Brilliant Pebbles (BP), the most important Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) concept developed by President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), was canceled by the Clinton Administration for ideological reasons and has been ignored ever since. If resurrected by President Trump’s Space Force and supported by Congress, it could begin deployment in space within five years and operate for 20 years for a total cost of $20 billion or less.

Numerous so-called experts claim that developing and building modern space-based interceptor systems would require many years and be excessively expensive.  At best, they are uninformed.

For example, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering has been criticized for his claim that we could build such a system for $20 billion.  These critics may not have known that Dr. Mike Griffin supported the SDI with major technology contributions while at the Applied Physics Laboratory and later as 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). His claim was well founded as 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.

To provide more detailed background, consider four questions:

• What was done 30 years ago?
• Why was that technology banished and ignored for 30 years?
• Why should you believe it is relevant today?
• What should be done today?

What happened during the SDI era. 

Perhaps the best way to review this history, is to consult the documentation of the SDI Historian of the days that witnessed those important events, Dr. Donald R. Baucom.  Click here (or link to it from the bottom of the High Frontier webpage (www.highfrontier.org) for his authoritative first hand historical account of most of the key events, “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 began his review by noting that, conceptually, the basic ideas were not new.  In the early 1960s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in its Project Defender, projected that lightweight, e.g. weighing only 2-pounds, would work just fine to destroy attacking missiles and reentry vehicles.  Moreover, 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.

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 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.)

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 of a 2-pound kill vehicle. 

While I urge you to read Baucom’s entire history — and I’m leaving our 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 over 29 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. 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 — for research, development, testing and 20 years of operations.
• 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 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 (in 1991 dollars) 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 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.

So How Did We Develop Corporate Amnesia?

This recounting makes one wonder how we went so far astray over the last quarter century. 

The short answer is that at the outset of the Clinton administration in 1993, the fundamental policy reverted from one favorable to ballistic missile defenses and protecting the American people from missile attack back to one that placed primary reliance on mutual assured destruction (MAD).  And the Clinton administration was adamant about it — claiming, as had the Soviets throughout the Reagan and most of the GHW Bush years, that the ABM Treaty was “the cornerstone of strategic stability.”  In January 1992, Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin proposed at the UN that SDI should take advantage of Russian technology and that we work together to build a global defense for the world community — essentially accepting President Reagan’s direction that I had defended in the Geneva Defense and Space Talks for almost five years. Regrettably, the GHW Bush administration did not conclude negotiations on that objective, and the Clinton administration scuttled all related SDI efforts in in early 1993.

This cancellation certainly was not because of cost considerations or technology limitations.  That it was quite deliberate was subsequently made clear by the White House spokesman, NSC staffer Robert Bell who was responsible for missile defense matters. He explained why President Bill Clinton used his temporary (it turned out un-Constitutional) Line Item Veto to kill a follow-on to the award winning Clementine mission (discussed below) that returned to the Moon for the first time in a quarter century, mapping its surface in 13 spectral bands (more data than the entire Apollo program).  He explained it was a “Star Wars” technology application — indeed Clementine space-validated the Brilliant Pebbles sensor suite required to satisfy the above mentioned Red-Blue (measure-countermeasure) studies from Baucom’s “season of studies.” See below for more on this important mission that earned awards from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences—and an honored place in the Smithsonian. 

The lead-up to this cancellation of the Clementine follow-on was also discussed by Former SDI Historian, Donald Baucom.  He describes in considerable detail how Brilliant Pebbles was derailed by congressmen and senators who opposed all space-based defenses and instead emphasized that U.S. homeland defenses be limited to those less cost-effective defenses permitted by the ABM Treaty.  See in particular pages 172 – 183 which includes (beginning on page 176) an April 9, 1992 Senate Arms Services Committee (SASC) hearing when Chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA) made his views abundantly clear to me in opposing the BP DemVal program that had been approved the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board (DAB).

Subsequently on August 9 in the floor debate on the National Defense Authorization Act for 1992, he was joined especially by future SASC Chairman Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), in cutting the budget and directing that the BP effort be reduced to a research program status.  This redirection of previously approved BP efforts ultimately forecast the end of the road for BP. Even so, the Bush-41 administration’s strong support for SDI led Congress to appropriate $300 million for BP in 1992 — nearly $600 million in today’s dollars.

Nevertheless, that experience sent a clear message (at least to me) that even if the President Bush were to win re-election in November 1992, the Democrats were going to do their best to kill even the residue of the Brilliant Pebbles program, in my judgment the most cost-effective product of the Reagan/GHW Bush SDI era. 

As Baucom noted, I had in January 1992 already set out to find a “politically correct” way to assure key BP technology could be demonstrated in space — and the Democrats on Capitol Hill reinforced that perspective.  That concern led us to initiate the Clementine program jointly supported by NASA and its administrator Dr. Dan Goldin, who had led the BP DemVal program at TRW — one of the two DemVal contractors selected (the other was Martin Marietta) from a competition of six contractor teams. 

Clementine was so-named named to reflect its mission: To return to the Moon for the first time in a quarter century, to go into Lunar orbit, while its sensors (actually scavenged early Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) variants of BP sensors being developed to meet the Red Team countermeasure challenges mentioned above) capturing images of the Moon’s surface (1.8 million frames in 13 spectral bands it turned out) and then to sling-shot path back by the Earth on its way to a deep-space asteroid and to go into orbit around the Sun — and then be “lost and gone forever,” in the words of the ballad. 

Clementine’s subsequent extraordinarily successful mission — conducted by a very small team of physicists and engineers from SDI, the Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) and LLNL — was also discussed by Don Baucom on pages 185-189.  The Clementine mission space-qualified all the sensors included in Baucom “season of studies” had identified as being were to assure Brilliant Pebbles could deal with all then conceived offensive countermeasures. And as Baucom noted it also validated the LLNL approach of exploiting the technology from the commercial, rather than the military, sector — a lesson again pertinent today.

That these preparations were well justified was made explicitly clear in early 1993 when the former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Les Aspin, as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, “took the stars out of Star Wars” by killing the BP effort entirely and dispersing the technology and its technologists and apparently even purging the files since there seems to be corporate ignorance in the Pentagon as to what was achieved a quarter century ago. 

Notably, an April 1994 report by the DoD Inspec­tor General, during the Clinton administration, noted that this fully-approved, Major Defense Acquisition Program — the SDI’s first — had been managed “efficiently and cost-effectively within funding constraints imposed by Congress” and the termination of key contracts “was not a reflection on the quality of program management.”

To augment Baucom’s history, I encourage the reader to consider Appendix I of the Independent Working Group (IWG) report , Missile Defense, The Space Relationship and The Twenty First Century.  Appendix I was largely based on contributions by Drs. Lowell Wood, Ed English, Lyn Pleasance and Arno Ledebuhr, key LLNL principals in con­ducting the Brilliant Pebbles and Clementine programs — and also knowledgeable of Motorola’s Iridium communication satellite system, which exploited Brilliant Pebbles’ concepts. Click here for this 2009 IWG report and scroll to Appendix I, which begins by noting:

 “Since withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, the United States is no longer legally pre­cluded from acquiring highly effective space-based inter­ceptor defenses, moreover in a very short time-interval. The primary impediment to doing so arises from lack of political will, rather than difficult or costly technical challenges. The needed technology was developed during the Reagan and Bush-41 administrations (1984-1992), was abandoned by the Clinton administration in 1993, and has not yet been revived. At best, there have been hints that the current administra­tion may initiate a plan to begin a “space-based testbed” in a future administration, sometime in the next decade.

“Such plans often reflect a false view that space-based in­terceptor systems are much more complex and costly — or less “technically ready” — than ground-based defenses, which are the primary focus of ongoing missile defense programs. But that premise does not square with history, which should be reviewed from time to time to make clear that the choice for not giving the American people the benefits of space-based defenses is purely a political decision — made quite delib­erately by the past two administrations, indicating the bi­partisan nature of the political aversion to building effec­tive space-based defenses.”

And of course, the Obama administration did nothing for the next eight years.  Thus, it has now been a quarter century since there was any serious consideration of space-based defenses such as was demonstrated by the BP effort. And today’s question is “Will the Trump administration be different?”

Following these introductory comments, the subsequent IWG discussion, based on the LLNL contingent’s inputs, briefly traced the evolution of space-based interceptors during the SDI era and technology demonstrations through the mid-1990s, when all the needed technologies were demonstrated especially via the Clementine program, such that there can be little objective doubt of the SDI claims for space-based interceptor systems.

Clementine’s implementation and mission-execution reflected a basic division of labor between NRL and LLNL. NRL built the Clementine spacecraft, inte­grating into it then-state-of-the-art technologies useful Brilliant Peb­bles sensor suite to accommodate different and to some degree more demanding conditions of the ex­tended Clementine space mission. Though heavier than BPs, the mass of the more extensive sensor suite still compared very favorably to the far lower-performance ones of the kill vehicles of current missile defense systems.

Remarkably severe budgetary stringencies and the un­precedentedly fast pace of the Clementine mission com­pelled creation of spacecraft-controlling software through­out virtually all of the mission, with required software often delivered to the spacecraft mere days before its mission-critical use — another Clementine ‘first’. This unique “just in time” mode of software delivery worked spectacularly well for the first 7 months of the remarkably-complex mission, but resulted in a crucial failure after the main portion of the mission — the Lunar mapping — had been completed, just be­fore the asteroid “near-miss” in deep space could be attempted.

The Clementine spacecraft was in circumsolar orbit and operational in 2009 when contacted by NASA’s Deep Space Network, more than a year after mis­sion-termination. In recognition of its many unique features and singular accomplishments, Clementine’s flight back-up spacecraft is on permanent display in the Lunar Alcove of the National Air and Space Museum, at the upper left next to the Lunar Lander. And the small SDI/NRL/LLNL team received well deserved awards from NASA and the National Academy of Sciences.

Most notably, Clementine space-qualified all Brilliant Peb­bles technology except for the light-weight miniature pro­pulsion system — and that capability was demonstrated on an Astrid flight test in 1994. The Astrid flight-test series employed a 21 kg fully fueled ground-launched rocket using 3rd generation Brilliant Pebbles pro­pulsion hardware. A lightweight titanium propellant tank formed the vehicle structure and a re-configured BP pro­pulsion system was constructed to support the simultane­ous thrusting of four axial thrusters. Fast liquid valves us­ing warm pilot gas were used to control the four thrusters. This experiment successfully dem­onstrated all the key subsystems needed for a Brilliant Pebbles propulsion system.

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.

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 Clementine died – and so ended the Pentagon’s deliberate efforts to advance key technology that would support effective space-based defenses.

It should be noted that Iridium validated a couple of important Brilliant Pebbles operational con­cepts.

Clementine and Astrid demonstrated the space-wor­thiness of all the 1990-vintage technology needed to build and operate the Brilliant Pebbles spacecraft — one at a time. But aspects of building, deploying, and operating a Brilliant Pebbles system of 1000 spacecraft remained controversial — and key to proving the viability of an effective space-based interceptor system.

For instance, prior to Brilliant Pebbles, DoD had never mass-produced spacecraft (remember the Brilliant Pebbles concept called for 1000 essential­ly-autonomous pebbles to be operated by a very small of­ficer-cadre), nor launched satellites in quantity or at high rates — nor had anyone else. Furthermore, the U.S. practice had been to “body-wrap” each of its operational military spacecraft, en­veloping each one with an average of not much less than 100 (military+civilian-contractor) operational personnel, and it was widely asserted that this was a prerequisite for space­craft mission-performance up to DoD specifications.

The SDI understood that a new way of building, deploying and oper­ating spacecraft was required to achieve the Brilliant Pebbles system goal — and built the development of such innovative attributes into its DemVal program. These key aspirations and programmatic initiatives also died with the Brilliant Pebbles and Clementine programs.

Nevertheless, these concerns were also laid to rest in the 1990s by a Motorola-led consortium, with its manufacture, launch-integration, launch, orbital deployment and subse­quent operation of the Iridium worldwide satellite cellular te­lephony-supporting constellation.

Iridium built and launched a constellation of 95 mid-sized (800 kg each – over 10 times more mass than the 50 kg pebble) spacecraft between May 1997 and November 1998, at a peak build-rate of 4 space­craft-per-week, employing 19 launchers from a wide variety of American and foreign space-launch service-suppliers. Spacecraft quality was operationally demonstrated to be exceptionally high, with an in-service mortal­ity rate unrivalled in mass-produced spacecraft of all types and origins. The Iridium constellation provided world-wide coverage for communi­cations via handheld cellphones and pagers.

Moreover, the peak build-rate of these much larger spacecraft was spacecraft-mass-com­parable to that planned for Brilliant Pebbles by the Bush-41 DoD. The total cost for developing and deploying the 66-sat­ellite operational constellation within a half-decade inter­val was about $5-billion, all paid for by the private invest­ment community.

Quite importantly, the entire Iridium constellation, in full commercial operation, was originally operated by a ground-crew of fewer than ten people, implicitly validating the pebbles es­timate of a required ground crew of the same magnitude — versus the thousands of personnel postulated by tradition­al rules-of-thumb.

Note: 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), Iridium es­tablished that complex operations of large constellations of sophisticated spacecraft can be controlled, year-after-year, by a literal handful of staff support­ed by highly automated expert system control software.

Iridium, though an economic disaster for its initial inves­tors, has been an outstanding technological success and advanced versions operate today. Quite importantly in the present context, the creation and opera­tion of Iridium has provided complete, essentially quantita­tive validation of several of the key economic, logistics and operational postulates of the Brilliant Pebbles ballistic mis­sile defense architecture. And it has been upgraded and continues in use today.

When combined with the legacy of Clementine and As­trid, Iridium demonstrated well over a decade ago that there cannot be any ratio­nal controversy regarding any of the major technical issues to be addressed in building a cost-effective effective space-based interceptor system. And as discussed last week, the total life-cycle-validated cost-estimates for the Bush-41 BP 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.

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.

Why Revive BP Today?

After another eight years (the Obama administration), it has finally been recognized that previously deployed BMD system concepts are not responsive to growing threats, mainly  the offensive countermeasures that composed the gauntlet successfully run by Brilliant Pebbles in Baucom’s season of studies over a quarter century ago, as discussed above.      

And the concerns are growing, especially given Russian behavior and especially Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s claims about his new missiles and hypersonic vehicles.

From its outset, Brilliant Pebbles launched from their orbits around the earth were designed to be capable of destroying Soviet ICBMs during their boost phase, eliminating their multiple warheads and decoys before these could be dispersed. In this way, a single Brilliant Pebbles interceptor could destroy as many as ten or more Soviet warheads carried on their large ICBMs like the SS-18, or SATAN I — or the Soviet SS-19, now reported possibly to be employed to carry Russia’s Avangard hypersonic vehicle.

Brilliant Pebbles supported our arms control agenda during the Reagan-GHW Bush era, especially our START efforts to reduce/eliminate the multiple warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). But that agenda was reversed subsequently and now Russia’s SATAN II ICBM is basically a replacement/upgrade of the original Soviet SS-18 that 30-years ago carried 10 reentry vehicles and potentially could carry up to 40. 

Reviving BP efforts could support President Trump’s diplomatic interests in dealing with President Putin, just as it did President Reagan’s. It could also provide options to counter the hypersonic threat.

So there are both policy and technical reasons for reviving effective Brilliant Pebbles, now with much more modern technology, developed by the private sector while our defense programs appear to have ignored the implications of such developments.

So, What To Do Now?

The first thing to accomplish is to remove Brilliant Pebbles from the dust bin of History, where then Defense Secretary Les Aspin memorably placed it in early 1993 when claiming he was “taking the stars out of Star Wars.”

The Clinton administration not only cancelled the Brilliant Pebbles effort but also purged all remnant underpinning SDI technology from the missile defense efforts that were permitted to continue under the effort renamed Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), while dispersing the contractor and government laboratory teams that had worked on the underlying technology that made that concept viable.

As did Lowell Wood over 30-years ago, we need to return to the design constructs summarized above (and more completely in Don Baucom’s excellent history) and employed by the LLNL team of yesteryear. That the private sector has advanced these constructs is obvious from a brief review of the news.

For example, consider that last year the FCC approved a SpaceX plan to launch 4,425 broadband satellites within the next decade — a telecommunications application to make money. This initiative is reminiscent of previous commercial efforts that exploited Brilliant Pebbles’ concepts and technology more directly — the residue of which is the Iridium communications systems supporting national security missions.

Click here for an early discussion of SpaceX plans to begin launching operational satellites as early as 2019 (that’s this year folks), with the goal of reaching the full capacity of 4,425 satellites in 2024. The FCC approval just requires SpaceX to launch 50 percent of the satellites by March 2024, and all of them by March 2027. And this SpaceX effort is only one of several building and deploying systems involving many small satellites for a variety of purposes.

Why not to defend Americans at home and our overseas troops, friends and allies?

Bottom Lines

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.

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