Missile Defense Planning Guides Emerge
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Michael Bruno
Much rides on the Pentagon's pending ballistic missile defense review, but a few core principles are emerging to guide the massive spending effort over the next several years, according to congressional testimony June 16 by top Defense Department officials.
DOD wants to redirect future efforts on early interception of missile threats because it forces potential adversaries to invest in costly responses, and the Department wants to make sure theater-based forces and allies are protected, even over legacy efforts to defend the homeland.
But even there, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system will be robustly supported and improved, asserted Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn III, Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, director of the Missile Defense Agency. And any related collaboration with Russia and other NATO allies in Europe would send a powerful message to Iran and be worth pursuing, they said.
"We think 30 silos and 44 missiles addresses the threat we face," Lynn said in defense of DOD's fiscal 2010 budget request to cap the existing Ground-based Interceptor (GBI) fields in Alaska and California.
"What we need most is early detection and early tracking [of what comes] out of Iran," O'Reilly agreed. He and the other officials cited concepts of operations relying on both unmanned aircraft with powerful sensors, providing persistent coverage, and surveillance satellites with infrared capability offering global vision.
Still, while Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) members from all political sides seemed to accept the Pentagon's new push toward early phase interception and theater protection, several expressed reservations over capping GBI emplacements, as well as a perception that the Obama administration was equivocating on George W. Bush administration GMD deals with Poland and the Czech Republic. Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) warned that backing off Bush-era commitments would insult the NATO allies, while new Alaska Sen. Mark Begich (D) questioned the analysis behind the planned shift in the GMD program toward reliability and lifecycle support.
But the Defense officials took the SASC comments in stride, answering that several alternatives to European-based missile defense were being considered, and that the GMD system already has a "90-percent-plus" likelihood of defeating any North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile launch, the leading "rogue" threat to the United States now.
Photo credit: Missile Defense Agency
