History Forum / General / British History / August 2006

Vide infra pro sapientia.

DSH
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THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

Star Warrior

If Reagan had had his way on SDI, threats from North Korea and Iran would
loom smaller today.

BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Saturday, August 26, 2006
The Wall Street Journal

ARLINGTON, Va.--In his 1983 "Star Wars" speech, Ronald Reagan famously
asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge . . . that we
could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached
our own soil?"

Fast forward to this summer. On July 4 North Korea test-fired a long-range
ballistic missile believed capable of reaching the continental U.S. The
launch was a flop--the Taepodong 2 fizzled before it got off the ground--but
to echo Reagan's question, what if? What would have happened if Pyongyang's
missile had been heading toward Los Angeles? Could we have shot it down?

"I'm confident that we could have," states Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering
III, director of the Missile Defense Agency. "If that missile had proceeded
to threaten Hawaii or the continental United States, then we would have had
the ability to shoot it down. I'm confident the system would have worked."

Years ago an American general, asked a similar question, would have had a
one-word answer: "No." Until 2004, when the ground-based missile-defense
system went partially online in Alaska--with the aim of intercepting an
intercontinental missile coming from North Korea or the Middle East--the
U.S. was wholly undefended against attack by ICBMs. This ground-based
system, as it is called, is still only intermittent, and works only against
long-range missiles. Moreover, the U.S. has no defenses deployed against
what many consider to be a more immediate threat--a short- or medium-range
missile, say a Scud, launched from a vessel off the coast of the U.S.

So it's perhaps no surprise that when Gen. Obering and I sit down in his
L-shaped office at the Pentagon's immense Navy Annex--an office whose window
has a bird's-eye view of the newly rebuilt portion of the Pentagon destroyed
on 9/11--he gives the impression of being a man in a hurry. He discusses the
emerging threat--"there are thousands of missiles" out there and "they've
become more accurate . . . more militarily effective." He talks about the
current capabilities of the U.S. antimissile program--they're "limited." He
lists future requirements--"sea-based" and "space-based."

And, inevitably, he brings up budgets--perhaps recalling the fight in
Congress this spring over funding for his agency's programs: "If you look at
all of the money that's been spent on missile defense since Ronald Reagan
started the program in 1983--adding in the 2006 budget--it's approaching
about $100 billion, $90-something billion dollars. If you look at the damage
costs from 9/11 alone just in New York City, based on a GAO report of 2002,
it was $83 billion. That means if we can prevent just one attack against one
major U.S. city, we almost would have paid for the entire program for the
last 24 years."

But first, the here-and-now. That word "limited" (to describe our
antimissile program) is a little disconcerting, especially as North Korea is
threatening to test more missiles and Iran, which reportedly had a
representative on site in North Korea on July 4, is rushing ahead with its
own missile program. Just how "limited" is the current defense?

In keeping with the Missile Defense Agency's unorthodox practice of fielding
new systems concurrently with testing--the classic approach is to test, then
field--the unfinished ground-based system is already in use. "We've actually
taken the system from what we call a developmental and test status to
operational status many times over the past two or three years," Gen.
Obering says. "I can't talk about any one particular day, whether we're on
or off or whatever, but suffice it to say that for the foreseeable future we
will continue to cycle back and forth between the operational state and the
developmental state."

The interceptor missiles are housed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska and at
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By the end of the year the aim is
to have 13 interceptors in Alaska and two in California. This provides
minimal coverage for the U.S. and none for Europe--"We can't defend Europe
from California or Alaska." Protecting U.S. allies is one reason the U.S. is
negotiating to locate 10 interceptors in Europe--probably in Poland or the
Czech Republic--but the other is "redundancy," one of the general's favorite
words. The U.S. wants the ability to take more than one shot at an incoming
ICBM. If ground is broken next year, as planned, a European site could be up
and running by 2011.

What about defenses against short- or medium-range missiles? "We can defend
against that sort of threat with some of the programs we have today," Gen.
Obering says. He mentions the ship-based Aegis system, which Japan is buying
for protection against North Korean missiles, and the Patriot PAC-3
antimissile system, which was used in the Iraq war. "So we have the assets,
but"--here comes the catch--"we don't have enough of them yet and we don't
have them deployed" to protect the homeland.

Gen. Obering mentions other systems that are in the works: the airborne
laser, designed to shoot down missiles while they are still in the boost
phase (that is, when that the warhead is more likely fall back to Earth on
the enemy), and Thaad--an acronym for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense,
which had a successful test last month. Thaad's missile and its
manufacturing production line were redesigned a few years ago with the help
of Nascar, which brought its "modular mentality" to the job, the general
says. "They can change a tire in less than a couple of seconds, they can
fuel in less than a couple of seconds, they can replace body parts just like
this." (These words are uttered with a bracing snap of the general's
fingers.)

The overall objective of the missile-defense system is to provide a
"layered" defense, another of Gen. Obering's favorite words. "Now what do I
mean by that? When a missile goes through flight, it goes through basically
those three phases. There's a boost phase--a power phase--then it coasts
during the mid-course phase and then it comes into a terminal phase, which
is usually re-entry into the atmosphere for most of the missiles that we're
talking about. What you want to do is build defenses in each one of those
phases in an integrated, layered fashion.

"You also want to tie together as many of your sensors as you can. You want
to tie together your space-based sensors with your ground-based radars [and]
with your ship-based sensors and radars because it gives you a much better
picture of what we call a birth-to-death tracking of the target. Well, the
ABM Treaty would not allow us to do that. We could not mix what were
considered to be regional, theater missile defense assets such as an Aegis
ship or a Patriot system . . . with the ground-based mid-course system."

The general is referring to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty under
which the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed not to defend their countries
against missile attack. The U.S. withdrew from the treaty in June 2002.
"Coming out of the treaty has allowed us to take full advantage of this
integration between assets," Gen. Obering says.

What's next? "In my mind, space-based interceptors [are] very attractive,"
he says. To those who say that would mean the "weaponization" of space, the
general has a ready answer. "We already do intercepts in space, because
that's where the missiles fly . . . What we're talking about is having
space-based interceptors that would engage from space." Congress has
authorized funding for some space experiments starting next year.

He also favors putting more sophisticated sensors in space. "If someone had
told me 15 or 20 years ago that we'd be fighting in Afghanistan, I wouldn't
have believed them. We don't know where we're going to be fighting in the
next 20 years . . . and so instead of populating radars around the world to
try to guess where those threats are going to be coming from, it makes a lot
of sense to go to space . . . We have sensors in space but they are not
sensors that you can accurately track from."

At the time of Reagan's missile-defense speech, Gen. Obering was an Air
Force captain on loan to the space shuttle program at the Kennedy Space
Shuttle. Does he remember the speech? "Oh, yes, very much so. It was very
dramatic. . . . It was intriguing to me to [see] the vision that President
Reagan had--to say, you know, we don't have to live under this threat. We
can actually do something about it."

Does he object to the term "Star Wars," the mocking nickname given by Sen.
Ted Kennedy to what was then known as the Strategic Defense Initiative? A
big smile crosses his face. "Personally, I don't. . . . When you look at
what the 'Star Wars' movie was really about, I think it fits. . . . It was
basically the force of good trying to address the force of evil."

Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.