I The Curious History of Missile Defense

   Sometimes history is a comedy of errors, sometimes poor thinking, sometimes misunderstanding, sometimes vaudeville.  The flap over US plans to forward base a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic is surely a classic of the type.  
   The missile defense proposal was advanced by Ronald Reagan once twenty years ago in a flight of fancy. Of course, after the Cold War there never really was any pressing reason to build it.  Nor has it ever been proved to work even though the tests for it have been rigged and continually watered down, lowering the bar ever lower to allow this system to eke over it.  
   Still it was a good talking point for shallow politicians with nothing else to say.  It filled a rhetorical void in their speeches with tough talk of something that sounded martial.  It was repeated over the years like a mantra as if it still had a strategic purpose behind it so often that it began to acquire a momentum all its own.  So now, regardless of its lack of any utility or purpose, it has been rushed into production anyway at massive costs to the American taxpayer and incredible profit to the contractors.  This would be more ironic if it weren’t so typical of how things work (or why they don’t) in Washington.  
   When Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative – called Star Wars by its many detractors – the Soviet Union cried foul.  Even though Reagan altruistically called SDI a hope for peace and offered to share the technology with our enemies, right wingers in this country, the biggest supporters of both Reagan and this idea, insisted we would never do that.  This undercut the generosity side of the proposal at the outset by making clear that altruism was a concept better kept to ourselves than shared.  This turned the defensive system that Reagan proposed into an offensive system which would disadvantage anyone without access to it.
   The Russians thought SDI would disrupt the strategic balance of power in the Cold War, so carefully arranged, which was called MAD, or mutual assured destruction, by rendering Soviet missile power moot.  They continued to stridently oppose this plan even as opposition in the US continued to claim that the idea was not even technically sound or currently feasible with existing technology.  
   Therefore, from the very start, the debate over this defensive system has been more visceral than rational.  From its inception, it has been convoluted with offensive repercussions, including domestic opposition in the US, practical problems with its technical capability, problems of funding, building and deploying the system and the opposition of the Soviets, who dutifully threatened a new arms race.  It was all further made irrelevant by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the corresponding removal of the traditional strategic challenge that Empire represented to the West.  Eventually, smart people assumed, this confluence of circumstances would render the whole issue rather less relevant than it at first seemed, a pure case of more noise than substance, more whimper than bang.  
   And then there came 9/11, which entirely changed the landscape of the world facing us and which should have decisively pushed the whole concept over the ledge of possibility for the time being all together.  
    Because even prior to 9/11, with a Democratic president in the White House, SDI had become just another research program with a higher political profile and price than most.  This was the case until the Bush administration took over in 2000.  This anachronistic administration, which has a long history, like a mule in a rut, of revising all the old Republican political platitudes as if they were eternal; proceeded to resuscitate everything that Reagan had ever said or done as if it were Koranic, from budget deficits to tax breaks to the wealthy to assaults on social programs to … SDI under a new name.  From its outset, the Bush administration has seemed often less a new administration than an old regurgitation of a poorly digested meal.
    So Bush, in his first months in office, completely ignoring the rumors of warnings of terrorists, pushed SDI back to the front burner.  Though warning signs of an impending attack against us were everywhere, increasingly credible and specific and growing more and more ominous, they were given short shrift in favor of pursuing the costly chimera of missile defense.  
   When at his ranch the President was briefed on the terror threat and handed an intelligence briefing titled something subtle like – al Qaeda determined to attack in the US – he completely dismissed it.  All the rest of the time his cabinet spent on foreign policy – I guarantee it – was spent discussing political methodologies by which they might be able to hoodwink Congress and the American people into funding full deployment of some variant of SDI.  As anomalous as it had become, it was the stated number one priority of George Bush’s entire foreign policy.
    It would be vastly unfair to saddle any one group or person with guilt for not protecting us from that terrible atrocity.  Let’s just say when 9/11 did occur on their watch it would have surely been comforting to know that our government had at least properly assessed the most likely threats facing us and had focused their full attention toward countering them.  Clearly this was not the case.  
   Because of the vast paranoiac secrecy with which this administration cloaks all their actions, they can implausibly deny this, but it is almost without question and beyond debate that 90% of this administration’s public statements and strategic planning prior to 9/11 were consumed not with protecting us from the imminent threat of terrorism but on the pay-off kick-back scheme of what was formerly known as Star Wars.
 
II The Loving Spoonful

    After astutely missing all the signs prior to 9/11 because of their obsession with missile defense they then, despite knowing exactly who it was who attacked us on that awful, fateful day in September, compounded their errors with another fatal misjudgment.  After we took out the Taliban in Afghanistan and had al Qaeda and bin Laden in our gunsights, the only reason we had fought the war in Afghanistan in the first place, the administration lost focus again.  As if their heads are on swivels, the administration had a relapse of Attention Deficit Disorder, and decided to attack Iraq instead.  This was a little like going to the trouble of fighting World War II and forgetting to capture Hitler.
    To say this mistake was one of the oldest in the book would be an understatement.  Listen to this quote from Livy: “Time would fail me if I tried to enumerate all the kings and commanders who rashly invaded foreign soil with utter disaster to their armies (and themselves).  The Athenians, for instance, for once forgot their native prudence and, on the suggestion of a young citizen (Alcibiades) as adventuresome in character as he was noble in blood, abandoned the war in Greece and sailed to Sicily, when in a single… defeat they brought irreparable ruin upon their once prosperous community.”  
   Replace Athens with America, Greece with Afghanistan, Sicily with Iraq and Alcibiades with Bush, and you have us replicating a mistake so classic that it was considered time worn 2,000 years ago.  
    As proof that old bad ideas are as persistent as inoperable diseases in the minds of our backward looking leaders, here you have us years later trying to re-fight Viet Nam and recreate the Cold War simultaneous to letting the terrorists who really did attack us on 9/11 go free.  So now the Bush administration, the most mechanical minded, pre-programmed and ideological we have ever seen, with a long history of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reason, in addition to the catastrophe of Iraq, is poised to erect a watered down, ground based version of Star Wars in Eastern Europe.  
   Their rationale for this is every bit as irrational as was the rationale for invading Iraq.  They say it is to protect Poland and the Czech Republic and, I guess, continental Europe and maybe the North Pole too, as if any of this were really our job, from missile attacks from North Korea or Iran.  Just what sort of imminent geopolitical crisis they are expecting, among all the nations in the world, that would set Iran and Poland at each other’s throats is hard to fathom.  
    But since neither North Korea nor Iran actually currently possess the missile capability to attack Europe it seems we are inflating and reversing the old adage by applying billions of pounds (as in dollars) of prevention to effect an imaginary ounce of cure.  Talk about a loving spoonful.  We can only wish our intrepid administration had been half as solicitous and diligent in protecting the United States from real terror threats as they are being in protecting Europe from imaginary intercontinental ones.

III  The Three Bears Missile Shield

    But if neither of these usual suspects really has missiles capable or worthy of being defeated by our new missile defense system, who are we really trying to defend Europe from?  Since Reagan initially intended this program to protect against the Soviet threat in the mid 1980’s, naturally there is a suspicion that Bush is aiming to protect Europe from the former Soviet Union twenty years after it was necessary.  
   We have heard the term (and if we haven’t we should have) that “presidents are here and now but bureaucracies are forever” and know full well of the torturously tortoise - like, excruciatingly slow, long lived process of our governmental weapons procurement process, but this really does seem one that would rewrite the books on the topic.
    But no not at all.  If this is what you think you would be wrong, as least that is what we are assured by Stephen Hadley, the president’s National Security Advisor.  He reassures us that there is no way this missile defense shield could possibly protect Europe from a missile attack which comprised more than a few missiles at a time.  Russia, he tells us, could easily overwhelm it.  
   Isn’t this a security breach?  When’s the last time a presidential advisor has been so solicitous to assure the entire world of the total strategic ineffectiveness of a brand new weapons system that has cost the taxpayer billions of dollars even before it’s been deployed?  And this, so that they will be able to deploy it anyway? 
Wouldn’t you have normally expected, once a weapons system or anything else that worked this poorly was discovered, that it would be voluntarily withdrawn?  Yet, this administration logic insists that it’s precisely because it works so poorly that it may be safely deployed.  Doesn’t it totally undercut any potential value it might have had as a deterrent by telling all our would-be enemies in advance exactly how and how easy it is to defeat it?
    Now the American people have a right to be confused.  Why are we spending tens of billions of dollars and squandering great amounts of political capital abroad to impose and erect an unproven, unworkable missile defense system which, by their own public definition of it, cannot conceivably protect anyone from anything?  Except, of course, perhaps to protect the American taxpayer from actually receiving any benefit from the money they are being asked to spend to build the thing?  You would think in this dangerous world of ours that it might be possible to find a more pressing use for taxpayer money than in protecting the Czechs from the North Koreans.
   All things being equal, this sure has all the earmarks of a weapons system searching desperately for an enemy to use against.  Trouble is it sounds like the Three Bears missile defense system.  Iran and Korea have no missiles to intercept and Russia has far too many.  No enemy is “just right” to fit our narrow system of defense.  So why are we putting it up anyway?  Unfortunately, when this administration can’t find any enemy worthy of the type of war they are in the mood to fight, they have a tragic history of inventing one in their own minds to wrestle against. Needless to say, this is backwards to the way such things are normally done.  
    When the administration’s own explanations of why this missile defense system is necessary to deploy fall this far short of a raison d’etre one’s left with the distinct belief after listening to them that this is still about what it has always seemed to be about – political graft for corrupt politicians and their contractor friends – more than any national benefit for the American people.  Other than the original construction costs on their soil they can’t even rationally explain how it is going to help the Czechs and Poles.
    In fact corruption is also the only conceivable explanation for why the testing for the system has been so vigorously rigged.  What interest would any American government have in premature approval and deployment of a defensive missile system doomed to fail?  There is no explanation for this behavior outside of graft.  The raw research may be valid and can be explained as a future benefit, but when the tests have been so contrived as to be untrustworthy, the actual deployment of a system that can’t be proven to work against an enemy that can’t be rationally defined, obviously has no use but as a fund raising point for politicians and a windfall for defense contractors.  
   As of now, as near as we can tell, as long as our imaginary enemies tell us well in advance when, at what and from where they will firing the missiles, don’t fire too many at once (and no fair trying to disguise the real ones with dummies or flack or engaging in evasive actions) and don’t upgrade their missile capability to a faster, lower flying or more radar resistant stealth model, we have a system that’s proven it can, if the weather’s right, be nearly 50% effective in knocking them down.

IV The Placebo Effect

   Some of its proponents have suggested that’s quite good enough for this government’s work.  Even if it probably won’t work, the very possibility that it might work, we’re told, could create confusion and uncertainty in the backs of the minds of our potential adversaries to give them a restless night or two.  Not to mention the uncertainty it will undoubtedly create in our own minds and those of our allies.  As it now stands, so little will we be able to trust this system, that if it ever actually does become necessary we will have to create a second fall back missile defense to protect us from the predictable failure of our first missile defense system.
   Others have said that even if the missile defense system doesn’t work, maybe our enemies won’t be smart enough to realize it, and so the placebo effect may pertain.  This could make us immune from missile attacks by an odd sort of extraordinarily expensive reverse psychology.  That is, unless our future enemies actually can read newspapers or watch television where these dimwits have been discussing this grand strategy in public. 
   Normally placebos are sugar pills or inexpensive dummies impossible to tell from real ones.  Yet to make sure our enemies fall for our ruse, our leaders cleverly propose to put up a phony system as expensive as a real one that will yet be no more effective than its sugar pill equivalent.  This seems to completely obviate any usefulness a placebo should supply to us.  For the same cost why don’t we just wait until a system is perfected, is needed or better yet, not put one up at all?  Except for the price tag there’d really be no difference in effect.  Such questions remain unanswered.
   Even some opponents, not believing what they are hearing and willing to give the administration the benefit of every doubt, have therefore concluded that the Bush administration may be merely being too smart by half.  In truth, they rather just seem too dumb by a mile and three quarters.  
    In fact, the only person in the world who actually seems confused and alarmed by our placebo missile defense system is Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who himself often seems to still be operating on Soviet time.  He was so outraged that anyone would imagine any malign intent on his part that he’s been willing to provide an actual instance of malign intent to prove that he doesn’t have one.  He claims that if this defensive system is deployed he will target more of his missiles at areas of Europe not previously targeted.  Apparently he is so anxious to prove the lack of necessity of a missile defense system targeted against him that he is anxious to fill the breach by providing one.  
    Fortunately, this proves once and for all the foresight of the Bush administration, which has a pure genius for discerning or creating threats where none actually exist while ignoring real threats which actually do.  So if Putin does threaten to launch his missile attack we will already have a system in place to deflect it.  Unfortunately the system we will have in place is the placebo system which, we have already been assured, doesn’t actually work well enough to stop the attack we are goading Russia into.
    Before the G-8 summit just concluded Putin made another proposal.  He suggested he would approve the missile deployment in Poland if Bush would agree to use a Soviet era radar system based in Azerbijan.  In other words we will be allowed to place our missiles anywhere as long as Russia gets to control the radar system on which the entire triggering mechanism depends.  Not only would this not inhibit any future attack from Russia against Europe but it would undoubtedly make North Korea and Iran, former and present allies of Russia, dependent client states of Russia which could then virtually enroll them as part of the extended arm of Russian power.  
    This would actually provide Russia with a clear incentive to provide North Korea and Iran with precisely the missiles they don’t already have, to use them as a proxy threat against Europe and the United States, while pretending there is nothing they can do about it.  In fact, this is pretty much what they are doing to us anyway and why China and Russia do so little to rein in rogue states as long as they are vexing, harassing and keeping us occupied.  Yet George Bush called this proposal of Putin’s interesting and Hadley termed it a “bold proposal”.
    On the contrary, to suggest that our high dollar state of the art missile defense system should be tied to a third rate cold war era relic of a radar system is a proposal so unserious as to be a none so subtle form of ridicule of the American president.  But Bush is so weakened and unsophisticated in foreign affairs and so deeply engaged in perpetrating willful fraud on his own people with the whole weird missile defense scheme that Star Wars represents, he is compelled to pretend that Putin’s bizarre proposal is a sound offer that we would be foolish not to take seriously.
   For my money, I’d suggest we take him up on his offer but only on the condition that Putin pays his share for the Azeri installation.  Put-in or shut-up, I’d say.  In fact, let’s sell him the whole kit, boondoggle and caboodle and be done with it in its present less than adequate state of effectiveness.  And then if I were George Bush I would just sit back and wait to see the look on Putin’s face when he comes slowly to the realization that the whole missile defense system never worked or ever had any discernible purpose in the real world to begin with. 
From its incipiency Star Wars has always been more about talking points and winning phony political wars in the United States than it has with winning real wars elsewhere.  But if he could unload the whole thing on Putin, though our making a profit on it is an opportunity undoubtedly long gone, then finally George Bush would have put one over on his Russian friend and won a victory of sorts in foreign affairs.  His placebo, Three Bears missile defense system scam would have worked and actually fooled someone, because his missile defense system never has.

V  For an Effective Missile Defense

    But seriously, what should be done about a missile interceptor system?  It should be self-evident to any serious student of government that you should never deploy a system like this until 1) it is necessary and 2) you are absolutely certain that it works.  In this case neither condition applies.  To erect an ineffective defensive system prior to its need in the wrong place at the wrong time, ensures its immediate obsolescence.  The missile defense system they are now poised to deploy is expensive junk that will never be needed, never used and will rust and rot in its place.  The manufacturers of the system, of course, don’t really care, nor do the politicians who pander to them.  The money between contractor and politician and back again will change hands regardless.  This seems to be the entire point and motivation of the exercise.
    In fact, putting up a bad system is clearly worse than putting up no system at all.  Strategically, defensive systems such as this are the most costly, least effective and most easily evaded form of security.  This is particularly true in this world of asymmetrical warfare in which a conventional, costly and outmoded defense against an unconventional enemy is bound to fail.  Flexible, offensive systems with strong forward based capabilities abroad are far more compelling deterrents to the type of enemy we are seeing today then stationary defensive ones, especially, I suppose it must be repeated, when they don't even work to start with.
    The better idea is to leave this system on the drawing board for now until it is proved and a use for it clearly presents itself to the point where it can actually be explained.  Otherwise, once it is in place and fixed at site, it will not only give our enemies ample lead time to figure out what to do to get around a static defense but burden us with a false sense of security it will invariably provide (even if our leaders know better).  To put our cards on the table first with a defensive system, unless it is absolutely comprehensive and foolproof is an absurdity. This will enable any potential adversary to marshal their resources better than we do and merely plot around, over, under and through a system which will be unable to adjust to meet new challenges as they develop.  
    On the contrary, the best defense is to have a system which is technically feasible and might be deployed but isn’t yet, because then we may keep all our options open.  Our economic and scientific and military resources are our best defense, not flawed hardware already built and rusting on the ground.  Even if it were entirely successful in its operations, deploying a missile defense system and then waiting for rogue states to build missiles doomed to be shot down by it as if it were a kind of latter day Maginot Line, “if we build it they will come” directly at it, theory, is inane and hardly worthy of a great and confident power.  
   We would merely be excusing them of the necessity of having to expend the money to build their missiles in the first place if they couldn’t build missiles that would beat our system.  Moreover, to put up a costly, failed missile defense shield prematurely will exhaust our resources, discredit missile defense in this country for a generation and make impossible erecting an advanced, more workable system later.
    Clearly, the fanatical push to deploy this missile defense system is not driven by any discernible national need or purpose.  There is no corresponding diplomatic, military or economic benefit to justify the costs which will accrue to the United States from its deployment now.  On the contrary, as everyone knows, this is being propelled by bad politics and bad politicians, graft and total lack of strategic coherence and economic self-restraint by an administration which is already well established as the least effective and most fiscally profligate in our modern history.