February 20, 2018—Space: The Ultimate High Ground!

“We’ve been led astray by viewing space as some kind of a fuzzy panda bear thing; I think the Chinese … the Russians and others, they view space as the ultimate high ground. They are preparing for battle in space.” ~ Admiral Harry Harris, Commander of U.S. Pacific Command, in February 14, 2018 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee

This warning is a welcome wakeup call from Admiral Harris, who is to be our next Ambassador to Australia. He reflects the reality that High Frontier has recognized and advocated for U.S. development since Retired USA Lt. General Danny Graham founded it and The Heritage Foundation published his initial report in 1981. (Click here for President Reagan’s telephone call thanking and congratulating Danny on High Frontier’s 10^th anniversary and recalling his March 23, 1983 speech that launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program.)

Space is truly the “high frontier” and the United States should own it for reasons that all but the dumbest among us should understand intuitively. But we have for too long delayed programs to develop such systems — and now some of our adversaries threaten to overcome us.

Actually, that space-based defenses would be preferred was an important conclusion of Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) studies in the early 1960s. But our technology then was not sufficiently advanced to enable such space based defenses.

President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983 speech challenged America’s scientific and engineering communities to see if technology could not be advanced to build truly effective defenses — and his SDI program demonstrated by the end of 1992 that it was indeed possible including especially with space passed defenses, but political counterforces have since prevailed in preventing the United States from realizing the benefits of those most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems.

Click here for Historian Donald Baucom’s The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles, a space based interceptor system that was the first SDI system concept to be approved (in 1990) by the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) as a Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) for Concept Demonstration and Validation.

It was nearing key demonstrations on my watch as SDI Director, before the Democrat controlled congress and the Clinton administration killed it and all its related technology in early 1993 — as then Defense Secretary Les Aspin memorably said at the time, he “took the stars out of Star Wars.” Click here for previous messages on Brilliant Pebbles, and particularly here for those interested in cost-effective defense, titled “Demand Cost-Effective Defenses and Stay the Course This Time!”

Actually, the Clinton administration killed all efforts actually to build missile defenses for the American people — e.g., it directed the proposals for a MDAP-approved Concept Demonstration and Validation program for a ground based homeland defense be returned to the contractors — unopened, and even cut by 25-percent the previously approved budget of the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems that it claimed was President Clinton’s top priority.

I was pleased that, with considerable help from friends on Capitol Hill, the Aegis BMD efforts begun on my watch as a TMD system concept continued. Such sea-based defenses were one of my key recommendations to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and President Bush in my March 1990 Independent Review of the SDI program.

Thanks to VADM J.D. Williams, then Director of Naval Warfare, the Chief of Naval Operations (ADM Frank Kelso) agreed to take SDI funds to initiate the Aegis BMD program, to be led by then Captain Rod Rempt as a primary SDI TMD system concept.

I had recommended that the focus of the SDI program be redirected from solely a homeland defense focus to a global focus including TMD systems to protect our overseas troops and allies, as well as ground-based homeland defenses and space-based defenses that could defend our homeland as well as our overseas troops and allies. And developing the TMD programs were assigned to me to be integrated into an overall global defense architecture.

We called our redirected SDI concept a Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, or GPALS, system. In particular, it was intended to have better than 95-percent probability to kill all of 200 attacking nuclear armed reentry vehicles — the number that was then under the command of a single Soviet/Russian strategic submarine captain. Click here for previous High Frontier messages that relate to this GPALS concept.

Since most of the earth’s surface is water, it is obvious that sea-based defenses could play a major role in defending not only our overseas troops, friends and allies, but also the United States homeland. But had we advocated that possibility in the 1990s, the arms control community immediately would have killed the system because Article V of the ABM Treaty banned development, testing and deployment of sea based defenses of the homeland. As a TMD concept Aegis BMD gained and retains wide bipartisan and well deserved support.

Regrettably, however, Aegis BMD has remained constrained to the TMD role even though President Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002. I believe the inherent Aegis BMD capabilities are now needed to help defend the U.S. homeland. President Trump’s September 2016 promise (below) suggests we can at last hope to make Aegis BMD “all it can be!”

“We propose to rebuild the key tools of missile defense, starting with the Navy cruisers that are the foundation of our missile defense capabilities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As we expand our Navy toward the goal of 350 ships, we will also procure additional modern destroyers that are designed to handle the missile defense mission in the coming years.” ~ Then Candidate Donald Trump, September 2016 in Philadelphia

Moreover, this welcome initiative would also set the stage for President Trump to return to my full GPALS vision. Given these comments, he is on the right path.

This still unrealized hope would reward the vision I have pursued with a number of colleagues since the mid-1990s. Even after the Clinton administration killed essentially all SDI efforts, a reduced TMD effort enabled Aegis BMD progress with continuing bipartisan support from Capitol Hill. In particular, our interests received a major boost in 1994, when a number of long-time SDI supporters gained support from a congressional majority, led by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) who became Speaker in the new congress.

Dr. Lowell Wood (from Livermore National Laboratories and the prime mover behind SDI’s Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor concept) and I traveled to a RNC meeting in Philadelphia to meet with Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) to urge that a “Team B,” distinct from the continuing Clinton administration, be established at The Heritage Foundation to help lay plans for such a revival, especially in view of Newt Gingrich’s leadership as Speaker. Jack, in turn, persuaded Heritage President Dr. Edwin Feulner to establish such a team, which I was privileged to lead for the next several years as a Heritage Visiting Fellow. The initial Missile Defense Study Team is given below along with our 1995 report cover.

We argued that we should never give the Russians a “veto” over our missile defense programs; and urged the Clinton administration in its negotiations with Russia to pursue a cooperative program that ultimately would include space-based defenses. This would fit with Yeltsin’s January 1991 call that we work together to build a “Joint Global Defense” for the world community, subsequently abandoned by both the U.S. and Russia. In our subsequent 1998 and 1999 reports, we called for the U.S. to declare the ABM Treaty to be “null and void” in the absence of our treaty partner, the Soviet Union, and “to build the best missile defenses that technology permits.”

We also again repeated our observation that our recommended “’first from the sea, then from space” approach would create the most effective, complete and responsible global defense system for the United States.”

This objective wasn’t met during the remainder of the Clinton administration, and we were gratified when President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 — and thought we were on our way to realizing our long sought objective. But we were to be disappointed. We saw no revival of the key SDI programs that had led to “Brilliant Pebbles.”

However, thanks to the efforts of then Assistant Defense Secretary J.D. Crouch and his Deputy Keith Payne, President Bush directed that Aegis BMD system development efforts be continued — but still only for TMD applications, despite its inherent capabilities to provide homeland defense capabilities.

Moreover, key efforts for Aegis BMD to include key SDI technologies pioneered in its Brilliant Pebbles program under Presidents Reagan and Bush-41 were cancelled even though detailed studies by the Navy’s BMD program office had demonstrated how those technologies could enable a much lighter Aegis BMD kill vehicle and provide a much greater defense footprint than was then the Bush-43’s “school solution.”

An exceptional team of engineers and scientists had space qualified those technologies in the mid-1990s on the Clementine Mission conceived as one of the last events on my watch as SDI Director.

That mission employed scavenged Brilliant Pebbles sensors and other technology from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and under program integration leadership from the Naval Research Laboratory, returned to the Moon in the mid-1990s for the first time in a quarter century, mapped the entire Moon’s surface in over a million frames of data in 13-spectral bands, discovered water in the polar regions, and received awards from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.

Lack of Pentagon support put even continuing such research and development out of business and dispersed the technical team that had pioneered this important work. Illustrating again that “no good deed goes unpunished” when it comes to building truly effective defenses.

That same technological capability not only would have enabled a viable sea-based homeland defense, much less expensive and more effective than the ground-based defense that became the Bush-43 hallmark.

In my opinion, it also would have set the stage for reviving the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor program — development of which was no longer constrained in any way after 2002 by the subsequently defunct ABM Treaty. And it would have revitalized our Heritage Team B recommendation “First from the sea, then from space.”

Thanks to support from our Japanese allies — including significant funding, the Navy’s BMD program has developed the systems now deployed on several of their Aegis BMD ships and 35 of ours.

They demanded that the Standard Missile-3 interceptor fit in the existing Aegis infrastructure rather than to develop a new larger diameter interceptor as some of the Pentagon leaders wanted (not the U.S. Navy) — otherwise the cost of those programs would have escalated and the Navy would no doubt have abandoned the program.

(Land based versions, called Aegis Ashore are operational in Romania and Poland — and Japan is reported to be buying two sites to help defend against North Korean ballistic missiles. In addition to making operational the Aegis Ashore system on our test range in Hawaii, we should be deploying Aegis Ashore sites on our military bases around the Gulf of Mexico and perhaps along our East and West Coasts. )

It should be noted that in 2008, the first generation Aegis BMD system was chosen by President Bush as the best system for shooting down a dying National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite, indicating again the inherent capability of the Aegis BMD system to perform a homeland defense mission. A mission still not included in current administration plans — perhaps in the pending Missile Defense Review?

In recalling this important history, it should be recalled that, beginning early in the George W. Bush administration, the Independent Working Group (IWG) was formed under the sponsorship of Dr. R. Danial McMichael of the Scaife Foundation, and led by Drs. Robert Pfaltzgraff and William Van Cleave. The IWG took an important next step beyond the Heritage Team B and critically reviewed the technical and especially political issues that had until then limited the development of effective BMD systems, and continued to do so even during the Bush-43 administration.

Click here for my March 24, 2015 discussion of some of this history, including Clementine and how we got on the wrong track by building the most expensive, least effective BMD systems while sharply curtailing the SDI programs aimed at the most effective, least expensive BMD systems—at sea and in space. And click here for more discussion on the IWG and links to its still pertinent 2007 and 2008 IWG Reports.

Perhaps most notably with respect to ADM Harris’ concerns about China, click here and review Appendix B, which a decade ago discussed how China was obtaining and exploiting SDI cutting edge technology — while we continued to ignore it in our missile defense programs.

Finally, as we await the Missile Defense Review report, it is pertinent again to recall President Trump’s words from his September 2016 speech in Philadelphia:

“We propose to rebuild the key tools of missile defense, starting with the Navy cruisers that are the foundation of our missile defense capabilities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. As we expand our Navy toward the goal of 350 ships, we will also procure additional modern destroyers that are designed to handle the missile defense mission in the coming years.”

At least we survivors of the 1995-97 Heritage Team B effort and the battles of the Clinton, Bush-43 and Obama administrations have reason to hope that maybe, just maybe, our recommendations will be headed this time:

“Global Defense: First from the sea and then from space.”

Bottom Lines:

High Frontier will certainly be pressing the “powers that be” to support President-elect Trump’s stated vision and will do all we can to see it implemented by his administration — including a revival of Ronald Reagan’s original SDI vision.

We await the Missile Defense Review (MDR) — laying out the Trump DoD’s plans for meeting BMD requirements. Hopefully, it will rectify important omissions in the National Defense Security and Nuclear Posture Review that should have dealt with EMP and missile defenses, including especially a role for space based defenses.

Meanwhile, since congress kicked the can on funding the government to March 23^rd, the body politic will probably be distracted from planned festivities on the 35^th anniversary of President Reagan’s speech that initiated the SDI program. But we Reaganites shall surely remember!

Stay tuned.

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