Posted on 09/03/2006 3:28:46 PM PDT by Paul Ross
Lost in Space
By Henry F. Cooper and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr.,
The Wall Street Journal, reprinted in Missile Threat.com in toto, August 31, 2006
Consider the implications of North Korea's July 4 missile tests. While the Taepondong-2 failed, Pyongyang has already demonstrated (in 1998) that it can launch long-range rockets. Meanwhile, the six short- and medium-range missiles it successfully tested can be sold to other rogue states and terrorists -- who could launch them at us from ships off our coasts.
When North Korea launched its missiles in July, what President Bush has properly termed our "modest" missile-defense system was activated -- but it included no protection against this short-range threat to the three-quarters of all Americans living within 200 miles of our coasts. Indeed, if a nuclear warhead on just one missile, launched from a ship off our coast, was detonated at an altitude of 100 kilometers, the electromagnetic pulse would have devastating consequences for critical infrastructures such as telecommunications, finance, fuel/energy, transportation, food and water supply, energy resources and space systems.
* * *
The blunt truth is that, since withdrawing from the ABM Treaty in 2002, the U.S. has not done enough to protect the nation from the threat of missiles. The Pentagon is improving ground-based interceptor systems, but it is not fully exploiting other interceptor-basing modes. Sea-based defenses, for example, remain focused on defending our overseas troops, allies and friends against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles—without using their inherent potential also to shoot down ballistic missiles aimed at the U.S. homeland.
Nevertheless, our continuing vulnerability to missile attack is the result of easily reversible past choices. Japan and the U.S., for example, are jointly developing sea-based missile defenses against short- and medium-range missiles; three U.S. ships equipped to shoot down these missiles will be operating in or near the Sea of Japan later this year. With a $25 million software improvement, these same ships can shoot down North Korean intercontinental-range missiles early in their ascent phase—long before ground-based interceptors in Alaska or California. And if ships operating near our coasts are similarly equipped, they could shoot down short- and medium-range missiles launched by terrorists from ships off our coasts.
We have already made an $80 billion investment in over 80 Aegis ships now at sea around the world that have the ability to shoot down cruise missiles. A minimal additional investment can enable them to shoot down ballistic missiles: Outfitting a single ship costs $100 million ($20 million for support systems and $80 million for eight interceptors). There is no better investment in near-term missile-defense capability.
As the administration has acknowledged, current missile defenses represent only a “starting point” for building improved capabilities. But rather than just marginally improving systems that evolved from the ABM Treaty era, missile-defense designers should start from the basics.
The authors participated in an Independent Working Group that for the last five years considered these issues in depth. Our full report, “Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the 21st Century,” is available at www.ifpa.org/pdf/IWGreport.pdf1. Here, we emphasize several points:
Political factors have dictated technical behavior, subordinating the development of the most technically sound and cost-effective defenses. The problem transcends administrations and political parties; it reflects the unprecedented political opposition that has been mounted against effective missile defenses over the past five decades. The most technologically feasible global defense—space-based—has not been politically acceptable, because of concerns about the “weaponization of space.” This is a dubious argument that ignores history, and the current efforts of other states to weaponize space. But the result is to leave us with a ground-based defense that is politically the most acceptable but technologically the least effective.
• Missile-defense systems should protect us against more than just small rogue states. We should make it virtually impossible for any adversary—rogue states, non-state actors and larger strategic competitors—to influence U.S. decisions, or the course of regional conflicts, by threatening to launch missiles with nuclear weapons against the U.S., its deployed forces or its allies.
Since we cannot be certain where or when a missile will be launched against us, we need a continuously ready, global, multilayered system to provide multiple shots at attacking missiles and their warheads in all their phases of flight—boost, midcourse and terminal. Such defenses make an attack more expensive, and therefore less attractive for enemies to buy the technologies to overcome them. The ABM Treaty era showed that it is the absence of defenses, rather than their presence, that encourages the development of offensive technologies.
• Ground-based defenses can protect specific territory; sea-based defenses can more flexibly defend larger areas for less money. Neither provides global protection. Only space-based systems can provide a truly global defense. The U.S. needs a streamlined development program to build space-based interceptors for boost-, midcourse- and terminal-phase interdiction—and to begin deployment of these interceptors by 2010.
Because of Ronald Reagan’s interest in research on all ballistic missile-defense concepts, his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) explored all possible concepts and pursued major technology initiatives, in order to underwrite those most effective. By the end of his administration, it was clear that a space-based interceptor system, “Brilliant Pebbles,” could meet even the strict so-called Nitze criteria (survivability under direct attack and cost-effectiveness at the margin as compared to investments in attacking missiles).
This interceptor system consisted of a constellation of very lightweight satellites (each about the size of a watermelon) that would continuously monitor the Earth below and detect any missile launch within its field of view. The satellite with the best intercept opportunity would release a Brilliant Pebble (weighing a few pounds) that maneuvers into the path of the oncoming missile or its payload and destroys it by impact. All key technologies were proven by the mid-1990s; today’s technology is more advanced and could intercept even short-range Scuds in their boost phase.
Brilliant Pebbles was approved in 1990; the Pentagon’s independent costing agency estimated acquisition and 20-year operations costs at $11 billion in 1990 dollars, or about $16 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. It would have been far more capable than all other missile-defense concepts pursued since then—at many times that cost—but political considerations killed Brilliant Pebbles in 1993. Even the supporting technology programs were cancelled and the technologists dispersed—so those most important products from the $30-billion SDI investment were lost.
* * *
Today the U.S. should make deployment of a multilayered missile defense, including space-based systems, an urgent priority. We should complete the ground-based sites in Alaska and California—but build no additional ground-based sites. Limited resources are better spent to meet emerging threats by building the more cost-effective (sea- and space-based) missile components.
Great advances in technology have resulted when visionary and persistent leaders, supported by competent scientists and engineers and set apart from the normal acquisition bureaucracy, are given the necessary resources to prove new ideas can and will work. This recipe should again be employed to revive cutting-edge technologies demonstrated over a decade ago—and to build the defenses we need in the 21st century.
_______________________________
Mr. Cooper, former director of the SDI and chief U.S. negotiator to the Geneva Space and Defense Talks, is chairman of High Frontier, a missile defense advocacy group. Mr. Pfaltzgraff is president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
While the article points out a valid threat from short range offshore missiles, it does not promote a valid defense. Unless you are willing to put 10,000 ships off our shores with short range missile defense systems thereby making our navy impossibly large, there is no way to protect from this threat.
The best way to protect ourselves from this threat is to destroy those nations that are a threat instead of trying to make trade partners with them and inviting them to send ships off of our shores.
Get a Dummycrat in office for the next president, and look forward to much smaller tax base.
Indeed.
it does not promote a valid defense. Unless you are willing to put 10,000 ships off our shores with short range missile defense systems thereby making our navy impossibly large, there is no way to protect from this threat.
Wrong. First it is recommending Brilliant Pebbles...which was killed by Clinton for purely ideological axe-grinding reasons. It also envisions about 22 NMD-dedicated ships with a FIXED SM-3 FlightIIa (drastically increasing range and closing velocity)...and uprating the other 80+ Aegis ships so they could supplement in a pinch...all could do the job. Their range would be a start, and later on TBMD or the KEI Kinetic Energy Interceptor would be added to the very same ships with more than twice their range. Deployed in conjunction with a reasonable screen of PAC-3s and THAAD city defenses...that we should already have deployed to deal with the high and low air threats such as cruise missile threats, we can have some confidence against essentailly all sporadic "anonymous" attacks.
And the thicker the BP screen is made, the more robust it will be against the ICBM threat from our "friends and trade partners"
The best way to protect ourselves from this threat is to destroy those nations that are a threat
In principle, (the best defense is a good offense) Agreed. But that isn't happening...or ever going to happen. Plus, these threats are near-term, not just long...and they are not being adquately recognized as such by the decision makers that are obstructing. Our RINO-In-Chief is too squeamish and "compassionate."
..instead of trying to make trade partners with them and inviting them to send ships off of our shores.
I'm with you on that..keeping a reasonable perimeter and forcing US-only transipments to protect ourselves. But again, that isn't going to happen...unfortunately. W thinks that such an aggressive approach is a retreat, and cowardice. And he is totally wedded to dressing up Thomas Barnett's trade "entanglement" theology as a "strategy".
Thanks for the ping!
Agreed.
I think to an extent we are already seeing that, however. We are seeing W RINO/RAT-policies in action. He is procrastinating...interfering with Rumsfeld's own desires to deploy... to an extreme extent. I am frankly surprised he has not resigned in protest yet.
An early Aegis defense could have been fully tested and deployed in ONE YEAR from when he took office...and the 22 NMD-dedicated ships put on order. Instead, he has had it all on the back-burner. Saying "no" to TBMD, KEI, and SM-3 FlightIIa, or the 22 NMD-Aegis ships...or Rumsfeld's staff reviving Brilliant Pebbles [they recognized that BP would be a far cheaper...and more robust... alternative to GBI].
W's naval ship procurements rate is precisely one-half of what the traitor Bill Clinton had. W came in with a Navy of 344 ships. It has been forcibly reduced...in war time...to 281 ships. At the current build rate, the Navy will collapse to only 180 ships. He is openly having think tanks justify a 9-carrier fleet. He is allowing to be retired without any alternative replacement all the S-3 Viking ASW planes and the F-14 air-superiority fighters (the F-18 cannot and does not replace the F-14). China will surpass our Navy by 2015. He has retired many ships with most of their service life unused, and his bean-counters have openly started talking about retiring older Aegis ships.
Remember the old saw, that "Only Nixon could go to China." Likewise today...what else CAN we think of him? Only W can destroy our Navy and Air Forces the way the Xlintons WANTED to.
I think it is viable. The support for missile defense is now overwhelming. The public only needs to be educated as to why their demands for defense are being frustrated by political interference and sabotage...and who to vote against...and who among NMD's "friends" to scream at, breathing Hellfire and Damnation.
We need that same visceral national groundswell, which the Illegal Amnesty crowd was torpedoed by, to get Medieval on our political lizards.
We need to make this a "litmus test" issue in '06 before its too late. I don't think we have the luxury of much time at all anymore. Note how the Iranian's wacked Israel with their proxy firing Katyushas with near-impunity...before Israel could get around to deploying THEL [on the back-burner for deployment, in what, two years?], which would have mopped up the threat. This guy is more observant and cunning than we are giving him credit for:
Argentina but not Venezuela?
Huh?
Spend a couple of trillion defending against intermediate range missiles and a couple of jihadists poison our water for less than a couple of million. I think there’s an optimal amount to devote to defense before the law of diminishing returns sets in.
We’re always going to be wasting money fighting an entrenched leftists opposition to progress unless we make a foundational change. I’d rather spend those two trillion on vouchers so that parents can choose whether to indoctrinate or educate their kids and enable the maturing product to change the electorate.
If they could have poisoned the water they would have done so. BTW, that's one of the reasons we have such elaborate municipal water works ~ to make the water safe.
I think al-Qaeda’s capable of neither now, but Iran could if they chose. It would be suicide, and still not have the propaganda value as nuclear missiles, so they don’t.
Water works security helps, but there are ways around it. If not water, public events. Fortunately, people willing to do this generally must also be inept in so many ways that they’re challenged to get it done and are relatively easy to disrupt.
AlQaida and their associates have been depending for the most part on mentally incompetent or damaged people. The Middle East has a near infinite supply of such types ~ mostly from centuries of marrying their first cousins.
Yeah, communist, but still not armed with the missile capabilities yet, which is all the map depicts.
True or not, sometimes less is more.
Very compelling. Thank you for the map!
Great responses, I was not aware that Bush had continued the destruction of the US Navy that Clintoon had started.
If the New World Order is such a strong solution to Mankinds "problems" why must the worlds petri dish be sterilized for it to take hold? In short, it is becoming obvious that America is being destroyed so the Globalists might make their new Utiopia.
Only one thing can show the weakness of the Socialistic Utopia, Free men.
Bump for Liberty.
Get 'em on record either answering why they are doing what they are doing...or ducking the question anyways...which is an answer of sorts too...an inferential admission...
Time to restore loyal..unapologetic... patriots to our leadership...and hound the rascals out.
I like to dwell on Reagan's conception of our liberty, and the source of it. It reminds me again why the effort of the Bush's to resurrect the empire of Babel will not only fail of its purpose but produce global calamity and tyranny of a scope heretofore only imagined:
The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight. Its discovery was the great triumph of our Founding Fathers, voiced by William Penn when he said: "If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants." Explaining the inalienable rights of men, Jefferson said, "The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time." And it was George Washington who said that "of all the disposition and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supporters."And finally, that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America's greatness and genius - and he said: "Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America . . . America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."
America is in the way of the New World Order and will have to be "sacraficed" to make way for their Utopian ideas of a pyramid of peons serving the powerful.
Free men make lousy peons anyway. So the reason that morality has been so carefully destroyed in America by years of Situational ethics comedy classes on TV and enforcing the Humanistic State Religion is to break the moral of the Nation. The first step to destroy your enemy in the field of battle is break their moral.
The new world order will ultimatly exist for a short time only, just to hand its power over to a new charismatic world leader who will turn on the NWO guys and destroy them to protect his power base.
The usurper king often has a violent purge to eliminate rivals. He will then create a very structured society that gives bread and circuses to the loyal and starves the disidents. His purge of society in general will kill off incredible ammounts of people. For a "sustainable ecology" of course. You only need so many servants...
This is the story told by the Book of Revelations. It is amazing how a guy two thousand years ago could have figured this all out eh?
The problem posed is short range missiles fired off shore to destroy coastal cities. The physics of the problem is that the missiles fired even at sub Mach speeds fly only say 200 miles. If you put an anti defense missile system,(on shore of course, off shore is an unnecessary expense), the spacing of the defensive batteries becomes a problem. If you put them every say 100 miles you have to intercept at above mach speeds just to catch up with the missile, plus the distance to the missile from the launch point, plus the reaction time to determine the validity of the alert.
For example, if fired from off shore of the entrance to the San Francisco bay, into the SF harbor at the speed of an airplane not a missile, the distance to travel is 360 miles an hour, going three miles, a minute, so your interceptor at say Mare Island in Vallejo would have to travel 50 miles 15 times the speed of a plane. Impossible.
The only way to protect would be to place launchers every 50 miles or so and write off the cities that were within three miles of the ocean, virtualy all of them. (Three miles chosen as international waters.)
It is impossible to make a screen dense enough to stop all off shore missiles fired from the three mile limit, and then that is assuming that our enemies would even honor the three mile limit. What about launching from withing the harbor of the city itself?
So, the premise of missile defense is not a complete answer. Besides most nations will use a terrorist proxy and not use a missile delivery system in the first place.
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