OPINION — “Offensive operations, often times, is (sic) the surest, if not the only (in some cases) means of defence,” a retired George Washington, living at Mount Vernon, wrote to a former military aide in a letter back in June 25, 1799.
Unsuccessfully, attempts over decades to build a defense for the U.S. homeland against Russian or Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) seems to affirm George Washington’s centuries-old advice.
Nonetheless, U.S. administrations have spent, and continue to spend, billions, trying to prove otherwise.
The Russians are no different, although they currently have 68 nuclear tipped, anti-ballistic missile interceptors surrounding Moscow, according to Dr. Robert Soofer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy.
Testifying on a panel before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces last Friday, Soofer said, “We remain confident that we can protect the homeland from a rogue state missile attack today [meaning North Korea or Iran], and we rely on our nuclear [offensive nuclear] weapons to deter a strategic attack from China and Russia.”
What Soofer was referring to as protecting the U.S. from rogue country ICBMs was the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system made up of 44 interceptor missile launchers at Alaska’s Fort Greeley and four other such launchers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The GMD system tries to intercept incoming ICBM warheads in space during the midcourse phase of their ballistic flight. The interceptors, carrying an Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV), fly into the path of a missile’s released warheads. The EKV uses onboard sensors to hunt down and physically collide with the targeted warhead, destroying it on impact.
It must be pointed out that the current GMD interceptors with EKVs have a checkered testing record over the years. Of the last six tests since 2010, only the last three were successful.
Soofer warned however, that today we are in the “pivotal stage” of an “age of growing missile threats to the U.S. homeland,” where the line between ICBMs and shorter-range missiles is being blurred.
Another panel member, General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, who heads the U.S. Northern and North American Aerospace Defense Commands, described to the subcommittee the growing need for “new defeat mechanisms for [enemy] cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonics, and small unmanned aerial systems.”
He added, using complex bureaucratese, “As adversary threat systems, employment doctrine, and operational competencies become more numerous, multi-modal, and complex, our current defeat mechanisms will become increasingly challenged.”
O’Shaughnessy then stated another factor of the offense-beats-defense theory that has always been raised during past ABM debates—the offense/defense cost differences.
“The cost ratio of adversary threat missiles to our missile-defeat mechanisms is not in our favor.” O’Shaughnessy explained. “We must flip the cost ratio back in our favor with deep magazine, rapid fire, and low-cost defeat mechanisms.”
Needless to say, that struck home to the members of Congress present, since the House subcommittee hearing was examining the Trump administration’s fiscal 2021 budget request for $20.3 billion for a variety of Defense Department missile defense research, development and production programs.
The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, and its former chairman, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), quickly pointed out that last August, the Trump administration had cancelled the replacement to the EKV, the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV). It had been under development since 2015 and was supposed to be deployed beginning in 2023.
Ironically, on March 26, 2019, the Missile Defense Agency carried out its first successful salvo firing of the GMD system where two ground-based interceptors armed with RKVs hit the target warhead and the next possible lethal object. Nonetheless, the RKV program was terminated for what the Defense Department said were “technical design problems.”
One of the issues involved could have been failure to integrate into the design intelligence on advances made by North Korea’s ICBM program. The GAO’s representative on the panel, Cristina T. Chaplain, Director of Contracting and National Security Acquisitions, told the House subcommittee the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) “provides the defense intelligence community with limited insight into how the agency uses threat assessments to inform its acquisition decisions.”
She added, “MDA is not required to obtain the defense intelligence community’s input; however, the [intelligence] community is uniquely positioned to assist MDA keep pace with rapidly emerging threats.”
Chaplain added that more recently, since the RKV cancellation, “MDA has been increasing its engagement with the intelligence community.”
Some $1.7 billion had been spent on the RKV program, but it has not been the only cancelled ABM element in development on which billions had been spent. It was preceded by halting of a kinetic energy interceptor program in 2009 after $1.2 billion had been spent and writing off an airborne laser system in 2012, for which an estimated $5 billion had been spent over the previous 16 years.
MDA, given the new threat environment, has had problems in the last seven months contracting for a new, Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) as well as a new, redesigned, kill vehicle.
MDA’s Director, Vice Admiral Jon Hill, told the subcommittee that the plan is to award two competitive NGI development design contracts this year with hopes that they will lead to providing the first new interceptor missile by 2028. However, GAO’s Chaplain warned that the NGI requires “research and development-intensive tasks, which carry significant technical risks and financial commitments.”
If getting right on a missile defense system to handle a relatively limited ICBM attack from a rogue nation like North Korea seems complicated, think of what appears to be the complicated defensive systems needed to meet the new threats from shorter-range missiles that Russia and China are perfecting.
O’Shaunessey described some STEPS to the subcommittee saying, “In order to defend the homeland in all domains, we need a sensing grid with undersea, maritime, land, air, near-space, space, and cyber layers that reach from the seafloor to outer space. These sensors must be able to detect, track, and discriminate advanced cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, hypersonics, and small unmanned aerial systems at the full ranges from which they are employed. The sensors must also detect and track the platforms—aircraft, ships, and submarines—that carry those weapons. A robust and resilient space layer is increasingly critical to provide the earliest possible detection and fidelity of data required.”
Beyond all that, the subcommittee was told the country will need a new and complex system that links these new detection systems to defensive weapons systems that can almost automatically direct fire.
We live today accepting that the U.S. homeland is virtually unprotected from a Russian or Chinese nuclear attack with ICBMs. That raises the question of why we’re suddenly fearful of shorter-range, but just as lethal, Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons that would be equally impossible to defend against.
It’s time to again use George Washington’s 220-year-old advice that offense remains the best defense.
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