The Kansas City Star July 5, 2001
Missile defense system: a Maginot line for 21st century?
By Scott CanonIn the 1930s, using the newest defense technology, the French created the Maginot line. The heavily fortified border was designed to keep Germany from overrunning France.
Indeed, German forces didn't pierce it. Instead, the Nazis simply ran an end run to Paris by way of Belgium.
"A passive defense, no matter what the era, generally doesn't work," said Raymond Callahan, the author of three books on World War II. "These things end up being surmountable inconveniences for the attacker."
The lesson of the Maginot line is a favorite among people at odds with President Bush over the idea of a national missile defense.
Bush campaigned on the plan and on his trip overseas last month, defending to skeptical European leaders an evolving system of weapons designed to shoot down an attacking rocket before its warhead vaporizes an American city.
It's not the invincible space shield Ronald Reagan imagined 20 years before. At least in its initial form, Bush's missile defense would only guard against the planet's minor league nuclear powers, countries such as North Korea or Iraq unlikely to own more than a few long-range missiles any time soon.
Still, critics see it as a latter-day Maginot line. It looks to repel rather than attack. It figures to cost billions. And, detractors warn, it fosters a false sense of security. There are just too many ways, they say, to get around it.
Others find the analogy a poor fit. The Maginot line wasn't reinforced with the threat of nuclear retaliation, just a large and conventional army. The North Koreans, in contrast, know that they strike the United States at the risk of reducing their country to a nuclear ash heap.
Further weakening the Maginot comparison, even some missile defense opponents see the plan as essentially offensive due to the upper hand it would deliver America in a geopolitical showdown.
Finally, those in the middle find themselves torn by history's lessons.They know that advances such as gunpowder and atomic bombs come along that instantly make older ways of war obsolete.
"If unilateral deployment (of a national missile defense) would make us more secure, then the president has a moral obligation to deploy it," said Sen. Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "But if it would make us less secure, he surely does not."
Levin and others worry that missile defense could make regimes in Pyongyang and Baghdad, in Moscow and Beijing newly uncomfortable. It might even, they say, prompt America's rivals into a race to overwhelm the shield or persevere to slip around it.
"We could even start a second Cold War," Levin said in a speech at the National Defense University.
The Chinese started walling their northern border about 600 years before Christ. As high and as long as it was, the Great Wall protected against minor attacks, but buckled under major invasions.
In Europe, walls served imperial armies well into the second millennium. The endurance of Constantinople was bolstered by a then high-tech defense recorded as "Greek fire." This ancient form of napalm _ jellylike and flammable _ could be tossed from the walls on attackers. Then, inexplicably to historians, the Byzantines forgot the recipe and the city fell in 1453.
Over the centuries, military technology accelerated. Each innovation prompted others. Even the barbed wire, machine guns and massed artillery that brought World War I to stalemate eventually were trumped by tanks.
Countries and commanders continually studied the battles of the last war in search of the weapons, or a weapons defense, that would win the next one.
After World War I the French came up with the Maginot line. Every iron girder, electric innovation and concrete gun turret boosted French confidence. Then the Germans raced once more across the undefended border with Belgium.
In the 1930s, military strategists debated whether the rise of the strategic bomber mattered. After all, barrage balloons and antiaircraft guns _ the latest walls of defense _ were developing as rapidly as the bombers.
"Once World War II started, certainly there were times when Germans shot down enough bombers where we decided to stay away from particular targets for a while," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, which is skeptical of missile defenses. "It's also the case that bombers got through. A bomber will always get through."
And that is the principal argument of missile defense critics: A missile shield might be good if it came with a guarantee. But no technology is perfect. And this defense, like all the military defenses, can't promise perfection.
For starters, its technological challenges have proved tricky in early development and early, and mostly unsuccessful, testing. Another try is set for July. In particular, the technology that is so often compared to trying to hit a bullet with a bullet has trouble identifying targets.
Indeed, before the initial riddles are solved, there already is open talk of how a deployed system could be foiled.
For instance, littering the sky with dummy warheads would give the missile defense system too many targets to shoot down.
Critics also note that nuclear bombs don't have to be delivered by a missile, easily detected and traced to its launch pad. Warheads could float by the defense system in the hold of a rusty freighter, fly in as airliner baggage or ride in on the bed of a pickup truck.
"The best you can say about defenses throughout military history is that they buy time until you can figure out a way around them," said Barry Blechman, chairman of Henry L. Stimson Center, a nonprofit organization.
Callahan, the author and a history professor at the University of Delaware, sees in past battles less an argument for or against a missile defense, but a means by which to judge it.
Strategists have always realized that their barricades could be overcome if enough pressure was put in the right place. China's wall was a great advantage on those stretches where it was backed with enough manpower. So was Roman emperor Hadrian's wall as a protection against the Picts across north England.
And if a missile defense could at least reduce the chance of, say, an Iraqi rocket torching San Francisco, Callahan said it might be worth the cost. But cost, he said, matters.
The shield's price tag starts at $35 billion. Skeptics see the price whizzing beyond $100 billion. The cost would swell with time and advancing technology that could take the defense from a land-based or sea-based system using relatively conventional technology to something anchored to satellites and using weapons yet to be invented.
So, Callahan said, the cost of the missile shield has to be weighed against existing defenses that discourage attack by threatening payback.
"You have to consider," Callahan said, "What is more likely to deter (a missile attack) _ the probability that we can knock one down, or the absolute knowledge that we would obliterate your country?"
Bush and legions of military strategists counter that the fear of retaliation might work to deter rational leaders and coherent regimes from bombing America, but not against some suicidal premier with newfound nuclear capability.
Notably, the debate over a missile shield model doesn't lead to absolutes from the experts who ponder this notion for a Great Wall of America.
Karl Mueller is a defense policy analyst for the Rand Corp. _ a think tank that studies military strategy for the Pentagon. He wonders aloud whether "a little missile defense might be a good thing." It would, he said, reduce America's vulnerability to attack even if it doesn't eliminate the possibility.
But a lot of missile defense _ or a system seen as invincible, or nearly so _ would leave Mueller more anxious. That would prompt America's rivals to switch their energy _ and military dollars _ to other ways of hitting the United States.
"(Long-range missiles) are less dangerous in practice to us than other things," he said. "They are expensive, and not suitable for attacking us. And I'd just as soon see enemies spending their money on that rather than commandos with nuclear backpacks, which worry me more."
Still others see missile defense as no defense at all, but a disguise for a way for America to go on the offense.
Karl Grossman, a journalism professor who has written critically of missile defense, frames it as a steppingstone to establishing weapons in space.
And that, he said, would violate treaties that have treated space like Antarctica _ neutral territory unfit for military beachheads.
"The problem here is that the U.S. is going to seize the ultimate high ground of space," said Grossman, who teaches at State University of New York at Old Westbury and has written for The Nation magazine. "It's mainly about space-based weapons to control the planet below."
Others say analogies to the Maginot line or to a Star Wars-style attack plan judge the idea of missile defense too simply.
"Weapons systems cannot be viewed as either merely offensive or defensive," said Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations. "It might be more useful to think about how weapons are rarely used completely in isolation to serve military or political purpose."
Consider, he said, North Korea. Today the United States can pressure Pyongyang on various matters. It can station troops in South Korea, and it can cruise its warships off the Korean peninsula. What's more, U.S. leaders can do these things without worrying that upsetting North Korea puts the American mainland in peril.
But as North Korea works to assemble an arsenal of missiles that could clear the Pacific Ocean, the United States might have to carry itself more gingerly. A missile defense would return the upper hand to the Americans.
"In that sense," Bacevich said, "it's both offensive and defensive."
Copyright 2001 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
