Tag Archives: Defense Procurement Policy

The Death of Illusions

(Washington, D.C.): One widespread and pernicious illusion died a fiery death on September 11: The notion that America — the “world’s only superpower” — was invulnerable and its people secure within their own borders against foreign attack was vaporized along with the World Trade Center towers, portions of the Pentagon and the hijacked jet aimed at the Capitol.

Two Lingering Illusions

It appears that two other dangerous illusions linger on, however. One involves the belief clung to by die-hard opponents of President Bush’s efforts to develop and deploy effective missile defenses that we can safely perpetuate our complete vulnerability to another, far more deadly attack from ballistic missiles. The second is, if anything, even more preposterous: The belief that there are some “good” terrorists with whom we can prudently make common cause, at least temporarily, in waging war against the “bad” terrorists responsible for the events of 9/11.

We Don’t Need Missile Defense’

In coming days, Democratic members of Congress led by Rep. John Spratt of South Carolina and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan are expected to sunder the new-found bipartisan unity that has broken out in Washington since last week’s attacks. They seek to make dramatic reductions in the levels of funding for the President’s missile defense program and, in Sen. Levin’s case, to impose in addition new legislative restrictions that would grievously hinder the use of any funds that may ultimately be approved for anti-missile systems.

The proponents of such legislation evidently have a fairly low regard for the intelligence of their colleagues and the public. They apparently hope to sell the argument that, since ballistic missile defenses would not have stopped the passenger aircraft used by the terrorists this time, we should not be defended against what may be their weapon of choice the next time.

Of course, this illusion flies in the face of common sense, to say nothing of the constitutional duty to provide for the common defense. Those who perpetrated these heinous crimes went to great lengths and considerable expense to inflict grave, but still relatively limited, damage on the nation they hate. They succeeded because the United States was unready to use defenses it does currently have to shoot down domestic commercial planes.

Does anyone think for a moment, that if those waging holy war on this country, people fully prepared to die in the process of doing so, had access to weapons capable of inflicting infinitely greater death and destruction on us — and against which we had no defense — they would refrain from using them?

Even more of an illusion, no a delusion, is the failure to appreciate a related point: The sponsors of terrorism, with whom President Bush has properly declared a state of war to exist, are working feverishly to acquire long-range ballistic missiles precisely so they can deter the sort of attack against their countries he has promised to launch. Would the United States really contemplate retaliation against Afghanistan if it could realistically threaten within 30 minutes to lay waste to the rest of New York City via missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction — and our President could do nothing to prevent such a disaster?

We Can Trust Good’ Terrorists

No less invidious than the illusory belief that the United States should be defended against some terrifying threats but not all of them is the sentiment now in evidence in Colin Powell’s State Department. Officials in Foggy Bottom seem to feel that some sponsors of international terrorism can be recruited to wage Mr. Bush’s war against other terrorist organizations and their hosts. Specifically, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, Bashar Assad’s Syria and Ayatolloah Khameini’s Iran are evidently being touted by some in the Administration as candidates for the new multinational coalition.

This is one of the most impractical, not to say bizarre, ideas to come along in some time. For one thing, if President Bush’s oft-repeated commitment to rid the world of terrorists and those who harbor them is to have any meaning — to say nothing of any chance of producing the desired result — he cannot be put in the position of turning a blind eye to some of the world’s most notorious sponsors of terrorism. For another, American officials cannot really believe that the United States would be able to mount effective strikes on Osama bin Laden’s organization, Al Qaeda, and some of his friends while sharing intelligence and operational details with coalition members who are also his friends, or who have, at least, made common cause with his terrorist campaigns against America, her interests and allies.

The folly of this strategy, if it could be called such, would be greatly compounded by its corollary: In order to induce America’s Arab enemies to participate in the new coalition, Israel will have to be excluded. Such a step would simultaneously deny the United States what may be its single best, and certainly most reliable, source of urgently needed intelligence and anti-terrorist skills. It would also be widely seen as implicit affirmation of the virulent attacks on Israel that the Bush Administration recently and wisely declined to dignify at the UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. After all, if Israel is deliberately excluded from the posse, there must be something to the charges that it is itself guilty of crimes against humanity.

The Bottom Line

Those murdered in cold blood on September 11 will not have died in vain if we as a nation are spared the potentially far greater costs associated with these lingering illusions. It behooves President Bush and the Congress to work together to ensure that effective missile defenses are built and deployed at the earliest possible time and that any new alliance is made with fellow democracies who are victims of terrorism, not with terrorists who have violently assaulted them and us.

Who is the Enemy and How They Must Be Fought

(Washington, D.C.): Press accounts detail how the Bush Administration and the Congress are reacting to the “acts of war” unleashed upon the United States two days ago. Much of what is being said is commendable. And it is commendable that expedited efforts are now underway to provide the emergency resources needed to address the immediate repercussions of the attacks in New York and Washington, and readying our national response.

Still, as two important essays — one an unsigned editorial in the Jerusalem Post (written by editorials editor and former Senate staffer Saul Singer) and the second by the superb (and recently rehabilitated/reinstated) Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby — make clear that the President and the American people need to be as clear about the nature of the enemies we face as they currently are about the need to wage war against them.

As the Post put it: “America’s first task is defining the enemy. In this war, the enemy’s attempt to distort and obscure its identity is its primary line of defense. The enemy is not merely Osama bin Laden or whatever terrorist organization carried out the monstrous attack….If the bin Ladens of the world are defined as the enemy, terrorism has won; if the governments that sponsor terrorism are the enemy, then terrorism can be defeated.” It may suit the Russians’ purpose to encourage American retribution against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that is hosting Osama bin Laden, but the United States must deal at least as forcefully and comprehensively against other terrorist-sponsoring governments that happen to be clients of Russia (notably, Iraq, Iran and North Korea).

In his complementary essay, Mr. Jacoby notes that, now that murderous terrorism has been visited upon us, no American officials are employing the kind of rhetoric so recently used to discourage Israel from dealing as effectively as possible against the same (albeit smaller scale) “acts of war” that the Jewish State has confronted in recent months. It can only be hoped that the United States government will not only adopt the techniques employed by its Israeli allies to detect and destroy its enemies, but display a long-overdue appreciation of the legitimacy of such acts of self-defense.

Defining the Enemy

The Jerusalem Post, 13 September 2001

As Americans try to recover from and comprehend the most devastating terrorist attack ever, it is not surprising that US leaders are groping for a new language and way of thinking to confront the new reality.

There is general agreement that America is and must be “at war.” But the pledge of President George W. Bush and many others to “find those responsible and bring them to justice” sounds not like war, but a police action against criminals.

The distinction between fighting a war and bringing criminals to justice is not a merely semantic one. It is a distinction over the nature of the enemy.

America’s first task is defining the enemy. In this war, the enemy’s attempt to distort and obscure its identity is its primary line of defense.

The enemy is not merely Osama bin Laden or whatever terrorist organization carried out the monstrous attack. The enemy is the states that sponsor terrorists and the ideology that animates them.

Imagine for a moment that bin Laden is proven to be the immediate culprit and the US were to successfully bomb him and his organization out of existence. Would terrorism have been defeated? No – such a success would be the equivalent of destroying a kamikaze or Nazi unit while leaving the wartime governments of Japan or Germany in place.

If the bin Ladens of the world are defined as the enemy, terrorism has won; if the governments that sponsor terrorism are the enemy, then terrorism can be defeated. As Israel learned in Lebanon, it was impossible to defeat Hizbullah while holding that organization’s Syrian, Iranian, and Lebanese sponsors were effectively immune from attack.
The idea that regimes, not just organizations, must be held responsible may seem obvious. Indeed, Bush has stated that the US will “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these act and those who harbor them.” But even before the rubble has ceased to smolder doubts are being expressed.

In its editorial on the attack, The New York Times mused that “this is an age when even revenge is complicated, when it is hard to match the desire for retribution with the need for certainty.” What retribution? What need for certainty? To talk about retribution and certainty is to act as if the task after Pearl Harbor was to prove which unit had attacked America and to punish that unit – rather than to defeat and replace the governments of Japan, Germany, and Italy.

In a second editorial, the Times argued that “part of the challenge for the United States is to recognize that the roots of terrorism lie in economic and political problems in large parts of the world.” This is errant nonsense.

As Michael Kelly points out in The Washington Post, “The whole world was stolen from somebody, most of it repeatedly; there are claims and counterclaims and counter-counterclaims for every inch of the planet that is desirable and for much that is not.” If poverty, corruption, tyranny, suffering, ethnic conflict, and territorial disputes were the sources of terrorism, sub-Saharan Africa would be terror center of the world.

To “recognize the roots” of terrorism is to harbor the notion that terrorism can be justified. Worse, it directly fulfills the goal of terrorism, which is to blackmail the world into addressing “grievances.” The obstacles to addressing real suffering are the regimes that are behind terrorism, which not coincidentally oppress and impoverish their own people.

For the free world, the war against terrorism cannot be limited to punishment, retribution, or sending signals. Those who sent the terrorists to attack America would be only too pleased to absorb a less than tit-for-tat cruise missile attack in response.

The free world must recognize that is in a war of self-defense whose goal is victory. The concept of a war against terrorism is meaningless without the goal of removing terrorist regimes. The exact combination of diplomatic, economic, and military tools to be deployed toward this goal is a legitimate matter of debate. But a war against terrorism that avoids the issue of regime change in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan cannot be won, because it has not even really been joined.

A case Study: Critics of Secret U.S. Biodefense Research Underscore Mindless Arms Control’s Perniciousness- Timely Insight into Fight over Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s New York Times gave front-page, above-the-fold treatment to a news article revealing that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have been pursuing secret research into the sorts of biological warfare threats the Nation confronts in the 21st Century. The importance of such research if the United States is to have any hope of protecting its forces and population against what has long been called “the poor man’s atomic bomb” is self-evident. So is the insidiousness of arms control agreements whose proponents contend they disallow our government from providing for the “common defense.”

A Secret Program Revealed

It turns out that even the Clinton Administration understood that the BWC was not going to rid the world of bioterrorist threats. This is somewhat surprising insofar as its policy concerning biological warfare issues was largely driven by zealous arms controllers like then- NSC staffer Elissa Harris and was largely subordinated to her determination to conclude and secure U.S. accession to a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) — even though it would not be effective and its costs would have been excessive.1

Accordingly, the Clinton Pentagon instituted a classified program to ensure that the nature of that threat was properly understood and that such prophylactic measures as could be taken were initiated. Importantly, a determined effort was made to ensure that such work was done in a manner consistent with the latitude afforded by the BWC for research and development on biological defensive technologies. Successive reviews by both Clinton and Bush lawyers vetted and approved the programs run by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Treat Reduction Agency.

Highlights of these programs included the following valuable initiatives:

  • An experiment to see whether a covert bioproduction facility could be cobbled together using exclusively commercially available materials and technology. DTRA established it could, and the resulting microplant was shown to be capable of fermenting sufficient quantities of lethal germs to kill many thousands of people, although it was never used even experimentally for that purpose.

    This initiative also demonstrated that such a facility — whose main component is a vat the size of an industrial strength coffee percolator — could be concealed from even highly sophisticated sensors and intrusive monitoring schemes.

  • Research into gene-splicing that would allow the deadly anthrax virus to be combined with germs that induce food-poisoning. This project was initiated after accounts that Russia’s illegal biological weapons program — which continues to produce and stockpile vast quantities of deadly BW agents in contemptuous violation of the Biological Weapons Convention — had engineered such an anthrax “superbug” and that existing vaccines against the disease were ineffective against it.
  • Development of components of a Soviet/Russian BW “bomb” like that which might be available for purchase on the international arms black market. This step was needed to address such practical question as: what sorts of devices might be used against us; how they would work; what their “signatures,” if any, might be; etc. It was not an operational device nor was it meant to be.

Arms Control Uber Alles

It is often said by those who oppose the U.S. development and deployment of effective missile defenses that a far more likely threat is that biological weapons will be smuggled into and used in this country by terrorists. Amazingly, some of those same people — including Spurgeon Keeney, president of the Arms Control Association and Mary Elizabeth Hoinkes, a former U.S. Arms Control Agency lawyer, who are quoted in today’s Washington Post — are sharply critical of even these modest efforts to understand and begin to address the threat that they purport to regard as a serious one (at least when opposing missile defenses).

Importantly, the question with respect to the secret American biodefense program does not appear to be whether the United States has the right under the Biological Weapons Treaty to conduct research for BW defensive purposes. In fact, the BWC clearly contemplates such activities; its Article I makes clear that states parties are even entitled to retain and utilize “microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities…justifi[able] for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”

What is not permitted are the sorts of activities we know the Soviet Union/Russia and Iraq (from high level defectors formerly responsible for those programs) and that we suspect China and virtually every other rogue state are engaged in, i.e., production and stockpiling of deadly biological agents and toxins.

Unfortunately, in their zeal to promote a wholly unverifiable, unenforceable and widely violated Biological Weapons Convention, arms controllers are suggesting that the American government has breached, if not the letter of that accord, certainly its spirit. This is not the case. And it is a grievous disservice to the public that our government is constitutionally obliged to protect and to our nation’s standing internationally to have such charges blithely made by those who should know better.

The Bottom Line

Regrettably, the thinking behind such criticisms is all-to-common in an arms control community that has invested incalculable intellectual capital and other human and financial resources in promoting the idea that pieces of paper signed with regimes that have nothing but contempt for the rule of law and international agreements are a better basis for American security than actual defenses.2 As it happens, this peculiar syndrome is much in evidence at the moment in the halls of Congress, the media and academe with respect to President Bush’s efforts to end the tyranny of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which — unlike the BWC — did explicitly prohibit the United States from defending.

In fact, such untoward, immoral and increasingly reckless sentiments are likely to find expression today as the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) proposes to slash funding for and/or impose new legislative impediments to the President’s missile defense program. It can only be hoped that the majority of his committee will reject such measures in favor of an approach to U.S. security that is rooted in a clear understanding of the threat and the development of capabilities needed to address it — precisely the approach both the Clinton and Bush administrations have taken with regard to the growing danger of biowarfare.

1See, for example, the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled A Pox on Our House: Will Clinton’s N.S.C. Compound America’s Vulnerability to Biological Warfare? (No. 99-D 36, 17 March 1999) and Soviet Defector Offers Timely Warning on Bioweapon Threat; Ex-CIA Director Woolsey Rejects On-Site Visits as Rx (No. 98-D 53, 27 March 1998).

2 Matters are made worse by the studied indifference of the professional arms controllers to evidence in hand of systematic treaty violations. Rather than confront the hard realities associated with enforcing existing agreements, they indulge in the “arms control process” in pursuit of still more agreements, as though the problem is inadequate verification rather than a failure of will. For this reason, among others, President Bush was absolutely right to have rejected Elissa Harris’ BWC Protocol (See, Why Bush Is Right to Reject a Defective B.W.C. Protocol ( No. 01-F 61, 20 July 2001)).

Strategy of a Thousand Cuts

(Washington, D.C.): It is probably, as the Communists are wont to say, “no accident, Comrade” that every day brings some news of yet another reason why President Bush is wrong to try to defend America against ballistic missile attack. After all, this initiative — like President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which preceded it — is absolutely anathema to the Left in this country and abroad.

A Sampler

Consequently, as Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin prepares this week to try to eviscerate the President’s request for missile defense funding and Rep. John Spratt plans a similar effort on the floor of the House of Representatives for later this month, anti-anti-missile invective is spewing forth from every conceivable outlet. Consider the following sampler of what might be called a “strategy of a thousand cuts”:

  • Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council and other left-wing organizations have launched a lawsuit aimed at compelling the Bush Administration to “reassess…the potential environmental damage” to be caused by its planned test facility in Alaska and provide…for public comment.” An Anchorage activist with Greenpeace confided to the New York Times the real purpose: “[Our] hope is that delay will lead to cancellation, that’s what we always hope for in these suits.”

    The problem is that the Clinton Pentagon actually did produce a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement for an Alaskan missile defense system — albeit one far larger (intended to house up to 100 interceptors) than the modest test facility President Bush proposes to build (involving only 5 interceptor silos). It is hard to imagine how the latter could create more “environmental damage” than the former, which was deemed acceptable even to the green weenies of the Clinton Administration.

  • Dr. Theodore Postol — the MIT PhD who has become the scientific poster-child for the stop-missile-defense crowd — has recently added a new item to his litany of debatable technical critiques of the Clinton and Bush programs: scare-mongering transparently intended to inflame allied opposition. He asserts that even if a missile interceptor succeeded in effecting a boost-phase “kill” on an incoming missile (that is during the early stage of its trajectory when it is moving relatively slowly, easily identified and vulnerable to destruction), its warhead might continue on and land in friendly territory with devastating effect.

    Of course, it is not possible to say with precision exactly what the target of a missile in boost-phase might be; perhaps allied cities were intended to be ground zero anyway? It is also true that intercepting a missile during that stage could cause any debris to land on the launching country since, by and large, for these weapons tend to be deployed deep in the interior of such states. Even Dr. Richard Garwin — whose decades-long record of techno-naysaying on defense programs makes Postol look like a piker — is quoted in the August 29 edition of the New Scientist magazine as pooh-poohing his colleague’s warnings: “If it hit land, the warhead would most likely hit a relatively uninhabited area and kill far fewer people than intended, says veteran physicist Richard Garwin….That fact should deter nations such as North Korea or Iraq from launching a missile at the US, he says, if they were ever tempted to do so.”

  • The latest “cut” was precipitated by a New York Times report on Sunday to the effect that the Bush Administration will tell China in the course of consultations about the President’s missile defense plans that the U.S. has “no objections to [the PRC’s] plans to build up its small fleet of nuclear missiles.” This unattributed statement was subsequently disavowed on the record by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who acknowledged the reality that the Chinese “modernization is underway” — whether the United States build a missile defense or not — but made clear that “We’re not going to acquiesce in it.”

    The original Times article, nonetheless, created an opportunity for a fresh round of hand-wringing and chest-beating by the President’s opponents. We should not be encouraging China to build more missiles, increasing the threat to us and triggering an arms race in South Asia, they say. In fact, our deployment of missile defenses should actually discourage such actions.

    Nonetheless, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden ventilated that the Administration’s “headlong, headstrong, irrational and theological desire to build a missile defense sends the wrong message to the Chinese and to the whole world.” One wonders what message the Chinese took from Sen. Biden’s his recent visit to Beijing, in which he made clear that he shared their determination to stop Mr. Bush in his tracks?

The High Priesthood of Arms Control

It is ironic indeed to hear the critics denounce the President’s commitment to defend America as “theological.” In fact, there is no greater leap of faith, no more unshakeably theological conviction than the belief Messrs. Biden, Levin, Postol and others appear to share — namely, that the United States will be perfectly safe if only it remains perfectly vulnerable to ballistic missile attack.

Unfortunately, in their adherence to the outdated, not to say morally problematic, Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) theology of a by-gone Cold War, the opponents’ “thousand cuts” strategy could well precipitate the very outcome they claim to fear most. If enough legislators are rattled or bamboozled by the cacophony of arguments against missile defense, they may vote to cut or otherwise hobble Mr. Bush’s missile defense program.

That would have a decidedly pernicious effect on the Russians. As former SDI director and arms control negotiator Amb. Henry Cooper has noted, the Kremlin will have no further incentive to agree jointly to end the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty regime that precludes development, testing and deployment of effective U.S. missile defenses. This would compel the President to proceed, as he has vowed to do, unilaterally.

The Bottom Line

The moment of truth on missile defense has arrived. Congress should not be distracted from the historic task at hand of defending America by those whose efforts to bleed the Bush anti-missile program to death risk a far bloodier fate for all of us.

Rummy’s Back: Choice of Gen. Myers Evidence Affirms that Rumsfeld is a SecDef for our Time

(Washington, D.C.): When President Bush last Friday announced his choice of General Richard Myers to become the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he not only selected a man with precisely the background and skills required for the job of fixing and transforming the military. He also gave a welcome vote of confidence in the judgment and leadership of his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

The Myers nomination, of course, originated with Secretary Rumsfeld and might be described as the first decision taken by the Pentagon chief in which he had full latitude to act as he saw fit. The budgetary decisions that have done much to traumatize the first months of Mr. Rumsfeld’s tenure were largely dictated by the Office of Management and Budget. The limits on available funds have, in turn, driven the controversial Defense Planning Guidance and Quadrennial Defense Review. These documents and the procurement programs they will define are, moreover, being produced by a difficult give-and-take with the armed services and the Secretary’s assortment of outside advisors and recently anointed subordinates.

The Right Stuff

But Secretary Rumsfeld had considerable, if not complete, latitude to determine not only who he wanted to lead the armed forces for the next few years but the direction in which he wanted them led. In picking Gen. Myers, his priorities are clear — and correct. They can be described as follows:

  • A real commitment to “transformation”: By virtue of his previous tenure as commander of U.S. Space Command, Gen. Myers has had first-hand experience with the challenges that are likely to shape the security and economic well-being of the United States in the 21st Century. In particular, he appreciates: the imperatives of America exercising control of outer space for both military and commercial reasons; the growing threats to our ability to do so; and what this mission will require in the way of vastly improved surveillance, access-to-space and power-projection capabilities.

    It is a credit to Gen. Myers’ integrity and courage that he was willing to lay out these requirements during the Clinton Administration, when his civilian superiors wanted to do nothing more than enunciate rhetorical commitments to U.S. space power while eviscerating any program that would enable the Nation to meet the stated requirement. Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush will need such a man to speak with equal independence as Chairman about the inadequacies of defense funding.

  • Missile defense is a transforming capability: Gen. Myers shares the commitment felt by the President and the Secretary to end America’s vulnerability to ballistic and cruise missile attack. During his tenure at Space Command, he witnessed visitors to its headquarters expressing incredulity that the United States could only watch helplessly if a missile were launched at this country, even if by accident. He has been a vigorous advocate of developing and deploying militarily and cost-effective means to destroy such weapons in flight. He also understands that this cannot be done so long as the United States adheres to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which explicitly prohibits such activities.

    Importantly, Gen. Myers appreciates that without missile defenses, in the future, it may not matter how formidable, modern and hi-tech — or, in the current vernacular, “transformed” — are the Nation’s conventional forces. It is likely that even impoverished and relatively backwards militaries will be able to deter the United States from engaging them, let alone defeating them, if our cities and people remain utterly vulnerable to mass destruction. As a result, perfecting and fielding anti-missile capabilities is not an alternative to transformation; it is an indispensable investment needed to enable the transformation of the rest of the military.

  • China is a problem: Prior to his stint at Space Command, Gen. Myers served in the terrestrial theater most likely to cause us problems down the road: The Pacific and its East Asian rim. As the commander of U.S. air forces in the region, he has been acquainted with Communist China’s increasing assertiveness, its repeated characterization of the United States as “the main enemy” and declarations by officials in Beijing that war between the two nations is “inevitable.”

    Gen. Myers also appears to appreciate the danger that the PRC could pose to American interests and military forces long before its current modernization program translates into anything approaching comparable conventional capabilities. He understands that the investment China is making in “asymmetric” capabilities — the ability, for example, to use cyber-warfare, electro- magnetic pulse weapons and weapons of mass destruction to neutralize or otherwise offset U.S. military advantages — could give rise to a formidable threat, even in the near-term.

The Bottom Line

These insights and priorities clearly track with those of Donald Rumsfeld. By enlisting a man who shares them, the Secretary of Defense has found a partner who should prove most helpful in articulating them publicly, translating them into budgetary realities and enlisting the support for them from his counterparts in the military services. To get the maximum benefit out of this appointment, however, the Secretary and the new Chairman should make a first order of business seeking congressional help in reforming the Goldwater-Nicholls Act, a well-meaning but ultimately counter- productive piece of legislation that has had the effect of politicizing and otherwise diminishing the senior-most ranks of the U.S. military.

After a rough patch over the past few months and a spate of bad press last week, Donald Rumsfeld can doubtless use a bit of good news. The best news of all, however, is that is that not only his secretaryship but the future security of the country stands to benefit from his decision to promote Dick Myers.

Prepare for Two Wars’

(Washington, D.C.): This just in: The retired four-star admiral who formerly commanded all American forces in the Pacific (a job known as CINCPAC) and served until recently as U.S. Ambassador to China announced last Friday that a “rising China is okay” and, from a military perspective, “not really” a threat. According to the South China Morning Post, Joseph Prueher told an audience in Seattle that the PRC’s “People’s Liberation Army was not very potent’ as a fighting force, even though China yearned for a strong military that matched its standing in the world.”

This analysis supports the effort now being made by “Friends of China” and others who want Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to solve the Pentagon’s present budget conundrum by cutting the American military’s force structure. They are urging him to use such an approach rather than press President Bush for additional funding authority needed to do the job of “transforming” the armed services for the future while fixing what ails them today. They contend that divisions can be safely cut from the Army, carrier battle groups from the Navy and air wings from the Air Force since the United States no longer need worry about the danger of fighting two simultaneous major regional conflicts around the globe.

What is Wrong With This Picture?

There is only one problem with the Prueher analysis. It is wrong.

A “rising China” is not “okay” because its ambitions are at odds with American interests. The Communist regime in Beijing is under no illusion on this point and, therefore, it routinely refers to the United States as “the main enemy.” Party cadre and military leaders declare war with the U.S. to be “inevitable.” And, when it suits their purposes, Chinese officials threaten this country with nuclear attack — threats that, unfortunately, have to be taken seriously in the absence of any deployed defense against the PRC’s “not very potent,” but still potentially devastating, long-range nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

While it is certainly true that the PLA’s conventional forces are today no match for their American counterparts, it would be foolish to take undue comfort from such a snapshot in time. For one thing, history is full of instances in which weaker countries have taken on stronger ones. What is more, China is rapidly modernizing every facet of its military, thanks in no small measure to the PRC’s “strategic partnership” with Russia and the advanced arms and training in their use, maintenance and manufacture that flows from it.

Beijing is also aggressively pursuing unconventional or “asymmetric” means of dealing with a superior American military. These techniques include cyber-warfare, electro- magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons and anti-satellite capabilities designed to attack and neutralize the electronic and information technologies upon which that U.S. superiority critically depends.

Beijing’s Regional Strategy

Most relevant to the question of whether the United States can responsibly abandon the force- structure requirements mandated by the so-called “two-war” strategy, however, are the steps China is taking with its clients around the world to confront America with at least two simultaneous conflicts if ever the two nations come to blows. Alternatively, Beijing may be calculating that far-flung crises involving U.S. allies and interests would allow it to secure its strategic objectives — notably, conquest of Taiwan — without any interference from this country.

Consider developments in two candidate regions. The intensifying conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors may metastasize at any time into a wider war. If so, it is entirely possible that weapons made available by China to her customers in the Middle East — both directly and indirectly via her proxy, North Korea — will be used not only in attacks against the Jewish State but to establish effective control over the oil lanes of the Persian Gulf. Such attacks could run the gamut from those involving ballistic missiles bearing conventional warheads or weapons of mass destruction to the use of deadly Silkworm anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, dynamic forces are at work in East Asia. North Korea’s thoroughly weird despot, Kim Jong-Il, has just completed a lengthy visit to Russia in which those two nations affirmed their friendship and solidarity. (Kim’s inveterate deceitfulness was on display in the course of his travels as he treated dignitaries to his favorite dish of donkey meat while representing it as “Heavenly Cow.”) It seems likely that the backing North Korea enjoys from both the Russians and Chinese will make Kim more intractable in ending the abiding threat his army and regime pose to South Korea.

This is all the more worrisome insofar as South Korea’s former political prisoner-turned- President, Kim Dae Jung, seems prepared to adopt anti-democratic practices to silence critics who fear that, under present circumstances, his so-called “Sunshine Policy” for normalizing relations with the North is increasingly dangerous. He is using trumped up tax investigations and arrests to suppress opponents in the media; he is denying an American request for a top North Korean defector and prominent skeptic about Kim Jong-Il’s intentions to take his warnings to the United States. Members of Congress, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, are among those who fear that such developments could come to imperil not only to South Korean democracy but its security and stability on the Korean peninsula.

China has also been at work in our own hemisphere, making a concerted effort to open trading and strategic ties with Communist Cuba and Venezuela’s Castro-wannabe, Hugo Chavez. In addition, the PRC has secured facilities from which it could disrupt or deny at will American use of the Panama Canal. In the event of two widely separated conflicts, these ties could impair free U.S. exploitation of the sea lines of communications through the Caribbean and Panamanian isthmus, seriously exacerbating any inadequacies in the size, capabilities and location of our forces.

The Bottom Line

Left to his own devices, Donald Rumsfeld is certainly smart enough to understand that — like the People’s Liberation Army — we should pay heed to the teachings of the ancient Chinese strategist, Sun Tsu. Sun observed that it was far preferable to accomplish your objectives without a war than by having to fight one.

Former CINCPAC Joe Prueher may not understand that a “rising China” is bent on creating strategic and other circumstances that will enable it to do just that. (An interesting question is whether his successor in that job, Adm. Dennis Blair — who is reportedly under consideration to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — is under a similar illusion.) It behooves the Bush Administration to ensure that America has sufficient forces, with the requisite capabilities and forward deployed in the right places so as to ensure that we can, in fact, deal with and, thereby, deter the two conflicts we don’t want to have to fight.

Start the Clock on the End of the A.B.M. Treaty

(Washington, D.C.): As the Bush Administration prepares for the visit to Moscow of a delegation led by Under Secretary of State John Bolton, the latest in a series of high-level consultations with the Russians concerning missile defense, the question recurs: To what end?

It is unclear how many times the United States can usefully and — more to the point, credibly — tell the Kremlin that we are going forward with the development and deployment of effective ballistic missile defenses without actually taking the steps necessary to do so. Insofar as the Administration maintains (wrongly, in our view) that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty continues legally to bind this country, the longest lead-time item among those steps remains the six-month notice of an intent to withdraw from that accord.

Today’s Washington Times helpfully calls on the Bush team to take that step forthwith. In its lead editorial, the paper recommends that the Administration inform the Russians that — absent an agreed understanding with them on jointly consigning the ABM Treaty to the dust-bin of history — the United States will start the clock on doing so unilaterally come November.

Now, November is better than next Spring, and for sure next Spring is better than never. But there is no time like the present — especially since the President and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are presumably serious about executing test and developmental activities that even now are being constrained and impeded. This is especially outrageous insofar as such obstacles are the only tangible by-product of a treaty: that long since outlived any usefulness to this country; that did not result in the offensive forces reductions upon which it was explicitly predicated by the United States; that was systematically violated by the other party before it went out of business a decade ago; and that continues to be contravened by a Russian territorial anti-missile defense in place today.

Time to Give Notice on ABM

The Washington Times, 17 August 2001

In pursuing President Bush’s commitment to develop and deploy a national missile defense (NMD) system at the earliest moment, Defense Secretay Donald Rumsfeld has encountered the usual problems one would expect in dealing with former KGB Col. Vladimir Putin, who is now Russia’s president, and former KGB Gen. Sergei Ivanov, whom Mr. Putin appointed defense minister in March. Complicating the obvious delaying tactics of the Russians, which were clearly on display during Mr. Rumsfeld’s Moscow visit this week, is the fact that the efforts of the U.S. defense secretary to disengage the United States from the anachronistic Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty are quickly approaching a critical deadline. As Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recently testified before Congress, the administration’s anti-missile testing activities will “inevitably bump up against treaty restrictions and limitations,” an event, he said, that is “likely to occur in months, rather than years.”

As if all of this weren’t enough, Mr. Rumsfeld must also deal with the consequences of a monumental disinformation and misinformation campaign conducted no doubt independently by the news staffs of three of the nation’s most powerful newspapers: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

At the heart of this campaign are declarations, assertions and obvious assumptions that simply have no basis in fact. Consider the statements of presumed fact that appeared on Monday, the day Mr. Rumsfeld engaged the KGB veterans in Moscow. Citing “the curious logic of the Cold War,” the front page of the Wall Street Journal declared that “building defenses would only provoke the other side into building more weapons.” The unstated but implicit assumption, of course, is that prohibiting the deployment of ABM systems would have the opposite effect, i.e., it should reduce the incentives to build more weapons. Indeed, that was a central goal of the ABM Treaty, which the United States and the Soviet Union signed in 1972. Also on Monday, the New York Times matter-of-factly reported that the 1974 Vladivostok summit between then-President Ford and then-Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev “proved to be a breakthrough in limiting the numbers of strategic nuclear weapons.” Completing the trifecta of disinformation, on Tuesday The Post flatly asserted, “During the Cold War, missile defenses were seen as destabilizing in that they encouraged the United States and the Soviet Union to build more and more missiles to overwhelm those defenses.” Again, the unstated corollary must be that the treaty’s prohibition of such defenses should have the opposite effect.

As the 20 years that followed the ABM Treaty clearly demonstrated, none of this proved to be true at all. In 1972, the United States deployed 1,054 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) carrying fewer than 1,500 independently targetable warheads. The Soviet Union deployed 1,547 ICBMs with a like number of independently targetable warheads. In 1972, the United States had 41 submarines carrying 656 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with 2,384 independently targetable warheads. The Soviets had 53 submarines carrying 497 SLBMs and warheads. The U.S. heavy bomber fleet consisted of fewer than 400 B-52s, none of which carried air-launched cruise missiles. The Soviets had 140 heavy bombers. Atop their ballistic missiles in 1972, the United States had 3,858 warheads and the Soviets had 2,024. Including nuclear bombs aboard strategic aircraft, the United States had 5,700 nuclear weapons and the Soviets had 2,164 in 1972. Fast forward to 1991, when the START I treaty was signed and the Soviet Union was effectively bankrupt as a result of its nuclear-weapons binging. The American strategic nuclear weapons inventory exceeded 12,000 in 1991, reflecting a post-ABM Treaty increase of 112 percent. The Soviets’ inventory was nearly 11,000, having increased by more than 400 percent since 1972. Needless to say, these 1991 inventories reflected vast improvements in technology and accuracy.

Thus, the 1972 ABM Treaty and the 1974 Vladivostok summit utterly failed to restrict the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. All of the assertions blithely reported as fact in recent days by the Journal, the New York Times and The Post have been proven to be false. Indeed, in the face of a once-robust Strategic Defense Initiative begun in 1983 by Ronald Reagan, first the Soviets and then the Russians signed treaties reducing nuclear weapons, including the START II treaty signed in 1993. Yet, the indisputable misconceptions recently reported as fact are routinely used to implicitly attack the rationale of the Bush administration underlying its determination to deploy NMD as quickly as possible. In fact, once these often repeated, seemingly immutable laws of deterrence theory are easily refuted, the logic for a robust missile defense system is stronger than ever.

The path that Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld must take is clearer today than it has ever been. Obviously, the obstructionist and delaying tactics used by the former KGB veterans in Moscow this week must not stand. With U.S. anti-missile testing expected to “bump up against” the ABM Treaty within “months” and given the treaty’s requirement that a party must give six-months’ notice before it withdraws, the time has arrived for Mr. Bush to give the Putin-Ivanov regime a simple ultimatum: Either agree to the changes the United States seeks in the ABM Treaty by the time Mr. Putin visits Mr. Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch in November, or expect to receive the requisite six-months notice of withdrawal at that summit. The ultimatum doesn’t have to be public, but it must come at the earliest moment.

Why Bush Is Right to Reject a Defective B.W.C. Protocol

(Washington, D.C.): President Bush’s most recent profile in courage came with the announcement last week that the United States would not sign onto a protocol that was supposed to make the wholly unverifiable and unenforceable Biological Weapons Convention somewhat more verifiable and enforceable. He took this step in spite of the enormous pressure he is under to accede to international accords — irrespective of their incompatibility with the Nation’s security, economic well-being and/or sovereignty — lest he be denounced for acting unilaterally or, worse yet, as an “isolationist.”

The Wall Street Journal did a signal service last Friday by publishing its own lead editorial together with an excellent op.ed. article by a member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council, Dr. Fred Ikl. These essays explain the compelling reasons why Mr. Bush acted as he did. As they make clear, the American people — and, indeed, all those whose security and prosperity depends far more on this country’s military and economic strength rooted in its constitutionally mandated representational government than on any number of international accords — owe him a debt of gratitude for rejecting mindless multilateralism and providing the leadership we all need.

The Bug Debate

Wall Street Journal, 27 July 2001

George W. Bush is the peace-through-treaties club crazy. First he refuses to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, then he nixes Kyoto, and lately he’s refused to genuflect before the ABM Treaty. This week, it’s germ warfare. Beyond the wailing and gnashing, the germ-warfare treaty, like the others, has a story behind it that serious people should know.

The U.S. has not opted out of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which obligates its 143 signatories to repudiate biological weapons of mass destruction. The original convention included no verification clause. For now, nobody knows, nor has any means of finding out, who’s cheating.

Trouble is, we still won’t know who’s cheating even if we adopt the whole 210-page U.N. protocol intended to give the convention teeth, and that’s what the Bush Administration just rejected. The straight-shooting Mr. Bush is begging off the protocol for one good reason: It won’t work. As Fred Ikle writes nearby, bio-weapons are notoriously difficult to detect. Lest we forget, germs are small. They are naturally occurring, and their cultivation is largely indistinguishable from business-as-usual at an ordinary pharmaceutical plant.

To test the verification measures that the U.N. protocol commends, in the 1990s the U.S. conducted a series of painstakingly realistic mock inspections of American vaccine production facilities, university labs and bio-defense sites. The inspectors were pros — industrial microbiologists, bio-defense experts, toxicology and virology scientists.

The results were shambolic. Merely careless record-keeping errors seemed to disguise unspeakable wickedness. Above-board vaccine manufacture looked to eminently qualified inspectors like nefarious microbe production. Setting off such false alarms in real life, inspections designed as “confidence-building” would only aggravate mistrust.

In a similar exercise organized by the Stimson Center, a pro-arms-control D.C. think tank, two prominent infectious-disease experts with extensive experience in Iraq and Russia examined a laboratory in New York State. The lab had been deliberately contaminated with artificial anthrax cultures. Dubious records were planted, and the chief technician was even instructed to “act nervous.” The examiners completely missed the anthrax. But they did raise the alarm over numerous irregularities that were perfectly innocent. And this lab was rigged to be discovered. North Koreans might not be so obliging.

Because the West, especially the U.S., maintains the vast majority of high-tech bio-labs, most inspections would take place in the very countries — let’s get real here — least likely to cook up toil and trouble in their basements. Meantime, the protocol would summon snowstorms of paperwork to report on all the premises and equipment that could conceivably be used for sinister purposes. Again, declaration requirements would fall disproportionately on Western nations, with the larger defense programs.

Worse, these declarations would be voluntary. Yet only states with nothing to hide would have any motivation to report honestly. What government is likely to file, “Hey, we just whipped up a big batch of cholera, come on over”?

Moreover, countries subject to random inspections would get a two-week warning, could limit what visitors see and could ban biological sampling. Even a state accused of a breach would get 108 hours to tidy up for guests, and could also limit access and prohibit sampling. Breweries and antibiotics factories would be exempt from inspection, yet both provide the requisite kit to breed nasty bugs.

The regime on the table is significantly less rigorous than the no-notice inspections to which UNSCOM subjected Iraq, the most intrusive and protracted arms-control effort ever attempted. Yet every UNSCOM inspector has bemoaned the fact that they failed to discover the extent of Iraqi bio-weapons programs, which in their heyday manufactured 8,000 liters of anthrax — enough spores to eradicate the entire human race.

Are ineffectual inspections better than none? Clearly not. Readily eluded verification procedures only induce a false sense of security and turn arms control into farce. States that successfully flout the convention could hide behind the U.N.’s Good Housekeeping seal, allowing Iraq, for example, to justify the lifting of sanctions, even with its bio-weapons back in production.

Germ warfare is centuries old. In the 1300s, the Tartars catapulted dead bodies over fortified city walls in the Ukraine to introduce bubonic plague to their enemies. Renowned as “the poor man’s nuclear arsenal,” microbes and toxins are cheap, easy to make and easier to hide. One-billionth of a grain of anthrax can kill a man; a quantity the size of a five-pound bag of sugar could wipe out New York City. We simply do not have the technology to detect that sack of anthrax, and there’s no use pretending we do.

A less ambitious protocol might accomplish more. Thorough disease reporting internationally would enable epidemiologists to identify anomalous outbreaks that might have resulted from military experiments, for example.

President Bush could have endorsed a superficially virtuous treaty and smiled for the cameras. Bill Clinton was often given to cosmetic gestures, like his all-talk tour of Africa, that appeared caring, but produced little tangible benefit. Valuing results over rhetoric, Mr. Bush seems to appreciate that it’s a whole lot harder to do good than to look good.

The New Germ Warfare Treaty Is a Fraud

by Fred C. Ikle

Wall Street Journal, 27 July 2001

For more than six years, during many pleasant sessions at Lake Geneva, some 50 nations — including such stalwart arms control violators as North Korea and Iraq — have been drafting a treaty that would allegedly make an existing ban on biological weapons verifiable and enforceable. The Bush administration has reviewed this 200-page draft and concluded that it is incurably flawed. Not surprisingly, the diplomats who fear for their handiwork are complaining.

This scuttled treaty is known as the BWC Protocol, since it purports to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 that bans the use, stockpiling and production of bacteriological weapons. Anyone who has studied the protocol has to wonder whether it has ever been analyzed properly by those arms control experts who now criticize the U.S. rejection.

Have any of the foreign ministers who are now complaining found out what this draft treaty actually says? If so, they would have discovered that the Geneva negotiations kept coasting in a fantasy land where the realities of pharmacological production processes and advances in biotechnology do not exist, and where the many dismal failures of other, much less difficult international inspection efforts have never occurred.

In particular, a conscientious foreign minister would make the following shocking discoveries.

First, the development of biological weapons is one of the most difficult things to detect since the lethal agents can easily be hidden, and the manufacturing facilities are essentially undistinguishable from legitimate pharmaceutical or research installationsTo manage this impossible job, the protocol would set up a large international organization that would have people on its staff from such nations as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Cuba. These nations would use their representatives in the decision-making councils of the organization to obstruct and oppose any finding that declared one of their nations guilty of a violation. And they would order their technical staff members of this organization to advise the germ-warriors back home how best to fool the inspectors. (This is what the Iraqis who worked for the international agency that enforces the nuclear non-proliferation treaty did.)

So how does this protocol propose to handle the verification problem? It demands that the parties to the treaty declare all their plants, factories, and laboratories where legitimate work goes on, if these facilities could theoretically be used to make bio-weapons. Hence, the U.S., European nations, and Japan will have to declare hundreds of pharmaceutical plants, vaccine laboratories, and medical research centers which would then be pointlessly inspected, wasting our tax dollars and creating rich opportunities for industrial espionage.

We have seen how Saddam Hussein can shield his bio-weapons plants from international inspectors. He surely would not “declare” them. He would not even admit the “challenge inspection” the protocol envisages for undeclared sites. When the United Nations presence in Iraq still had some muscle — far more muscle indeed than this protocol would ever provide — Saddam simply told the inspectors that his palaces and other sites were off limits. He suffered no penalty.

The proponents of the protocol praise it as a “legally binding” treaty. “Legally binding” has different meanings. In case of North Korea’s recent violations of nuclear agreements, “legally binding” apparently meant that North Korea had to be rewarded, not penalized; while we were the ones who became legally bound to pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually so that these violations would temporarily cease.

Anyhow, law-abiding nations do not violate treaties they ratified. Hence, to abide by the Biological Weapons Convention they do not need this protocol that is merely supposed to strengthen the convention. Conversely, nations that are willing to violate the 1972 convention by preparing for germ warfare will surely be willing to violate the protocol as well. So what on earth do the defenders of this protocol mean when they praise it as being “legally binding?”

President Clinton told Congress this protocol would “enforce” the ban on bio-weapons. Perhaps his thought was that if the international organization actually certified a violation (instead of whitewashing it), such a verdict would lead to proper punishment. On this point, too, recent history has been forgotten. A treaty has been in force since 1925 prohibiting the use of poison gas (as well as bio-weapons). Undeterred by that treaty, Saddam used poison gas against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. After a U.N. inspection team had verified this attack and brought back horrific videotapes of the injured Iranians, arms control specialists were miffed that their benign assumptions had been so crudely disproved by Saddam. But they quickly regained their faith in treaties and organized a huge international conference in Paris in January 1989 — to “strengthen” the 1925 treaty.

This conference turned into the most revolting appeasement in the entire history of arms control. In deference to Saddam, the assembled delegates never mentioned the clear-cut, uncontestable U.N. verification that proved Iraq had used poison gas. Not one of the assembled diplomats dared to hold up photographs of the hideously injured Iranians so that at least the media could report the truth. Not one of the delegates had the courage to call for sanctions against Iraq. This is the kind of “enforcement” that the new protocol would provide. Indeed, the 200-page draft does not include a single meaningful enforcement provision.

Any foreign minister who goes to the trouble of actually studying the treaty should, if he has any integrity, pick up the phone and call Secretary of State Colin Powell. And this is what he should say: “You have my full support, Colin, we must ditch this treaty, it is a malignant, fraudulent draft.”

Dr. No,’ Meet President Yes’

(Washington, D.C.): Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold what amounts to a pep rally for the campaign its chairman, Sen. Joe Biden, is mounting to oppose President Bush’s efforts to defend America against ballistic missile attack. As the lead editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal, makes clear Sen. Biden is “Dr. No” with respect to pursuing development, test and deployment of missile defenses incompatible with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The Journal editorial echoes a call issued yesterday by the Center for Security Policy for President Bush to ensure that the Joe Bidens of the world are not able to infer, interpret or otherwise impute to the somewhat nebulous understanding reached on Sunday by Mr. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin a U.S. commitment not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, as Sen. Biden put it on Sunday, “anytime soon.”

Fortunately, shortly after the Center urged Mr. Bush to confirm that he is, in fact, “President Yes” when it comes to his determination to deploy missile defenses as soon as technologically possible (as required, by the way, by law), “W.” did just that in remarks at a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He emphasized in particular that the discussions he has directed take place with the Russians are not to going to be of an open-ended nature and that America will be defended, with or without the Kremlin’s assent:

…I have told President Putin that time matters; that I want to reach an accord sooner, rather than later; that I’m interested in getting something done with him. That’s my first priority. The American people, our friends and allies, and others should take me for my word when I said in the campaign, and since being the President, that I will consult with our friends and allies, that I will work with Russia.

But make no mistake about it, I think it’s important to move beyond the ABM Treaty. I would rather others come with us, but I feel so strongly and passionately on the subject about how to keep the peace in the 21st Century, that we’ll move beyond, if need be….

…It’s a treaty, of course, that — from which either party can withdraw with ample notice. And I can understand why he wants time. And I’m going to give him some time. But I also want to emphasize to you that time is of the essence. It is time to move beyond. It is time to begin the research and development, which we have yet to do — the research and development, constrained by the ABM Treaty, to determine that which is feasible….

…And since I feel so strongly, if we can’t reach agreement, we’re going to implement. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what I told the American people we’re going to do. It’s what I’ve explained to our allies that we’re going to do.

Further evidence that the President’s determination to proceed is having a salutary effect at home, as well as abroad, is to be found in today’s New York Times article headlined “Democrats Try to Work Up a Shield Plan of Their Own.” According to the Times, a group of former Clinton national security officials are working with “centrist” Democratic Members of Congress to come up with a damage-control plan. It seems that many in the Democratic Party are finding it increasingly uncomfortable — read, untenable — to be simply “issu[ing] critiques of Mr. Bush’s plan” a la “Dr. No” Biden.

Unfortunately, the Democratic plan seems to be basically a “bait-and-switch” scheme — serve up a different, less capable missile defense program that could “defend the country against very limited attacks from small nations like North Korea or Iran, but that would not be extensive enough to undermine the deterrent power of Russia or China’s nuclear arsenals.” Sounds a lot like what these “experts” tried to do when they were in office during the Clinton years. The product was billions of dollars expended in a desultory development of the so-called National Missile Defense (NMD) program, a hugely expensive system that would not defend all of the United States or any of its allies and would take years to bring on-line.

Whether opponents of missile defense are honest about their stance or disingenuous about it, as long as Mr. Bush remains “President Yes” — pressing forward with the perfection and deployment of militarily efficacious and cost-effective defenses — he will prevail with overwhelming support not only from the American people, but from the majority of their elected representatives of both parties.

A Putin Set’-Up on Missile Defense?

(Washington, D.C.): At the press conference George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin held after their meeting Sunday in Genoa, the career-KGB-officer-turned-Kremlin-leader announced that he and his American counterpart have reached an understanding that “the issue [of] offensive arms and [the] issue of defensive arms will be discussed as a set.” Although President Bush was clearly delighted by this announcement, there is a considerable danger that what Mr. Putin has in mind is less a “set” of discussions that will clear the way for American missile defenses than a “set-up” designed to ensure that goal is never realized.

What’s a Discussion’

The problem is that Mr. Bush appears to have opened the door not to “discussions” but to negotiations of a kind he has, heretofore, wisely eschewed. They not only hold out the prospect that the United States will again once again make the mistake of portraying the size, composition and status of its nuclear arsenal as things that can usefully be — indeed, need to be — defined in bilateral agreements with Moscow. (To his credit, Senator Joe Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, warned on Sunday talk shows that the result could be too-deep cuts in U.S. nuclear forces.)

What is more, negotiating with the Russians on missile defense assures that, at best, there will be needless and undesirable delay in the development and deployment of missile defenses. After all, unless otherwise stated, the presumption will be that the primary impediment to such activity — the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty — is going to remain in force until such time as a new, substitute arrangement is jointly agreed and promulgated. Predictably, Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware and an inveterate opponent of the deployment of U.S. missile defenses, greeted the Bush-Putin announcement by declaring it implies “the Administration won’t break out of the [ABM] Treaty anytime soon.”

Worse even than untoward delay in the deployment of missile defenses is the prospect that the negotiating “set” Putin has in mind will enable him to interfere with U.S. choices about the type, timing and robustness of American anti-missile systems. This could translate into a de facto veto over the sort of “layered” and “effective” defense President Bush has repeatedly pledged to field for the American people, their armed forces deployed overseas and their allies.

Either of these outcomes, to say nothing of a combination of the two, would probably prove deadly for the effort to field U.S. missile defenses “anytime soon.” The job of getting the funding required to prepare and deploy competent systems will only get harder as the mid-term and 2004 presidential elections approach. Mr. Bush’s political opponents — who at the moment perceive no risk to giving preference to protecting the ABM Treaty rather than the Nation — will be emboldened by any delay.

Some, like Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, have already made known their determination to deny President Bush funds for developmental and testing activities deemed incompatible with the ABM Treaty. As long as Mr. Bush permits the Treaty to bind the United States, he will find himself unable to ready the most militarily efficacious and cost- effective anti-missile systems possible.

Insult will be added to injury if the result of all this is not only to give Putin the leverage over U.S. missile defense programs that he has sought ever since the Bush II team came to office, but to recreate the image that Russia is a co-equal superpower. Ironically, this would breathe fresh life into the very bipolar, Cold War-era dynamic that President Bush has gone to such great lengths to insist has ended. (It is a measure of Putin’s cynicism that he has embraced some of Mr. Bush’s rhetoric on this score even as he tries to maneuver the “world’s only superpower” into behaving as though, if not acknowledging that, in Russia it still has a peer.)

Enter Dr. Rice

The only hope that the United States may yet avoid the trap being “set” by the Russians for its missile defense program is that, after the Bush-Putin meeting, Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice briefed the press about the American understanding of the “discussions” to which her boss agreed. According to the New York Times, Dr. Rice “made clear…that [the] discussions will not be formal negotiations over detailed arms control limits. Rather, she said, they will be more like consultations among allies in which each side simply tells the other what programs they have in mind. It is our view that these are more like defense planning talks, that you look at what is required for each side to insure itself.'”

Such a formulation has the advantage of being consistent with Mr. Bush’s longstanding approach to these matters. It would amount to consultations that would neither tarry nor disrupt an accelerated missile defense development and test program. It also would enable the United States to adjust its strategic offensive forces as we see fit, not according to a force structure that roughly mirrors whatever strategic arsenal Moscow can afford.

Of course, by engaging in discussions with the Russians that are not, repeat not, negotiations, and that hew to the American agenda, the United States can also undercut opposition at home and abroad to Mr. Bush’s missile defense initiative. It will be hard for the Carl Levins of the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate and left-wing allied leaders to be holier than the Kremlin when it comes to opposing the ABM Treaty’s demise.

Yet, it is for precisely these reasons that the Bush team would be wise to expect the Russians to try to spring their trap. Within hours of the Genoa press conference, Vladimir Putin was making known his view that there had, in fact, been “no principle breakthrough” on the missile defense question. When Dr. Rice visits Moscow this week, she will doubtless be sharply pressed to accede to the Kremlin’s terms of reference for the upcoming meetings lest bilateral ties be “set” back, a body-blow to the image of competence and savoir faire that President Bush is working to cultivate.

The Bottom Line

Mr. Bush can spare himself — and the program for defending America in which he has properly invested so much personal political capital — considerable aggravation, if not worse, by promptly affirming that Dr. Rice’s characterization of the “way ahead” tracks with his own. He should say that it is still the case, notwithstanding the undertakings at Genoa, that the United States will be engaged in activities inconsistent with the ABM Treaty “within a matter of months, not years.”

In short, notice needs to be given to Vladimir Putin, the allies and Senate Democrats: The only thing that is really “set” is Mr. Bush’s mind with respect to fulfilling the law of the land that requires him to deploy effective U.S. missile defenses “as soon as technologically possible.”