Tag Archives: Defense Procurement Policy

The Real Debate’ About Missile Defense

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

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

What, Me Oppose Missile Defense?

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

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

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

Let’s examine each of these conditions in turn.

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fire Next Time

By Mark Helprin

The Wall Street Journal, 24 April 2001

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

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

Consensus Destroyed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prudent Course

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

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

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

Accept No Substitutes on the Aegis Sale to Taiwan

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

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

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpts of:

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

by Sven Kraemer

The Washington Times, 8 & 9 April 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dead Clinton Treaty Given New Life

By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

The American Spectator Online, 25 March 2001

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

The Defense We Need

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

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

Bottom-Up Goes Bust

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

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

The New Marshall Plan’

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

Whither the Bush Team?

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

Critical Mass: Getting the Bush Nuclear Review Right

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

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

Don’ts and Do’s

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

  • Don’t Make Unwise Deep Cuts

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

  • Deterrence is not a science but an art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

Putin’s Lie

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

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

Does Russia Already Have A National Missile Defense?

By Melanie Kirkpatrick

The Wall Street Journal, 6 March 2001

Bad treaties are bound to be violated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preordained’ Not to Succeed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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