Deploying US missile defences - Volume 9, Issue 1 - January 2003

 

 

The merits of ballistic missile defence (BMD) no longer dominate international strategic debate as they did prior to the demise of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002. Yet President George W. Bush's 17 December 2002 announcement committing the United States to a firm deployment date has given new life to BMD critics and supporters alike. The question for critics now is less one of strategic stability than programmatic detail: the diminished salience of mutually assured destruction – the notion that shared vulnerability is superior to missile defences as a deterrent – has elevated technical, scheduling and cost details to the forefront of the debate. To the most avid supporters of BMD in the Bush administration, however, such details are less important than achieving pre-emptive deployment, or at least sufficient progress by the 2004 presidential election to set the programme on an irreversible course. Nevertheless, the accelerated deployment plan faces serious technical and policy obstacles.

 

Pace and scope

The Bush administration's deployment plan should not come as a complete surprise. The Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the press in March 2002, called for the deployment of an emergency missile defence capability between 2003 and 2008. Moreover, administration officials had already spoken about assembling a rudimentary ground-based midcourse intercept system by 2004, primarily using test assets in Alaska. Preparations for Bush's fiscal year 2004 budget submission to Congress explain the 17 December announcement.

 

The administration's plan entails the use of existing prototype and test assets to furnish an admittedly modest BMD capability in the 2004–05 timeframe. The initial deployment would include up to 20 ground-based interceptors (a legacy of the Clinton administration's BMD programme) for midcourse intercept of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 16 of which would be located at Fort Greely, Alaska (six by 2004, 10 more in 2005) and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California (all in 2004). The plan would also accelerate the deployment of 20 sea-based interceptors placed on three Aegis cruisers/destroyers, along with an undetermined number of Patriot PAC-3 interceptors; these are designed primarily to deal with short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The announced elements of target detection and tracking capability would combine the existing Defense Support Program's infrared early warning satellites; an upgraded Cobra Dane radar at Shemya, Alaska; a new sea-based X-band radar; SPY-1 radars on Aegis-class ships; and upgraded early warning radars in the United Kingdom and Greenland. The latter radars would require the approval of the British and Danish governments and would become part of the overall system in 2005. Without them, tracking ballistic missiles emanating from the Middle East would be problematic.

 

Additional capabilities would be added over time to improve overall system effectiveness. Further PAC-3 and Aegis-based interceptors would eventually be complemented by the US Army's Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, which is designed to intercept short- and medium-range missiles at high altitude. Assuming it overcomes developmental difficulties, the Airborne Laser aircraft, which is designed to use a high-energy chemical laser to destroy missiles in their boost phase, would eventually join the mix. Also planned are a common family of boost-phase and midcourse interceptors for land and sea basing and several enhancements in radar and sensor programmes. This evolutionary approach involves no predetermined architecture, meaning that as threats change, so would the nature and quality of the deployments.

 

Administration spokesmen make no pretence that the 2004–05 deployment elements will furnish much protection against limited ICBM threats. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld described the initial plan as 'better than nothing'. Nor was the Bush decision, according to White House officials, related to current North Korean nuclear ambitions, or the threat that Pyongyang might abrogate its self-imposed missile-testing moratorium. Still, the most likely ICBM threat to the US homeland remains North Korea's Taepo-dong–1 three-stage missile. This was tested only once, in August 1998, during which a small third stage failed. The CIA believes that if the Taepo-dong was made operational, it could barely reach Alaska, and then only with a payload capacity too small to carry a nuclear warhead. However, the administration's decision to move ahead with BMD deployment seems predicated on its new 'capabilities-based' approach to defence acquisition: instead of planning against narrowly defined threat scenarios, which are increasingly difficult to anticipate, decisions will be based on achieving desired capabilities that reduce palpable vulnerabilities. Thus, the objective is to respond to threats before they fully emerge.

 

Technical hurdles

The Bush administration's goal is to declare its rudimentary BMD system operational by 1 October 2004, giving the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) a mere 21 months to overcome several technical hurdles. The toughest challenge is producing a reliable operational booster to carry the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) into space towards a 'threat cluster', consisting of a re-entry vehicle (RV), possible decoys, and perhaps a deployment bus, whereupon the EKV would discriminate the RV from other objects and then hit and destroy the RV. To date, the MDA has used surrogate boosters made from Minuteman II rockets, while two competing contractors – both nearly two years behind schedule – work intensively to produce a workable operational booster. MDA Director Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish has expressed exasperation with the booster programme and is counting on two separate tests of the competing designs this spring and summer to demonstrate the technical success needed to meet the aggressive deployment schedule. Near-term success with a booster is critical to the overall programme, because of the need to ensure that the higher accelerations associated with the production booster will not adversely affect other system components.

 

The booster problem highlights the broader difficulty of conflating research and development with testing and deployment. Under US law, a major defence acquisition programme cannot proceed into full-rate production without first undergoing significant operational testing. In March 2002, Lt. Gen. Kadish told a Senate subcommittee that, were test facilities compressed into operational service, MDA would lose some of its testing capability. In the aftermath of Bush's 17 December announcement, however, the MDA position changed to suggest no adverse impact. Once operational, the MDA would turn the test bed over to the US army, which would assume operational control. As for the potentially adverse legal ramifications of concurrent testing and deployment, there appears to be sufficient definitional latitude in the relevant statute (Title 10 of the US Code) simply to view the system that is declared operational in 2004 as one involving low-rate production. More importantly, Republicans now control both houses of Congress, and are unlikely to impede progress towards BMD deployment.

 

The nature and extent of operational testing will, however, determine the limitations of the system declared operational in late 2004. Given the limited time during which typical real-world engagements occur, missile defence systems must be highly pre-programmed to reflect the full range of threat possibilities (alternate trajectories, possible decoys, RV details, and so forth). Existing intercept tests have not mirrored such realistic operational environments and the short time remaining before October 2004 greatly limits the system's probable initial military utility. Even assuming the availability of a production booster that has been tested to resolve system integration issues, the early deployment system would at best have limited capability to intercept North Korean missiles flying on pre-determined trajectories, displaying past flight conditions and carrying either no decoys or rudimentary ones similar to those used in the past, or in the remaining flight tests before the October 2004 deployment date. Until much more robust discrimination capabilities become available – most notably with the addition of sea-based X-band radars and SBIRS satellites – the early system will have little, and more likely, no capability against ballistic missiles fired from the Middle East. Nor would it be able to intercept accidental or unauthorised launches from China or Russia, which was the original intention of the Clinton administration's initial operational capability.

 

Prioritising threats

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 surprise terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Bush's decision to concentrate on the putative ballistic missile threat arguably risks neglecting ones that are perhaps more likely. Critics certainly have asked whether accelerated spending on BMD makes good sense in light of growing demands to protect the American homeland against far less sophisticated terrorist means of WMD delivery. While a substantial majority of Americans support measure to defend against ballistic missiles, these polling numbers tend to plummet as soon as the question of such support is framed in terms of alternative choices or possible international consequences. Important, too, is the fact that the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has argued that the United States is less likely to be attacked by an ICBM than an array of other less costly, easier to acquire and more reliable means. One is hinted at in the 17 December plan, which includes additional Patriot PAC-3 and Aegis-based interceptors for short- and medium-range ballistic missiles.

 

Besides furnishing limited area protection for troops overseas, such interceptors could conceivably figure into protecting against shorter-range ballistic missiles launched from cargo ships nears US shores. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has drawn attention to such a threat, claiming that US intelligence has recently observed an unnamed 'outlaw state' attempting to launch a short-range ballistic missile from a ship.

 

Indeed, there are easier and more effective ways to threaten the US homeland than by putting a cumbersome ballistic missile on a boat. Past NIEs have noted the possibility of putting land-attack cruise missiles inside containers on commercial vessels, thousands of which are in the international fleet. Even the large, bulky Silkworm cruise missile easily fits inside a standard 12-metre container.

 

Given that cruise missiles are conservatively at least 10 times more effective in delivering biological weapons, such a course of action would seem more attractive to terrorists than using a ballistic missile. In August 2002, press reports indicated that Rumsfeld had sent the White House a classified memorandum warning of the cruise missile threat and urging an intensified government-wide effort to defend against it. Yet budgetary and bureaucratic attention to the matter pales by comparison with the BMD effort. In spending alone, MDA is requesting $17.5bn for BMD programmes over the next two years, while cruise missile defence programmes remain mired in inter-service rivalries. Only recently has the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) begun evaluating a pilot programme employing an airship for long-range detection and tracking of offshore cruise missile threats. Widening the range of possible threats, general aviation or even recreational airplanes could be converted into unmanned weapons carriers and launched from within the US homeland. While Federal Aviation Administration radars have been linked to NORAD since 11 September 2001, this measure alone does not provide an adequate defence against such a threat.

 

However modest the Bush plan's rudimentary 2004–05 BMD system will prove to be, America's new sense of vulnerability strongly suggests that such an evolutionary programme is likely to gain solid public support. At the same time, unless the Bush administration demonstrates a more even-handed approach that embraces the expansive new array of post-11 September security challenges, it risks being seen as too narrowly focused on traditional threats to the neglect of more likely ones.