Back in 1983 those who allegedly knew better scoffed at then-President Ronald Reagan when he announced the United States would begin the development of a Strategic Defense Initiative that might someday neutralize the threat posed by incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“You can’t hit a bullet with a bullet,” critics of the new initiative said as they tried to derail Reagan’s efforts to sell the program to a skeptical Congress. The mere idea was supposed to be destabilizing to a world where the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction kept the missiles in their silos at the tensest moments of several international crises.
Reagan stood by his guns, going so far as to walk out of a superpower summit in Reykjavik rather than kill the program as the Soviets demanded in exchange for what at the time were thought to be considerable concessions on their part.
History has proven Reagan right and naysayers wrong. Even without being fully developed, the help the nascent missile defense system provided in winning the Cold War was immeasurable. Every president since has continued to fund SDI research, keeping alive the hope that a missile shield like what was described in Reagan’s original speech might someday become a reality.
The global situation is much less stable that it was when the Berlin Wall came down, making it more vital than ever that missile defense research continue. The North Koreans have apparently developed a nuclear weapon. The Iranians are not far behind and, as the American imperative to keep them from becoming a nuclear power has shifted under President Barack Obama, it is likely they may have something to show for their efforts by the end of the decade if not sooner.
According to Lt. Gen. David L. Mann, commander of the U.S. Army’s Space Missile Defense Command, at least 22 nations currently have ballistic missile capabilities. Of those, nine are likely to also have the capacity to manufacture a nuclear weapon. ICBM’s carrying payloads intended to level a major American city or to spark an electromagnetic pulse that some scientists believe would destroy the nation’s power grid, its computers and anything else that uses electricity could now come at the United States from almost any direction. Yet the only protection against such an attack comes from a system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, that is currently being starved for money.
This would be a horrible mistake for no less reason that than “something better” does not yet exist. The Ground-Based Midcourse Defense provides the capability to engage and destroy intermediate and long-range ballistic missile threats in space and has been expected to remain in place until at least 2032. Obama administration budget cuts have reduced the number of tests that could be conducted to ensure the system works. With no opportunity to test, there are fewer opportunities to improve, meaning the critical lessons that have been learned over decades are being lost to inertia.
Right now the biggest challenge is the need to upgrade the so-called kill vehicle, that part of the system that actually comes in contact with an incoming missile and knocks it out of the sky. What is now in use, said Admiral James Syring, the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, is “1990’s technology” – meaning it could be dramatically improved.
There are two alternatives. One is to increase the budget for missile testing, research and improvement of the existing technology. The other is to start over, which, it should be said, might very well leave the United States undefended against a nuclear payload launched from somewhere outside Pyongyang.
If instead the Defense Department is allowed to leverage previous public and private investment, the existing kill vehicle can be brought up-to-date through gradual redesign achieved over time by additional testing. This way, even if the Pentagon goes ahead with a new concept for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense’s kill vehicle, the existing system will be continually improved until such time as something new is ready to go online. The dual track approach is a near-term solution that addresses near-term threats while keeping the possibility of a dramatic technological breakout alive.
We’ve faced these kinds of choices before. The advent of the jet engine did not cause the U.S. military to scrap its entire propeller-driven air force while new fleet was readied; in fact, what they did was quite the contrary, moving ahead with revisions and upgrades to proven existing technologies while experimenting with radically new designs that later became the backbone of the America’s military defenses.
The same should be true for missile defense: Keep making what we have better, while branching out into new areas of research and development that may someday make today’s cutting-edge technology seem antiquated and, at the same time, provide a seamless defense against the actions of our enemies.