January 22, 2019—Update 1989-90 Brilliant Pebbles Studies!

Brilliant Pebbles, the most important Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) concept from President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), entered a fully approved Concept Development and Validation (DemVal) program in 1990 and was anticipated to cost $20 billion (in today’s dollars) to begin deployment in space within five years and operate for 20 years. Current “powers that be” should make sure new studies take that definitive effort into account to support President Trump’s Space Force initiative.

Last Thursday, the President went to the Pentagon to release and endorse the Missile Defense Review (MDR) that he mandated a couple of years ago. Click here for the full report (large file).

While announcing numerous important conclusions and consequential decisions that are applaudable, the MDR only endorsed the existing Congressional mandate that space-based interceptors be studied — among a number of other studies. That six-month study should include the development and fielding of space based interceptors capable of “boost-phase defense” — long understood (since studies of the early 1960s) to be the most effective way to counter ballistic missiles, before they can release multiple warheads and various countermeasures.

The only question has been whether technology was sufficiently mature and affordable to build a space-based interceptor system to shoot down attacking ballistic missiles, including while their rockets still burn as they rise from their launch pads — a question that was answered positively by numerous “studies” 30 years ago.

Nevertheless, the Arms Control Association and various arms control advocates, including in congress, immediately rejected the MDR interest in space-based defenses as they have done many times before, including during my watch as Director of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) during the George H.W. Bush administration.

Click here for an important 1992 report to congress, still worth reading if you wish to understand the concepts we were pursuing 30 years ago. It discusses the merits of the most important SDI effort, dormant for nearly 30 years. Below is a Figure from page 20, showing that a Brilliant Pebbles system (with 1000 space based interceptors) could intercept North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) beginning in their boost phase and throughout their further flight until after they begin their reentry into the atmosphere over the United States. Over a hundred independent intercept opportunities would be provided. Note numerous intercept opportunities against even relatively short range ballistic missiles would also be provided.

While we had proceeded in the face of congressional opposition, the Clinton administration immediately in early 1993 followed the wishes of the arms controllers in spite of well-established merits of Brilliant Pebbles, the most important and only cost-effective missile defense concept of the SDI era (1982-93).

They will still be a major obstacle to progress today — which will no doubt be supported by uninformed congressional skeptics. In fact, they have in response to the MDR, without even acknowledging previous comprehensive studies to the contrary, claimed such space-based defenses are “unaffordable, unworkable and massively destabilizing.”

Congressional opponents of the most cost-effective product of the SDI era should be regularly reminded of the 1989-90 comprehensive “season of studies,” as it was called by the SDI Historian, Dr. Donald R. Baucom. He wrote the definitive accounting of those days that he witnessed close-up and personal.

Click here (or link to it from the bottom of the High Frontier webpage (www.highfrontier.org) for his “The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles” — published in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Volume 29, Number 2, Summer 2004, pp 143-190.

Baucom’s important paper actually was written and publically presented in time to influence the George W. Bush administration, which ignored it even though President Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, removing arms control constraints that had previously banned the development, testing and deployment of space-based defenses. Politically motivated arms control concerns likely were still a root cause of this reluctance on the part of many who should have known that then existing technology could confidently support building Brilliant Pebbles.

Today’s “powers that be” should not allow a repeat reaction to the MDR six-month review. In particular, President Trump should not allow a repeat performance when considering the Pentagon’s plan to implement his Space Force initiative. Consider a synopsis of Baucom important report, drafted over two decades ago.

He began by noting that, conceptually, the key basic ideas were not new, with references to studies in the early 1960s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which projected that lightweight interceptors, e.g. weighing only 2-pounds, would work just fine to destroy attacking missiles and reentry vehicles. DARPA emphasized the utility of intercepting ballistic missiles in their boost phase, while their rockets still burn and they are most vulnerable — and recognized the importance of meeting stressful cost-challenges in building space based defenses. The only question was when such capabilities could be available.

What was new with Brilliant Pebbles was the impact of advancing technology over the subsequent quarter century — and I would add, most prominently by the private sector, especially with the impact of microprocessors and dramatically increasing computer power that were at the heart of the Brilliant Pebbles concept.

Brilliant Pebbles (BP) was proposed and pursued by physicists and engineers of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL), led by Dr. Lowell Wood with considerable public support from Dr. Edward Teller. They recognized this maturing of technology, especially the rapidly evolving miniaturization of key applications of that technology, perhaps most notably with computers to enable their proposed Brilliant Pebbles constellation and deal with likely offensive countermeasures that enemies might develop.

Dr. Wood’s personal inventory of applicable technologies concluded that autonomous interceptors could be produced using technology that could be bought off-the-shelf, much of it only a little advanced over mass-produced consumer and technical professional electronics: video camcorders, scientific work stations and the like. Though this result was striking enough, it was even more astonishing to total up the likely costs. It seemed likely that a simple, small kinetic kill vehicle seeker package composed of such elements could be mass-produced for a few tens of thousands of dollars. This new interceptor was to “be small, cheap and smart.”

Most important, it would have none of the vulnerabilities that came with big tracking satellites or groups of interceptors housed in orbiting garages. (This reality should be borne in mind as these same garage concepts are again being considered, no doubt for the Pentagon’s anticipated report to congress .)

Lowell argued that BP would be designed to be brilliant, not merely smart, and to have far better than human vision, not just crude imaging systems; so that the defensive system architecture would be simply the BP constellation, and nothing else. No additional space-based sensor system would be required — as later validated by studies on my SDI watch.

Each BP would carry so much prior knowledge and detailed battle strategy-and-tactics, compute so swiftly and see so well that it could perform its purely defensive mission adequately, with no external supervision or coaching. Complexity, durability, reliability and testability issues in such architectures thereby either would simplify to readily manageable levels, or else vanish entirely.

While future BPs could be smaller and lighter, Lowell believed it was then possible to develop an effective Pebble that would weigh between 1.5 and 2.5 kilograms (3.3 and 5.5 pounds), which was about 100 times the mass needed to assure destruction of an armored missile. Note the early 1960s DARPA Project Defender projection the possibility of a future 2-pound kill vehicle — still possible with today’s even more advanced lighter weight technology.

While I urge you to read Baucom’s entire history — and I’m leaving out a lot, most pertinent for our purposes here is his review of the “season of studies” that examined LLNL concepts and related SDI companion efforts. These studies included extensive “red-team” evaluations of the LLNL Brilliant Pebbles concept and its ability to defeat potential future countermeasures and perform as planned. Consider just a brief list of comments:

The Space-Based Element Study (SBES), begun in May 1988 under the leadership of Dr. Charles Infosino, to reevaluate the space based defenses of the evolving overall architecture, and ended up pushing the prior concepts toward the LNLL BP model. In early 1989, General Abrahamson retired and his end of tour (EOT) report strongly endorsed Brilliant Pebbles as the key to an effective, affordable space-based architecture and believed that BP could be operational in five years at a cost of less than $25 billion (for a full blown constellation—several times larger than that advocated on my watch as SDI Director). “This concept,” he wrote, “should be tested within the next two years and, if aggressively pursued, could be ready for initial deployment within 5 years.” Moreover, “once deployment has begun and a competitive industrial base is established, the system could be scaled to higher levels of effectiveness for ever-decreasing incremental costs.”
General Abrahamson’s EOT report came about three weeks before President George Herbert Walker Bush took office on January 20, 1989, and his administration immediately launched a major review of American security requirements including an examination of the structure and objectives of the SDI program and its possible future role in the then emerging security environment. General Monahan then took the SDI helm and proceeded to review and modify the evolving SDI overall system concepts. In June 1989, President Bush’s National Security Directive 14 concluded that the goals of the SDI program remained “sound” strategic defenses” should continue to be a major U.S. response to the “Soviet challenge.”
In this R&D effort, “particular emphasis” was to be placed on “promising concepts for effective boost-phase defenses, for example, ‘Brilliant Pebbles.’” Bush also directed Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney to commission an independent review of the SDI program to see that the goals laid down in NSD-14 were carried out. This independent study was to be completed by 15 September 1989, but it was after leaving the Defense and Space Talks that I was chartered to conduct this study, and my March 15, 1990 report strongly endorsed the Brilliant Pebbles concept. My conclusions were based not only on my brief review, but on input from several other reviews led by General Monahan, as discussed by Baucom. By May 1989, these studies included two technical feasibility studies by outside advisers, a Red/Blue evaluation to judge how well BP would deal with Soviet countermeasures, and a “bottom up” cost estimate.
One of the most important technical feasibility studies was conducted by JASON, a group of America’s top scientists, who work under the aegis of MITRE Corporation and advise government agencies on defense and other technical issues. This study, during June and July of 1989 focused on the technical feasibility of BP’s component technology and of its battle management command, control and communications (BMC3) system. The JASONs also examined other interceptor concepts for comparison purposes and concluded that there were no technological “showstoppers” or fatal flaws in the BP concept; and that the Brilliant Pebbles interceptor could probably be produced using then current technology, although a better BP interceptor could be produced with technologies that were just a couple of years downstream. (Note this was 19 years ago.) Their final report also noted several problems needed to be addressed: Performance of readily-available technology; lack of hardness of commercial technology against a nuclear environment; and serious countermeasures threats.
Even with such qualifications and suggestions for further analysis, the JASONs observed that BP’s general concept of autonomous interceptor operation offered important advantages, among them that no additional space sensor support might be required since “the extra constellation size needed (because of inefficiencies in selecting targets autonomously compared to central battle management) is likely to be less costly than the central battle manager, and, of course, avoids reliance on a small number of high-value or essential components which are hard to defend. This observation should receive weight in the context of the current wide support for space sensors to support our terrestrial bound BMD systems.
Overlapping the JASON study, the Defense Science Board (DSB), established a Brilliant Pebbles Task Force to review the BP concept, which met six times between June and September with the various other groups, including the JASONs. Its report at the end of December 1989, like the JASONs, concluded that BP faced some technical problems that would have to be overcome, but found no fundamental flaws with the concept. In fact, the DSB noted that the design of BP had thus far been examined by a number of competent and independent groups that had pointed to several areas for possible improvement, but found no fundamental flaws had been uncovered.
Another evaluation of Brilliant Pebbles was a Red-Blue interactive countermeasures exercise completed in two formal phases in 1989 — in July-August and September-October — concluding that BP would be subject to the same countermeasures faced by all space-based elements in the SDI architecture, but faced no special problems in this area. The study’s major recommendation was that survivability features should be built into the BP system.
Cost studies were also conducted for the complete SDI architecture at the time, which included a much larger BP constellation that is of current concern. More pertinent for our current considerations are subsequent cost estimates that bear on the BP constellation that actually entered into a formal Defense Acquisition Program sized for the mission recommended in my March 15, 1990 Independent Review, as also discussed by Baucom. Just over a month earlier General Monahan accompanied President George H.W. Bush to LLNL, during which Lowell Wood briefed on BP and the president gave LLNL and the BP program a boost, lauding America’s national laboratories for “developing technologies to strengthen deterrence through strategic defenses.” Among the most promising of these new technologies, he said was Brilliant Pebbles.
Following my March 15, 1990 independent review (recommending a global defense concept including Theater Missile Defense (TMD) as well as homeland defense systems and an overlay BP system that could do both), Secretary Dick Cheney asked me to become SDI Director and “make it happen.” And the studies continued with that construct as General Monahan’s primary focus, now focused on Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) reviews. He chartered the Terminal Tiers Review (MATTR) in the Spring of 1990, which continued into my SDI watch that began in June 1990. Prior to then, Defense Acquisition Executive Betti approved my recommended (Protection Against Limited Strikes) PALS, later Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS), architecture. At that stage, the estimated cost of the 1000 BP constellation was $11 billion in 1991 dollars.
On January 3, 1991, two weeks before the beginning of the first Gulf War, I joined a full blown briefing of GPALS to President Bush in the White House Situation Room. During that war and the Scud-Patriot duel, leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee — Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and John Warner (R-VA), actually experienced a Scud raid while visiting Israel. Thus, it was not surprising that the combined houses of Congress applauded President Bush on 29 January 29, 1991 when he announced in his State of the Union Address that the focus of SDI was shifting to the GPALS architecture, saying: “I have directed that the SDI program be refocused on providing protection from limited ballistic missile strikes – whatever their source. Let us pursue an SDI program that can deal with any future threat to the United States, to our forces overseas, and to our friends and allies.”
Shortly thereafter—on February 12, 1991, Assistant Secretary of Defense Steve Hadley and I gave a Pentagon press briefing on GPALS. Click here for the annotated briefing (rotate for ease of reading). I then briefed that research, development, testing, deployment and operations for 20 years was expected to cost about $10 billion in 1988 dollars, approximately the same as the $11 billion I had briefed to Secretary Cheney in my March 15, 1990 independent review prior to the completion of several studies. Either case inflates to about $20 billion today — and that estimate counts deployment and operations for 20 years. Today’s cost should be less because of the technology developments over the past 20 years.

This Brilliant Pebbles constellation would have a very high probability of intercepting all of an attack (well over 95-percent likelihood) from a few hundred nuclear reentry vehicles. Such intercepts could occur:

In the “boost phase” of the attacking missiles, while their rockets are burning and they are easy targets;
During their much longer mid-course phase above the earth’s atmosphere, provided they are able to defeat the attacking missiles’ penetration aids; and
Upon reentry into the upper atmosphere as those decoys and other penetration aids are stripped away.

The MDR’s mandated Pentagon review of the space-based interceptors should at a minimum take these original studies into account — without any significant weight given to more recent less competent and informed reviews. The records should have been kept somewhere.

Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin was one of the SDI’s major technology contributors before and during Baucom’s “season of studies”—and he was my first Deputy for Technology. His views should be given overwhelming weight in assessing the advances since the early 1993, when the biases of the arms control community “took the stars out of Star Wars,” as boasted by then Defense Secretary Les Aspin.

Since he served with the first three SDI Directors and the Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO) (who had to pick up the pieces after the Clinton administration scuttled the most advanced SDI activities), he well understands this full history and the fact that these former directors of what naw is called the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) were advocates of Brilliant Pebbles back then and are still today—and they will stand behind his claim that we can build a modern Brilliant Pebbles system for $20 billion. After all, he was Deputy SDI Director for Technology during the era that advanced the Brilliant Pebbles program to become the first SDI concept to be fully approved by the Pentagon’s top acquisition executive to enter a formal Demonstration and Validation (DemVal) program, and his claim’s validity is illustrated by at least three articles by key personnel who lived through the formative years that underpin his 30-year old estimate:

USAF Retired Lt. General James A. Abrahamson (the first SDI Director who began the Brilliant Pebbles over 30-years ago as a special access program) joined me in two articles. Click here for our July 21, 2017 Wall Street Journal Letter to the Editor rebutting a previous Journal article that claimed greatly exaggerated (by a factor of 5-10) the costs for building space-based interceptors today and click here for our August 14, 2017 Newsmax article further elaborating this important point. There is little doubt that, were he still alive, the second SDI Director USAF Lt. General George Monahan would have joined us — since he led the efforts involving numerous expert technical reviews that supported Brilliant Pebbles becoming the first SDI effort to be approved by the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) to enter a DemVal phase.
Earlier, I joined three others who lived through and well understand the pertinent history, and believe we should replicate that history with today’s technology to provide even more cost-effective space-based defenses, based on the same Brilliant Pebbles approach. Click here for our November 29, 2016 National Review article, “How Trump Can Fulfill Reagan’s Defense Vision.” Retired USA Lieutenant General Malcolm R. O’Neill, who was my Deputy SDI Director, then Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, and subsequently Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology. A first rate Physicist, Mal also was in charge of Kinetic Interceptor programs on General Abrahamson’s SDI watch and in charge of the early most important technology demonstrations undergirding the Brilliant Pebbles approach. Colonel Rowland “Rhip” H. Worrell, USAF (Ret.) was Director of the SDI Brilliant Pebbles Task Force that managed the Brilliant Pebbles acquisition effort narrowing the field from six competing companies to two engaged in a fully approved DemVal program—including validated cost estimates. Subsequently Rhip served as Director of the National Test Facility Joint Program Office, and Vice Commander of the USAF Space Warfare Center. Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr. is president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA), Inc., and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, and chairman of the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, which documented in substantial detail the political and technical issues that derailed the entire SDI effort and especially the sidelining of the most cost-effective product of the SDI era.

Moreover, the award winning (from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences) Clementine mission that returned to the Moon for the first time in a quarter century, space-qualified all key Brilliant Pebbles technology except for the light-weight miniature propulsion system — and that capability was also demonstrated on an Astrid flight test in 1994.

With the award-winning publication of the scientific fruits of the Clementine mission early in 1994-5, it seemed reasonable to expect that DoD would permit follow-on work to proceed toward realization of a set of advanced technologies useful in a wide variety of DoD spacecraft. However, President Clinton employed his short-lived line-item veto to de-fund all Clementine follow-on work — Congressionally “earmarked” funding had kept the program proceeding at a minimal level on a year-by-year basis up until that point — with the cognizant White House staffer, Robert Bell, proclaiming to a press conference that this represented the final termination of the Brilliant Pebbles program.

Thus, the arms controllers prevailed. When the line-item veto was overturned by a Supreme Court decision, the Clinton administration’s Air Force officials proceeded to re-program the Congressionally-earmarked funds to other purposes, and that legacy of Clementine died – and so ended the Pentagon’s deliberate efforts to advance key technology that would support effective space-based defenses.

Nevertheless, Clementine demonstrated that a first-of-a-kind, very high-performance deep space mission can be controlled by a mission control center crew of typically two people (in marked contrast to the many dozens of staff characteristic of NASA missions of comparable complexity). And the private sector applied Brilliant Pebbles concepts in the Iridium communication system, which has validated that complex operations of large constellations of sophisticated spacecraft can be controlled, year-after-year, literally by a handful of staff supported by highly automated expert system control software.

Bottom Lines.

The above facts should be accounted for in the studies of space based defenses mandated by the Missile Defense Review. Remember that the total life-cycle-validated cost-estimates for the Bush-41 Brilliant Pebbles deployment, including all of its RDT&E expenses, all of its production and launch costs, all of its operational and testing costs for 20 years — plus complete replacement of the constellation (involving the orbiting of another 1000 pebbles) — would translate to about $20 billion today, just as Mike Griffin has claimed.

The MDR-mandated study should also account for the advances in the private sector that illustrate current technology can accomplish this objective — e.g., the FCC-approved a SpaceX plan to begin, by 2024, launching 4,425 broadband satellites — a telecommunications application to make money. This initiative is reminiscent of the Iridium efforts that exploited Brilliant Pebbles’ concepts and technology more directly.

When President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002, I hoped in vain that his administration would also return to the most cost-effective concept developed during the SDI era (1983-93), Brilliant Pebbles. Alas, it did not; and instead invested in the most expensive defense concepts — as discussed by the Independent Working Group (IWG) during that period. Click here for those 2007 and 2008 IWG reports.

Hopefully, the MDR will set this record straight. Brilliant Pebbles was the most cost-effective product of the SDI era (1983-93). It was “ready for prime time” in 1990, and should be re-invented ASAP. A great team is forming in the Pentagon that could revive the best of the SDI era and move beyond those advances, based on all that has happened since it ended a quarter century ago.

So, what will President Trump do? Stay tuned for his anticipated Space Force and its “birth pains.”

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

Click here to make a tax deductible gift. If you prefer to mail a check, Please send it to 500 North Washington Street, Alexandria, VA 22314.

E-Mail Message 190122