Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective

Catherine McArdle Kelleher, Peter Dombrowski, Catherine McArdle Kelleher, Peter Dombrowski

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective explains the origins, evolution, and implications of the regional approach to missile defense that has emerged since the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and has culminated with the missile defense decisions of President Barack Obama. The Obama administration's overarching concept for American missile defense focuses on developing both a national system of limited ground-based defenses, located in Alaska and California, intended to counter limited intercontinental threats, and regionally-based missile defenses consisting of mobile ground-based technologies like the Patriot PAC-3 system, and sea-based Aegis-equipped destroyer and cruisers.

The volume is intended to stimulate renewed debates in strategic studies and public policy circles over the contribution of regional and national missile defense to global security. Written from a range of perspectives by practitioners and academics, the book provides a rich source for understanding the technologies, history, diplomacy, and strategic implications of the gradual evolution of American missile defense plans. Experts and non-experts alike—whether needing to examine the offense-defense tradeoffs anew, to engage with a policy update, or to better understand the debate as it relates to a country or region—will find this book invaluable. While it opens the door to the debates, however, it does not find or offer easy solutions—because they do not exist.

Part I

U.S. POLICIES AND PROGRAMS

1

ADDRESSING THE MISSILE THREAT: 1980–2008

Susan J. Koch

THIS CHAPTER WILL DISCUSS U.S. BALLISTIC missile defense policies and programs through four administrations, from President Reagan through the second President Bush. That history has been one of major change—in basic strategy, military aims, threat definition, technological focus, funding, and U.S. and international political salience. National missile defense (NMD) efforts, aimed at countering strategic ballistic missiles, were particularly subject to dramatic fluctuations over this period. Programs grew or contracted, and were emphasized or terminated, depending on several different factors.

One major determinant was the changing perception of the primary strategic missile threats facing the United States. There were real differences on the nature of the ballistic missile threat, especially during much of the Clinton administration. However, for most of the period, the central controversies surrounding missile defense tended to be more about the feasibility and desirability of active defenses to counter those threats than about the threats themselves. The early Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), still in the Cold War, was to defend against a full-up Soviet ballistic missile threat. Over the years, with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of greater proliferation dangers, major focus changed, first to accidental or unauthorized Soviet launch, then to proliferant short- and medium-range threats, and finally to proliferant threats of all ranges. NMD proponents strongly objected to the initial shifts from the Reagan vision, but there is now near consensus that missile defenses can and should address only limited proliferant threats.

Other factors were more controversial. As George Lewis discusses in Chapter 4 of this volume, arguments about the technical feasibility and affordability of strategic missile defenses continue, even if they no longer create headlines. Controversy also surrounded the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty for decades, with some constituencies arguing that it must be preserved and others that it presented unacceptable obstacles to defenses required for U.S. security. That controversy essentially disappeared after the United States withdrew from the treaty in 2002. Finally, there were long-standing partisan political differences as to whether NMD would benefit U.S. security. Although the Clinton administration at first dramatically reduced NMD efforts, it adopted a quite different policy late in its first term, not least because of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Although this chapter will address ballistic missile defense programs only from the Reagan through second Bush administrations, it is worth noting that the trend of major fluctuations to U.S. NMD policy and programs from one administration to the next leveled off in the Obama administration. Most important was the continuation of the limited Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) deployments begun by the George W. Bush administration, directed against North Korean missile threats. Still, the Obama administration reduced NMD budgets (although nowhere near as dramatically as the early Clinton administration had done) and canceled two important boost-phase intercept programs—the Airborne Laser and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor. As noted by George Lewis, analysts differ as to whether those programs were ended for political, affordability, technical, or a combination of reasons. The Obama administration also slightly reduced the planned Alaska deployments at first but restored the Bush numbers after the third North Korean nuclear test in 2013.

Any effort to measure the precise impact of the decades-long fluctuations in U.S. NMD programs is necessarily a “what might have been” exercise that is difficult at best. Nonetheless, continual changes in policy emphasis, funding levels, and technical direction certainly did not provide a good foundation for effective, efficient progress.

In contrast, as discussed by both George Lewis (Chapter 4) and Amy Woolf (Chapter 3) in this volume, U.S. theater missile defense (TMD) programs have benefited from more continuity. The level of attention paid to TMD compared to NMD did vary from administration to administration; most striking was the Clinton administration’s nearly exclusive focus on TMD. Nevertheless, TMD had many fewer programmatic starts and stops than did NMD. The result was a less turbulent (although certainly not smooth) development and deployment path for many TMD elements.

THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION: 1981–1989

Earlier Efforts

Reagan administration policy on ballistic missile defense is primarily associated with the president’s March 23, 1983, speech announcing the SDI. Important though that speech was, it was neither the beginning of administration missile defense efforts nor the last word on them.

The United States had long deployed air defenses, both nuclear and conventionally armed, throughout the country. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the planned deployment of the Sentinel system, a thin antimissile defense to defend cities from an accidental Soviet launch or a Chinese attack. Two years later, President Richard Nixon changed that program to Safeguard, to protect land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Soviet attack. The interceptors for both Sentinel and Safeguard were to be nuclear armed.

With the 1972 signature of the ABM Treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to maintain deterrence based on strategic offensive forces, prohibiting nationwide strategic ballistic missile defenses. Those defenses were limited to two 100-interceptor sites, one to protect an ICBM field, the other the national capital. The 1974 protocol to the treaty reduced permitted deployment to a single 100-interceptor site. The United States deployed its Safeguard site at Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1975 but deactivated it just five months later. Some attribute the end of the Safeguard program to opposition to nuclear-armed defenses; others cite its high operating costs for very limited capabilities. The Soviets kept, and Russia continues to retain, the nuclear-armed ABM site outside Moscow.

After Safeguard’s termination, the Army’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization focused research and development on hit-to-kill interceptor technology and, for the longer term, space-based defenses, especially using high-energy lasers. The aims were described as “preservation of cost effective defense options which could be developed and deployed rapidly to meet near-term objectives with low development risk; and . . . the maturation of advanced technology systems concepts which could counter projected Soviet threat growth and still be cost effective.”¹

The “Astrodome”

Thus, President Reagan’s speech launching the SDI in March 1983 did not emerge in a technological vacuum. Moreover, in February 1983, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended greater attention to strategic missile defense, out of concern with growing Soviet ballistic missile capability. Still, the speech was a surprise. The mere fact of a presidential prime-time television address brought missile defense to the political forefront for the first time in over a decade. More important, the speech was breathtaking in its ambitions for defense dominance:

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? . . . I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.²

Two other important elements of the speech maintained continuity with existing policy and strategy. First, the president stressed repeatedly the need to retain an effective nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future to protect the United States and our allies. Second, the proposed strategic defenses would aim solely at countering “the awesome Soviet missile threat”; there was no mention of defenses against third parties or accidental or unauthorized launch.

Reduced Ambition

Within two years, the Reagan administration began to be more cautious about near- and medium-term ballistic missile defense. In February 1985, Paul Nitze, special advisor to the president and secretary of state on arms control matters, outlined three criteria for missile defense deployment: feasibility, survivability, and cost-effectiveness at the margin (meaning that incremental additions to defenses would be less expensive than any offensive growth designed to defeat them). That third Nitze criterion was designed to counter arguments that strategic defenses would inevitably trigger an endless offense–defense arms race. In retrospect, however, it is difficult to imagine that any system aiming at defense dominance over Soviet forces could fully meet that standard. Thus, although the Nitze criteria remained official policy throughout the Reagan administration, they may have helped to set the stage for the decreased strategic defense ambitions that began to emerge.

Two years after the Nitze speech, the Reagan administration endorsed limited initial defenses, while keeping to its ultimate goal of complete defense dominance. The January 1987 National Security Strategy of the United States stated that the SDI could “shift deterrence to a safer and more stable basis.” Those defenses would not overwhelm offensive forces but “inject greater uncertainties” into Soviet first strike calculations.³ In September 1987, Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger approved a concept of phased SDI deployments. Phase I, in the mid-1990s, would include space- and ground-based interceptors as well as surveillance and tracking systems. Like the full-up SDI, it would be a layered defense, designed to intercept strategic missiles in all phases of flight: boost, midcourse, and terminal. Subsequent deployment phases were not defined. Press reports said that Phase I would be designed to intercept about one-third of a 5,000-warhead Soviet attack.

In a further effort to scale back SDI, Senator Sam Nunn in January 1988 proposed an Accidental Launch Protection System (ALPS) to defend against accidental or unauthorized Soviet launches, while calling for research on advanced technologies that might provide a nationwide defense in the longer term. The Defense Science Board (DSB), a Pentagon advisory committee, endorsed ALPS as the first step in a six-step Phase I deployment process. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci did not explicitly accept the DSB recommendation but called in October 1988 for keeping open an ALPS option. In doing so, he may have been accepting political reality. In the last years of the Reagan administration, the Congress cut administration budget requests for SDI, and in the FY 1989 National Defense Authorization Act urged the secretary to direct the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) to emphasize ALPS-type systems.

Arms Control

The ballistic missile defense envisioned in the Reagan SDI speech would not be allowed under the ABM Treaty, even with extensive amendments. The strategic concepts underlying the two were completely antithetical. However, the Reagan administration SDI program kept to research and development that did not raise treaty compliance issues, even after adopting the so-called broad interpretation of the ABM treaty in October 1985. Agreed Statement D to the treaty provided that “in the event ABM systems based on other physical principles . . . are created in the future, specific limitations on such systems and their components would be subject to discussion in accordance with Article XIII and agreement in accordance with Article XIV of the Treaty.” The broad interpretation would allow development and testing of mobile and space-based directed energy (and some would argue kinetic energy) systems. Although the issue generated great controversy, neither the Reagan nor Bush administration ever acted on the broad interpretation. The Clinton administration explicitly disavowed it in 1993.

At the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, President Reagan proposed a two-phase U.S.–Soviet agreement. Over a ten-year period, each side would eliminate its offensive ballistic missiles and abide by its interpretation of the ABM Treaty. Thereafter, each would be free to deploy missile defenses unless agreed otherwise. General Secretary Gorbachev counterproposed the elimination of all strategic offensive arms, including heavy bombers, and a ban on testing space-based defense components outside the laboratory. Finally, the Soviets would not explicitly endorse freedom to deploy defenses beyond those allowed by the ABM Treaty, although they did recognize the right of treaty withdrawal.

At the Washington summit in December 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to pursue a legally binding accord that would echo some of the Reykjavik themes but not the elimination of ballistic missiles (still less of all strategic offensive arms). Under the proposal, the sides would abide by the ABM Treaty “for a specified period...