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Thirty-six years
ago, the United States embarked on a serious effort to render the threat of
nuclear-armed ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.” Despite some
progress, however, we are not significantly closer to that goal today than
we were in 1983. What does the future hold for the development and
advancement of the U.S. missile defense program?
How the Past Has
Shaped the Present
President Ronald
Reagan made protecting the U.S. against Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic
missiles one of the U.S. defense establishment’s organizing principles. He
launched a family of missile defense programs under the umbrella of the
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). These programs built upon existing U.S.
missile defense efforts, which had been constrained by the limitations in
the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. We continue
to reap the fruits of those intellectual (if not technical) efforts today.
Moreover, missile defense will likely continue to be a prominent aspect of
U.S. defense policy.
Regrettably, the
threat of ballistic missile attacks on the United States, our forces,
allies, and partners will not diminish anytime soon. These missiles have
attributes that make them prized strategic possessions for many states and
even non-state actors. Ballistic missiles are prized as tools of power
projection and coercion because they can attack quickly, are relatively
cheap as compared to the damage they can cause, and are difficult to
intercept. Continued increases in the sophistication of ballistic missiles,
as well as their decreased costs, will undoubtedly help to shape future
security environments.
Thanks to our
adversaries, however, we no longer have the luxury of being able to worry
only about ballistic missiles. The threat today includes missiles that do
not fly on ballistic trajectories, including hypersonic weapons and cruise
missiles. Missiles can be armed with multiple independently targetable
reentry vehicles, possess stealthy characteristics, maneuverable reentry
vehicles, decoys, and jammers – all of which complicate U.S. efforts to
intercept them. In recognition of these developments and expanding threats,
the Trump administration’s congressionally mandated review of U.S. missile
defense policy was titled the “Missile Defense Review (MDR)” rather than
the Obama-era “Ballistic Missile Defense Review.”
However,
disagreements over the technical feasibility of missile defenses that
plagued the SDI effort are largely gone today. U.S. missile defense
interceptors now have a proven track record. Admittedly, it is not perfect,
but such is always the case with extremely complicated and technologically
challenging systems. And U.S. missile defenses are getting better every
day.
After all, the
goal of our efforts is to hit an incoming missile traveling thousands of
miles an hour with a relatively small kinetic kill vehicle. Decades ago,
the technology to accomplish this feat did not exist, and the United States
had to rely on nuclear-tipped interceptors. At that time, some thought that
non-nuclear, hit-to-kill intercepts would never be possible. Today, the debate
about U.S. missile defense programs centers largely on whether they are
feasible in the context of strategic relations with other nuclear-armed
states, particularly Russia and China, and whether the price of these
systems is worth it in an era of decreasing defense budgets. Discussions
about costs associated with the system will continue to be prominent,
particularly as we face potential sequestration this fall under the Budget
Control Act.
U.S. policy has
required missile defense systems to be “cost-effective at the margin.”
Generally, that means that the cost of the interceptor should be comparable
to the cost of the incoming missile. But over time, we have come to realize
and appreciate the deficiencies of this component of the so-called “Nitze criteria.”
Missile defense interceptors are much more expensive than ballistic
missiles, but we do not question why policemen wear bulletproof vests even
though a bullet is much cheaper than the vest.
We have seen a
real-life demonstration of the benefits that missile defenses bring to
policymakers and to populations terrorized by missile and rocket attacks.
The Israeli experience with the Iron Dome system illustrates that what
matters is the value of what is being protected, not just how much an
interceptor costs relative to an incoming missile. Missile defenses give a
government additional time to consider the least escalatory steps in a
crisis in which an adversary uses ballistic missiles in an effort to
escalate a conflict, potentially averting a hot war with many more
casualties. Missile defense may never be able to catch up with missiles in
terms of costs, but future advanced technologies and miniaturization
certainly have the potential to put missile defense in a more favorable
position on the cost curve.
An Imminent
Reckoning
Yet U.S.
policymakers will soon face a missile defense reckoning. Today, we agree on
a bipartisan basis that we need to defend the U.S. homeland from Iranian or
North Korean missiles. As the missile capabilities and technologies of
those two regimes become more advanced, our missile defense systems will
have to evolve to address them if we do not want to open ourselves up to
blackmail. In addition, this inexorable evolution might eventually give our
missile defense systems capabilities against Russian and Chinese missiles.
The Trump administration’s MDR explicitly rejects accepting limits on U.S.
homeland missile defense systems to counter North Korean and Iranian
ballistic missiles, even if those defense systems might have some
capability against other states’ ballistic missiles.
President Trump
was even more forward-leaning in his remarks announcing the MDR at the
Pentagon in January 2019, when he said, “My upcoming budget will invest in
a space-based missile defense layer. It’s new technology. It’s ultimately
going to be a very, very big part of our defense and, obviously, of our
offense. The system will be monitored, and we will terminate any missile
launches from hostile powers, or even from powers that make a mistake. It
won’t happen. Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of
the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth
or in the skies above.”(1) But any such lofty plan must be backed by
resources; otherwise, it remains just a statement.
The President’s
declaration also highlights an important contradiction in today’s U.S.
missile defense policy. If we are truly in an era of great-power
competition with China and Russia, as the Trump administration’s National
Security Strategy declares2, our missile defense policy should reflect
that. It must translate into investment in capabilities that can address
large, sophisticated Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles. As President
Reagan asked on another occasion, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than
to avenge them?”
Yet having a sound
missile defense policy is just a starting point – necessary but not
sufficient by itself. We need to back this policy with investments. The MDR
came out too late to have a significant influence on the President’s fiscal
year (FY) 2020 budget request for the Department of Defense, and that could
explain deficiencies in terms of building missile defense systems for the
future as far as this budget cycle is concerned. The MDR was supposed to be
released in the Fall of 2017, but it was delayed for more than a year, not
coming out until January 2019 and largely missing an opportunity to impact
the FY 2019 and FY 2020 budget cycles.
Shooting down
Russian and Chinese missiles, ballistic or not, means increasing
investments in advanced technologies, including directed energy missile
defense concepts, defenses against hypersonic weapons, and space-based
interceptors. The United States must invest in boost-phase missile defense
because that is where missiles are the slowest and have not yet deployed
decoys and countermeasures. Regrettably, the boost phase of flight is also
the shortest and consequently most technologically challenging phase in
which to conduct an intercept.
Missile Defense
Policy for the Near Future
Even before we get
to technologically advanced programs and concepts, however, there are steps
the United States can and should take to improve the existing missile
defense architecture. The United States should make existing missile
defense capabilities more effective. We can accomplish that by improving
the quality of the data fed into our existing sea-based and ground-based
missile defense architecture. The best way to get this done is to develop a
space-based sensor layer. Not only do space-based sensors “see” more than
ground-based sensors do, but they are also, relatively speaking, less
vulnerable to adversary attacks.
The President’s FY
2020 budget request, however, allocates only $15 million for “a prototype
proliferated Low Earth Orbit communications and data transport layer.” That
is simply not enough to make any meaningful advancement on this important
issue. The lack of funding is even more surprising when one considers that
successive directors of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the agency
responsible for missile defense research and development, have all strongly
emphasized the need to improve U.S. cueing and tracking data.
Additionally, the
United States can explore options to increase the capability of the
existing family of interceptors. For FY 2020, the MDA is requesting a mere
$14 million for the Multi-Object Kill Vehicle program, which is designed to
allow a single interceptor to destroy more than one incoming object. That
is not a significant amount of funding for a program that is simply common
sense and that should have been pursued consistently since President George
W. Bush’s abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.
If the United
States truly is serious about great-power competition with Russia and
China, and about defending against their long-range ballistic missile
arsenals, it will have to increase both its investment in and the
capabilities of more than just large ground-based interceptors. This is not
to say that the United States should cease all investments in its Ground-Based
Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, but GMD interceptors today are simply too
expensive and too vulnerable to a potential Russian or the Chinese attack.
If we are serious,
we will increase investments in space-based capabilities and future missile
defense technologies, including directed energy weapons. Finally, we will
make it an explicit U.S. policy to defend against any ballistic missile
attacks, just as President Trump, speaking at the Pentagon, said he would.
Unless we take these steps today, our missile defense future will be bleak.
ENDNOTES
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