Why Lott's attempt to relaunch 'Star Wars' is going to be shot down
http://www.boston.com:80/globe/ope/ed/cgi-bin/retrieve.cgi?%2Fglobe%2Fbgc%2F 079%2Fepg%2F002
Joseph Cirincione
This oped ran on page a27 of the Boston Globe on 03/20/97.
The re-release of the movie "Star Wars" made more than $100 million in just a few weeks, but this is small change compared with what Congress wants to spend building the real thing.
Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader, recently introduced the National Missile Defense Act as one of his top 10 Senate priorities. The bill would force the deployment of a nationwide system of satellites, radars, and missile interceptors by the year 2003 at an annual cost of more than $4 billion.
Before committing much political capital to this vision, Lott should review the humiliating defeat the previous Senate majority leader suffered pushing a similar bill.
Last March, Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich introduced the nearly identical ``Defend America Act.'' Dole said, ``National missile defense must be America's top defense priority.'' Gingrich promised it would be ``the most important national defense debate since Churchill argued for building radar.'' The conservative defense establishment was sure that this would be the wedge issue to expose President Bill Clinton's weakness in ``failing to defend America.''
They failed miserably. Proponents ignored five factors that history has shown to be crucial in determining the success of any major new defense program: the presence of a genuine threat, credible technology to answer the threat, military enthusiasm, adequate funding, and popular support. A program need not have all, but this plan didn't have any.
Conservatives at the Heritage Foundation warned, ``The potential threat is real and is increasing rapidly.'' They claimed that dozens of countries would soon be able to launch missiles at the United States. The official National Intelligence Estimate said, however, that there are only two potential enemies in the world that can strike the United States with land-based ballistic missile warheads: Russia (which has 3,500) and China (which has 7). Moreover, it is unlikely that ``any other country will acquire this capability during the next 15 years.''
Conservatives were furious, charging that the analysts had ``politicized their estimates'' and demanding that an independent panel evaluate the threat.
In December that panel, headed by Robert Gates, the former CIA director in the Bush administration, testified that there was ``no evidence of politicization'' and that they were ``completely satisfied that the analysts' views were based on the evidence before them and their substantive analysis.'' The panel agreed that we are unlikely to face an ICBM threat from the Third World before 2010, ``and that case is even stronger than was presented in the estimate.''
Whatever the threat, does the United States possess ``the technological means to develop and deploy defensive systems that would be highly effective,'' as Senator Dole, and now Senator Lott, claim? Effective missile defense remains elusive despite more than $54 billion spent since President Reagan's famous March 1983 ``Star Wars'' speech. In tests conducted since 1982, only two hits were scored in 13 attempts against long-range targets. This is one reason Deputy Secretary of Defense John White warned Congress last year that a system of 100 ground-based interceptors might be able to intercept a few warheads, but ``this basic system is likely to provide poor protection of the US.'' If the attacker used decoys, he said, it would allow ``real warheads to penetrate the defense'' and it could not ``protect against an unauthorized launch which might contain a large number of warheads,'' for example, from a Russian ballistic missile submarine.
With a low threat and inadequate technology, there is little military enthusiasm for a national system. The Joint Chiefs of Staff last year advised spending no more than $500 million a year researching such a system and no more than $2.3 billion for developing theater defenses against short-range missiles like Scuds. They urged a ``balanced and proportional'' program that could meet war-fighting needs and still ``save dollars that can be given back to the services to be used for critical recapitalization programs.''
Still, proponents were anticipating swift House passage in May when a required cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office landed like an incoming Scud. The CBO said it would cost up to $60 billion to deploy the system mandated by the bill (upped to $116 billion over 20 years by another CBO report in July). The Heritage Foundation had promised that it was essentially free - just $7 billion over the existing budgets. Freshman Republican deficit hawks in the House revolted, refusing to support a major new government program, even for national defense. The leadership was forced to pull the bill from the floor.
Finally, there was little public support for deploying missile defenses. Only one in five supported the bill in a national poll, and just 3 percent thought it was likely that the United States would be attacked by nuclear missiles in the next five years. In short, there was no national anxiety that could be exploited to propel an expensive program over the objections of military and intelligence leaders and a budget-cutting Congress. Congress pumped extra funds into the budget, but legislation mandating deployment never made it out of the House, and the issue never made a difference in the campaigns.
Nothing has changed to warrant reconsideration. The threat has not grown, nor has the technology advanced; funds are still precious, and the public and the military are uninterested. Lott should look before he leaps into this beckoning black hole.
Joseph Cirincione is a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a policy research institute in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted from an article in Foreign Policy, spring 1997.
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