By Thomas E. Ricks

The Washington Post, 29 January 2001

Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado — Last week, the possibility of war in space moved from pure science fiction created in Hollywood to realistic planning done here by the Air Force.

Spurred by the increased reliance of the U.S. military and the U.S. economy on satellites, and facing a new secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is more focused on space than his predecessors were, the Air Force’s Space Warfare Center here staged the military’s first major war game to focus on space as the primary theater of operations, rather than just a supporting arena for combat on earth. The scenario was growing tension between the United States and China in 2017.

“We never really play space,” Maj. Gen. William R. Looney III said. “The purpose of this game was to focus on how we really would act in space.”
The unprecedented game, involving 250 participants playing for five days on an isolated, super-secure base on the high plains east of Colorado Springs, was the most visible manifestation of a little-noticed but major shift in the armed forces over the last decade.

The Gulf War showed the U.S. military for the first time how important space could be to its combat operations — for communications, for the transmission of imagery and even for using global positioning satellites to tell ground troops where they are. The end of the Cold War allowed many satellites to be shifted from being used primarily for monitoring Soviet nuclear facilities to supporting the field operations of the U.S. military.

But military thinkers began to worry that this new reliance on space was creating new vulnerabilities. Suddenly, one of the best ways to disrupt a U.S. offensive against Iraq, for example, appeared to be jamming the satellites on which the Americans relied or blowing up the ground station back in the United States that controlled the satellites transmitting targeting data.

In response, the Air Force over the last year focused more on space — not just how to operate there, but how to protect operations and attack others in space. It established a new “space operations directorate” at Air Force headquarters, started a new Space Warfare School and activated two new units: the 76th Space Control Squadron, whose name is really a euphemism for fighting in space, and the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, whose mission is to probe the U.S. military for new vulnerabilities.

All those steps come as Rumsfeld, who just finished leading a congressional commission on space and national security issues, takes over the top job at the Pentagon. Among other things, his commission’s report hinted that if the Air Force doesn’t get more serious about space, the Pentagon should consider establishing a new “Space Corps.”

So, perhaps to show that it is giving space its due, the Air Force held its first space war game here, and even invited reporters inside for a few hours. The players worked in a huge building behind two sets of security checkpoints, the second of which features two motion detectors, four surveillance cameras and a double-fenced gate with a “vehicle entrapment area.”

Yet officials were notably jumpy about discussing specifics with the reporters they brought in. “We’re doing something a little unprecedented, bringing press into the middle of a classified war game,” said Col. Robert E. Ryals, deputy commander of the Space Warfare Center here.

The U.S. military has a long tradition of conducting war games, not so much to predict whether a war will occur, but to figure out how to use new weapons, how to best organize the military and how political considerations might shape the conduct of war.

After World War II, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz commented that the war in the Pacific had been gamed so frequently at the Naval War College during the 1930s that “nothing that happened during the war was a surprise — absolutely nothing except the kamikaze tactics towards the end of the war. We had not visualized these.”

Last week’s space war game was set in 2017, with country “Red” massing its forces for a possible attack on its small neighbor, “Brown,” which then asked “Blue” for help. Officials described “Red” only as a “near-peer competitor,” but participants said Red was China and Blue was the United States. When asked directly about this, Lt. Col. Donald Miles, an Air Force spokesman, said, “We don’t talk about countries.”

Going with the conventional wisdom in the U.S. military, the game assumed that the heavens will be full of weapons by 2017. Both Red and Blue possessed microsatellites that can maneuver against other satellites, blocking their view, jamming their transmissions or even frying their electronics with radiation. Both also had ground-based lasers that could temporarily dazzle or permanently blind the optics of satellites.

The Blue side also had a National Missile Defense system, as well as reusable space planes that could be launched to quickly place new satellites in orbit or repair and refuel ones already there. Veiled comments made by some participants indicated that both sides also possessed the ability to attack each others’ computers — in military parlance, “offensive information warfare capabilities” — but no one would discuss those.

On Monday, as the game began, no conflict had occurred — or was even inevitable. As Red threatened its neighbor Brown, the first major question that Blue faced was whether to stage a “show of force” in space, akin to sending aircraft carriers to the waters off a regional hot spot.

On Day Two of the game, Blue decided to show force by launching more surveillance and communications satellites, making it harder for Red to stage an early knockout attack — that is, a successful Pearl Harbor.

Space gives the United States “more opportunities to demonstrate resolve” without using force, said Maj. Gen. Lance L. Smith, who played the role of commander of a Blue military task force. Asked whether that included taking over Red’s broadcast satellites, he said: “Those are the kind of options.”

On Day Three of the game, privately owned foreign satellites became a key issue. The Blue side asked the foreign firms not to provide services to Red. In response, Red tried to buy up all available services to constrain the U.S. military, which relies heavily on commercial satellites for many of its communications. Red offered to pay far more than is customary. Blue then said it would top Red’s offer. The eight people playing the foreign firms responded that they would honor their contracts, which left Blue worried and unhappy.
Robert Hegstrom, the game’s director, concluded that “dealing with third-party commercial providers is going to be a priority for CincSpace” — the U.S. commander for space operations.

Another lesson of the early friction between Blue and Red was that the Pentagon should prepare plans for what to do if it picks up indications that an adversary is getting ready to shoot blinding laser beams at commercial satellites operated by U.S. firms. Among other things, one official said, the government could tell the American companies to close the “shutters” over the optics on those satellites.

For four days, the two sides tiptoed up to the edge of war, but never actually fired a shot. They did come close: At one point, the Red military prepared a plan to fire dozens of nonnuclear missiles at U.S. military installations in Hawaii and Alaska. They calculated that those missiles would use up all the shots the United States had in its missile defense arsenal — and thereby leave the U.S. homeland open to being hit by subsequent missiles.

But the players found that “theater missile defense” — that is, coverage of a region, usually by U.S. Navy warships — bolstered deterrence in two ways, by making it harder for Red to attack deployed U.S. forces, and by encouraging U.S. allies to stay in the coalition, which would keep them under the protective umbrella of those ships.

Red also launched cyberattacks on U.S. computers, said Miles, the Air Force spokesman, who declined to provide details.

Officials were unusually tight-lipped about what actually happened in the game but were willing to describe some of their conclusions.

Not surprisingly, they found that many of the weapons on the Air Force’s drawing boards — missile defenses, anti-satellite lasers and “reusable space planes” — could have a useful role in deterring future wars by discouraging adversaries from thinking they can preemptively knock out the United States.

“With a robust force, we can absorb some losses before [the situation] becomes critical,” said Hegstrom, the game director. But, he said, with the “thin” space presence the United States will have in 2017 if current trends continue, “it becomes critical to respond almost immediately.” Thus a future president might be backed into escalating quickly, launching preemptive strikes against enemy weapons that could attack key U.S. satellites.

“Space surprised us a bit” in how much it might help boost deterrence of a future war, said retired Air Force Gen. Thomas S. Moorman Jr., who played part of the Blue team’s political leadership. “It turns out that space gives you a lot of options before you have to go to conflict.”

But generally the players came up with more questions than answers, both about how deterrence might work in the 21st century and how to employ the new weapons the Air Force is contemplating.

“We know what deterrence was with ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War,” said Brig. Gen. Douglas Richardson, commander of the Space Warfare Center. “But what is deterrence in information warfare?”

Likewise, said Maj. John Gentry, who played a staff member on the Blue force, the small attack satellites that both sides possessed are only barely understood. “A lot more thinking will have to go into the microsatellite, the concept of operations about how to use it,” he said.

“I hate to use the word ‘paradigm,’ but mind-set changes are happening here,” added Maj. George Vogen, who helped run the game. “This is the next step in seeing the growth of space into its own right.”