Tag Archives: Defense Budget & Expenditures

Clinton’s October Surprise(s)

(Washington, D.C.): President Clinton’s self-indulgent, “Me-Generation” excesses in recent days before a convention of ministers, his admirers in Hollywood and the Democratic Convention has a companion, darker side that is threatening to do serious harm to U.S. national security interests.
State’s Agenda

A memorandum circulated by the State Department to other agencies last week makes clear that Mr. Clinton intends to try to commit the United States to more than a dozen dubious U.S.-Russian and/or multilateral arms control-related initiatives. They are clearly meant to burnish his tattered public image and round out his “legacy” as a statesman.

These measures appear most likely, however, to lock-in his successor to policies, accords, arrangements and institutions that will prove highly problematic for, if not downright inimical to, the Nation’s ability to deter aggression, safeguard its intelligence secrets and minimize the transfer of strategic dual-use technologies to potential adversaries.

What is more, the timing of this frenzy of diplomatic doings — at least some of which might lend themselves to highly publicized unveilings in October — may even be calculated by Mr. Clinton to influence the election of the man who will succeed him.

Holum’s Folly

The first of these initiatives out of the box will be the subject of bilateral negotiations this week in Geneva. Leading the U.S. delegation will be newly installed Under Secretary of State John Holum. That should be cause enough for concern. Holum is a former George McGovern staffer and unalloyed arms control ideologue whose nomination was so controversial that it failed to receive Senate approval for over a year — a situation that surely would have persisted until Mr. Clinton left office, had it not been ended by a recess appointment after the Senate left town earlier this month.

No less troubling is Holum’s assignment. He aims to reach agreement with the Russians on a “combined U.S.-Russian proposal” to be presented in September to a group the diplomats have, in their inimitable fashion, dubbed the “Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) Reinforced Point of Contact Meeting.”

The starting point for this drill is a Kremlin proposal for a “Global Monitoring System” (or GMS). Its ostensible purpose is to enhance efforts to curb the proliferation of ballistic missiles. In fact, it is a transparent Soviet-style ploy, aimed at creating further impediments to U.S. ballistic missile programs (including cooperation with allies like Britain and Israel) and undercutting the rationale behind efforts to deploy national missile defenses for the American people.

Worse yet, Moscow proposes “incentive measures for states that have renounced the possession of missile systems for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and assistance to national space programs.” Put in layman’s terms, the Russians want the West to provide technical and financial support for the Kremlin’s clients, like North Korea, that fraudulently promise to “give up” their own missile programs.

The Clinton-Gore Administration has responded to this scam with characteristic fawning unctuousness. In a “non-paper” given the Russians, it actually “acknowledge[d] the important role Russia has played in making this the critical time to address a first-ever global missile non-proliferation mechanism, and in proposing new and important ideas for its substance and direction.” Never mind that the government of Vladimir Putin is one of the world’s most egregious proliferators of ballistic missile and WMD systems and know-how.

The State Department sees the Russian proposal as an opportunity to up the ante. It has proposed a draft “Code of Conduct,” whose stated purpose is to “delegitimize missile proliferation while providing a framework for carefully-crafted incentives for countries to give up their missile programs.”

Been There, Done That

These are vintage, if thoroughly discredited, arms control nostrums: If only international norms can be created by banning things like chemical or biological weapons or landmines, they will lose their legitimacy and, then no one will want to have or use them any more. And, just to sweeten the deal, give them “incentives” like the Atoms for Peace provisions of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty or the corresponding sections of the Chemical Weapons Convention pursuant to which those who promised to forgo prohibited activities would be given advanced Western technology with which to pursue them covertly.

As with these previous, failed experiments in international law, the likely effect of the proposed “incentives” meant to wean would-be ballistic missile states from their missiles will be actually to proliferate at least some of the capabilities the “Code of Conduct” agreement is intended to curb. To add insult to injury, the State Department wants such “benefits” to be promised on a “conces sionary/subsidized basis.”

Meanwhile, vital American missile developments, our ability to use and control space for commercial and military purposes and technology-sharing activities with our allies are likely to be subjected to criticism — if not actually sanctioned — to the extent they are contrary to a commitment to “reduce…holdings [of] ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles to the maximum extent possible.” To their credit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are expressing serious concerns about what is now being billed as a “Global Action Plan Against Missile Proliferation” (or GAP), a multilateral effort to codify, among other things, the worst of the Russian and U.S. proposals.

Other Worrisome Initiatives

Similar reservations should attend other eleventh-hour Clinton diplomatic initiatives. These include:

  • a START III Treaty that contemplates reductions in strategic nuclear forces — and attendant constraints on dual-capable platforms (notably, bombers) that are unacceptable to the Joint Chiefs;
  • briefing Moscow on the latest classified U.S. National Intelligence Estimate about missile proliferation a step sure further to compromise fragile sources and methods of collecting such intelligence;
  • a multilateralized monitoring center that will, in due course, require pre-notification of missile and space launches, with obvious adverse implications for operational security;
  • the bankrolling a dubious Russian satellite scheme known as Raymos with at least $344 million in U.S. taxpayer funds; and

  • “cooperation” on theater missile defenses that may assist in the development and proliferation of countermeasures against U.S. anti-missile systems.

Clinton’s Unconsitutional Effort to Implement the C.T.B.T.

The Center for Security Policy has learned that the Clinton-Gore Administration is also aggressively participating in efforts to prepare for implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) an accord a majority of the United States Senate voted last year to reject. By some estimates, three linear feet of documents have been produced in connection with such implementation, with each paper being subjected to review by U.S. government personnel — if not actually drawn up by them. Similarly, American officials are participating in myriad working groups, meetings of experts, interagency backstopping sessions and other conclaves for the purpose of establishing procedures for on- site inspections, reporting requirements, etc.

It is one thing for President Clinton to announce, as he did following the Senate’s repudiation of his CTB Treaty that he would ignore the clear intent of the Framers of the Constitution and continue to represent the United States as bound by an accord that had been denied Senate advice and consent. It is another, even more outrageously unconstitutional act for him to expend huge amounts of manpower and taxpayer resources on activities not consistent with America’s status as a non-party.

The Bottom Line

If the Clinton-Gore Administration is willing to defer to the next President the decision to deploy effective missile defenses something that the Nation urgently needs the least it can do is defer actions on initiatives like Holum’s “Code of Conduct” that will be harmful to vital U.S. interests and that need not be taken now (or for that matter, ever).
In any event, if, as seems likely, a President George W. Bush would rather not be saddled with the detritus of such orgiastic lame-duck negotiating, he should make it known at once. By so doing, he will put the Russians and America’s other diplomatic interlocutors on notice that the United States may not be bound by the fruits of the present negotiations and, therefore, that their energies would be better spent on other activities until after the November election.

Spin Control’: Architects of Hollow Military See no Evil’

(Washington, D.C.): There is good news and bad news about the op.ed. article published in today’s Washington Post by former Clinton-Gore Secretary of Defense William Perry and his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Shalikashvili. The good news is that, with their essay entitled “The U.S. Military: Still the Best by Far,” these prominent Democrats1 have further intensified a needed debate over the condition of today’s armed forces — and tomorrow’s.2

The bad news is that Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili’s contribution to that debate has been less than helpful. In important respects, their assessment of the question at hand — namely, has the reduction in the size and capability of the U.S. military over the past decade been excessive, leading to a condition where it “cannot adequately protect American national interests?” — is highly misleading, transparently politicized and, since the authors should know better, seemingly intentionally disingenuous.

In the final analysis, it may well be that, as two of the leading architects of the hollow military Mr. Clinton is bequeathing to his successor, Secretary Perry and General Shalikashvili cannot objectively discuss their handiwork. If so, it would be better for all involved if they did not inject themselves into the public debate about their dubious legacy.

A Bill of Particulars

The following are among the more troubling of the arguments and contentions advanced by Clinton-Gore’s first-string defense “spin doctors”:

  • The Peace Dividend’

Perry-Shalikashvili: “[A] dramatic reduction in the threat [following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR ]allowed for…a significant reduction in the size of our military forces….The most obvious benefit of [the resulting] reductions in force and support structure was a reduction in the defense budget. If these reductions had not been made, the current defense budget would be almost $400 billion instead of almost $300 billion.

“This peace dividend,’ amounting to about $100 billion a year, has been a major contributor to the balanced budget that our country now enjoys. The question of course, is did the nation pay too high a price for this benefit? In particular, was the capability of the military forces reduced to the extent that they cannot adequately protect American national interests? Our answer to that question is an emphatic no.”

The Facts: It is, at best, premature to answer this question in the negative since the full costs of the so-called peace dividend’ being touted by Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili have yet to become clear. Between Fiscal Year 1993 and 2000, the Clinton-Gore team deferred or canceled some $426 billion worth of procurement purchases by the Defense Department. The savings were not a product of sound military policy; rather, they were the result of the Administration ignoring procurement requirements — including many identified in its own four-year plans (i.e., the 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR) and the 1997 Quarterly Defense Review (QDR)) — creating false savings in the defense budget that translated primarily into additional funds for domestic priorities.

According to Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney, authors of Averting the Defense Train Wreck in the New Millennium:

The military departments already deferred $426 billion of procurement purchases during FY 1993- 2000. These deferred purchases accounted for 52 percent of the procurement budget demand during this period. Under the February 1999 military spending plan for FY 2000-2005, DOD plans to defer during FY 2001-2005 another $389 billion….These deferred purchases in turn raise future procurement budget levels — if QDR forces are to be maintained. For example, if the $815 billion cumulative deferred purchases are added to the procurement demand for the next 15 year period (FY 2006-2020), the procurement budget will be $4,367 billion or 23 percent higher than if no deferrals been made since FY 1993. (Emphasis added.)

In short, the “peace dividend” is not only a myth, but the United States has actually been earning negative interest on this dividend — and we will be lucky if the only currency in which the full price has ultimately to be paid is in dollars.

  • One Major Regional Conflict

Perry-Shalikashvili: “The United States has a military force that is capable of dealing decisively with any likely regional conflict (and the convincing demonstration of this capability in Desert Storm, Bosnia and Kosovo decrease the likelihood of such a confrontation).”

The Facts: One should not need to remind a former Secretary of Defense and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the standard against which U.S. forces have been supposed to be sized and equipped is to deal with not a single major regional theater war (MTW) but two, “nearly simultaneous” ones. And current military leaders — the men and women who understand all too well the limitations with which they have been saddled, thanks to the cumulative effect of years of underfunding — are under no illusion about the United States’ ability to execute the two-MTW strategy. For example, on 10 February 2000, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Eric Shinseki, told Congress: “The first MTW would be moderate risk. The second one, risk would be in the high category with risk here measured in the amount of time it would take us to bring that second MTW to conclusion. You measure that risk in national treasure, lives, and expended dollars.”

More recently, the Commander of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command, General John Jumper, USAF, elaborated further on the degree of risk we are currently running. In an interview with CBS News last week, General Jumper revealed that the entire Air Force had to be drained to perform its operations in Kosovo, which meant that if it had to face a second major campaign, it would have been “unable to perform. We would have had very great difficulty trying to respond to a crisis of equal proportion.”

What is more, what the former Secretary and JCS Chairman euphemistically call “convincing demonstrations [that would] decrease the likelihood of [even one future] confrontation” actually suggest no such thing. These “demonstrations” — i.e., Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo — have not ended, to say nothing of ended satisfactorily. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein has defied the West and survived to resume his rebuilding of conventional and unconventional weapons with which to threaten its vital interests. Bosnia is at peace only as long as armed international forces stand between the warring factions. And Milosevic remains the leader of Serbia, poised to strike again at Kosovo, Montenegro or others when it suits his purposes.

Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili also conveniently failed to mention other, not-so-successful Clinton-Gore military campaigns in places like Somalia and Haiti, in which thugs and gangs have successfully withstood the “overwhelming force” brought to bear, at least temporarily by the United States. It is hard to imagine that their ilk — far from being deterred — have been other than emboldened by the experience and will be tempted to do worse should the U.S. military be weakened further.

  • How Much is Enough?

Perry-Shalikashvili: “During the force reductions of the ’90s, we reduced the procurement budget disproportionately in order to preserve force readiness. This was an appropriate decision at that time, but its legacy today is a due bill as our military equipment ages. Substantial increases must be made in the procurement account to modernize equipment at an accelerated rate, since the aging equipment is itself becoming a readiness problem. This has been recognized both by the Department of Defense and Congress, and procurement authorizations have increased from $40 billion to $60 billion during the past two years. In our judgment, these authorization levels will have to be sustained for a number of years at this level or somewhat higher to effectively recapitalize the force.

“We…believe that this force superiority can be sustained at current budget levels (but to do so will take careful management by the Defense Department and uncommon discipline by Congress).” (Emphasis added.)

The Facts: The apparent internal contradiction of these statements — unless Messrs. Perry and Shalikashvili mean that they favor raping maintenance and pay accounts to compensate for “recapitalization” programs they acknowledge are needed so as to stay within “current budget levels — is all the more astounding in light of the actual budgetary realities. As Dan Goure and Jim Ranney have noted:

If defense spending was maintained at [Clinton’s proposed] Gross Domestic Product level for FY 2001-2010, it would leave enough procurement dollars to pay for modernization and replacement of only 44 percent of the QDR force equipment…A 56 percent reduction of the QDR forces would clearly call into question the capabilities of the U.S. armed forces to carry out the national military strategy.

  • We Spend More Than Anybody Else

Perry-Shalikashvili: “While American defense spending is (in current dollars) about $100 billion a year less than Cold War levels, it is still greater than the combined defense budgets of Russia, China, Germany and France. As a result of this investment, combined with the U.S. military’s advantage in technology and training, the United States today has the dominant military force in the world, and whichever nation is second is far behind.”

The Facts: The idea that gross U.S. defense expenditures must somehow relate to the size of those of potential adversaries (and/or friends) is one of the most insidious of arguments advanced by the “see no evil” crowd.3 It makes about as much sense as saying that local police departments should receive no more for protecting their communities than criminals spend in connection with the commission of their crimes.

Overwhelming force — not the relative size of one’s defense budget — is the only thing that deters the aggression of other nations and, in the event deterrence fails, that permits the situation to be remedied with a minimum of wasted lives and national treasure.

The United States will simply not be able to ensure that it can apply overwhelming force in the future without a significant increase in defense spending to ensure that both today’s military is fully combat-ready and to recapitalize that force so that tomorrow’s will be able to meet the Nation’s defensive requirements. Consider the following warning signs: In 2010, the average age of Apache helicopters, Abrams main battle tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles will all be beyond their design life — and there are currently no funded plans to buy replacements. Despite the decreased size of the Army, about $5,000 less will be spent per soldier on modernization in Fiscal Year 00 than was spent in FY 89. Despite the reduction in ships, the Navy is still facing a personnel shortage resulting in around 12,000 unmanned at-sea billets. In the past 7 years, Air Force readiness for combat units has declined from 85 percent to just 65 percent. By 2010, the average age of Air Force strategic bombers will be 36 years — well in excess of their 15-25 year estimated service half-life, and there are no approved plans to buy more.

The Bottom Line

As the Center noted on 10 August:

A nation with a projected $1.9 trillion budget surplus can afford consistently to allocate a minimum of four percent of its Gross Domestic Product to ensure its security. Such an commitment of resources would assure the readiness of both today’s armed forces and tomorrow’s for many years to come, while allowing important new defense initiatives — like Gov. Bush’s laudable pledge to protect the American people against ballistic missile attacks at the earliest possible time — to be fulfilled. We must not forget that the alternative has, in the past, often proven to be far more costly: unnecessary, avoidable wars whose price in blood and treasures dwarfs the savings achieved via pound-foolish “peace dividends.”

This election is an opportunity not only to acquaint the American people with the full magnitude of the crisis facing our military, but to seek a mandate from them for correcting it by adopting what might be called the “Four Percent Solution.” If all candidates will pledge, as Gov. Bush did so eloquently last week, to “use these good times for great goals,” there is surely no greater goal than assuring we have the freedom to pursue our other ones in peace and security.




1While, like most military officers, Gen. Shalikashvili has not publicized his party affiliation, a report that appears in today’s New York Times makes clear his intimate connection to the Gore political machine: “Mr. Gore…instructed Mr. Christopher to consult freely and frequently with an informal group that consisted of Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman and former Housing Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, both of whom have faced ethics inquiries, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

2 For more on this developing debate, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Four Percent Solution’ (No. 00-D 72, 7 August 2000).

3See Whose Foreign Policy, Mr. President? (No. 00-D 55, 8 June 2000).

The Four Percent Solution’

(Washington, D.C.): Finally, there is reason to believe that one of the most important challenges likely to confront the next President will actually become a focus for the 2000 election: the present and future readiness of the U.S. military to fight the Nation’s wars.

In his acceptance speech last Thursday, Republican nominee Governor George W. Bush put the issue squarely in the spotlight when he declared, “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report: Not ready for duty, sir.'”

The next day, the Clinton Pentagon responded with interviews by its highly political press spokesman, Ken Bacon, and a statement by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton asserting that all of the Army’s divisions are good-to-go. Of course, they could not deny that the two divisions of which Mr. Bush spoke — the 1st Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division — had been declared unready for war last fall due to the detachment of a brigade from each to peacekeeping duties in the Balkans. But that was then, reporters were told, and this is now. According to the Washington Times, Gen. Shelton declared that “the Army had jumped right on top of that’ and brought [both divisions] back to combat readiness.”

The Real Readiness’ Crisis

The problem for the Clinton-Gore Administration is that, whatever the status of any given unit at any point in time, the overall trend for the armed forces is bad — and getting worse. This fact is so palpable that the Joint Chiefs Chairman was compelled to acknowledge it, even as he carried out his assignment of rebutting Gov. Bush’s specific point. As the Times reported, Gen. Shelton felt compelled to add, “That doesn’t mean that everything is the way we would all like to have it.’ There are some readiness shortfalls’ that will not be fixed quickly. Once readiness starts down, you don’t just turn it around overnight.‘”

To be sure, this is not the first time Gen. Shelton has warned about these “readiness shortfalls.” In September 1998, he used an aeronautical metaphor to describe the situation the armed forces faced: “In my view, we have nosed over’ and our readiness is descending. I believe that with the support of the Administration and Congress, we should apply corrective action now. We must pull back on the stick’ and begin to climb before we find ourselves in a nose dive that might cause irreparable damage to this great force we have created, a nose dive that will take years to pull out of.”

Interestingly, just a month before, Clinton Under Secretary of Defense Jacques Gansler had declared that the military not only had already entered such a “nose dive.” He opined that it was an irrecoverable one:

We are trapped in a “death spiral.” The requirement to maintain our aging equipment is costing us more each year: in repair costs, down time, and maintenance tempo. But we must keep this equipment in repair to maintain readiness. It drains our resources — resources we should be applying to modernization of the traditional systems and development and deployment of the new systems. So, we stretch out our replacement schedules to ridiculous lengths and reduce the quantities of the new equipment we purchase, raising their costs and still further delaying modernization.

In other words, the truth of the matter is far worse than Gov. Bush suggested. Not only is today’s military facing severe shortfalls that are impinging upon its combat readiness. The fact that the armed services are obliged constantly to rob Peter (tomorrow’s forces) to pay Paul (allowing today’s barely to make do) means that future defense capabilities may be seriously inadequate. History suggests that the consequence of such a practice is a vacuum of power that hostile nations often feel invited to fill.

Let’s Do the Numbers’

The magnitude of this double-whammy is staggering. According to the most rigorous independent analysis done to date concerning the deplorable condition of the American military — a study entitled Averting the Defense Train Wreck in the New Millennium1 published last year by Daniel Goure and Jeffrey Ranney:

A substantial defense strategy-resources mismatch…already exists. It is profound. It has been ongoing for some time and will take years to overcome. It is reaching crisis proportions and requires immediate attention, involvement, and action by the White House, Defense Department, Congress and the general public. It is of great national importance today because military spending levels now are too dangerously low in relation to current and future U.S. foreign policy and national security interests — which remain global and immense.

The irony is that, as Messrs. Goure and Rainey observe, the military is getting far less than even the Clinton-Gore Administration believes it requires. In order to pay for the forces deemed needed by a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) performed by the Clinton Pentagon in 1997, would entail an allocation “equal [to] 3.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in Fiscal Year 2001. Thereafter, to provide for continued modernization and replacement of military hardware, the QDR force will require slightly larger defense budgets. Based on the cost characteristics of the QDR force, the defense budget will need to equal 4.0 percent of the GDP in FY 2010 and, later, 4.3 percent of the GDP in FY 2020.”

But as the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Jones, told Congress in February:

The percentage of our gross domestic product that we currently invest for the national security pillar upon which our superpower status maintains itself is about three percent — roughly three cents on the dollar. (Over the last 60 years, the average has been 8 percent.) Three cents on the dollar for global responsibilities and global leadership. My opinion is that if we do not sustain this turnaround that we will not sustain our role as a superpower, we will not be able to recapitalize and modernize at the rate that we require, and we will not sustain the all-recruited force, which we refer to as the all-volunteer force, that the nation deserves.

The prognosis for the future is worse yet. According to the Goure-Rainey analysis:

…The February 1999 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) FY 2000-2009 10-year budget projection provided to the Senate Budget Committee projected that — [while] the defense budget will grow during this period at an average annual rate of 1 percent (from $270 billion in FY 2000 to $293 billion in FY 2009) — measured in terms of GDP, [it] will fall from 2.9 percent of GDP in FY 2000 to 2.4 percent of GDP in FY 2009. Thereafter, if defense budget levels continue to grow at an annual rate of 1 percent during FY 2010-2020, [the Pentagon’s] share will gradually fall from 2.4 percent of GDP in FY 2010 to 2.0 percent of GDP in FY 2020.

The Bottom Line

A nation with a projected $1.9 trillion budget surplus can afford consistently to allocate a minimum of four percent of its Gross Domestic Product to ensure its security. Such an commitment of resources would assure the readiness of both today’s armed forces and tomorrow’s for many years to come, while allowing important new defense initiatives — like Gov. Bush’s laudable pledge to protect the American people against ballistic missile attacks at the earliest possible time — to be fulfilled. We must not forget that the alternative has, in the past, often proven to be far more costly: unnecessary, avoidable wars whose price in blood and treasures dwarfs the savings achieved via pound- foolish “peace dividends.”

This election is an opportunity not only to acquaint the American people with the full magnitude of the crisis facing our military, but to seek a mandate from them for correcting it by adopting what might be called the “Four Percent Solution.” If all candidates will pledge, as Gov. Bush did so eloquently last week, to “use these good times for great goals,” there is surely no greater goal than assuring we have the freedom to pursue our other ones in peace and security.




1See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Don’t Let the F-22 Fall Victim to a Defense Train Wreck’ (No. 99-D 81, 19 July 1999).

China’s Missile Business

Washington Post, 14 July 2000

INTELLIGENCE reports indicate that China is helping nuclear-armed Pakistan build
long-range
ballistic missiles. The problem persists after the visit to Beijing last weekend by John D. Holum,
the State Department’s senior arms control adviser. Though Mr. Holum claimed some progress in
the talks, the Chinese took the occasion to deliver yet another lecture about U.S. missile defense
development and arms sales to Taiwan–and to link resolution of those complaints to the issue of
Beijing’s exports of missile technology.

The question, then, is whether U.S. policy needs more teeth. Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.)
and
Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) are sponsoring the China Nonproliferation Act, which would
require the president to make an annual report on China’s distribution of potentially dangerous
technology, and to impose sanctions on persons or companies within China that appear
responsible, as well as on the Chinese government.

The Clinton administration says this would make an improving situation worse. Dialogue
with
China has produced results, such as a 1994 Chinese promise to stop selling M-11 missiles to
Pakistan and to abide by the “guidelines” of the Missile Technology Control Regime (which
China has still not formally joined). Beijing also foreswore “new” nuclear help to Iran. The
administration further contends that the bill’s sweeping language could mean punishing U.S.
businesses that innocently sold “dual use” technology to China that was passed on to Pakistan.

Yet, as Mr. Holum has just experienced, the U.S.-China dialogue on
nonproliferation–recently
resumed after Beijing suspended it over the accidental bombing of China’s Belgrade
embassy–remains hostage to Chinese pique over, and designs on, Taiwan. And Beijing clearly
interprets its
promise to observe the Missile Technology Control Regime as permitting assistance to Pakistan
short of actually transferring weapons. This aid may obey the letter of the 1998 public joint
pledge by President Clinton and China’s President Jiang Zemin not to provide ballistic missiles
to any South Asian country–but it’s not exactly in keeping with the spirit. Yes, Mr. Clinton
already has authority to sanction China under current law. But he has doggedly declined to do so
without a “smoking gun” from U.S. intelligence.

No doubt the Republican sponsors of the China Nonproliferation Act are playing
election-year
politics. And the White House has a point when it asks why the bill addresses only China when
other countries, such as Russia and North Korea, engage in similar behavior. Still, China’s
continuing assistance to Pakistan’s weapons program in the face of so many U.S. efforts to talk
Beijing out of it shows the limits of a nonconfrontational approach. Clearly, China views certain
missile-making projects abroad as vital to its national security strategy–vital enough to trump
some other economic and diplomatic interests. By the same token, the United States should make
clear that a certain amount of Chinese missile-making is incompatible with business as usual.
Sen. Thompson is negotiating with Senate Democrats and the White House to modify the
clumsier aspects of his bill, so that it can be brought to a Senate vote without obstructing passage
of permanent normal trade relations (which we support). If the bill is appropriately refined and
separated from the trading relations legislation, then its passage will send Beijing a useful
signal.

The Navy Clears for Action’ on Missile Defense CNO’s Reorganization Will Prove More Important than Intercept Test

(Washington, D.C.): While the media, pundits and critics of the so-called National Missile Defense program obsess about the results and implications of today’s scheduled intercept test, that event is sure to be overshadowed in the long-run by a Pentagon announce ment made earlier in the week: The U.S. Navy is “clearing the decks for action” on developing and deploying competent, global anti-missile systems.

To his credit, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jay Johnson has recognized that providing protection against ballistic missile attacks is a natural, valuable and increasingly necessary mission for his service.1 Adm. Johnson also recognized that for the Navy to be able to perform this function, it had to square itself away — replacing fractured, uncoordinated and often conflicting divisions of labor with a consolidated and streamlined management structure under the command of a dynamic and visionary leader. Such an arrangement produced, under Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Nation’s extraordinarily successful nuclear Navy program.

Organizing and Staffing for Success

Toward this end, the CNO has created (clearly with the endorsement of his successor, Adm. Vernon Clark) — a new office in his immediate staff: the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (ACNO) for Missile Defense. No less laudable is Adm. Johnson’s choice for the first occupant of this position, Rear Admiral Rod Rempt. For a decade, Adm. Rempt (who, as befits his new responsibilities, is expected to become Vice Admiral Rempt in short order) has been a prime-mover behind the Nation’s efforts to adapt its vast investment in AEGIS fleet air defense platforms for anti-missile purposes. The new ACNO’s promotion is especially welcome insofar as, until recently, he was planning to retire which would have been a terrible loss to the Navy and the country.

To be sure, given the Clinton-Gore Administration’s adamant determination to prevent Navy assets from providing timely and competent missile defenses for the American people, or for that matter to defend “theaters” other than that of North America — an opposition that mirrors, if not exceeds, that of the Russians, Chinese and other potential adversaries — the full benefits of this reorganization will only be realized by the next President. But by taking these long-lead-time steps now, Admiral Johnson has laid the groundwork for the next Administration to have options for an accelerated deployment of sea-based missile defenses that are virtually certain to be available more quickly, at a fraction of the cost and with greater strategic benefits (e.g., offering the ability to provide protection to U.S. forces and allies overseas) than the ground-based alternative Mr. Clinton professes to favor.2

The Bottom Line

Today’s test is, of course, not an inconsequential event. If it successfully intercepts the target missile, however, it will be but the third out of nineteen planned experiments. And critics have already sought to minimize the political boost that might flow from such an outcome by claiming that the test was rigged or otherwise made less challenging/realistic.

On the other hand, if the test proves to be another “incomplete success,” opponents of defending America against missile attacks will wrongly overstate its significance as evidence that the technology either cannot be made to work or, at least, is insufficiently mature to justify going forward with deployment decisions.

The fact is that, either way, the right response will be to accelerate the effort to bring anti- missile technology to fruition as required by the Missile Defense Act of 1999, which Mr. Clinton signed into law last August — namely “as soon as technologically possible.” Fulfilling that legal obligation means taking the fullest possible advantage of every available shortcut, including those that may finally become available thanks to Admiral Johnson’s courageous vision and leadership and Admiral Rempt’s actualization of the potential they have created for a near-term, militarily valuable and cost-effective global missile defense.




1For more on Adm. Johnson’s visionary leadership in this area, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Nation’s Top Sailor Endorses a Near-term Approach to Missile Defense: The Aegis Option’ (No. 00-D 18, 28 February 2000).

2For additional details on the “AEGIS Option,” see How to Share’ U.S. Missile Defense Protection: Deploy Sea-Based Anti- Missile Systems (No. 00-D 53, 1 June 2000) and Sea-Based Missile Defenses – For the Allies, for the U.S. (No. 00-D 52, 30 May 2000).

Record Surplus Must Address the Hollow Military’ Will the Presidential Candidates Seek a Mandate to Do So?

(Washington, D.C.): President Clinton’s announcement on 26 June that the U.S. government’s projected budget surplus would amount to as much as $1.9 trillion dollars over the next ten years has produced the typical response from politicians and interest groups: Give it back to the American people in tax cuts and/or spend more of it on a plethora of domestic programs — from a new prescription drug entitlement program to making social security solvent to improving education.
Meanwhile, Back at the Pentagon

Notably absent from the debate to this point has been what is the federal government’s first responsibility: providing for “the common defense.” Neither Vice President Al Gore nor Texas Governor George Bush has pledged to address the sorts of vast shortfalls in defense investment that have been identified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff — on the order of $30 billion per year over the six- year Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP). Regrettably, neither the Chiefs, the presidential candidates nor practically any other elected official has proposed to correct the well-documented, and far larger, deficiencies laid out by Daniel Gour and James Ranney in their seminal work, Averting the Defense Trainwreck — i.e., roughly $100 billion per year for the next five years.

According to the highly respected Messrs. Gour and Ranney, there is a $376 billion deficit in the funding needed over the next five years to meet the Clinton Pentagon’s own modernization goals as defined in its latest blueprint, the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In fact, the Gour-Ranney study suggests that the procurement shortfall in Fiscal Year 2000 alone is $71 billion. If the QDR projections prove unduly optimistic, moreover, even that staggering amount would actually be understated.

Yet, according to the Washington Post, “Gore’s plans for a Medicare lockbox, target tax cuts, prescription drugs and other spending would cost $1.75 trillion. Bush’s proposals for a bigger tax cut and health, education, environment and other programs total $1.8 trillion.” In other words, neither of the two parties’ incipient standard-bearers are leaving appreciable room in their budgets for major new infusions of funds for national security activities.

Lip Service?

To be sure, both candidates have, to varying degrees, expressed their support for maintaining a U.S. military “second to none” and promised to improve readiness and the acquisition of modern weapons. Unfortunately, neither has made a concerted effort to educate the American people about the extent of the damage done to the armed forces as a result of the steep decline in Pentagon spending during much of the past decade. According to the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Floyd Spence: “Over the past eight years, the Administration’s cumulative defense budget requests have fallen more than $300 billion short of even covering the costs of inflation relative to the Fiscal Year 1993 defense spending levels it inherited.”

By failing to address with the American people the strategic and policy implications of these yawning mismatches the public is denied the opportunity to understand them, let alone to hire someone who will take corrective action. This merely exacerbates the problem arising from the candidates’ reluctance to date to promote a real national debate about the dynamic and increasingly volatile international environment that seems likely to follow the “Post-Cold War world” — and that could make the deteriorated state of the U.S. military a major liability for the country.

Don’t Just Throw Money at the Problem

The grievous difficulties afflicting the American armed forces today are, of course, not limited to the effects of denying them the requisite funding over many years. Neither will they be corrected simply by adding funds.

Robust presidential leadership will be required to correct the cumulative effects of eight years of an administration that has pursued a “counter-culture”-style agenda that has weakened the power and morale of the Nation’s military. Elements of this agenda include: an abiding hostility towards security — particularly, information, personnel and physical security — whose bitter fruits have become increasingly evident in a succession of scandals across the government; social experimentation pursued in the name of opening up the combat arms to women and homosexuals without regard for the deleterious effect on either good order and discipline or the readiness of the armed services to fight the country’s wars; and the subordination of U.S. military capabilities and freedom of action to multinational institutions like the UN.

There’s No Getting Around the Need for Significant Increases in Defense Spending

That said, even if the next President understands the need for and is prepared to effect corrective action in these areas, he will still have to address the the procurement “gap” — and similar, although less acute, shortfalls in the research and development, operations and maintenance and personnel pay accounts.

Happily, these would essentially disappear if the United States were willing for the foreseeable future to allocate 4% of its Gross Domestic Product to defense, rather than today’s less than 3%. Such a proportion of GDP is well below the more than 5-6.7% that President Reagan dedicated during the 1980s to rebuilding our military after its last hollowing-out. And this percentage is a small fraction of the allocations the Nation made to national security earlier on, notably during John F. Kennedy’s administration.

It is unlikely that any President could accomplish such an allocation of resources — particularly in an era still widely perceived to be one of durable peace as well a sustained prosperity — without engaging in a vigorous dialogue with the American people and seeking their mandate for a new defense build-up. It seems unlikely that even with his electoral landslide Ronald Reagan would have been able to accomplish his vital defense modernization program, whose legacy the U.S. military and successive Presidents have continued to draw upon to this day, without making that initiative a centerpiece of his 1980 election campaign.

To achieve such a mandate, the presidential candidates will have to exhibit vision and will. They will have to address the actual state of the world and the reality that, in important ways, the American people are less safe today than they were eight years ago. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missile delivery systems is but one example of a problem that has grown much more acute since 1993, despite President Clinton’s repeated effort (until very recently) to deny that the United States was at risk of missile attack.

The presidential candidates are also going to have to eschew the temptation to play fast and loose with the options for rebuilding the sort of U.S. military that will be required down the road. Glib promises of “doing things smarter” and fielding lighter, more mobile and yet more lethal forces cannot change the fact that the maintenance of global presence and power projection capabilities will, for quite some time to come, require the sorts of forces we have today — and will, therefore, require that their obsolescing equipment be modernized as quickly as possible with available technologies. We are simply unable to wait in every case for the generation-after-next technologies that may emerge from the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

The Bottom Line

Fortunately, the American people have sufficient common sense to be willing to pay the price for a robust defense posture that is at least comparable to that available at the time of Desert Storm. This is especially true when it can be done with surplus government revenues, rather than deficit spending. All they require to make such a sacrifice is to be told coherently, consistently and credibly that the world in which we now live is not one free of missile and other dangerous threats and is one in which vital American interests and even our people are at risk.

Most especially, they require the truth from their elected leaders and above all from their military commanders the truth. To their credit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have started to tell it; it’s time for those who would be their Commander-in-Chief to do so as well.

Clinton Legacy Watch #49: Rogue States by Any Other Name… North Korea Still a Threat; China is a Country of Concern’

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered fresh proof that the Clinton-Gore foreign policy can accurately be characterized just as President Clinton did offhandedly to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier this month: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In an NPR radio interview on Friday, Mrs. Albright declared that the United States government would no longer use the term “rogue states” to describe what were henceforth to be characterized as “countries of concern.”

This is no mere semantic adjustment. It is a substantive as well as symbolic step, designed to clear the way for Mr. Clinton’s end-game effort to build a dubious legacy by normalizing relations with every bad actor on the planet.

Ignoring North Korean Capabilities in Favor of Wishful Thinking About Its Intentions

The first beneficiary of this linguistic/material sleight-of-hand is North Korea. Immediately following the charm-offensive-masquerading-as-a-summit-meeting between the Kims of North and South Korea in Pyongyang last week, the Clinton-Gore Administration announced that it was lifting economic sanctions against the Communist regime.

Those increasingly persuaded that President Clinton and his subordinates have displayed a sustained disregard for security matters can only feel confirmed in their assessent. After all, whether acknowledged as such or not, the clear implication is that a single meeting — however distorted its public relations impact in South Korea and elsewhere in the West — has actually precipitated a significant, to say nothing of a permanent, change in North Korea’s intentions (not to mention its formidable military capabilities). This is foolish in the extreme, and may prove to be recklessly so.

Even more troubling are indications that the Clinton-Gore Administration hopes that by no longer seeing North Korea as a “rogue state,” or calling it that, will enable the President to finesse his increasingly problematic approach to building a limited national missile defense. In the first seven years of their tenure in office, neither Mr. Clinton nor Vice President Gore evinced a serious commitment to defending America against missile threats. To be sure, as a lengthy (if grossly imbalanced) report in the New York Times yesterday makes clear, the Administration has been willing to pay lip-service to the need for such protection whenever it became politically necessary to do so. This was especially evident in the 1996 election and in the run-up to the 2000 campaign.

The Administration would like nothing better than to find a pretext for deferring a decision on deploying missile defenses — if it could do so without exposing Al Gore to undue political risk. The desire to find a way out has only grown in the face of: a mass revolt on the part of the Veep’s ideological base (which shares his historic, intense hostility to missile defenses); an aggressive campaign by Putin to divide the U.S. from its allies; discomfort on the latter’s part about an American missile defense plan that will provide them with no protection; and questions about the limited utility and high costs of an Alaska deployment designed primarily with ABM Treaty considerations in mind. The Administration’s hunt for a deus ex machina has become all the more intense in the wake of ridicule heaped on recently revealed efforts by Administration lawyers to reinterpret the Treaty in such a way as to construe the start of construction on a new radar on Shemya Island to be compatible with an accord that clearly prohibits such activity.

If the aforementioned considerations explain the Clinton-Gore team’s willingness to write-down the threat posed by North Korea’s missile program on the basis of a summit meeting and highly perishable promises from Pyongyang not to continue flight tests of its long-range Taepo Dong missiles, they do not justify such revisionism. More to the point, even if the North Korean government fell tomorrow and its missile program was genuinely and permanently terminated, the United States would still need a defense against other states whose behavior and/or military programs indisputably must make them “countries of concern.”

Mother of All Rogue States: China

As an important hearing conducted Wednesday by the House Armed Services Committee made clear, the United States ignores at its peril the fact that Communist China is a nation that increasingly must qualify as a “country of concern.” Among the highlights of this event were the following excerpts from the testimony delivered by Dr. Arthur Waldron, a world-renowned Sinologist who is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Absent some systemic change in China, we can expect a steady level of military tension with Beijing with the real possibility of a crisis.
  • China is carrying out a massive military buildup not because it faces threats or dangers — it does not — but rather because it remains a communist dictatorship and needs enemies. It is in the leadership’s best interest to give [the Chinese military] what they want, which is the best and most advanced of everything.
  • China is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on enormously costly military and military-related programs, ranging from a manned space program to extensive nuclear warhead development to the perfection of new generations of mobile, solid-fueled ballistic missiles, to submarines to aircraft to aircraft carriers, not to mention communications, satellites, electronics, and so forth.”
  • U.S. pressure prevents Taiwan from developing missiles, and Japan has none. But China’s missile program gets a free pass…when all is said and done, what drives the entire arms race in Asia is China’s missile program. See to it that China cannot use free world finance for military plans….There is no reason for the rest of the world to finance a Chinese military buildup aimed outward.”
  • As in Europe, our security in Asia depends above all upon our alliances….At present, China is working very hard to cut our alliance ties in Asia….The recent Korean diplomacy, in which China clearly had a major role, prepares the way for a campaign to end South Korea’s close alliance status with the United States. That, in turn, will bring the Japanese alliance into doubt….I find it all deeply worrying.
  • At the same time that China is attempting to cut US alliances, she is building up a network of her own. Internationally, she is cultivating Russia by pouring money into the floundering ex-Soviet arms industry, and receiving in return technology that greatly increases her military where withal….Such behavior undermines alliance cohesion, while the military gains China is making, through Russian and Israeli as well as Western European transfers, are definitely non-trivial….
  • China’s dubious claims to most of the South China sea would be strengthened and Singapore would undoubtedly join the tilt. Under such conditions, the U.S. would be well-nigh excluded from Asia, just as we were in the late 1930’s and 1940’s when Japan had hegemony there….What I am describing here is a possible Chinese hegemony over the Asia region…the fact that China is actively pursuing this course is very worrying.”

Further grounds for “concern” about China — notably, its ongoing proliferation to Pakistan and other “rogue states” — are illuminated in an important op.ed. article by Edward Timperlake and William Triplett William, authors of the best-sellers Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Times. It noted, in part, that:

  • For some time, the American intelligence community has known that Chinese communist nuclear and missile arms smuggling has been increasing dramatically. By whatever means, this month private information from the Administration relating to Chinese nuclear weapons and missile sales to Pakistan has made its way to MSNBC, the Washington Times and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
  • What we now know: 1) American military and intelligence officials now estimate Pakistan’s nuclear strike capability is five times that of India. This represents an American reassessment in the order of 500 percent. 2) right now, Communist China is secretly building a second M-class ballistic missile plant in Pakistan. When this comes on stream, it will be able to increase Pakistan’s nuclear missile stockpile by an additional 100 percent. And 3) if Chinese arms smuggling to Pakistan is fivefold what we originally estimated, how good are our estimates of Chinese nuclear arms sales to North Korea? Iran? Syria? Libya? Iraq?

    What about our estimates of Chinese germ warfare sales to Iran and other places? All our current estimates of Chinese proliferation to terrorist nations and others have to be labeled, “Suspect. To be re-assessed.” (Emphasis added.)

We Are Going to Share Intelligence With Whom?

Incredibly, it is against this backdrop of incoherence about U.S. policy towards threatening “countries of concern” and growing alarm about Clinton-Gore mishandling, if not outright malfeasance, with respect security issues, that the Administration has just unveiled a new “intelligence-sharing” initiative with Communist China.

In Beijing last week, the President’s “drug czar,” General Barry McCaffrey, announced that he and his Chinese counterpart had just signed a new cooperation agreement aimed at improving U.S.-PRC efforts to combat the drug trade. With this initiative, the United States is repeating similar, well- intentioned but seriously misguided efforts — notably in the latter day Soviet Union and Russia: Equipping governments and institutions tied to drug traffickers with intelligence, training and other information that is likely to make it more difficult to counteract their cultivation, transhipment and/or smuggling operations.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton pursuit of a legacy that will bind his successor and the Nation to policies of appeasement and an attendant unpreparedness to deal with real and growing threats from what remain “rogue states” cries out for congressional oversight and sustained debate in the coming election season. To those with a sense of history like Dr. Waldron, this behavior bears ominous similarities to what proved to be the last inter-war period:

The pattern is so similar to what occurred before World War II: the cutting of Japan’s alliance with Britain, the substitution of a weak multilateral system, an international tilt toward China that left Japan feeling cheated — and finally, of course, Japan’s catastrophic decision that, because the international community was unwilling to take her security needs seriously, therefore she had no choice but to act unilaterally.

By allowing feckless and irresolute U.S. leadership to contribute to the weakening, if not the actual severing of important alliance relationships, and the emboldening, if not actually the empowering, of potential adversaries, the United States risks transforming the present age of peace and prosperity into another interlude book-ended by terrible conflicts.

Unfortunately, the Congress — under intense election year pressure from Archer-Daniels- Midland and other agribusinesses (who may or may not speak for the classic American family farmer but whose immense lobbying resources have repeatedly been put at the disposal of causes that are contrary to larger national interests) — is poised to deny itself the moral standing to criticize such dangerous Administration policies. The House of Representatives is expected shortly to adopt legislation that would not only effectively remove the “rogue state” label from nations like Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Libya. By ending embargos on trade in food and medicines with these countries, this initiative would inevitably communicate as well that these states are no longer even “countries of concern.” To its credit, the Republican leadership has until recently tried to resist these steps; its reported, reluctant willingness now to accommodate the lobbyists and the Members of Congress under their influence may be expedient politics in the short-term but threatens real and long-term strategic harm to the Nation.

Like it or not, American interests and security are at risk from nations that wish us harm. They may choose to inflict or threaten such harm with missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction — and the United States simply can no longer afford to be defenseless in the face of that prospect. Building an effective, global missile defense is a necessary, but hardly sufficient, corrective step. The Nation must also attend, though, to threats to its homeland posed by other means of delivering chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. It must reinvigorate its alliances. And it must pursue policies designed to resist and undermine, not appease, hostile despotic regimes and other potential adversaries. To do so, however, those entrusted with safeguarding our security must recognize and portray accurately the nature of rogue states and other countries of concern.

Post-Mortem on the Summit: The Talbott Communique

Call it the Talbott Communique. To be sure, President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued what was entitled their "Joint Statement on Principles of Strategic Stability." But a DNA test would clearly demonstrate that paternity of the document issued Sunday capping the presidents’ weekend summit in Moscow belongs to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

Talbott’s preeminent role in the summit — and, indeed, in shaping U.S.-Russian relations for most of the past eight years — was underscored by his inclusion in the two leaders’ intimate dinner Saturday night. His nominal boss, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and National Security Advisor Samuel Berger were among the scores of lesser lights who did not make the cut.

Talbott’s Fingerprints

Talbott’s fingerprints can be clearly seen in the language and content of the Joint Statement. The communique reeks of the Moscow-centric, bipolar Cold War mindset which he has exhibited throughout his career as a journalist, author and, most recently, as a senior U.S. policy-maker. This paradigm — and the communique it has just spawned — attach supreme importance to arms control, in general, and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in particular.

For example, the first principle of the Joint Statement stresses the need to "maintain strategic nuclear stability." This is Cold War code for the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, as measured by the arcane (and substantially artificial) standard of treaty-accountable strategic warheads.

A second "principle" makes clear that the "capability for deterrence has been and remains a key aspect of stability and predictability in the international security environment." Translation: Russia is right in asserting that it needs to deter a threatening United States. It follows that Russia is entitled to the same number of nuclear weapons that the U.S. retains and that American anti-missile systems must not jeopardize the Kremlin’s ability to launch a devastating attack on this country.

A Slap at George W. Bush

These principles are about as direct a repudiation of the central premise advanced on May 23 by the man who may well be Mr. Clinton’s successor — Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. In a Washington press event, Gov. Bush declared:

The Cold War era is history. Our nation must recognize new threats, not fixate on old ones….Russia itself is no longer our enemy. The Cold War logic that led to creation of massive stockpiles on both sides is now outdated. Our mutual security need no longer depend on a nuclear balance of terror….The Clinton-Gore administration…remain[s] locked in a Cold War mentality. It is time to leave the Cold War behind and defend against the new threats of the 21st century.

The Talbott Communique is most noteworthy, however, for the emphasis it places on the ABM Treaty. Mr. Clinton and his Russian counterpart agreed "on the essential contribution of the ABM Treaty to reductions in offensive forces and reaffirm their commitment to that Treaty as a cornerstone of strategic stability." In what could pass for a parody of diplomatic obeisance to an international agreement, no fewer than three of the sixteen principles explicitly call for "increasing," "enhancing" or otherwise "strengthening" what Talbott and Company euphemistically call the "viability of the ABM Treaty." If the practical effect of this serial genuflection at the high altar of the arms control theology were not so inimical to U.S. security interests, it would be hilarious. Unfortunately, its intended purpose is no laughing matter: It is designed to create the international legal equivalent of "overkill" — bilateral commitments that would effectively foreclose any U.S. missile defenses not explicitly approved by the Russians.

What ABM Treaty?

Naturally, for the ABM Treaty to be viable — let alone strengthened — it must be in force. Under international law and domestic precedent, however, the ABM Treaty had to have lapsed when the other party, the Soviet Union, was liquidated.

The powerful arguments on this score — and the utter failure to date of the Clinton Administration to rebut them in any sort of rigorous fashion — will be on display in a very timely symposium to be held on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. The meeting will be chaired by Ambassador Max Kampelman, President Reagan’s highly respected chief negotiator in the U.S.-Soviet START I talks, and sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy. It will bring together for the first time in public debate executive branch officials, among other ABM Treaty devotees, and experts (such as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith1) who can demonstrate why that accord has been legally "non-viable" since the dissolution of the USSR nine years ago.

Other Flim-Flams

Scarcely less bizarre than the effort to impute vital signs to the moribund ABM Treaty were two other highlights of Mr. Clinton’s adventures in Moscow. First, Principle Six of the Talbott Communique declares that "the international community faces a dangerous and growing threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, including missiles and missile technologies,2 and stress their desire to reverse that process…." While true — and the only laudatory aspect of the entire Joint Declaration — this principle blithely ignores an unsavory fact: The U.S. government knows that Russia is actively abetting such proliferation; countries we call "rogue states" the Kremlin calls "clients."

Second, in his address to the Duma, President Clinton announced that "soon I will be required to decide whether the United States should deploy a limited national defense system designed to protect the American people against the most imminent of these threats." He went on to describe the four criteria that would govern that decision: "the nature of threat, the cost of meeting it, the effectiveness of the available technology, and the impact of this decision on our overall security, including our relationship with Russia and other nations,3 and the need to preserve the ABM Treaty."

Last August, however, Mr. Clinton signed legislation adopted by veto-proof majorities in both houses. Therefore, pursuant to this Missile Defense Act of 1999, the Nation has already made a decision to deploy an effective limited national missile defense. By statute, it is to be deployed "as soon as technologically possible." The only question outstanding is how fast can that be accomplished.

The Bottom Line

The good news is that the debate is now joined. Americans will shortly have an opportunity to decide whether they wish to endorse the Clinton-Gore approach to national security spelled out in the Talbott Communique. Or will they give a mandate to Gov. Bush, who has made clear his personal commitment to defending the U.S. and its forces and allies overseas against missile attack — and who will not let an ABM Treaty that is neither viable nor desirable become a new impediment to our doing so?

1See the Center’s Press Release entitled Definitive Study Shows Russians Have No Veto Over Defending U.S. (No. 99-P 11, 22 January 1999).

2 In recent months, increasing attention is being paid to a new and particularly insidious weapon of mass destruction — electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) devices. As hearings before the House Armed Services Committee and a new "Backgrounder" by Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation entitled "America’s Vulnerability to a Different Nuclear Threat: An Electromagnetic Pulse," makes clear, a rogue state or other enemy could inflict grievous harm on an advanced society like America’s by exploding a nuclear weapon high above the United States. Without killing a single person on the ground (at least directly), such a device could fry the electronic infrastructure over a huge area with incalculable effects. Defeating such a relatively low-technology attack is yet another compelling reason to begin deploying global anti-missile systems at once.

3The attached op.ed. published in today’s Washington Times by a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council, James Hackett, makes clear that claims (by the CIA and others) about the unanimous opposition of America’s allies to the deployment of effective anti-missile systems are erroneous. The thoughtful study described by Mr. Hackett that was recently issued by Lady Margaret Thatcher and other prominent Britons should be required reading on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lady Thatcher on Missile Defense

By James Hackett
The Washington Times, 05 June 2000

Last month, I brought bad news – most of America’s allies are siding with Russia and China in opposition to a U.S. missile defense. Now I bring good news – Lady Margaret Thatcher and a defense study group of the House of Lords have endorsed U.S. missile defenses.

Once again, Lady Thatcher has stood for what is right against the majority. In commenting on a report issued last week by the House of Lords Missile Proliferation Study Group, she wrote “This report is a wake-up call to the West. The threat from ballistic missile attacks against us from rogue states turns out to be greater, and growing more quickly, than anyone thought. We ignore it at our peril.”

She urges the British government to acquire ballistic missile defenses and encourages the United States to create a global missile defense. “Our leaders will not be forgiven if they shirk this challenge,” she wrote. Lady Thatcher, who stood virtually alone in her determination to fight the Argentine occupation of the Falklands, again is standing almost alone against the weight of European opinion.

The report she endorsed comes none too soon. It was issued on May 15 with the title, “Coming into Range: Britain’s Growing Vulnerability to Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Prepared under the leadership of Lord Chalfont, president of the bipartisan defense group of the House of Lords, the study director was Gerald Frost.

Like its predecessor, the Rumsfeld Commission report issued here two years ago, the British report concludes the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction “poses a much more alarming threat” than a succession of British governments have been willing to admit. The threat, the study finds, presents both a direct danger to the population of Britain and its overseas forces, and an indirect danger of intimidation or blackmail by states with such weapons.

The report notes that the ballistic missile is the weapon of choice for Third World states because of its assured penetration, ease of concealment, the prestige it confers, and an increasing range that soon will enable rogue states to target Europe and America. It also finds the threat of ballistic missile attack can be a major deterrent to Western intervention when national interests are at stake.

The report adds, “Traditional arms control approaches to the proliferation problem have demonstrably failed.” Nor can Britain rely any longer on Cold War deterrence to deal with threats to its interests. A ballistic missile defense, the report notes, is important both to preserve Britain’s ability to project power to defend its interests, and to defend Britain itself if deterrence fails.

“It is not in Britain’s interests,” the report finds, “for the leader of the Western Alliance the U.S. to be vulnerable to missile threats as a result of misplaced faith in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and a flawed Cold War dogma.” Britain, it adds, should support a U.S. decision to “free itself from the constraints of the treaty.”

The paper concludes with the observation that a U.S. missile defense that does not cover the allies could lead rogue states to target them, rather than America. Therefore, it urges deployment of a global ballistic missile defense to protect the security interests of both America and its allies. This, it says, would enhance the cohesion of the Alliance and contribute to international stability.

Writing about the report, study director Mr. Frost was critical of European governments for failing to grasp the far-reaching political and strategic implications of the rapid proliferation of ballistic missiles. Europeans, he charged, have entered a new century with a misplaced confidence in arms control. They fail to grasp that rogue states will target countries that are undefended instead of those that are defended. If Europe is included in a missile defense system, it could lead to a renewal of the Western Alliance. If not, it could wreck it.

This bipartisan British report mentions neither the Blair government nor the Clinton administration, yet is implicitly critical of both. It accuses British governments of ignoring the threat and relying too heavily on arms control, while criticizing the U.S. for proposing to defend this country alone. The solution, Mr. Frost suggests, is to get out of the ABM treaty and deploy a global missile defense.

This support from England is welcome. It also is a warning, as Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush said recently U.S. plans to defend against missile defenses also must defend the allies. A missile defense of North America should be just the first step. At the same time it is being deployed, NATO and America’s other allies should be offered advanced Patriots and the Army’s high-altitude THAAD interceptors to give them regional missile defenses. Then sea-based interceptors and other technologies can be added as soon as they are ready, to create a truly global missile defense.

James T. Hackett is a contributing writer for The Washington Times based in San Diego.

How to Share’ U.S. Missile Defense Protection: Deploy Sea-Based Anti-Missile Systems

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday, on the margins of meetings with European allied leaders and en route to his weekend summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Mr. Clinton blithely further compounded the already severe incoherence of his policy on missile defense. In the face of withering criticism — from allies and potential adversaries alike — of his putative determination to decide on initiating a deployment of a “national” anti-missile system prior to his departure from office, the President declared that he thought it would be “unethical” not to “make available” U.S. defensive technology to “other civilized nations who might or might not be nuclear powers but were completely in harness with us on a non- proliferation regime.”

Never mind that Mr. Clinton has up to this point not shown much interest in equipping the United States with missile defense technology, let alone making it available to others. Set aside for the moment as well just what the definition of “civilized nations” might be in the infamous Clinton lexicon — to say nothing of his self-acknowledged proclivity for “fudging” findings on things like the systematic contribution to global proliferation being made by nations “in the non-proliferation regime” like China and Russia.

The trouble with his statement in Lisbon is that, if the ABM Treaty is the “cornerstone of strategic stability” that Bill Clinton and Al Gore insist it remains, such sharing of missile defense technology would be, if not banned outright, then so limited as to negate its value to the recipient nations. After all, the Treaty’s Article IX states that, “To assure the viability and effectiveness of the [1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)] Treaty, each Party undertakes not to transfer to other States, and not to deploy outside its national territory, ABM systems or their components limited by this Treaty.”

What About the Rest of the ABM Treaty?

Article IX’s explicit ban on “sharing” strategic (read, highly capable) ballistic missile defenses is, of course, far from the only problem with the Clinton approach. Article I of the ABM Treaty committed each of the Parties — that is, the United States and the late Soviet Union — “not to deploy ABM systems for a defense of the territory of its country and not to provide a base for such a defense.” Yet, the White House insists (incredibly) that the “national” missile defense system the President is considering deploying would provide protection to all fifty states.

Mr. Clinton seems to think that, if the Russians are amenable — and so far, at least, they appear to be anything but — this circle could be squared by some minor tinkering with a few of the other provisions of this treaty. The truth of the matter is that to make a treaty that was designed to preclude all national missile defenses into one that permits even a “limited” one would require a wholesale rewrite of that accord.

The Way to Go

More importantly, if President Clinton is serious about sharing the “benefit” of U.S. anti-missile “protection” with America’s allies — to say nothing of “every country that is part of a responsible international arms control and non-proliferation regime” — the obvious way to accomplish this is by using sea-based missile defense systems, not the fixed, ground-based and highly expensive version the Administration has under consideration for deployment in Alaska.

As it happens, the wisdom of adapting Navy AEGIS fleet air defense ships for this purpose has been increasingly recognized by influential Democrats. Former Secretaries of Defense Harold Brown and Bill Perry, former CIA Director John Deutch and even Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware have recently espoused this idea. In so doing, they appear to have embraced an approach for acquiring effective missile defenses long advanced by a blue-ribbon Commission on Missile Defense sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and by most leading Republicans — including Governor George W. Bush, who has noted the role modified AEGIS ships could play in defending allies like Taiwan, as well as Americans here at home.

Best of all, a new analysis by Mr. Clinton’s own Defense Department has reportedly confirmed these judgments. According to a report in last Saturday’s Washington Post, the Pentagon believes that “sea-based national missile defenses could be built with existing technology and would add both flexibility and firepower to the land-based system proposed by President Clinton.”

Once again, the impediment turns out to be the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Its Article V commits the two parties “not to develop, test or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea- based, air-based, space-based or mobile land-based.”

The Russians are no fools. They understand every bit as well as sentient Americans the utility of an approach to global missile defense that can — thanks to the prior $50+ billion investment in the Navy’s air defense infrastructure — begin defending U.S. forces and friends overseas and the territory of the United States people far more quickly and flexibly and at less cost than any ground-based system.

The Bottom Line

To the extent the United States will continue to allow the Kremlin to exercise a veto over American decisions concerning the nature, location and capabilities of American missile defenses and with whom their benefits and/or technology are shared, however, the Russians will do so. This American policy is all the more absurd insofar as the ABM Treaty clearly ceased to be legally binding when the Soviet Union went out of business.

The Russians will take full advantage of the fact that President Clinton is going to Moscow, to coin a phrase, not to bury the ABM Treaty but to praise it — or, in the words of Strobe Talbott (the friend-of-Bill and chief ideologist who serves as the de facto Secretary of State for Russia and arms control) to “strengthen” it. Translation: Clinton and Company intend to recommit this nation not to pursue sea-based or other, sensible approaches to global missile defense.

Clearly a different approach is required. Renegotiating, to say nothing of “strengthening,” the obsolete ABM Treaty is neither in the interest of the United States nor its friends and allies. President Clinton and Vice President Gore should not only release, but read, the report on the value and feasibility of sea-based that the Post reports “top civilian officials at the Pentagon” are deliberately withholding from Congress. That way, each of us could appreciate the opportunity to provide near-term, cost-effective missile defenses that could extend “protection” against missile attack to all “civilized” nations, including this one — but only if the Cold War ABM Treaty is relegated to the dust bin of history, where it belongs.