March 10, 2020—Whither BMD and the Space Force?

“Regrettably, both Congress and the Administration appear to present ambiguities in their approach to missile defense policy. The U.S. Congress can do better, as the FY 2017 NDAA demonstrated. And the Administration will have to get on the same page consistently if it wants to effectively communicate the value of ballistic missile defense to the American people and members of Congress who represent them.” Michaela Dodge

Click here for Michaela’s excellent March 5, 2020, Real Clear Defense article, The Backward Step on Missile Defense in the FY 2020 NDAA that includes a pdf link to her complete National Institute for Public Policy report with the same title. I encourage you to read her paper and report — I interject my own biases in the following comments, while hopefully not undermining Michaela’s arguments.

Just What is our Missile Defense Policy?

In both presentations, Michaela begins with a reference to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 — NDAA (2017), which strengthened U.S. missile defense policy by highlighting the need to counter a growing range of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland and U.S. allies and forces abroad. The Act said that

“it is the policy of the United States to maintain and improve an effective, robust layered missile defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States, allies, deployed forces, and capabilities against the developing and increasingly complex ballistic missile threat….”

Michaela began by emphasizing that the NDAA (2017) made no distinction between missile threats emanating from major powers like Russia and China or rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran — a wise decision recently undermined by the NDAA (2020), which emphasized that the United States will as a matter of policy “rely on nuclear deterrence to address more sophisticated and larger quantity near-peer intercontinental missile threats to the homeland of the United States,” while improving missile defenses against “rogue states.”

She also emphasized that this return to previous long-standing “Cold War” U.S. policy that emphasized “deterrence” by retaliatory threats, is a step backward from the Trump administration’s 2019 Missile Defense Review (MDR).

The Trump Administration’s MDR observed that the United States today relies on “nuclear deterrence to address the large and more sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities” a statement of fact, not a U.S. deliberate policy to do so in perpetuity, especially as U.S. missile defense technologies mature and threats advance.

Importantly, it implied that the United States would defend against all types of ballistic missile threats regardless of potential (and likely) Russian and Chinese objections.

Now, as Michaela suggested, the NDAA (2020) actually discourages building the most effective missile defense capabilities against sophisticated threats, and I believe will hinder the development of the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems to defend against the growing ballistic missile arsenals of even less than near-peer competitors — including North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles.

Moreover, I believe our lack of a truly cost-effective BMD system actually incentivizes our enemies to build more relatively inexpensive ballistic missiles that will surely overwhelm our much more expensive BMD systems.

Most unhelpful are congressional statements of U.S. policy that reflect the Cold War mutual assured destruction (MAD) policy, leaving Americans vulnerable to large-scale intercontinental missile threats that also have a chilling effect on government and private industry efforts to develop better overall defensive capabilities.

These were the very conditions that made President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) so important. Coupled with his Strategic Modernization Program, the Soviets were driven to conclude they could not compete with American advancing technology — and that fact led to an end of the Cold War. As Britain’s Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher famously said, “SDI ended the Cold War without firing a shot.”

So now, we find ourselves playing “catch-up” to growing technological threats from Russia and China as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDRE) Michael Griffin has said. Regrettably, the Clinton administration cancelled SDI’s most cost-effective advances — and no administration has revived them before President Trump. Moreover, it is unclear to me whether the Trump administration is pursuing programs to revive those most important SDI technologies.

Meanwhile, Iranian and North Korean ballistic missiles continue to improve in sophistication and range. Both countries invest considerable resources into their missile programs, despite international pressure and sanctions. They are intent on threatening the United States and its allies and do not show signs of slowing down.

So, will the United States choose to remain vulnerable to growing ballistic missile threats in deference to Chinese and Russian complaints and their feigned interest in strategic “stability?”

As Michaela pointed out, the 2019 MDR appeared to be consistent with the Obama Administration’s 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review (BMDR), which did not differentiate between a rogue missile attack and a limited Russian or Chinese missile attack. It stated that “The United States will continue to defend the homeland against the threat of limited ballistic missile attack. . . These efforts are focused on protecting the homeland from a ballistic missile attack by a regional actor such as North Korea or Iran,”

But the Trump 2019 MDR did not rule out shooting down ballistic missile attacks from Russia or China as the Trump 2020 NDAA seemingly does.

This is not consistent with President Trump’s statement when officially launching his 2019 MDR, “Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above.” President Trump’s statement — and presumably his intent — implied a much more robust commitment to U.S. missile defense than spelled out in the MDR (or in subsequent missile defense budgets) or in the FY 2020 NDAA.

Michaela quoted Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Hyten who remarked in January 2020 that U.S. Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) interceptors are “built for North Korea. They’re not built for anything else….” We have only 44 of the interceptors … as part of a very expensive ground-based interceptor sustem.

Yet, potential Iranian ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland were considered in the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and have motivated congressional interest in potential additional GMD deployments on the East Coast. And, I might add, my longstanding advocacy for giving our Aegis BMD system a homeland defense mission — either in its Aegis Ashore mode or from our Aegis ships operating near the East Coast or in port.

And, as Michaela observed, coercive limited nuclear threats appear to be a prominent part of the Russian nuclear playbook. Should we not defend against them?

I concur with Michaela’s conclusion that Congress and the Trump Administration present ambiguities in their approaches to missile defense policy. The U.S. Congress can do better, as the FY 2017 NDAA demonstrated. And the Administration will have to get on the same page consistently if it wants to effectively communicate the value of ballistic missile defense to the American people and members of Congress who represent them.

The American people deserve to be protected, regardless of the origin of missile threats, and protection against at least limited missile threats appears to be feasible. With advanced technology much more effective defenses are possible.

The FY 2020 NDAA seems to take a step back in this regard, but Congress will have another opportunity to correct it in the upcoming FY 2021 NDAA debate. When the key committees to consider these issues, they should also consider an important recent article in Forbes by Loren Thompson.

Click here for Thompson’s discussion of how our missile defenses should be upgraded to be responsive to the threat, and his pertinent observation that when future historians analyze U.S. security policies during the early decades of the 21st century, they may be hard-pressed to explain what policymakers were thinking.

He recalls that between 2001 and 2019, Washington spent a trillion dollars defending Afghanistan from the Taliban, while during the same period it spent 5% of that amount, $50 billion, defending the U.S. homeland against ballistic missile attack by another nuclear power. Moreover, that ground based BMD system can easily be overwhelmed by many much less expensive missiles launched by Korea or Iran.

We need a clear policy statement that reflects a commitment to defend Americans from all types of missile threats.

This return to the Reagan policy is long overdue and would help ensure that U.S. missile defense efforts move forward instead of backward. Notably, space-based defenses would be the most cost-effective way to accomplish that objective — as Reagan’s SDI demonstrated 30-years ago.

Then There Are Space Force Issues?

I would again emphasize in this discussion my reminder that the most cost-effective BMD system of the SDI era (1983-93) was the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor system — it was gutted in early 1993, when then Defense Secretary Les Aspin bragged that he “took the stars out of Star Wars.” And no administration since — Democrat or Republican — has taken any initiative to revive it.

If we are going to be serious about an effective Space Force, reviving that important cost-effective BMD system deserves high priority. Yet there is no sign of a revival with the Trump administration.

Click here for John A. Tirpak’s March 5, 2020 Air Force Magazine article based on a speech by USDRE Michael Griffin, pertinently entitled, “Griffin: America Needs to Adjust to Reality of Great Power Competition.”

While Mike was not addressing Michaela’s argument per se, his points fit—as indicted by Tirpak’s lead-in quote: “The U.S. can’t wish away great power competition with Russia and China, and it needs to get serious in structuring for it over the long-term.”

His second sentence also fits with my concerns: “Space defense, for example, despite boasting a new service and new thinking, is still oriented toward outmoded ideas” and he then quoted Mike as saying the threat from China’s hypersonic weapons is particularly tough to counter.

While I encourage you to read Tirpak’s entire article on Mike’s views, I want to emphasize several of his points:

Since the early 1990s, there’s been inadequate U.S. research in the technologies that will provide an advantage in the 21st century. (As I noted above, the best SDI technologies were curtailed early in the Clinton administration, and regrettably no administration since has revived them, at least until now.)
Preoccupation with wars in the Middle East that were “important, but not existential” threats and led to too little being spent on leap-ahead and stay-ahead technologies, enabled Russia and China to take advantage of the opportunity to steal a march on the U.S.
Those countries, and others on the rise, “don’t respect Western values” and are challenging the U.S. and its ideology. “Western liberal democracy, Western thought, is under attack.” U.S. adversaries do not share values such as “the rule of law, property rights of individuals, the right to freedom of movement, the right to free markets, and many other things.”
“We need to accept that we are once again in a Great Power Competition,” and invest accordingly. . . “It won’t be easy convincing the nation the situation has changed, but I believe we will step up. That’s why I took this job.”
To deal with new threats, the U.S. has to rethink its space architecture. “We have the architecture I would design if we didn’t have a threat. But in case anyone hadn’t noticed, we have adversaries and we have a threat to our architecture, and so we need, above all else, to be far more resilient, because space is absolutely critical to everything about the way the United States fights wars.”
America’s space architecture still consists “of a relatively few very high value, extraordinarily exquisite, unbelievably capable space assets.” For which, “the other name for them is targets to the adversary.”
“We cannot give the adversaries even the faintest idea that they could disable our space architecture. So we need proliferation,” and not just in low-earth orbit as Griffin has championed. We need “to proliferate in all orbits, with assets that are individually lower-value but collectively very high value, so that they don’t give the adversary a …desirable aimpoint.”
China poses a particularly important threat. China’s hypersonic weapons threat is “real and increasing.” “They outrun and out-range our best radars. We have to be prepared to deal with raids of not one and two, but many”… which Griffin asserts, “We can do.”
“You will not hit a target that you cannot see.” Until the U.S. can spot and track “dim upper stages without being dependent on exquisite radar assets, we will be concerned.” Chinese hypersonic weapons are “20 times dimmer, or more, than the targets we are able to track” with the Space-Based Infrared System, or SBIRS.
Adding more “exquisite” radars is either not an option or would only create more targets for an adversary. Thus, the U.S. “can only do the target acquisition and fire control problem from space … We need to be closer to the action, or we need very large optics, which, again, creates more high-value targets.”

Finally, Griffin said allies can play a big role in technology development. “To defend those values requires not just the United States as the Lone Ranger, with maybe some sidekicks, but really, full and open partnerships, and we are working with allies on many of these technology areas.” Most, he said, he cannot discuss, but “it is incredibly valuable. … We wouldn’t succeed without our allies and partners.”

Sure sounds like reinventing Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. To which I say, “Amen” and “Amen.”

But will it come to be?

Click here for Rachael Cohen’s encouraging Air Force Magazine report that Space Force Vice Commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson told the House Appropriators on March 4, 2020 the service has started testing new tools built to defend American assets on orbit, possibly hinting at classified counterspace capabilities. I sure hope so, because I’ve seen nothing publicly encouraging signs of space-based defenses of any sort.

But General Thompson claimed that prototyping, and demonstrating, and preparing for “abilities to protect and defend our assets” in the fiscal 2020 budget — and that in the 2021 budget, the Space Force was “taking steps to extend that across the fleet, as well as look at other capabilities to be able to continue to defend those assets that we have and defend adversary use of space.”

In written testimony submitted for the hearing, Space Force officials said the service will create a “broad range of counterspace options” to respond to threats against national security space assets.

“We will protect and defend the highly capable satellite systems that are not easily replaced while designing new, more resilient, systems,” the testimony states. “To ensure a credible deterrent posture in the 21st century, we must demonstrate the capability and will to defend vital national interests across all domains, including space.”

What about defending Americans on the ground from space? Hmmmmm . . .

Bottom Lines.

We live in a very dangerous world — actually, the most dangerous I can recall, and I remember World War II.

Our national security policies leave much to be desired…and as discussed here, seems to have regressed when it comes to our overall policies related to protecting the American people from missile attack. That regression is related to the policies of previous administrations, but also seems to have been within the Trump administration.

While there are hints that the Space Force may include a revival of the most important technology pioneered by Reagan’s SDI efforts to provide the most cost-effective BMD systems, that conclusion is not clearly justified — especially to protect Americans where they live on the ground.

I surely hope the Trump “powers that be” will give USDRE Mike Griffin his head and needed funds to make both our BMD and Space Force technology all they can be.

What can you do?

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