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The Shield is High Frontier's quarterly newsletter addressing all issues pertinent to missile defense.
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The Shield - Volume XX, No. 3 - July-September 2003 (IN PRODUCTION)	The Shield - Volume XX, No. 2 - April-June 2003 Missile Defense Prospects In The Changing World Scene! White House BMD Policy North Korea: Arms Control Folly Defensible War Crimes Collision
The Shield - Volume XX, No. 1 - January-March 2003 On To Winning One For The Gipper! The Right Call On Missile Defense The Old Dominion Speaks! Pyongyang's Nuclear Blackmail Potpourri	The Shield - Volume XIX, No. 4 - October-December 2002 Taking Stock of 2002 CIA Director Says al Qaeda Still A Major Threat North Korea Sells Scuds To Yemen North Korea's Global Threat Lessons From The Past on Space-Based Interceptors
The Shield - Volume XIX, No. 3 - July-September 2002 Overcoming Bureaucratic Inertia and Collective Amnesia An Urgent Homeland Security Requirement CIA Assessment of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs Worries About Russia Eyes Wide Shut	The Shield - Volume XIX, No. 2 - April-June 2002 Free At Last! Moscow Summit Excerpts Another Navy Hit In Self Defense The Root Cause of Terrorism New National Security Ways
The Shield - Volume XIX, No. 1 - January-March 2002 At Long Last: Poised To End America's Vulnerability! Putin, Bush May Sign Two Arms Deals At May Summit New Hampshire House Resolution Countdown For Sea and Space-Based Defenses? ABM Systems and the Outer Space Treaty	The Shield - Volume XVIII, No. 6- November/December 2001 Free At Last, Free At Last; Let’s Roll!!! New Hampshire Resolution Words For The History Books by President George W. Bush Missile Defense's Feminine Mystique Urgent Call For Help
The Shield- Volume XVIII, No. 5- September/October 2001 Read The Fine Print And Watch What They Do!!! A 'Prophet' Finds Honor At Last The Coalition Trap Remarks from Senator Jesse Helms To Do Iraq or Not Do Iraq – That's the Question for Dubya Potpourri	The Shield- Volume XVIII, No. 4- July/August 2001 Good News, Bad News on Missile Defense Prospects Rempt: "No Showstoppers" To Building Sea-Based Global Missile Defense Missile Defense: Unprepared For Manifest Peril Stop The MADness: The Case For Missile Defense Weldon Proposes U.S.-Israeli-Turkey Cooperation On Boost-Phase Defense Kozyrev: NMD System Offers Russia Hope Missile Defense Advocate: DoD Approach Too Narrow
The Shield- Volume XVIII, No. 3- May/June 2001 The Month That Was  When will America respond to China's space challenge?  Reagan’s Science Advisor Speaks Out For A Global Defense  Pssst.. The ABM Treaty is dead!!	The Shield- Volume XVIII, No. 2-  March/April 2001 Poised To End America's Vulnerability! Self-Deterred From Defending the U.S.? An Urgent Threat Does Russia Already Have A National Missile Defense? Cooperation With Russia? Space: Battlefield Of The Future? Final Thoughts
The Shield- Volume XVIII, No. 1-  January/February 2001 A New Old Wind Blowing! Capitol Hill Support for Building Defenses British Conservatives Back Bush on Missile Defense Proposed Bush Missile Defense Agenda Rumsfeld II Happy Gulf War Anniversary!	The Shield- Volume XVII, No. 6-  November/December 2000 Defense in the Balance!!! Trying to Ban Space Weapons Potpourri Front and Center Happy Holidays
The Shield- Volume XVII, No. 5-  September/October 2000	The Shield- Volume XVII, No. 4-  July/ August 2000 An Expensive "No-Test" - And Consequences Missile Defense Isn't Rocket Science Missile Defense Triumph Bush on Missile Defense Go Navy! "FRONT AND CENTER"
The Shield- Volume XVII, No. 3- May/June 2000 Shocked, Shocked at NMD Cost Growth! A New Coalition to Protect Americans Now! First By Sea Time for Missile Defense Anti-Missile Defense Chorus Naval NMD Role? Generally Speaking: Getting the Word Out!	The Shield- Volume XVII, No. 2- March/April 2000 Coming Out for Sea Based Defense November Missile Defense Missiles and Gnashing Teeth Fiscal Year 2001 Defense Budget Missile Defense Hearing Introduction Radio Audience to Double

“Countries have placed ballistic missiles in ships – dime a dozen – all over the world.  At any given time, there’s any number off our coasts – coming, going.  On transporter-erector-launchers, they simply erect it, fire off a ballistic missile, put it down, cover it up.  Their radar signature’s not any different than 50 others in close proximity.”
Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld
Pentagon Press Briefing/September 16, 2002

    Rear Admiral Rod Rempt publicly stated almost 2 years ago that, for $100-200 million, the Navy could adapt its existing air defense interceptor system within a year to provide a limited sea-based defense to help counter this threat identified by Secretary Rumsfeld.  Seems like it would be better than nothing – which is what we now have.

    According to a recent formal assessment by the U.S. intelligence community, Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions.  Baghdad has chemical weapons (CW) and biological weapons (BW) as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions agreed to by Iraq in 1991.  If left unchecked, Iraq probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.  Furthermore, the CIA’s assessment is that if Iraq can purchase the needed weapons grade fissile material, it could build a nuclear weapon within a year.
    Baghdad hides large portions of Iraq's WMD efforts.  Revelations after the Gulf war starkly demonstrated the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information.  For example, the CIA believed in 1990 that Iraq was a decade away from building a nuclear weapon – in 1991, intrusive inspections discovered a massive covert nuclear development program, employing over 20,000 scientists and engineers, and Iraq was within 6-months of testing a nuclear device at the beginning of Desert Storm.
 
Key findings of the recent CIA assessment were:

    Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its CW effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in BW; most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.

· Iraq's growing ability to sell oil illicitly increases Baghdad's capabilities to finance WMD programs; annual earnings have more than quadrupled.
· Iraq largely has rebuilt missile and BW facilities damaged during Operation Desert Fox and has expanded its chemical and biological infrastructure under the cover of civilian production.
· Iraq has exceeded UN range limits of 150 km with its ballistic missiles and is working with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which allow for a more lethal means to deliver BW and, less likely, CW agents.
· Saddam probably does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, but remains intent on acquiring them.

· Iraq's aggressive attempts to obtain proscribed high-strength aluminum tubes are of significant concern.  All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program.  Most specialists assess this to be the intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs.
· Based on tubes of the size Iraq is trying to acquire, a few tens of thousands of centrifuges would be capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a couple of nuclear weapons per year.
Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX.  Its capability was reduced during the prior inspections and is probably more limited now than it was at the time of the Gulf war, although VX production and agent storage life probably have been improved.
· Iraq probably has a few hundred tons of CW agents.
· The Iraqis have experience in manufacturing CW bombs, artillery rockets, and projectiles, and probably have CW for short-range ballistic missile warheads, including for a limited number of covertly stored, extended-range Scuds.
R&D, production, and weaponization of Iraq's offensive BW program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war.
· Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and can quickly produce and weaponize a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers, and covert operatives, including potentially against the US Homeland.
· Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent production capability, which includes mobile facilities; these facilities can evade detection, are highly survivable, and can exceed the production rates Iraq had prior to the Gulf war.
Iraq maintains a small missile force and several development programs, including for a UAV that most analysts believe probably is intended to deliver BW agents.
· Gaps in Iraqi accounting to UNSCOM suggest that Saddam retains a covert force of up to a few dozen Scud-variant SRBMs with ranges of 650 to 900 km.
· Iraq is deploying its new al-Samoud and Ababil-100 SRBMs, which are capable of flying beyond the UN-authorized 150-km range limit.
· Baghdad's UAVs – especially if used for delivery of CW/BW agents – could threaten Iraq's neighbors, US forces in the Persian Gulf, and the United States if brought close to, or into, the US Homeland.
· Iraq is developing medium-range ballistic missile capabilities, largely through foreign assistance in building specialized facilities.
Although not emphasized in the CIA assessment, Saddam Hussein has long had connections to terrorists, and could enable them independently to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction.

“ He [Saddam Hussein] is working as if his life depended on it to acquire nuclear weapons and deliver them.  Do we doubt that terrorist groups would turn down the opportunity to get their hands on Saddam’s weapons and use them against us?”
- Senator George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio)

· "We continue to have concerns that [Russian] technology and know-how for nuclear weapons are flowing to Iran."
· "Russia has to keep close watch on nearby countries -- Iran, Iraq, North Korea -- that are actively seeking to acquire nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."
· "Russia has to avoid letting its desire for commercial gain end up hastening the day that these countries can pose a threat that could not only destabilize their own region, but undermine the security of the entire world."
· "We hope that in the wake of this new initiative [in which Western nations have pledged $20 billion to help Russia destroy or secure its weapons of mass destruction], Russia will do its part by tightening its controls on nuclear cooperation with Iran."
· "Could the massive amounts of weaponry that Russia sells to China – for understandable commercial reasons – add to the instability of Asia? . . . If war broke out in the Taiwan Straits, this would lead to serious instability on Russia's eastern border."

· "Will Russians have the right to associate with one another and with those abroad as they wish, or will the state keep track of associations with foreigners and messages sent on the Internet?"
· "Will Russia have the courage to seek a political solution to the bloody war in Chechnya, which continues despite the government's claims that the situation is returning to normal? Will the Russian leadership hold to account those members of the security forces who, in the name of fighting terrorism, are committing serious violations of the human rights of the civilian population?"

    The following is a review of a very important and enlightening book, Breakdown, written by the Washington Times star national security reporter and recently published Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, DC, 2002.  Gertz’s Book was reviewed in the September 29, 2002 Washington Times by Joshua Sinai, a senior analyst on terrorism issues at ANSER (Analytic Services). He teaches a course on "Forecasting Terrorism" at the Internet-based American Military University, and a course on "Long-Term Forecasting" at George Washington University.

 
Eyes Wide Shut
By Joshua Sinai
    "Breakdown" is the inside story of the intelligence community's failure to anticipate, preempt, and prevent the horrific simultaneous suicide aircraft bombings of September 11. According to Bill Gertz, the book's author, and others, al Qaeda's success in carrying out these attacks represented a Pearl Harbor failure of catastrophic proportions for the nation's counterterrorism community.
    One of the many strengths of this important book is that Mr. Gertz places the September 11 attacks in context. He sees the assaults as much more than a single counterterrorism failure and he presents instead a chronicle of this nation's ineffectuality in thwarting previous al Qaeda attacks going back to the early 1990s. In his view, the events of last fall represented a systemic failure encompassing all aspects of U.S. counterterrorism.
    Mr. Gertz, a reporter on the national desk of The Washington Times, is considered one of America's leading national security investigative journalists. His unparalleled access to contacts and knowledge of America's intelligence/counterterrorism system makes him ideally suited to dig deep into what is, by any measure, an embarrassing episode of tragic proportions.
The pages are sprinkled with one major insight after another from the country's leading counterterrorism experts, such as James Woolsey (former director of the Central Intelligence Agency), Oliver "Buck" Revell (former associate deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for counterterrorism), retired Gen. Patrick Hughes (the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency), Angelo Codevilla (former congressional intelligence committee staffer), and others — whose wisdom about what went wrong needs to be incorporated into the congressional committees and national commissions that have been created to assess shortfalls and recommend solutions.
    According to this account, the counterterrorism components in the CIA, the DIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency completely broke down in the 1990s. Despite "the most formidable intelligence-gathering system in the world," Mr. Gertz writes, there was a "succession of missed opportunities, undetected — until too late — attacks, and unfortunate surprises that have been the hallmark of U.S. intelligence agencies over the last five decades."
    The attacks against the United States by al Qaeda and its network of affiliates that necessitated a much more pro-active and vigorous U.S. counterterrorism response began in the early 1990s. In 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-American Islamicist, assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane (in one of the book's few errors, the author misspells Kahane's first name). However, as Mr. Gertz points out, this was not an isolated incident, but part of a bigger plot involving blueprints in Nosair's possession to bomb New York City landmarks, including the World Trade Center. However, nothing was done at the time to sift through these blueprints, leaving al Qaeda's cell free to carry out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
    Mr. Gertz cites numerous other examples of missed signals that could have thwarted future attacks, but the most glaring, in light of what happened on September 11, was the failure to follow through on the plots by Ramzi Yousef to hijack or use civilian aircraft as weapons of mass destruction. Yousef was the leader of the initial World Trade Center bombing, who was apprehended in 1995.
    Despite the failed attempt by an Algerian affiliate of al Qaeda to plunge a civilian airliner into the Eiffel Tower in 1994 — it failed because the hijackers lacked flight skills — and the subsequent training of Islamic terrorists to fly aircraft, U.S. intelligence agencies appeared to be completely oblivious to al Qaeda's intention to use civilian airliners to launch catastrophic attacks against the American homeland.
    The systemic problems in the U.S. intelligence apparatus Mr. Gertz criticizes began with wrongly assuming that Osama bin Laden was "primarily" a financial backer — but not a major organizer — of terrorism. They continued with an ineffectual intelligence covert operations capability to track, penetrate and preempt al Qaeda.
    Mr. Gertz writes that President Bill Clinton's response to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa was "anemic" because its "primary goal here, as always, was to identify terrorists, capture them and return them for prosecution in a court of law. It was a reactive strategy that did nothing to deter attacks. Even the administration's extremely limited military counterstrikes were designed to send political signals rather than do actual damage to terrorists, their supporters, and the infrastructure they used."
    Domestically, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI were hampered from carrying out effective intelligence operations in the United States because of a host of legal restrictions. This was a serious problem that paved the way for the FBI's inability to track all the al Qaeda operatives who were training at U.S. flight schools.
    For example, as Mr. Woolsey told Mr. Gertz, "The FBI guidelines required . . . a very clear criminal predicate in order to open a full-scale investigation" — but by the time a specific act is already planned, intelligence gathering in the form of surveillance and penetration would be too late. Mr. Gertz also criticizes the FBI for its previous "law enforcement" as opposed to the needed "intelligence" culture, which is necessary to track and preempt terrorist groups from mounting their operations during the crucial incubatory pre-incident phases.
    Congress also is subjected to Mr. Gertz's criticism. He writes: "By 2001, congressional oversight of intelligence had two results. First, it had left the intelligence services burdened with a combination of restrictions, constraints, and funding controls produced during the destructive period of the Church and Pike committees. Second, and in reaction to the first, it left Congress uninterested in performance-based oversight, which meant, ultimately, that millions of dollars were wasted on bureaucracy rather than intelligence achievement."
    In his incisive conclusion, Mr. Gertz proposes a blueprint to reform and improve America's intelligence capabilities. He recommends a new clandestine service to replace the CIA's Directorate of Operations and the DIA's Defense HUMINT Service that would conduct more extensive intelligence operations; a new domestic counterintelligence service based on the British MI-5 that would work closely with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to collect intelligence on terrorist groups and a new clandestine military intelligence apparatus that would be absorbed into the military services in order to directly feed intelligence to the warfighting community.
    The latter's clandestine operations force would also conduct military campaigns against terrorist groups.
    In one of his most controversial recommendations, Mr. Gertz proposes the reorganization and renaming of the CIA into a "central analysis agency" that would produce analysis and technology research — but not covert operations — based on a new system of "competitive analysis" with outside specialists.
    There is little likelihood that the current intelligence apparatus will change bureaucratically to accommodate Mr. Gertz's prescriptions. Nevertheless, it is likely that the Bush administration's emphasis on upgrading the intelligence community's counterterrorism capabilities on all fronts and at all levels and streamlining it through the newly formed Department of Homeland Security will result in incorporating Mr. Gertz's insights into what constitutes effective counterterrorism.
Mr. Gertz's book is highly accurate, except for one omission, which actually is not the author's fault. One of his sources, Marvin Cetron, a leading Washington-area futurist, is portrayed as having "produced" the 1995 report entitled "Terror 2000: The Future Face of Terrorism," for the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. That study, in fact, was a joint effort by Mr. Cetron and Peter Probst, at the time a special assistant for concept development at OSD SO/LIC, who served as the primary author of the report's terrorism sections. Mr. Probst, who has since retired from the Pentagon, is currently a leading consultant on terrorism issues.
    "Breakdown" is the most insightful and penetrating of the books published so far about the organizational and analytical intelligence problems that led to the catastrophic attacks of September 11 and, as such, should be required reading for those who are committed to transforming those problem areas into solutions.
The above review was published in the September 29, 2002 Washington Times, reprinted by permission.

On Sept. 11, the terrorists who perpetrated their evil deeds against America successfully accomplished exceedingly complex and exquisitely timed acts of terrorism but, despite their precision, they made a huge miscalculation. They concluded that Americans would cower and hide, that the government of the United States would not undertake a worldwide response, using all the financial, diplomatic, economic, and military resources at its disposal. They believed that their financial networks were secure, that their sanctuaries would protect them, and that the world would have no stomach for such a fight.
They were wrong on all counts.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
Writing in Asahi Shimbun (Japan), September 10, 2002

    From the May 24, 2002 Moscow Joint Statement signed by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin:

    “ . . . The United States and Russia proceed from the Joint Statements by the President of the United States of America and the President of the Russian Federation on Strategic Issues of July 22, 2001 in Genoa and on a New Relationship Between the United States and Russia of November 13, 2001 in Washington.
    “The United States and Russia are taking steps to reflect, in the military field, the changed nature of the strategic relationship between them.
    “The United States and Russia acknowledge that today's security environment is fundamentally different than during the Cold War.
    “In this connection, the United States and Russia have agreed to implement a number of steps aimed at strengthening confidence and increasing transparency in the area of missile defense, including the exchange of information on missile defense programs and tests in this area, reciprocal visits to observe missile defense tests, and observation aimed at familiarization with missile defense systems. They also intend to take the steps necessary to bring a joint center for the exchange of data from early warning systems into operation.
    “The United States and Russia have also agreed to study possible areas for missile defense cooperation, including the expansion of joint exercises related to missile defense, and the exploration of potential programs for the joint research and development of missile defense technologies, bearing in mind the importance of the mutual protection of classified information and the safeguarding of intellectual property rights.
    “The United States and Russia will, within the framework of the NATO-Russia Council, explore opportunities for intensified practical cooperation on missile defense for Europe.
    “The United States and Russia declare their intention to carry out strategic offensive reductions to the lowest possible levels consistent with their national security requirements and alliance obligations, and reflecting the new nature of their strategic relations.
    “A major step in this direction is the conclusion of the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions. . . . ”

    On June 13, the Navy again successfully tested its Navy Theater Wide (NTW) interceptor by shooting down an Aries rocket – a hundred miles above the sea – fired from the island of Kauai.  An Aegis cruiser, the USS Lake Erie, acquired and tracked the target rocket from its location off the coast of Hawaii, computed an intercept solution, and launched its test interceptor – and repeated its January 25 feat of destroying the target by directly hitting it above the Earth’s atmosphere.
This successful test is another major step forward for the Navy’s efforts to improve its existing Aegis-based air defense system to protect our overseas troops, friends, and allies against missile attack.  And the really good news is that, since the U. S. also withdrew from the ABM Treaty on June 13, this sea-based system now can be tested and built also to defend the American homeland – for a relatively small investment in the relatively near future.
    We have known for years that, for a small percentage of the $60 billion the U.S. taxpayer has invested in Aegis system, we can rapidly begin operating a sea-based defense and improving it with block changes as new technology is tested and proven.  Such an SDI program was begun under the first President Bush and supported by the Secretary of Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations.  With then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s blessing, the Pentagon fully budgeted to build and begin operations of such a capability years ago.
    The Clinton Administration scuttled that program – no doubt because of their higher priority for the ABM Treaty than building effective defenses.  And they “dumbed down” the anemically funded sea-based defense programs they did reluctantly continue – under persistent pressure from Congress.  The Clinton Administration resisted spending the money Congress added year after year; instead they conducted study after study of the merits of sea-based defenses.  Every study – over a dozen by inside and outside experts – was positive.  But the Clinton Administration delayed and dissembled – and refused to provide even Congressionally mandated study results to the Congress.
    And the fight is not over.  As elaborated by Senator Kyl in the following article, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) and the Democrat majority on the Senate Armed Services Committee drafted recent legislation to continue to curtail this important program even in its ABM Treaty compliant “Theater Missile Defense” form as proposed by the Bush Administration.  His proposed legislation would also constrain other important missile defense programs that now, in the absence of the ABM Treaty, also can be pursued in earnest.
    Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has written to Congressional leaders to say he would recommend that President Bush veto such a Bill.  Hopefully, the full Senate will stand with the President and reject the SASC Bill – or, failing that, the House will avoid such offensive restraints and prevail in the House-Senate Conference in the Fall.   If not, the President can again impose his will against those devotees to the ABM Treaty with his veto pen.
    This is an important matter – because such a defense is needed as quickly as possible.  There have been press reports, for example, that Al Qaeda already may have up to 100 SCUD missiles that Osama bin Laden could attempt to launch from ships off our coasts at cities where most Americans live.  Even when the Alaska site, which began construction on June 15, is completed – hopefully in 2004, it cannot defend against this threat.  We need the kind of defenses that NTW and other systems can provide to counter that near-term threat.  Happily, such near-term defense options are available – not the least of which is simply to quickly deploy a number of the prototype interceptors tested on June 13.
    In addition, Navy studies concluded last summer that there are relatively inexpensive deployment options to begin defending the United States homeland and within a year:

•  Within 12 months for a few hundred million dollars, the Aegis system’s existing air defense missile can be given a boost-phase intercept capability useful in some scenarios to shoot down North Korean missiles as they rise from their launch pads.  This capability could – in concert with existing coastal radar systems and Coast Guard operations – help protect metropolitan areas from short range SCUDs that might be launched from tramp steamers off all our coasts – e.g., near Boston, New York, Norfolk, etc.  In the context of September 11, this is an appropriate homeland security concern.
• A second stage of sea-based defense could begin protecting American cities within 2-3 years for about $2 billion more than already programmed for the Navy Theater Wide program, which conducted last Friday’s test.  Aegis cruisers operating normally around the world could be given the capability to destroy attacking missiles in their boost- and mid-course phases and so protect a large portion of the United States – as well as our overseas troops, friends and allies.
•  These near-term sea-based defenses could later be substantially improved, for about $10 billion more.
• Senator Levin and his colleagues should cease their interference with the needed efforts to build the best defenses possible as quickly as possible; and Pentagon authorities should conclude their studies of sea-based defenses and begin – now – building real capability for America, as well as our overseas troops, friends and allies!!!

By Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona)

    There is a strange disconnect between recent developments in the Middle East and here in the U.S. Senate. In early May, Iran — newly dubbed by the State Department as the number one terrorist nation — conducted a successful test of its 800-mile-range Shahab-3 missile. There are reports that Iran is now set to begin domestic production of the missile, which will be able to reach Israel, as well as U.S. troops deployed in the Middle East and South Asia. On May 7, the Associated Press, citing an administration official, reported that Iran is continuing development of a longer-range missile, the Shahab-4. With an estimated range of 1,200-1,800 miles, the Shahab-4 will be able to reach deep into Europe. That means the fanatical mullahs in Tehran will be able to put a multitude of U.S. allies and tens of thousands of U.S. troops within striking distance.
    These developments represent a dramatic increase in the worldwide missile threat, and one could be forgiven for thinking that the United States might want to accelerate its efforts to build defenses against such weapons. Yet on May 9, the Democrat-led Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill that would seriously hamper our ability to do just that. The annual defense authorization bill passed by the committee makes deep and damaging cuts to the president's proposed budget for missile defense. Unless remedied, these cuts will erode our ability to end our vulnerability to ballistic-missile attack.
    The threat from ballistic missiles continues to grow. Today, nearly three dozen countries have or are developing ballistic missiles of increasing range and sophistication. This includes Iran's fellow "Axis of Evil" members Iraq and North Korea, as well as the terrorist-supporting regimes of Syria and Libya.
    This is precisely why a January 2002 national-intelligence estimate warned that, "[t]he probability that a missile with a weapon of mass destruction will be used against U.S. forces or interests is higher today than during most of the Cold War, and will continue to grow as the capabilities of potential adversaries mature."
    After September 11, which demonstrated the willingness of our enemies to exploit our weaknesses, we dare not willfully remain vulnerable to this threat. But, that is essentially the impact of the partisan vote of the Armed Services Committee. Though the bill still authorizes several billion dollars for missile defense, its cuts are carefully designed to gut the Pentagon's plans to protect the American people from missiles. Having liberated us from the constraints of the ABM treaty last December, the Bush administration has proposed an aggressive transformation of the previous administration's missile-defense program. The new approach features: a single, integrated architecture to command and control all of the various components of a missile- defense system; multilayered defenses capable of intercepting missiles in all phases of flight; and the ability to deploy defenses rapidly in the event of an emergency. To accommodate these goals, the administration has reformed the Missile Defense Agency and given it wide latitude to pursue innovative approaches.
    The Armed Services Committee majority has taken aim at each of these worthy efforts. Its bill cuts by two-thirds the Missile Defense Agency's staff. The critical functions of system integration and command and control are reduced by a similar amount. Programs to intercept missiles in the boost phase, particularly those employing new basing modes and technologies, are virtually wiped out. And funding for 10 test missiles, which could be deployed in an emergency, is eliminated.
    So, essentially this bill leaves the old, piecemeal approach, with many of the most promising technologies starved of funding and a variety of impediments to early deployment. Interestingly, just as this saga is unfolding, the ABM treaty is set to lapse on June 13. This bill appears to be an attempt to revive the spirit of the treaty by those who have never accepted President Bush's decision to opt out of it. If this is the case, they are in dwindling company.
    A year ago, there was much hubbub over how any decision to renounce the ABM treaty would alienate our allies, cause a major rift with Russia and spark an arms race. None of those dire predictions have come true. Dozens of countries are side-by-side with the United States in our war on terrorism. Mr. Bush has just inked a new nuclear-reduction treaty with Russia, which in turn has entered into a new partnership with NATO. To be sure, Russia and many European countries would have preferred that Mr. Bush not renounce the treaty. But it seems that these countries were not quite as wedded to this outmoded document as some of its American supporters.
    We have entered a new era in international relations in which the threats to this nation are increasingly complex and difficult to predict. That reality was brought home with horrible abruptness on September 11. Imagine if that day were to repeat itself, but this time with a ballistic missile armed with a nuclear, chemical or biological warhead. The only responsible course of action to deal with that possibility is to proceed with the most robust program of missile-defense development we can muster.
That will entail restoring the missile defense funds cut by the Armed Services Committee majority.
Originally published in the June 13, 2002, Washington Times, reprinted with permission.

By Benjamin Netanyahu
    Do not be fooled by the apologists of terror.
    These apologists tell us that the root cause of terrorism is the deprivation of national and civic rights, and that the way to stop terror is to redress the supposed grievances that arise from this deprivation.
    But the root cause of terrorism, the deliberate targeting of civilians, is not the deprivation of rights. If it were, then in the thousands of conflicts and struggles for national and civil rights in modern times we would see countless instances of terrorism. But we do not.
    Mahatma Gandhi fought for the independence of India without resorting to terrorism. So too did the peoples of Eastern Europe in their struggle to bring down the Berlin Wall. And Martin Luther King's campaign for equal rights for all Americans eschewed all violence, much less terrorism.
    If the deprivation of rights is indeed the root cause of terrorism, why did all these people pursue their cause without resorting to terror? Put simply, because they were democrats, not terrorists. They believed in the sanctity of each human life, were committed to the ideals of liberty, and championed the values of democracy.
    But those who practice terrorism do not believe in these things. In fact, they believe in the very opposite. For them, the cause they espouse is so all-encompassing, so total, that it justifies anything. It allows them to break any law, discard any moral code and trample all human rights in the dust. In their eyes, it permits them to indiscriminately murder and maim innocent men and women, and lets them blow up a bus full of children.
    There is a name for the doctrine that produces this evil. It is called totalitarianism.
Indeed, the root cause of terrorism is totalitarianism. Only a totalitarian regime, by systemically brainwashing its subjects, can indoctrinate hordes of killers to suspend all moral constraints for the sake of a twisted cause.
    That is why from its inception, totalitarianism has always been wedded to terrorism –  from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to the ayatollahs to Saddam Hussein, right down to Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat.
    It is not merely that the goals of terrorists do not justify the means they choose, it is that the means they choose tell us what their true goals are. Osama bin Laden is not seeking to defend the rights of Muslims but to murder as many Americans as possible, and ultimately to destroy America. Saddam Hussein is not seeking to defend his people but to subjugate his
neighbors. Arafat is not seeking to build a state but to destroy a state; the many massacres of Jews he sponsors tells us what he would do to all the Jews of Israel if he had enough power.
    Those who fight as terrorists rule as terrorists. People who deliberately target the innocent never become leaders who protect freedom and human rights. When terrorists seize power, they invariably set up the darkest of dictatorships – whether in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Arafatistan.
    In short, the reason why some resort to terror and others do not is not any absence of rights, but the presence of a tyrannical mindset. The totalitarian mind knows no limits. The democratic mind sets them everywhere.
    The essential steps to defeat international terrorism are being courageously undertaken by President Bush. By declaring that terrorism is never justified, and by deterring or destroying those regimes that support terror, President Bush has bravely charted a course that will lead the free world to victory.
    But to assure that this evil does not re-emerge a decade or two from now, we must not merely uproot terror but also plant the seeds of freedom. Only under tyranny can a terrorist mindset be widely cultivated. It cannot breed in a climate of democracy and freedom.
    The open debate of ideas and the respect for human life that are the foundation of all free societies are a permanent antidote to the poison that the terrorists seek to inject into the minds of their recruits.
    That is why it is imperative that once the terrorist regimes in the Middle East are swept away, the free world, led by America, must begin to build the institutions of pluralism and democracy in their place. This will not happen overnight, and it is not likely to result in liberal, Western-style democracies. But given an option between Turkish-style freedom and Iranian-style tyranny, the choice is clear.
    We simply can no longer allow parts of the world to remain cloistered by fanatic militancies. Such militancies, once armed with nuclear weapons, could destroy our civilization. We must begin immediately to encourage the peoples of the Arab and Islamic world to embrace the idea of pluralism and the ideals of freedom – for their sake, as well as ours.
Mr. Netanyahu is a former prime minister of Israel, published in the April 19, 2002 Wall Street Journal, reprinted with permission.

    It is a time of new beginnings – the most important innovations in our national security structure, policies and plans since the 1948 National Security Act established the Department of Defense and set the stage for the 40-year Cold War struggle that ended a decade ago with the Evil Empire on the ash heap of history.  Some changes are associated with the Cold War’s end; others reflect urgent requirements on the heels of September 11, 2001, which made evident for all to see that we still live in a dangerous world – perhaps even more dangerous than the Cold War, and more threatening to American citizens in their homes and workplaces.
    For over 5 years, numerous policy and technology reviews have pointed to the growing and now evident threat of terrorism to the American homeland – and recommended changes to our national security structure that would be more in keeping with the threat we now face.   Some were conducted within the Executive Branch as concern grew and Americans died in the first attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City Bombing, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Cole attack, etc. Others were conducted by Congressionally appointed bipartisan commissions.  All sensed the growing danger and the need to develop our defenses and adapt our institutions to provide needed protection.
    For example, the largest Defense Science Board Summer Study ever held – in 1997 – conducted a comprehensive study of the “transnational threat” and recommended major initiatives to begin to prepare the Defense Department for helping “first responders” in the event of terrorist attacks, especially with weapons of mass destruction.  Included were state Adjutant Generals, local firemen, police, etc. – as well as members of the National Guard and senior Defense and Intelligence officials.  Congress joined in supporting initiatives – including commissioning several bipartisan groups – to aid in the transformation of our institutions to deal with the perceived threat of major attacks on the American homeland.
    This threat includes a growing ballistic missile threat.  In 1998, the Rumsfeld Commission, chaired by now Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, concluded that, within 5 years, the U.S. might be threatened by long-range missiles built by rogue states – including those recently named by President Bush as constituting an “axis of evil,” because of their support of Al Qaedar and other terrorists who currently threaten us.   The Rumsfeld Commission also noted that, even sooner, already existing Scuds could be launched from tramp steamers off our coasts at cities where most Americans live.
    President Bush is now acting in a comprehensive way to implement sweeping changes prompted by the need to protect all Americans, and to combat terrorists and those states that support terrorism – by whatever means.  Last December 13th, he announced his intention to withdraw from the ABM Treaty and build defenses to protect Americans from missile attack – that 30-year-old Treaty ceased to be 6 months later, on June 13th.  On May 24, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Treaty of Moscow, which promises to reduce U.S. and Russian strategic weapons to 1700-2200 and a Joint Statement committing the U.S. and Russia to work together on missile defenses – so much for the arguments of the liberals and erstwhile allies that our moving ahead on defenses would make arms reductions impossible.   Now, for the first time in 30 years, American engineers can use our best technology to build effective defenses – hopefully before they are actually needed, because we still cannot stop even a single ballistic missile launched at us.
    At West Point on June 1, President Bush announced a new overarching policy, one that includes a more prominent role for “preemption” to destroy the capacity of those who plan to attack the United States before they can launch that attack.  The Washington Post reported that a formal policy directive, reflecting this new direction, is expected by this Fall. This new direction is warranted by the changing times.  Secretary Defense Rumsfeld told NATO representatives that they could not wait for “absolute proof” before acting against threatening entities in this new world disorder.

“If a terrorist can attack at any time, in any place, and using any technique, and it’s physically impossible to defend in every place, at every time against every technique, then one needs to calibrate the definition of the term ‘defensive.’   The only defense is to take the effort to find those global networks and to deal with them as the United States did in Afghanistan. . . . Every nation has the right of self-defense and this is the only, conceivable way to defend ourselves against those kinds of threats.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
At a June 6 Press Conference in Brussels

1. 1) Border and Transportation Security – to assume the responsibility of operational assets currently in the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Border Patrol, the Animal and Plant Health Administration of the Department of Agriculture and the recently created Transportation Security Administration;
2. 2) Emergency Preparedness and Response – to include the Federal Emergency and Management Agency (FEMA), to oversee various activities in the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, manage such critical assets as the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) and the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, and to integrate national emergency response plans into a single comprehensive, government-wide plan;
3. 3) Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures – to set national policy and provide guidelines to state and local governments to prepare for and respond to the full range of terrorists threats involving weapons of mass destruction, to manage national efforts to develop diagnostics, vaccines, antibodies, antidotes, and other countermeasures and consolidate, and prioritize the disparate homeland security R&D currently scattered throughout the Executive Branch (drawing heavily on the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories); and
4. 4) Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection – to fuse and analyze intelligence and other information on threats to the U.S. homeland and protect critical U.S. infrastructure, including food and water systems, health systems and emergency services,  information and telecommunications, banking and finance, energy (electrical, nuclear, gas and oil, dams), the chemical and defense industries, postal and shipping entities, and national monuments and icons.


“This new agency will control our borders and prevent terrorists and explosives from entering the country.  It will work with state and local authorities to respond quickly and effectively to emergencies.  It will bring together our best scientists to develop technologies to detect biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, and to discover drugs and treatments to best protect our citizens.  And this new department will review intelligence and law enforcement information from all agencies of government, and produce a single daily picture of threats against our homeland.”
President George W. Bush
June 6, 2002

    On April 1, the Moscow Times reported that U.S. and Russian negotiators have made so much progress on offensive weapons and a new strategic framework that Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin may sign agreements on both at their Moscow summit in May.
    The article quotes U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton as saying that a “maturing and merging” U.S.-Russian relationship “hopefully will culminate in [their] being able to sign and release these documents in May. . . . Their determination to move forward is quite evident.”
    Among the issues still to be worked out is a U.S. proposal for a new way to count warheads as the United States and Russia reduce their strategic arsenals to 1,700 to 2,200 each.  Bolton also observed that “The nonproliferation question is a very high priority for us,” and that the Bush administration is focusing on sales to Iran and other "countries of concern” that could lead to new nuclear-armed militaries.
    Although the United States suspects Russia of helping Iran develop nuclear weapons, Bolton indicated the two generally worry about many of the same countries. “On the Russian side, their threat assessment ultimately was not that different than ours,” he said. Russian military officials recognized they faced even greater danger because “The countries we're concerned about are closer to Russia than they are to the United States.”
    Bolton also said the United States hopes to work with Russia to develop defenses against the common threat, but that cannot happen until the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty expires June 13, six months after Bush announced the United States was withdrawing from the pact.  Calling the ABM Treaty a curiosity, Bolton said it "precludes the sharing of technology and research and development on missile defense from one country to another." So cooperation must wait until the treaty expires.

    While President Bush presses ahead with his agenda to end the ABM Treaty and to build effective defenses as soon as possible, the political fight is far from over.
As indicated above, Russia may join in building a global defense, as then Russian President Boris Yeltsin actually proposed in 1992 – a vision lost while the Clinton Administration focused on strengthening the ABM Treaty rather than on building effective defenses banned by its terms.  Rebuilding momentum that existed during the first Bush Administration is an important challenge.
President Bush is clearly doing his part to end the Treaty and to revive a serious program to build effective defenses.  The Treaty is to end on June 13, thanks to his commitment.  And his budget for research and development for missile defense doubles that of the Clinton years.  But the Capitol Hill battle goes on.
For example, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) recently complained in a Wall Street Journal interview that “there’s a huge resource commitment that the Administration wants to make to this system. And it is, in my judgment, greater than what is justified, given the likelihood of the threat.”  So he will do all he can from his post as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to cut the budget and/or restrain the President’s program.
And Senator Levin is not alone.  Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) has made it clear that he assigns a high priority to blocking the President’s efforts to build effective defenses.  So has Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), who from his post as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee can influence the President’s discussions with the Russians and friends and allies about working together to build effective defenses.
What can we do?  High Frontier is working with other conservative groups to inform State legislatures of the threat and the potential for ending America’s vulnerability to even a single ballistic missile – and, in turn, the State Legislatures are sending a message from the grass roots to the U.S. Congress that they want to build a robust layered defense as soon as possible.  Consider the following resolution, passed by the New Hampshire Legislature and sent to the President and Congressional leaders.  A similar one is being considered in the Vermont Legislature, and other states are expected to follow.  You might consider how you might get involved in your state.

Be It Resolved By The Legislature of the State of New Hampshire:

· WHEREAS, New Hampshire is located in the New England region of the Northeastern United States and is populated by over 1,000,000 persons, and maintains distinguished centers of higher learning, and is the site of advanced information and defense technology, and is noted for outstanding natural endowments of forests, mountains, lakes, and derives partial energy from nuclear power; and
· WHEREAS, the People of New Hampshire are conscious of the state’s current assets and favorable future development for their children in other generations; and
· WHEREAS, New Hampshire responded to the call at Bunker Hill with volunteers in the struggle for American independence and has contributed to national defense through its citizenry ever since; and
· WHEREAS, the People of New Hampshire are aware of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their threat to New Hampshire, New England, and the United States; and
· WHEREAS, the United States does not possess a means of defense against ballistic missiles, bearing warheads of mass destruction, launched by those who oppose American interests throughout the world; and
· WHEREAS, New Hampshire is imperiled by the existing incapability of national self-defense against ballistic missile attack from hostile or accidental sources along with other States of the Union; in consequence, New Hampshire asserts it leadership as one of fifty;
· BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire respectfully requests the President of the United States to take all actions necessary, within the considerable limits of technological resources of this great Union, to protect New Hampshire, New England, and all the people of the United States from the threat of missile attack; and be it
· FURTHER RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire respectfully requests that the President of the United States act to allow the United States freedom to defend itself from missile attack, Treaties to the contrary not withstanding; and be it
· FURTHER RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire conveys to the President and the Congress of the United States that national missile defense requires the deployment of the most robust system consisting of a land-based, sea-based, and space-based multi-layered architecture so that future threats will be adequately met or deterred.

    After June 13 – if things go as President Bush has planned and we are finally free of the ABM Treaty, American engineers will, for the first time in 30 years, be able to develop and test sea- and space-based defenses to defend America.  A very important door will open, because both concepts are ready to be developed and tested to enable effective global defenses to defend Americans at home and our overseas troops, friends, and allies.
During the Reagan and first Bush Administrations, Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) technology demonstration programs were directed to evaluate these options, because they were inherently flexible.  They offered options to intercept attacking missiles early in their flight, beginning in the short boost-phase while their rockets still burn and before they can release decoys and other countermeasures; through the much longer midcourse-phase when they are in outer space and discrimination between decoys and real warheads is a critical problem; and into their re-entry, terminal- phase when lightweight decoys are stripped away from the heavier warheads by the Earth’s atmosphere.
The most effective near-term space-based interceptor concept, the Brilliant Pebbles system, was critically evaluated during the late 1980s, and became the first fully approved Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) in 1990.  For political reasons – largely associated with the ABM Treaty, this important program was sharply curtailed by the Democrat Congress in 1991 and 1992 – and then killed by the Clinton Administration in 1993.
If the Bush Administration is prepared to fight and win the political battle to build space-based defenses, the Brilliant Pebbles program can be revived within a year to build an initial operational capability within five years.  But there is little if any corporate memory of the status of that important program nine years ago – and there appear to be few willing to take on the major political fight required to revive this most effective of all the SDI programs.
But at least sound engineers will be free to advocate  testing such a concept after June 13, unless some new agreement with the Russians precludes us from doing so.
There are fewer political obstacles to building sea-based defenses – in large measure because that capability is only an evolutionary improvement over existing sea-based systems designed for other purposes.  For example, Aegis cruisers deployed around the world carry with them an impressive air defense capability – which can be given the capability to shoot down ballistic missiles as well as aircraft and cruise missiles.  For relatively little additional investment, this capability in which the American taxpayer has invested over $50 billion can be given the capability to shoot down medium and long-range ballistic missiles.
The political/management problem with sea-based defenses is different from the space-based systems.  During the Clinton years, sea-based defenses proceeded largely at the insistence of Congress – but they were “dumbed-down” to meet ABM Treaty constraints, assuring they could not defend Americans at home while they provided limited defenses for our overseas troops, friends and allies.
In spite of these difficulties, the Navy Theater Wide system successfully intercepted a ballistic missile in late January – setting the stage for increasing the Pentagon’s investment is sea-based defenses.
The Navy was prepared to lead such a revival last summer when they suggested a staged way to begin defending the U.S. quickly: 1) For a few hundred million dollars, the Aegis system could be given a rudimentary boost-phase capability within 12 months, useful in some scenarios to shoot down North Korean missiles in their boost-phase – and this capability, in conjunction with existing coastal radar, could be used to help protect metropolitan areas from SCUDS launched from tramp steamers off our coasts; 2)  For $2 billion more than currently programmed, the Navy Theater Wide program could begin protecting American cities within 2-3 years;  and 3) For another $10 billion, these near-term sea-based defenses could later be substantially improved.
The question remains:  Will the Bush team really move out on sea- and space-based defenses after June 13?   Hope springs eternal!!!
    “Madam President, there have been two important events relating to missile defense programs that occurred last week, which I would like to bring to the attention of the Senate.    First is the successful test last Friday night of our Nation’s long-range missile defense system. This was the fourth successful test against an intercontinental ballistic missile and it was much more complicated than earlier tests have been, in that the target warhead was accompanied by three decoys. Despite the presence of these countermeasures, the interceptor was able to destroy the ICBM warhead. . . .  This impressive event cannot be considered routine, but it is becoming regular. The regularity with which our missile defense testing is succeeding is very encouraging. Although slowed down by uncertain funding and ABM Treaty restrictions in the past, the missile defense program is now showing the benefits of the support provided by Congress over the past few years and of the new seriousness with which President Bush has attacked this problem.    There is still much technical work to be done, and problems are bound to occur, as they do in all weapons programs. But the continued testing success of our ground-based missile defense system-as well as in other missile defense systems such as the Patriot PAC-3 and the sea-based midcourse system-suggests that we are steadily making progress and moving toward the time when we will no longer be defenseless against ballistic missile attacks.”

    This memorandum briefly describes the legal effect of the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies with respect to testing, development, and deployment of ABM systems.  Professor Moore, one of the Nation’s leading international law authorities, was prompted to prepare this authoritative memorandum to respond to claims that the Outer Space Treaty banned testing in space of missile defense systems.

    This Outer Space Treaty prohibits the placement of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction either in orbit around the Earth or installed on the moon or other celestial bodies. Further, it prohibits the establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military maneuvers on the moon or other celestial bodies.
    This Treaty does not prohibit the testing, development or deployment of ABM systems in space. ABM systems are not weapons of mass destruction, but indeed, the opposite - that is, weapons to defend against weapons of mass destruction. While older ABM systems used nuclear warheads on interceptors that is not true of contemporary systems.
    ABM systems were neither the genesis nor the purpose of the Outer Space Treaty. Indeed had ABM systems been the focus of that Treaty, one would have expected to see its limitations referenced in the subsequent 1972 ABM Treaty. Yet there is not such reference, and Article V of the ABM Treaty contains an undertaking “not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components which are... space-based....” Nor was any Outer Space Treaty argument seriously advanced in the subsequent “broad-narrow” debate about whether development and testing of mobile ABM systems (including space-based systems) based on other physical principles was permitted or banned.
    Some have apparently argued that since the Preamble to the Outer Space Treaty refers to “use of space for peaceful purposes”, space-based ABM systems would be banned by the Treaty. This is wrong. There is a crucial distinction in international law between a general reference to “peaceful purposes” and a specific reference to particular banned military activities. The former is merely a general admonishment that activities must be defensive as opposed to aggressive in violation of Article 2(4) of the United nations Charter. There is, in the Outer Space Treaty no prohibition of space-based ABM systems, as opposed, arguably, to such systems based on celestial bodies such as the Moon. That the “peaceful purposes” argument as a ban on ABM systems is wrong is clearly illustrated by the example of Article 88 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which says “the high seas shall be reserved for peaceful purposes.” This Article does not ban warships or other military activities on the high seas, and if such an interpretation were taken seriously there would have been no agreement on the Treaty. Today this Treaty is one of the most widely adhered to international agreements in the world, including as parties states encompassing most of the major navies of the world. A 1985 report of the United Nations Secretary General says “military activities which are consistent with the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, in particular with Article 2, paragraph 4, and Article 51 [the right of individual and collective defense] are not prohibited by the Convention on the Law of the Sea”. Report of the Secretary-General (A/40/535), para. 188, 40 GAOR, annexes, agenda item 68(b) (1985, mimeo.). Similarly, during the law of the Sea negotiations the United States Representative indictaed the generally accepted interpretation of such “peaceful purposes” language when he said:
     “The term ‘peaceful purposes’ did not, of course, preclude military activities generally. The United States had consistently held that the conduct of military activities for peaceful purposes was in full accord with the Charter of the United Nations and with the principles of international law. Any specific limitation on military activities would require the negotiation of a detailed arms control agreement.”
    Thus, the United States approach is that “peaceful purposes” means “nonaggressive”, that is, activities compliant with the United Nations Charter. This is the majority view of the international community today. Moreover, Russian agreement that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea does not ban warships or other military activities on the high seas indicates that even the Russians have backed away from the old Soviet argument that “peaceful purposes” meant “non-military”.

“The international community should adopt effective preventative measures and make a special international agreement to ban any weapons of mass destruction from outer space”

Recent statement by Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Qiao Zonghuai, intended to impede U.S. efforts to build space-based missile defenses – expect U.N. support.

On December 13, President Bush made a historic announcement – in six months, the United States will withdraw from the ABM Treaty!!!
June 13 ends 30-years during which America has endured a Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) suicide pact –  the U.S. and Soviet Union threatened to destroy each other if either attacked the other.
After June 13, America’s engineers will be free to use their best talents and technology to end America’s vulnerability to even a single ballistic missile – provided arms control advocates in the Congress and elsewhere don’t either impose unilateral constraints on the Pentagon’s efforts to build defenses quickly or require negotiations to, in effect, replace the ABM Treaty with some other onerous agreement that continues to impede the development of the most effective defenses.
This concern is not  hypothetical.  Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and the Chairmen of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relation Committees – Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Joe Biden (D-DE) – have said they intend legislation to block or impede the President’s plans to build effective defenses.
So, we in the High Frontier family cannot rest easy until after the ABM Treaty coffin is nailed shut and America’s engineers are free at last.
Remember what is at stake.  No defense of the American homeland is possible under the terms of the Treaty – that was the purpose of the Treaty.  Moreover, our engineers have been precluded from even testing the most cost-effective ways to defend America – because Article V bans the development, testing and deployment of space-based, sea-based, air based, and mobile land-based ABM systems.
So, most missile defense R&D during the past 30 years has been on fixed ground-based defenses, the most expensive way to defend large areas – like the entire U.S. and our overseas troops friends and allies.
Even during the Reagan-Bush I era, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) invested well over half of its funding on ground-based defenses – in spite of contrary suggestions associated with the “Star Wars” label used by opponents to imply SDI was a “fantasy” about “space.”  This division of effort kept the R&D “politically correct” in the eyes of some influential members of Congress, as they appropriated the funding for the SDI program.
Immediately after taking office, Clinton’s team killed or stifled R&D on systems other than ground-based systems – “taking the stars out of Star Wars,” as Defense Secretary Les Aspen said in 1993.  Consider three examples of less expensive near-term defense alternatives that fell victim to the Clinton ax – no doubt because of ABM Treaty concerns.
The “Brilliant Pebbles” space-based interceptor – SDI’s most advanced concept was killed outright.  If developed free of the ABM Treaty, a constellation of 1000 Brilliant Pebbles could by now have been deployed in space for less than $10 billion to protect the entire world against modest ballistic missile attacks – say up to a hundred ballistic missiles launched from anywhere to anywhere else more than a few hundred miles away.
The first generation Brilliant Pebbles technology was space qualified in 1994 when the award winning (awards from the National Academy of Sciences and NASA) Clementine space mission returned to the Moon for the first time in 25 years, mapped its entire surface in over a million frames of data in 15 spectral bands, and discovered water at the Moon’s south pole.  There is little doubt that Brilliant Pebbles could have been tested and deployed before now, if competent engineers had been given their heads without Treaty or other political constraints.
The Clinton Administration also killed a cost-effective air-based “boost-phase” intercept program – “Raptor-Talon” – which could have built unpiloted air vehicles (UAVs), like the Predator used in Afghanistan to carry sensors and shoot at targets on the ground.  “Raptor” UAVs  would shoot “Talon” interceptors at missiles while their rockets burn as they rise from their launch pads.
One of the inexpensive (less than $3 million, including development) “Raptors” has been flying at NASA for the past eight years, so that technology is now proven.  The “Talon” interceptor, to be derived from Brilliant Pebbles technology, was killed outright in 1993.
     Bottom line: Raptor-Talon could have been built, tested, and deployed by now, were it not for the Treaty.  It could be revived and, if free of the Treaty, provide an emergency defense capability within two years.
A third example of how the ABM Treaty frustrated development during the Clinton years has to do with sea-based defenses.  When I resigned as SDI Director in 1993, I left fully funded programs that could, by now, have produced wide-area sea-based defenses for our overseas troops, friends and allies – and, with minor modifications, Americans at home.  Defending our troops is consistent with the Treaty; defending America is not – indeed sea-based ABM systems could not even be tested under the Treaty.  And it was a difficult engineering challenge to develop a sea-based defense that could do the former but not the latter.
Under pressure from Congress to build sea-based defenses – and with political direction from Clinton policy makers and constraints from the Treaty lawyers, the Clinton engineers found an engineering solution – a way to “dumb-down” the sea-based defenses:  They: slowed down the interceptor and precluded the use of sensor data other than the ship’s radar co-located with the interceptor – reducing the area that could be defended; used relatively ineffective sensors on the interceptor kill vehicle – limiting its effectiveness against long-range missiles that might attack the U.S.; and established a firing protocol that precluded the ship’s captain from launching his defensive interceptor until after the attacking missile’s rockets burn out – assuring that the defensive interceptor is in a “tail-chase” with a faster rocket and cannot catch up.
This last, most ludicrous, constraint meant that the captain of an Aegis cruiser in the Sea of Japan could shoot down a North Korean Missile flying overhead if it were headed to Tokyo but not a longer-range missile flying overhead to Honolulu.
The Bush Administration should revive robustly funded Brilliant Pebbles and Raptor-Talon programs and overhaul Clinton sea-based defense programs to remove constraints that dumbed-down the development activities during the Clinton years.  These three programs, among others, could begin building a layered, global defense in a relatively short period of time – earlier than the first ground-based defense site in Alaska, and for less cost.
Now is the time America’s best and brightest engineers to move beyond the political and arms control constraints of the last 30-years and build as quickly as possible the defenses America needs.   They might adopt Todd Beamer’s now famous battle cry, made just before charging the terrorists on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, “Let’s roll!!!

Passage by the New Hampshire Legislature of House Resolution 21 could be very helpful in the expected ABM Treaty fight during the next five months.  A product of the New Hampshire House Committee on Veterans Affairs and Federal-State Relations, this Resolution reminds federal officials of their Constitutional duty to provide for the common defense:

Be It Resolved By The Legislature of the State of New Hampshire:

    WHEREAS, New Hampshire is located in the New England region of the Northeastern United States and is populated by over 1,000,000 persons, and maintains distinguished centers of higher learning, and is the site of advanced information and defense technology, and is noted for outstanding natural endowments of forests, mountains, lakes, and derives partial energy from nuclear power; and
    WHEREAS, the People of New Hampshire are conscious of the state’s current assets and favorable future development for their children in other generations; and
    WHEREAS, New Hampshire responded to the call at Bunker Hill with volunteers in the struggle for American independence and has contributed to national defense through its citizenry ever since; and
    WHEREAS, the People of New Hampshire are aware of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their threat to New Hampshire, New England, and the United States; and
    WHEREAS, the United States does not possess a means of defense against ballistic missiles, bearing warheads of mass destruction, launched by those who oppose American interests throughout the world; and
    WHEREAS, New Hampshire is imperiled by the existing incapability of national self-defense against ballistic missile attack from hostile or accidental sources along with other States of the Union; in consequence, New Hampshire asserts it leadership as one of fifty;
    BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire respectfully requests the President of the United States to take all actions necessary, within the considerable limits of technological resources of this great Union, to protect New Hampshire, New England, and all the people of the United States from the threat of missile attack; and be it
    FURTHER RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire respectfully requests that the President of the United States act to allow the United States freedom to defend itself from missile attack, Treaties to the contrary not withstanding; and be it
    FURTHER RESOLVED that the Legislature of New Hampshire conveys to the President and the Congress of the United States that national missile defense requires the deployment of the most robust system consisting of a land-based, sea-based, and space-based multi-layered architecture so that future threats will be adequately met or deterred.

    President Bush made several memorable speaches and statements during December 2001.  On the 3-month anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack on America, he remembered those who died and observed:
    “Today, the wrong is being righted and justice is being done.  We still have far to go.  And many dangers lie ahead.  Yet, there can be no doubt how this conflict will end.  Our enemies have made the mistake that America's enemies always make.  They saw liberty and thought they saw weakness.  And now, they see defeat. . . . In time, perhaps, we will mark the memory of September the 11th in stone and metal -- something we can show children as yet unborn to help them understand what happened on this minute and on this day. But for those of us who lived through these events, the only marker we'll ever need is the tick of a clock at the 46th minute of the eighth hour of the 11th day.  We will remember where we were and how we felt.  We will remember the dead and what we owe them.  We will remember what we lost and what we found.  And in our time, we will honor the memory of the 11th day by doing our duty as citizens of this great country, freedom's home and freedoms defender.  God bless.”
    These were strong and comforting words to an already aroused nation, followed later in the day at The Citadel in South Carolina with a tour de force on why the world will always remember September 11; how innovative technology was transforming warfare as our forces root out terrorism in Afganistan and elsewhere; and how we are putting behind us the trappings of the Cold War with new policies and defenses for the American people.  And then, from High Frontier’s perspective, he gave the speech of the decade on December 13, when he announced that the United States, under the terms of the ABM Treaty, will withdraw from the Treaty in six months.  Below are excerpts from his Citadel speech and his complete December 13 statement on withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.

Excerpts from President Bush’s December 11 Speech at The Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina

    . . . Four days ago, I joined the men and women of the USS Enterprise to mark the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.  December 7th, 1941 was a decisive day that changed our nation forever.  In a single moment, America's "splendid isolation" was ended.  And the four years that followed transformed the American way of war.
    The age of battleships gave way to the offensive capability of aircraft carriers.  The tank, once used only to protect infantry, now served to cut through enemy lines.  At Guadalcanal, and Normandy, and Iwo Jima, amphibious warfare proved its worth.  And by war's end, no one would ever again doubt the value of strategic air power.
    Even more importantly, an American President and his successors shaped a world beyond a war.  They rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, formed a great alliance for freedom in NATO, and expressed the hope of collective security in the United Nations.  America took the lead, becoming freedom's defender and assuming responsibilities that only we could bear.
    September 11th, 2001 -- three months and a long time ago -- set another dividing line in our lives and in the life of our nation.  An illusion of immunity was shattered.  A faraway evil became a present danger.  And a great cause became clear:  We will fight terror and those who sponsor it, to save our children from a future of fear.
    To win this war, we have to think differently.  The enemy who appeared on September 11th seeks to evade our strength and constantly searches for our weaknesses.  So America is required once again to change the way our military thinks and fights.  And starting on October 7th, the enemy in Afghanistan got the first glimpses of a new American military that cannot, and will not, be evaded.
    . . . The Taliban and the terrorists set out to dominate a country and intimidate the world.  Today, from their caves, it's all looking a little different.  And no cave is deep enough to escape the patient justice of the United States of America.
    We are also beginning to see the possibilities of a world beyond the war on terror.  We have a chance, if we take it, to write a hopeful chapter in human history.  All at once, a new threat to civilization is erasing old lines of rivalry and resentment between nations.  Russia and America are building a new cooperative relationship.  India and the United States are increasingly aligned across a range of issues, even as we work closely with Pakistan.  Germany and Japan are assuming new military roles, appropriate to their status as great democracies.
    The vast majority of countries are now on the same side of a moral and ideological divide.  We're making common cause with every nation that chooses lawful change over chaotic violence -- every nation that values peace and safety and innocent life.
    Staring across this divide are bands of murderers, supported by outlaw regimes.  They are a movement defined by their hatreds.  They hate progress, and freedom, and choice, and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews, and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.  They love only one thing -- they love power.  And when they have it, they use it without mercy.
    The great threat to civilization is not that the terrorists will inspire millions.  Only the terrorists themselves would want to live in their brutal and joyless world.  The great threat to civilization is that a few evil men will multiply their murders, and gain the means to kill on a scale equal to their hatred.  We know they have this mad intent, and we're determined to stop them.
    Our lives, our way of life, and our every hope for the world depend on a single commitment:  The authors of mass murder must be defeated, and never allowed to gain or use the weapons of mass destruction.
    America and our friends will meet this threat with every method at our disposal.  We will discover and destroy sleeper cells.  We will track terrorist movements, trace their communications, disrupt their funding, and take their network apart, piece by piece.
    Above all, we're acting to end the state sponsorship of terror.  Rogue states are clearly the most likely sources of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons for terrorists.  Every nation now knows that we cannot accept -- and we will not accept -- states that harbor, finance, train, or equip the agents of terror.  Those nations that violate this principle will be re-garded as hostile regimes.  They have been warned, they are being watched, and they will be held to account.
    Preventing mass terror will be the responsibilities of Presidents far into the future.  And this obligation sets three urgent and enduring priorities for America.  The first priority is to speed the transformation of our military.
    When the Cold War ended, some predicted that the era of direct threats to our nation was over.  Some thought our military would be used overseas -- not to win wars, but mainly to police and pacify, to control crowds and contain ethnic conflict.      They were wrong.
    While the threats to America have changed, the need for victory has not.  We are fighting shadowy, entrenched enemies -- enemies using the tools of terror and guerrilla war -- yet we are finding new tactics and new weapons to attack and defeat them.  This revolution in our military is only beginning, and it promises to change the face of battle.
    Afghanistan has been a proving ground for this new approach.  These past two months have shown that an innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict.  The brave men and women of our military are rewriting the rules of war with new technologies and old values like courage and honor.  And they have made this nation proud.
    Our commanders are gaining a real-time picture of the entire battlefield, and are able to get targeting information from sensor to shooter almost instantly.  Our intelligence professionals and special forces have cooperated in battle-friendly -- with battle-friendly Afghan forces -- fighters who know the terrain, who know the Taliban, and who understand the local culture.  And our special forces have the technology to call in precision air strikes -- along with the flexibility to direct those strikes from horseback, in the first cavalry charge of the 21st century.
    This combination -- real-time intelligence, local allied forces, special forces, and precision air power -- has really never been used before.  The conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums.
    The Predator is a good example.  This unmanned aerial vehicle is able to circle over enemy forces, gather intelligence, transmit information instantly back to commanders, then fire on targets with extreme accuracy.
    Before the war, the Predator had skeptics, because it did not fit the old ways.  Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.  We're entering an era in which unmanned vehicles of all kinds will take on greater importance -- in space, on land, in the air, and at sea.
    Precision-guided munitions also offer great promise.  In the Gulf War, these weapons were the exception -- while in Afghanistan, they have been the majority of the munitions we have used.  We're striking with greater effectiveness, at greater range, with fewer civilian casualties.  More and more, our weapons can hit moving targets.  When all of our military can continuously locate and track moving targets -- with surveillance from air and space -- warfare will be truly revolutionized.
    The need for military transformation was clear before the conflict in Afghanistan, and before September the 11th.  Here at the Citadel in 1999, I spoke of keeping the peace by redefining war on our terms.  The same recommendation was made in the strategic review that Secretary Rumsfeld briefed me on last August -- a review that I fully endorse.  What's different today is our sense of urgency -- the need to build this future force while fighting a present war.  It's like overhauling an engine while you're going at 80 miles an hour.  Yet we have no other choice.
    Our military has a new and essential mission.  For states that support terror, it's not enough that the consequences be costly -- they must be devastating.  The more credible this reality, the more likely that regimes will change their behavior -- making it less likely that America and our friends will need to use overwhelming force against them.
    To build our future force, the Armed Services must continue to attract America's best people, with good pay and good living conditions.  Our military culture must reward new thinking, innovation, and experimentation.  Congress must give defense leaders the freedom to innovate, instead of micromanaging the Defense Department.  And every service and every constituency of our military must be willing to sacrifice some of their own pet projects.  Our war on terror cannot be used to justify obsolete bases, obsolete programs, or obsolete weapon systems.  Every dollar of defense spending must meet a single test:  It must help us build the decisive power we will need to win the wars of the future.
    Our country is united in supporting a great cause -- and in supporting those who fight for it.  We will give our men and women in uniform every resource, every weapon, every tool they need to win the long battle that lies ahead.
    America's next priority to prevent mass terror is to protect against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.  I wish I could report to the American people that this threat does not exist -- that our enemy is content with car bombs and box cutters -- but I cannot.
    One former al Qaeda member has testified in court that he was involved in an effort 10 years ago to obtain nuclear materials.  And the leader of al Qaeda calls that effort "a religious duty."  Abandoned al Qaeda houses in Kabul contained diagrams for crude weapons of mass destruction.  And as we all know, terrorists have put anthrax into the U.S. mail, and used sarin gas in a Tokyo subway.
    And almost every state that actively sponsors terror is known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them at longer and longer ranges.  Their hope is to blackmail the United States into abandoning our war on terror, and forsaking our friends and allies and security commitments around the world.  Our enemies are bound for disappointment.  America will never be blackmailed, and we will never forsake our commitment to liberty.
    To meet our new threats, I have directed my National Security Advisor and my Homeland Security Director to develop a comprehensive strategy on proliferation.  Working with other countries, we will strengthen nonproliferation treaties and toughen export controls.  Together, we must keep the world's most dangerous technologies out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people.
    A crucial partner in this effort is Russia -- a nation we are helping to dismantle strategic weapons, reduce nuclear material, and increase security at nuclear sites.  Our two countries will expand efforts to provide peaceful employment for scientists who formerly worked in Soviet weapons facilities.  The United States will also work with Russia to build a facility to destroy tons of nerve agent.  I'll request an over-all increase in funding to support this vital mission.
    Even as we fight to prevent proliferation, we must prepare for every possibility.  At home, we must be better prepared to detect, protect against, and respond to the potential use of weapons of mass destruction.  Abroad, our military forces must have the ability to fight and win against enemies who would use such weapons against us.
    Biodefense has become a major initiative of ours.  This year we've already requested nearly $3 billion additional dollars for biodefense, more than doubling the level of funding prior to September the 11th.
    The attacks on our nation made it even more clear that we need to build limited and effective defenses against a missile attack.  Our enemies seek every chance and every means to do harm to our country, our forces, and our friends.  And we will not permit it.
    Suppose the Taliban and the terrorists had been able to strike America or important allies with a ballistic missile.  Our coalition would have become fragile, the stakes in our war much, much higher.  We must protect Americans and our friends against all forms of terror, including the terror that could arrive on a missile.
    Last week we conducted another promising test of our missile defense technology.  For the good of peace, we're moving forward with an active program to determine what works and what does not work.  In order to do so, we must move beyond the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a treaty that was written in a different era, for a different enemy.
    America and our allies must not be bound to the past.  We must be able to build the defenses we need against the enemies of the 21st century.
    Our third and final priority in the fight against mass terror is to strengthen the advantage that good intelligence gives our country.  Every day I make decisions influenced by the intelligence briefing of that morning.  To reach decisions, a President needs more than data and information.  A President needs real and current knowledge and analysis of the plans, intentions, and capabilities of our enemies.
    The last several months have shown that there is no substitute for good intelligence officers, people on the ground.  These are the people who find the targets, follow our enemies, and help us disrupt their evil plans.
    The United States must rebuild our network of human intelligence.  And we will apply the best new technology to gather intelligence on the new threats.  Sophisticated systems like Global Hawk, an unmanned surveillance plane, are transforming our intelligence capabilities.  Our technological strengths produce great advantages, and we will build on them.
    Our intelligence services and federal law enforcement agencies must work more closely together, and share timely information with our state and local authorities.  The more we know, the more terrorist plans we can prevent and disrupt, and the better we'll be able to protect the American people.
    And in all they do, our intelligence agencies must attract the best people -- the best collectors, the best analysts, the best linguists.  We will give them the training they need and the compensation they deserve.
    There have been times here in America when our intelligence services were held in suspicion, and even contempt.  Now, when we face this new war, we know how much we need them.  And for their dedication and for their service, America is grateful.
    We're also grateful to you, the students of the Citadel.  Your uniforms symbolize a tradition of honor and sacrifice, renewed in your own lives.  Many of you will enter our military -- taking your place in the war against terror.  That struggle may continue for many years, and it may bring great costs.  But you will have chosen a great calling at a crucial hour for our nation.
    The course we follow is a matter of profound consequence to many nations.  If America wavers, the world will lose heart.  If America leads, the world will show its courage.  America will never waver.  America will lead the world to peace.
    Our cause is necessary.  Our cause is just.  And no matter how long it takes, we will defeat the enemies of freedom.
    In all that is to come, I know the graduates of the Citadel will bring credit to America, to the military, and to this great institution.  In the words of your school song, you will go where you've always gone -- "in the paths our fathers showed us.  Peace and Honor, God and Country -- we will fight for thee." God bless.

December 13, The White House Rose Garden, 9:58 A.M. EST: Withdrawal From the ABM Treaty

    Good morning.  I've just concluded a meeting of my National Security Council.  We reviewed what I discussed with my friend, President Vladimir Putin, over the course of many meetings, many months.  And that is the need for America to move beyond the 1972 Anti Ballistic MissileTreaty.
    Today, I have given formal notice to Russia, in accordance with the treaty, that the United States of America is withdrawing from this almost 30 year old treaty.  I have concluded the ABM Treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks.
    The 1972 ABM Treaty was signed by the United States and the Soviet Union at a much different time, in a vastly different world.  One of the signatories, the Soviet Union, no longer exists.  And neither does the hostility that once led both our countries to keep thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, pointed at each other.  The grim theory was that neither side would launch a nuclear attack because it knew the other would respond, thereby destroying both.
    Today, as the events of September the 11th made all too clear, the greatest threats to both our countries come not from each other, or other big powers in the world, but from terrorists who strike without warning, or rogue states who seek weapons of mass destruction.
    We know that the terrorists, and some of those who support them, seek the ability to deliver death and destruction to our doorstep via missile.  And we must have the freedom and the flexibility to develop effective defenses against those attacks.  Defending the American people is my highest priority as Commander in Chief, and I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses.
    At the same time, the United States and Russia have developed a new, much more hopeful and constructive relationship.  We are moving to replace mutually assured destruction with mutual cooperation.  Beginning in Ljubljana, and continuing in meetings in Genoa, Shanghai, Washington and Crawford, President Putin and I developed common ground for a new strategic relationship.  Russia is in the midst of a transition to free markets and democracy.  We are committed to forging strong economic ties between Russia and the United States, and new bonds between Russia and our partners in NATO.  NATO has made clear its desire to identify and pursue opportunities for joint action at 20.
    I look forward to visiting Moscow, to continue our discussions, as we seek a formal way to express a new strategic relationship that will last long beyond our individual administrations, providing a foundation for peace for the years to come.
    We're already working closely together as the world rallies in the war against terrorism.  I appreciate so much President Putin's important advice and cooperation as we fight to dismantle the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.  I appreciate his commitment to reduce Russia's offensive nuclear weapons.  I reiterate our pledge to reduce our own nuclear arsenal between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons.  President Putin and I have also agreed that my decision to withdraw from the treaty will not, in any way, undermine our new relationship or Russian security.
    As President Putin said in Crawford, we are on the path to a fundamentally different relationship.  The Cold War is long gone. Today we leave behind one of its last vestiges.
    But this is not a day for looking back.  This is a day for looking forward with hope, and anticipation of greater prosperity and peace for Russians, for Americans and for the entire world.
    Thank you.

Missile Defense's Feminine Mystique
by Tod Lindberg

    Like most people who write about Washington politics, I operate from a bifurcated point of view whose components are A) a set of positions I favor on a variety of issues and B) a curiosity about how the Washington animal works. One must be vigilant against allowing the former to interfere with one's investigations into the latter. But, of course, this is not an easy thing.
    In the aftermath of September 11, it struck me that the devastating attack on the twin towers and the Pentagon would buttress the case for a missile defense system. Here, after all, was an example of a determined enemy out to inflict as much damage on the territory of the United States as possible. If such an enemy had a missile capable of reaching us, there is no reason to think he wouldn't fire it.
    But on further reflection, did I mean that the attack would buttress the case for missile defense or that it should buttress the case? Long ago, after all, I had reached the conclusion that it made sense for the United States to build and deploy such a system.
    Meanwhile, it quickly became apparent in the Washington salons of national security and foreign policy that people who had never been in favor of missile defense took the meaning of the September 11 attack to be just the opposite with regard to the issue. For them, here was proof of the folly of spending money on an expensive and (to their minds) unworkable defense system. If your enemies are determined to reach you, their weapons will be utility knives capable of transforming airliners into fuel bombs. Missile defense is no defense against the more plausible avenues of attack. Thus for them, September 11 would (make that "should"?) tend to undermine the case for missile defense.
    Thanks to a survey conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, we now have some data to help us untangle the "would" from the competing "shoulds." Support for missile defense has, in fact, increased significantly over levels found in an early September pre-attack survey. Sixty-four percent of Americans now say they favor a missile defense system, up from 56 percent.
    But this is not so much where the question gets settled as where it gets interesting. Support among men for missile defense hasn't changed from early September levels. All the movement in the survey is attributable to women, who have long lagged men in support for such a system but have now eliminated the gender gap in its entirety, increasing their level of support from 52 percent in early September to 64 percent now.
    But it's not just missile defense on which women's opinion has moved. Support for increased spending for the military is also up for both men and women, but most sharply among women. In early September, 24 percent favored more spending on defense; by now, that figure is 47 percent (support among men moved up from 39 percent to 53 percent over the same period). And there is a greater sense of urgency among women now than previously. Half say they want a system now, up from 29 percent, again closing the gender gap with men.
    But if you scratch a little further in the survey, you do find a gender gap. It arises in relation to perceptions of threat.     Sixty-three percent of men think another terrorist attack is imminent, whereas eight in ten women do. About 34 percent of women say life has returned to normal, compared to 48 percent of men. And one in five women think life will never return to normal.
    In short, women feel more threatened than they did before and than men do now. This is the point at which supporters of missile defense should take note. I think it's probably reasonable to interpret women's increased support for missile defense not as a sudden increase in enthusiasm for missile defense as such but as part of a sharp secular swing in favor of increased security measures in general.
    This also makes sense in the context of the long-running debate over the issue. There have always been, in effect, two arguments going on. One, of course, was over the particular likelihood of a missile attack on the United States and thus the necessity of trying to develop a capability to stop it. But that particular debate also served as a proxy for an underlying argument, which was over the broader question of how threatened the United States really was.
    It's the second question on which people's opinions have shifted decisively since September 11, especially women's opinion (and especially among mothers, the survey shows). Smart policy-makers — and dare one say, smart politicians? — will respond to the entirety of this shift, not just the particular elements they have long favored.

Tod Lindberg, editor of Policy Review magazine and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, writing in the November 27 Washington Times – reprinted with permission.

Urgent Call For Help

    Like many other fine organizations that depend upon donations, High Frontier has had to curtail operations since the September 11 terrorist attack.  That is why you are just receiving your November-December 2001 issue of The Shield – we could not pay the publication and mailing costs earlier.
    High Frontier depends upon grass roots support – we seek no funds from the government or industry.   Without a significant increase in contributions very soon, we will have to drop out of the fight to defend American begun over 20 years ago.
    The President’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from the ABM Treaty on June 13, 2002, marks a top priority milestone on High Frontier’s agenda, but our fight is not over.
    We need to convince many powers that be that technology and America’s best engineers should determine the best defenses we can build – not politics and arms control lawyers.  And we need to continue to press the case for the most effective defenses, once we are free of the ABM Treaty –specifically for space-, sea-, air-, and mobile ground-based defenses which could not even be tested under the ABM Treaty.  But we need resources to continue.
    We understand that many who normally support us have suffered losses associated with September 11 – and many others have redirected their giving to aid families of the victims of the terrorist attacks.   We do not quarrel with any aspect of these realities.
    But we hope you will consider going the extra mile in supporting us – so that we can finish what we began 20 years ago. Whatever you can afford to give would be most appreciated.
    Your gifts to High Frontier are tax deductible.  Send your gift today and help us continue the fight to end America’s vulnerability to ballistic missiles.
    God bless you – and God bless America!

On May 23, 2000, Presidential Candidate George W. Bush solemnly pledged to the American people:

    “At the earliest possible date, my administration will deploy antiballistic missile systems, both theater and national, to guard against attack and blackmail.  We will offer Russia amendments to the Anti-Ballistic Missile [ABM] Treaty—an artifact of the Cold War confrontation.  Both sides know that we live in a different world than in 1972 when the Treaty was signed.  If Russia refuses the changes we propose, we will give prompt notice, under the provisions of the Treaty, that we can no longer be party to it.  I will have a solemn obligation to protect the American people and our allies, not to protect arms control agreements signed almost 30 years ago.  Given today’s realities, we can no longer drag our feet on building and deploying a missile defense system; nor can we allow Cold War arms control agreements to restrict America’s ability to defend itself and its allies.”

    That’s pretty straight talk – and President Bush, once elected, has been consistent in articulating the need to move beyond the Treaty and build effective defenses.  But actions speak louder than words – and the fact is that his Administration, like the Clinton Administration before it, continues to restrict its missile defense programs according to the terms of that Cold War relic which should have gone out of existence with the Soviet Union.

    For example, there have been recent reports that the Navy will not be permitted to include its Aegis radar to track missiles in upcoming National Missile Defense (NMD) tests because of the Treaty.  Now bear in mind that this radar has, for five years, been used to track Chinese and other missiles fired to intimidate others – it’s OK, you see, to defend our overseas troops, friends and allies – but not Americans at home under the bizarre terms of the ABM Treaty, which stipulates that America must remain vulnerable.

    Furthermore – in spite of its obvious potential as an early defense for the American people, the Bush Administration has been exceedingly slow in starting a robust sea-based defense – the Treaty blocks even the development and testing of such a system, you see.  The Bush Administration simply continues the lethargic, under-funded, over constrained Clinton program.  And nothing has been done to revive the most mature space defense programs of the first Bush Administration – again, no doubt because of Treaty concerns.

    Presidents Bush and Putin may be “inching” toward a deal – possibly to be consummated  in Crawford, Texas – in mid-November, but it may not solve this problem.

    Putin sounded like Cold War arms controllers in Shanghai when he said on October 21, “First of all [our progress here] relates to the START issue.  We reaffirmed our mutual intention to reduce strategic offensive weapons.  And now our task is to develop parameters of such reductions and to design a reliable and verifiable method to reduce the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States.  As for the ABM-related issues, we also made some progress.  At least I believe we do have understanding that we can reach agreement, taking into account the national interests of Russia [and] the United States, and take into account the necessity to strengthen inter-national stability in this very important area.”

    As Ronald Reagan’s negotiator with the Soviets for five years, I heard this very language so often that I can still repeat it in my sleep. It no doubt warms the hearts of diplomats in the State Department.  But it’s not what President Bush promised to the American people.  Especially after September 11, it is intolerable to continue dumbing down our defenses because of the ABM Treaty.

    High Frontier urges the President to instruct his negotiators to make clear that the United States will now withdraw from the ABM Treaty – the only question should be whether Russia will join us in building global defenses to protect Americans and others around the world.

    As President Bush said in Shanghai, “The events of September 11 make it clearer than ever that a Cold War treaty that prevents us from defending our people is outdated and, I believe, dangerous.”

    Indeed, September 11 has changed everything.  No one now argues the benefits of vulnerability – or that no one would dare attack us for fear that we would retaliate.  Deterrence does not work against terrorists. Osama bin Laden knew we would find out he was behind September 11 and come after him.

    The President says we are after the terrorists and states that harbor them.  His “coalition” strategy gets in the way of going after them all at once.  But they must be on our target list if we are to rid the world of terrorism.  Does anyone believe that Iraq, for instance, is not in cahoots with bin Laden?  Perhaps he provided the Anthrax that shut down both Houses of Congress and killed innocent Americans.  And remember that Saddam said in 1991 he would have attacked American cities had he the missiles to reach them.  And make no mistake about it – many who argue against American defenses, including Russia and China, are involved in proliferating weapons of mass destruction and missiles to deliver them.

    We dare not tarry.  We need to be free of the ABM Treaty and to build the most effective defenses we can, as soon as possible.

A 'Prophet' Finds Honor At Last
by Cal Thomas

    If there were such things as prophets in our day, as there were in ancient times, former (and perhaps future) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be one.

    Last week, Mr. Netanyahu, whose grandfather was a rabbi, was in Washington sounding vindicated. For years he has been prophesying about terrorism, but few would listen. Now everybody is listening.

    Mr. Netanyahu testified before the House Committee on Government Reform and later met in private with senators. What he said should be required reading for every person who loves liberty and wants to maintain it.

    "What is at stake today," he warned the committee, "is nothing less than the survival of our civilization." Three weeks ago, that would have sounded alarmist, even extreme. Not anymore. "Our values are hated with an unmatched fanaticism that seeks to destroy our societies and our way of life," he said soberly.

    Mr. Netanyahu knows the neighborhood in which he lives and has been personally scarred by terrorism. His brother was killed in 1976 during a commando raid he led to free hostages from Palestinian terrorists who had hijacked a plane to Entebbe, Uganda.

    Echoing President Bush, Mr. Netanyahu told the House committee that terrorism is sustained by nations, such as Syria, Iran, Iraq and Libya. "Take away all this state support and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into the dust," he said.

    While Mr. Netanyahu spoke only of modern terrorism and gave a lesson in recent history, the fact is that Islamic terrorism has been an endemic element of the Middle East for 13 centuries. With the exception of Turkey, all modern Islamic regimes have come to power through violence. None has tolerated any challenge to its supremacy. They first terrorize their own citizens who fail to comply with the regime's political or religious beliefs, then they terrorize outsiders, claiming a divine mandate. Equal rights, especially for women, are unknown in such nations.

    Terrorism is not an aberration, nor is it born primarily out of frustration to achieve economic parity with wealthier nations. Terrorism is a policy. It is embraced to achieve an objective its practitioners believe cannot be reached in any other way. It has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of Israel; otherwise there would have been no terrorism in the Middle East for so long.

    It matters little that a majority of Muslims have not pledged themselves to the forced implementation of radical Islam. They do not have the guns or the fanaticism of the radicals, who seek, according to Mr. Netanyahu, to "roll back the West and install an extremist form of Islam as the dominant power in the world." It makes one long for the good old days of communism.

    In a telephone conversation before returning to Israel, Mr. Netanyahu told me he sees America's tardy recognition of the terrorist threat as "the beginning of the beginning." He worries, though, that not everyone has gotten the message, noting the continued "pressure on Israel" to meet with Yasser Arafat, an author and promoter of the very terrorism the U.S. opposes. Mr. Netanyahu wants us to know about a "terror museum" erected at Al-Najah University, in the Palestinian West Bank city of Nablus. The grisly exhibit glorified the recent suicide bombing of a Sbarro pizza restaurant in Jerusalem.

    Mr. Netanyahu says he believes most of the American public now understands what he and Israel have experienced for decades. "The liberals are smashed," he says. "They must be quiet or join in the applause [for President Bush’s policies]." Not exactly. The "peace at any price" crowd is beginning to stir. But they are less likely to be taken seriously by the public, which gives President Bush a 90 percent approval rating.

    In his appearance before the House committee, Mr. Netanyahu warned, "Some of you may find it hard to believe that Islamic militants truly cling to the mad fantasy of destroying America. Make no mistake, they do. Unless they are stopped now, their attacks will continue, and become even more lethal in the future."

    That sounds like the warning of a prophet.

Writing in The September 30, 2001 Washington Times, reprinted with permission.

The Coalition Trap
By Robert Kagan and William Kristol
    Can the United States win a war on terrorism while winking at some terrorists and cozying up to nations that support them? Can the United States effectively fight terrorism and reward terrorism at the same time?  You shouldn’t have to ponder those questions very long.  The certain answer is no.

    But the Bush Administration isn’t certain.  In its effort to build the broadest possible coalition of nations in support of the narrow objective of destroying Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terror network in Afghanistan, the Administration now runs a real risk of making so many compromises with terrorists and their sponsors that the fundamental goals of President Bush’s war on terrorism will be sacrificed.

    Consider the compromises with terrorists that the United States has already made.  Under the Secretary of State’s direction, the Bush Administration has already been courting Iran.  Now Iran has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism for over two decades.  It supports the Hezbollah terror organization, with a long and bloody record of terrorist actions against the Israelis and Americans.  Whatever openings may come to Iran under the more moderate President Khatami, the men who hold real power in Teheran will sponsor terrorism as a key tool of Iranian foreign policy.   And Khatami himself still supports Hezbollah.  That is why, in the efforts to woo Iran, the Bush Administration has, incredibly, decided to soft peddle any criticism of – let alone take any action against – Hezbollah.  When the White House released the list of terrorist bank accounts it intended to freeze, accounts related to Hezbollah (among others) were absent.  Can one plausibly be fighting a war against terrorism if Hezbollah is off the target list?

    There’s more.  This past week the Bush Administration backed a mission to Iran by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.  Among the messages Straw delivered to the Iranians was this, “I understand that one of the factors which helps breed terrorism is the anger which many people in this region feel at events over the years in Palestine.”  You may have thought that the only people who think the September 11 attack was related to the lack of progress in the peace process were American college professors and European intellectuals.  As the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and others have pointed out, Osama bin Laden and his gang don’t give a hoot about the peace process.

    But now, amazingly, the Bush Administration, by the Secretary of State’s coalition-building strategy, has linked the September 11 attack with the peace process.  President Bush’s distinction this past week that he favors a Palestinian state was designed to firm up wavering Arab support, such as it is, for the war on terrorism.  We doubt it will have much effect on Arab leaders, who are with us or against us for reasons largely unrelated to the peace process.  It certainly will have no effect on the Iranians, as Jack Straw learned when the Iranians rebuffed his overture.

    But let’s assume that the message was really designed to appease the so-called “Arab street.”  Will it?  No.  In fact, it will have the opposite effect.  Just think for a moment about the message the President, at the Secretary of State’s direction, was really (if inadvertently) sending:  Terrorism works.  Prior to September 11, Bush has said not a word about a Palestinian state.  After September 11, he was declaring it his vision.  To the Arabs and Palestinians, who danced and cheered as the twin towers fell, Bush’s statement told them they were right to celebrate.  Kill enough Americans, and the Americans give ground.  Bush’s statement last week was thus not a blow against terrorism.  It was a reward for terrorism.  It tends to make bin Laden a hero to the Arab masses, and it will teach a generation of radical Arabs that progress in the war against Israel and the West can be achieved through the killing of Americans.

    How could the President have blundered in this way?  We fear that his understandable admiration for Secretary of State Powell, the man, has clouded his judgment about Powell the strategist.  But Powell has made bad strategic judgments before, the most egregious being his well-documented effort to avoid going to war against Iraq in 1990.  Then, too, Powell was preoccupied with conditions, resistant to the use of American military might, and hostile to regime change.  Of course then, Americans had not been attacked. Now that they have, our most basic strategic imperatives should be obvious: We must severely punish the aggression against America, and we must either deter or destroy other enemies considering or planning such acts.  Moral clarity is indispensable to the strategic clarity needed to pursue a successful war against terrorism of the sort the President outlined.

    This does not mean allies, diplomacy, and deal-making are unimportant.  Quite the contrary.  They are crucial to an overall strategy of fighting terrorism.  But for the Secretary of State, the coalition has now become the strategy.  And so, in pursuit of the coalition, we have averted our eyes from Iranian-backed terrorism.  In pursuit of the coalition, we have allowed our Arab allies to conclude we will not target Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein’s development of weapons of mass destruction may soon pose an even greater threat than bin Laden.  In pursuit of the coalition, we have encouraged Palestinian and Arab radicals to believe that terrorism works.

    It does not have to be this way.  For one thing, who can imagine that this form of appeasement really buys the United States anything?  Saudi Arabia appears every bit as ambivalent about letting the United States use Saudi bases to launch attacks on the Taliban as it did before Bush proffered his commitment to a Palestinian state.  Iran will do nothing to aid the United States against bin Laden and the Taliban, except what it perceives to be in its own interest.  Saddam Hussein will not reward American reticence with anything but savagery, as soon as he has an opportunity.  In short, there is no evidence that Powell’s compromises have bought us anything we could not have gained without them.

    What’s more, the United States has coalition partners whose allegiance does not require us to embrace terrorism in order to fight terrorism.  Our strongest and most reliable partners are of course in Europe.  Ironically, the Bush Administration has been far less assiduous to courting our European allies than it has been in appeasing radical Arabs and Iranians.  And then there is Israel, the only nation in the Middle East where we share a common culture and a common commitment to liberal democracy, and with whom we have now been joined as a common victim of radical Islamic terrorism.  Yet as we seek to embrace the terrorist sponsors in Teheran, we treat our Israeli ally as a dangerous nuisance.

    Thus our President, following Powell’s guidance, last week made this extraordinary statement: “We are fully committed to working with both sides [Israel and the Palestinian Authority] to bring the level of terror down to an acceptable level for both.”  An “acceptable level of terror” for both terrorists and their victims – now there’s a goal for the war on terrorism!  But the reductio ad absurdum of this policy was reached later in the week, as the United States was pressuring Israel not to break off talks, despite the continuation of Palestinian terrorism.  To do so, the New York Times reported, would “risk the appearance of undermining Mr. Bush’s war on terrorism.” So that is the logic of the present situation: One of our allies must turn a blind eye to terror for the sake of a coalition with terror-supporting states in the pursuit of the war on terrorism.  This is the level of incoherence to which the Secretary of State has led the President.  The moral and strategic incoherence risks undermining the President’s – and America’s – great venture.

    We are often told not to worry, that some compromises have to be made now in order to get bin Laden, but that we are only in Phase One of the war.  Later on we can, presumably, turn on the people with whom we have made the compromises, and can break whatever promises we have made to our Arab friends.  We can then fulfill President Bush’s promise to go after all the terrorists who threaten us and the states that sponsor them.

    But the world doesn’t work that way.  Once having promised not to go after Iraq, we are not going to turn on a dime and launch an attack.  Once having compromised with Iranian-backed terrorism, we will not pivot and get serious about stopping it.  If Powell’s policy prevails, there will be no Phase Two.  If he succeeds in enmeshing America in a coalition of the wicked, the war against terrorism will be brief, limited, and ineffectual.  It will fail.

    It need not fail.  The broad struggle against terrorism and the states that sponsor it – the struggle the President promised the American people we would wage – is eminently winnable, and eminently worth winning.  All the evidence suggests the American people will support doing what it takes.  What they need and deserve is leadership that recognizes that the events of September 11, and the threat of worse disasters ahead, require a real break from the old ways of doing business.  What we need now is not timidity disguised as prudence, but boldness commensurate with the mission and the moment.

From the October 15, 2001, issue of The Weekly  Standard, reprinted with permission.

    “The deadly attacks on the United States in New York and Washington prompted some suggestions that the U.S. must work with Communist China to combat international terrorism. This is a badly misguided proposal that merits a hasty burial. . . . China's alliance with major rogue regimes has been so extensive and so well known for so long that it is absurd to pretend otherwise. Indeed, it is equally absurd to expect assistance against terrorism from a regime that has supplied nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan and Iran, chemical weapons materials to Iran, missile technology to Libya and air defense equipment to help Iraq shoot down U.S. pilots, all of which China has done. Less well known is that the Chinese government is one of the foremost benefactors of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, the focus of so much of U.S. attention since Sept. 11. Moreover, China is the largest foreign investor in Afghanistan. . . . The goals of the United States are clear. Having been attacked, America properly seeks to punish and deter fanatical, mostly small, Islamic groups and their state sponsors. China, on the other hand, has two goals, both utterly incompatible with ours. Internally, the Chinese government is at war with all of Islam. As a religion, and as a means of organizing and inspiring people, Islam represents a mortal threat to Chinese communist rule. Externally, China's ultimate goal is to destroy America's status as the sole superpower in the world.  To the Chinese government, this is a zero-sum game: anything that embarrasses, diminishes or bloodies the United States automatically serves China's interest. (Witness the nationalistic glee, assiduously stoked by the Chinese government, that was on display on the Internet in China in the wake of the attacks.)"

    “In its anti-U.S. effort, the Chinese government finds the Islamic rogue regimes of the Middle East to be useful allies.
Strategically and morally, the United States cannot and must not assume that China is part of a solution to terrorism. Indeed, Communist China is a very large part of the problem.”
Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) – Ranking Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

To Do Iraq or Not Do Iraq – That's the Question for Dubya
By Michael Kramer
    Like a narcotic, we get our fix each day as we watch our military do what it does best: pummel an inferior force from the air with precision weapons that only rarely miss their targets.

    The result is predictable: Sooner or later, the combined toll will become unbearable, the Taliban will fold, a new, presumably moderate regime will take power in Afghanistan and, unless Osama bin Laden has been caught or killed by then, the hunt for him will continue.

    And sooner or later, that mission, too, will succeed.

    But then what?

    Despite President Bush's promise to press the war against terrorism everywhere, there's a growing sense that with bin Laden's demise, the U.S. will declare victory and retreat.

    We'll still try to choke off the terrorists' money, but that strategy is proving lame even now, when we're fully at war: Spigot nations like Saudi Arabia are reliably reported to be stonewalling the effort for fear of upsetting their citizens.

    Similarly, the impressive sharing of intelligence among nations accustomed to jealously guarding their secrets will likely revert to meager, low-level cooperation.

    There's a common denominator here: As the world got used to the mere threat of terrorism before Sept. 11, so it will again live with that possibility – unless and until those threats are translated into atrocities.

    At which point it will be shown that we've learned nothing: We'll find ourselves responding to acts of terror after they happen, when the clear lesson of Sept. 11 is that we must act beforehand.

    The obvious test case for this proposition is Iraq – and the signs are not encouraging.

    Although Richard Butler's incorruptible United Nations weapons inspection team proved long ago that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, senior Bush administration officials question the evidence.

    This is a stunner, for official "United States Government White Papers" regularly assert that Iraq has such weapons and the means to deliver them.

    The only reason for a Bush official to doubt those conclusions is because the plain English interpretation of the President's many statements since Sept. 11 would demand that we do something about it.

    Two words sum up the impediment to acting on Bush's rhetoric: coalition politics.

    A Call for Evidence:  Among the Arab members of America's latest alliance against evil, there is simply no appetite for extending the campaign beyond bin Laden and the Taliban without convincing proof that some other individual or group – or some other state – can be unambiguously tied to Sept. 11.

    But it's not just the Arabs. Even Washington's strongest ally has stepped away from taking the war to Iraq if the only rationale for doing so is that Saddam presumably will use what he has against someone at some time.

    On his third trip to the Middle East last week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said there would have to be "absolute evidence" of Iraq's complicity with bin Laden's Al Qaeda network before striking Saddam – evidence the PM said does not yet exist.

    Taking Blair at his word – and assuming such proof never materializes – fighting Saddam might ultimately require America to act alone – a move many experts say would shatter the coalition against bin Laden and the Taliban.

    To which there should be only one response: So what?

    It is beyond dispute that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that he harbors, finances and encourages terrorists.

    The time to deal with the worst of Iraq's capabilities is now, even if that would cause angry Arabs to topple their governments in a fit of collective rage.

    Past Due: The time to worry about our actions causing the destabilization of regimes that are themselves illegitimate is long past – or rather, 36 days past.

    If doing what's necessary to ensure our homeland security means losing the support of other nations, the President should at least know that he can count on American public opinion – for a time.

    Unless other terrorist acts are perpetrated against Americans on U.S. soil, the urge to get serious, and the support for doing so, will wither – but if we fail to get serious about Saddam now, we will rue the day.

Published in the October 17, 2001 New York Daily News, reprinted with permission.

    “There is no doubt that Iraq is in the sights of the United States, and sooner or later, the Americans will take this country on.”
Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Dalia Rabin-Pelassof

    “[Saddam Hussein] will attack Israel if he feels the United States is threatening his control of Iraq.”
Head of Israeli Intelligence General Amos Malkha

    “We do not take any risks, and we have taken into account the possibility that the war will spread to Iraq, and this time, we will be prepared.”
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer

THREE OUT OF FOUR AMERICANS SUPPORT MISSILE DEFENSE, CNS News, September 26.  A new poll showed that, since the September 11 terrorist attack, 76 percent of U.S. adults support the idea of a national missile defense, despite attempts by some Democrats in Congress to derail spending for the program. The Alexandria, Va.-based research firm, Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates surveyed 1,000 American adults between Sept. 18 and 23 and found that more than half, 55 percent, "strongly" support the program. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) reportedly called President Bush's request for a 57 percent increase in missile defense spending "unjustified," yet even a majority of Democrats in the poll – 57 percent – gave their overall support to missile defense.

RUSSIA, IRAN AGREE TO ARMS SALE, Washington Post, October 3, 2001.  Russia signed an agreement today that paves the way for up to $300 million a year in conventional arms sales to Iran, dismissing U.S. fears that more weapons in Iran's hands could further destabilize the Middle East. . . .  Analysts said the pact was only a framework for future sales, and did not specify what weapons Russia might supply. . . . Besides agreeing to sell arms, Russia is helping Iran build a 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station in the port city of Bushehr. Today, Russian officials announced that it will deliver the first reactor to the station next month.

‘ROGUE STATE’ HAS FIRED SHIPBOARD BALLISTIC MISSILE, Jane’s Missiles and Rockets, October 2001.  A nation identified only as a ‘rogue state’ has successfully demonstrated the shipboard launch of a ballistic missile, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a group of local journalists during his recent visit to Russia.  “A weapon of mass destruction can be delivered over intercontinental range by a ballistic missile that has less than intercontinental range,” said Rumsfeld.  One technique “is to put it on a ship, peel back the cover, use a transporter-erector-launcher, and fire it from a distance shorter than ICBM range.  That has been done.”  He provided few details. . . .  However, he confirmed that “a rogue state has done that.”. . .  He declined to identify the specific countries involved . . . “but certainly you would include in that category North Korea and Iraq and Iran and Libya. . . .”

REP. WELDON PROPOSES U.S.-RUSSIAN COOPERATION ON DEFENSE, SPACE, Aerospace Daily, October 3, 2001.  Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) . . . proposed Oct. 2 that the U.S. and Russia increase cooperation on missile defense, space technology, weather satellites, and several other aerospace fronts . . . [and] is working to quickly build support for his plan in the Bush Administration and both parties of Congress. . . . “If the U.S. and Russia are cooperating on issues across the board, Russia will be more likely to work closely with America on the national security issues that matter most to us – missile defense, the war against terrorism, and proliferation,” he said. . . .

TOP DEFENSE SCIENTISTS URGE BIG INCREASE IN LASER RESEARCH FUNDING.  Inside the Air Force, October 5, 2001.  The potential military application for high-energy lasers is so great that team of top defense scientists has recommended a substantial cash infusion in science and technology to make these systems more reliable and less costly.  The effect would be an easier transition into military operations, they say.  According to a June report of the Defense Science Board task force on high-energy lasers, low funding for defense-wide science and technology in HEL programs is “our greatest concern.”. . .  The report also advises that the Defense Department develop a “coherent defense-wide HEL science and technology investment program to support increasing potential for military laser applications.

WILSON SPEAKS OUT FOR MISSILE SHIELD AS VITAL TO DEFENSE, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 10, 2001.  The United States is missing two powerful tools in its war on terrorism -- a missile shield and sanction to assassinate hostile foreign leaders -- former Gov. Pete Wilson (R-CA) said yesterday.  Wilson, who serves on two Bush administration national-security advisory boards, also said the United States should prosecute the war on terrorism regardless of cold feet among anti-terror coalition states.  "The most important thing is to succeed, to win, and then you will find all kinds of people eager to join your coalition," Wilson [said].  Wilson, a Republican who also served as a U.S. senator and San Diego mayor, denounced former President Bill Clinton for not building a missile-defense shield, a major defense goal of President Bush.  "In my judgment, Bill Clinton's lasting moral dereliction will not be of Monica Lewinsky, it will be wasting eight years in which we should have been putting in place a missile defense against the ultimate form of terrorism," Wilson said. . . .   Wilson called missiles "the most certain form of delivery of weapons of mass destruction.". . .  Wilson, a former Marine lieutenant, serves on the Defense Policy Board, which reports to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and was named last week to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. . . .

AFTER THE TERROR, Forbes,  [Opinion, Caspar W. Weinberger], October 15, 2001.  For a long time to come everything we write or say or think will be prefaced by "before Sept. 11, 2001" or "after Sept. 11, 2001." That is the way it was for many years after Dec. 7, 1941. . . .   In the wake of Sept. 11, it is clear we will be going on the offensive and will take war to the terrorists. Older budget formulations--even the higher program estimates--are not enough for this.  We need to increase our air- and sea-lift capabilities.  We also need to add to, not reduce, our carrier forces, because in some parts of the world carriers will be our only bases. And we will have to develop and deploy an effective missile defense against missiles that can carry nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.   Many of missile defense's diehard opponents, including most of the Democratic leadership in the Senate, keep telling us that a missile defense would not have stopped these attacks. That is true, but quite irrelevant. Sept. 11 showed us one form of attack. . . .   But this is not the only kind of attack of which these and other terrorists are capable. We must be prepared to deal with many kinds of threats. . . .   We need a missile defense, as well as the more conventional forms of defense. Many less-than-fully-friendly countries have weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver those missiles to our shores.  The longer we stay defenseless, the more the tyrants and terrorists of the world will be tempted to use those weapons against us. Should they succeed because we have continued to adhere to the 1972 ABM Treaty, which forbids an effective missile defense, the resulting horror will be far worse than that which we have already experienced.   The Bush Administration . . . will still have a fierce fight on its hands to overcome the almost surreal and slavish adherence to the ABM Treaty voiced by many in Congress and by domestic and foreign "experts."

BUSH PLANS HOW TO EXIT ABM TREATY, Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2001.  In a test of their warming relationship, President Bush is expected to tell Russian President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. plans deep, unilateral cuts in offensive nuclear weapons, but will give notice by year end that it will withdraw from the ABM treaty banning missile defenses. . . .  Mr. Putin, whose own arsenal is decaying, has called for both countries to cut back to 1,500 long-range weapons, while U.S. nuclear planners had been resisting cuts much below 2,500. . . .  Mr. Bush's expected move would be an important step toward his goal of building an ambitious, and costly, national missile-defense system. While considerably sweetened by a pledge of steep reductions of weapons, Mr. Bush's proposal still is high-risk, especially as he tries to keep together an international coalition for military action in Afghanistan and a broader war on terrorism. . . .  The Russians, who have neither the technological nor economic might to match the U.S. in missile defenses, fear that abandoning the treaty will undermine what is left of Moscow's strategic parity with the U.S. . . .  U.S. officials say they expect Mr. Putin eventually to go along with Mr. Bush's missile-defense plans -- almost certainly not this weekend, but perhaps by mid-November, when the two men are expected to meet again at Mr. Bush's ranch.

NEW URGENCY SEEN FOR U.S. MISSILE SHIELD, Washington Times,  [Opinion, Rep. Bob Schaffer (R-CO)],  October 19, 2001.  How ridiculous it would be to start leaving the front door unlocked just because burglars had recently found it easier to enter through the back window. When it comes to national defense, America will regret leaving its front door wide open. . . .  The needs for modern defenses have not diminished. In fact, they have only become more acute. . . .   The United States must not neglect building a defense against ballistic missiles and the possibility of terrorists making an unauthorized launch of ballistic missiles. Instead of the loss of 6,000 lives, the United States could lose 6 million. . . .  In the early 1990s, the United States recognized the threat of an accidental or unauthorized (terrorist) launch of ballistic missiles in President Bush's plan for building a ballistic missile defense called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS). . . .   Unfortunately, Congress underfunded the program, and then-President Clinton discontinued it.. . . .  If the United States is to succeed in its war against terrorism, it must act decisively against bin Laden, confiscate his nuclear devices and destroy his chemical weapons. At the same time America must guard itself against ballistic missiles, realizing that ballistic missiles can be hijacked by terrorists. . . .  It must build the best ballistic missile defense it can by accelerating its Navy Theater Wide program, and emphasizing space-based defenses, including high-energy lasers, Brilliant Pebbles interceptors, and particle beams.

“They [al Qaeda] have nothing to defend.  You know, for 50-years we deterred the Soviets by threatening the utter destruction of the Soviet Union.  What does bin Laden value?  There’s no piece of real estate.  It’s not like a state or country.  The notion of deterrence doesn’t really apply here. There’s no treaty to be negotiated, there’s no arms control agreement that’s going to guarantee our safety and security.  The only way you can deal with them is to destroy them.”

Vice President Dick Cheney
October 19, 2001

One-eighth of the way through President George W. Bush’s first term, it is hard to imagine what he might do better to end America’s vulnerability to even a single ballistic missile – at least at a policy and international political level.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that reviving a sound program to build the most effective defense is taking longer than I had hoped.

The Good News
President Bush returned home from his July European trip a clear winner over the naysayers – in particular Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), who broke with the tradition of supporting the President while he is abroad.  On the eve of the President’s trip, Senator Daschle charged he was “isolating” and “minimizing” U.S. interests.

But President Bush, despite derision by the liberal chattering class as a novice in international affairs, scored big-time with a joint communiqué with Russian President Putin.  In it, they agreed in principle that the United States could pursue its missile defense plans, provided both countries committed to a reduction in their nuclear arsenals.

As many in Russia have since acknowledged, President Putin accepted President Bush’s approach: to build defenses and to reduce nuclear weapons – the U.S. agenda of the Reagan-Bush I years, abandoned by the Clinton Administration.

President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, gave a hopeful snapshot of the Bush missile defense policy to the Editors of the Washington Times, as reported on August 2.  Shortly after returning from Moscow meetings to arrange high level U.S.-Russian “defense planning” talks, she made the following main points:

1) These talks of limited duration aim to replace the ABM Treaty with a “loose” cooperative framework that “recognizes the need for limited defenses” and reduces the number of offensive nuclear weapons.  The talks are to be of limited duration so as not to hamper the development and deployment of missile defenses “at the earliest possible date,” as President Bush has pledged – “At the end of the day, he’s going to have to go forward, and since we don’t plan to violate the treaty that would mean we would have to withdraw.”

2) The Bush Administration rejects the Clinton Administration’s missile defense testing plan that forced the Pentagon to restrict its tests within the constraints of the ABM Treaty.  “Our guidance has been: Put together a testing program that will get us the best missile defense system at the earliest possible date.  Now, given that we developed a robust testing and evaluation program, it is going to run afoul of the Treaty – there is no doubt [of this] in anybody’s mind.”

The Talks arranged by Dr. Rice will involve the most senior officials.  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be meeting with his Russian counterpart, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, in mid-August. Secretary of State Powell will also be meeting with his counterpart, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, on these issues.  And Presidents Bush and Putin will be discussing these issues face to face in Shanghai, China in September and at President Bush’s Texas Ranch in October.

According to senior Defense officials, planned testing will “bump-up’” against the Treaty constraints in a matter of months.  So, much has to happen in a very short period of time.

Meanwhile, Congress has to act on the President’s missile defense budget request for fiscal year 2002, which begins in October.  Before leaving for their August recess, the House Armed Services Committee recommended about $8.1 billion for missile defense, strongly supporting the President’s request.  The Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) who opposes “unilateral” steps to move beyond the Treaty and build effective defenses, will make its recommendations in September – while the above mentioned Talks prepare for the September and October Bush-Putin meetings.
Will Congress support the President?  If they don’t, how will they explain it to the American people who want to be defended?  It appears the President has Congress in a bit of a box.  Good for him!

The Bad News
While the President and his policy team have been doing great things, advancing his agenda with the Russians, our overseas allies and friends, and many on Capitol Hill, the Pentagon missile defense program management team has not kept pace with its program planning in support of that policy.

I was very disappointed to learn from an authoritative briefing on the program that the Pentagon has not revived programs to build the most effective defenses – rather they seem stuck on the Clinton program, which is receiving three-quarters of the funding, including a 60-percent funding increase.

More innovative system concepts than the ground-based interceptor system are still being delayed and placed at risk by, I fear, bureaucratic forces still driven by ABM Treaty concerns – which favor inherently more expensive and less effective basing options.

For example, the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) program continues to be delayed and underfunded.  I fear it is no accident that the Bush Administration continues its predecessor’s resistance to making NTW all it can be because Articles V and VI of the ABM Treaty ban: 1) development and testing of sea-based ABM systems and 2) giving Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems ABM capability or testing them in an ABM mode.

The Pentagon’s program is simply not following the policy guidance to define a testing program to produce “the best missile defense at the earliest possible date.”   It cannot be that it must take twice as long to deploy a kill vehicle for the Navy’s Standard Missile already operating on Aegis cruisers around the world as to build a ground-based interceptor site in Alaska.  And obtaining an initial sea-based capability would cost less than 10-percent of the Alaska site.  (See below.)  Yet, I was briefed on only “go-slow” NTW plans by authoritative Pentagon officials.

The sad truth is that the Clinton program, which was clearly designed to fail, is alive and well – and little is being done to revive cheaper, faster and better ways to build missile defenses to fulfill the President’s guidance.

The Way Ahead
Rectifying the above criticism of the current development of sea-based defenses is relatively inexpensive.  The needed additional funding is only a tiny percentage of the overall $8 billion missile defense budget for 2002.  Overcoming the inertia of a missile defense bureaucracy which has for eight years been dedicated to preserving and strengthening the ABM Treaty is more difficult and requires inspired leadership beyond what has so far been demonstrated.

A robust development program is required – funded at a technology limited pace and managed by a dedicated, competent Navy office like that which, over 40 years ago, deployed in under four years the first Polaris strategic submarine and its associated ballistic missiles.  In fact, that was a much more daunting engineering task than building sea-based defenses.  But leadership is needed to find and empower a modern RAdm. Levering Smith to make it happen.  Stay tuned!

Rempt: “No Showstoppers” To Building Sea-Based Global Missile Defense

In the Navy’s first public acknowledgement that vindicates High Frontier’s long-standing position for building sea-based global defenses, Rear Admiral Rodney Rempt – the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for missile defense – says the U.S. Navy could produce a sea-based "global" missile defense system with relative ease, beginning within 12 months.

At a June 14 Capitol Hill breakfast seminar sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association and the National Defense University Foundation, Rempt said that developing such a system to protect the U.S. and its allies would be "fairly straightforward" and present "no showstoppers. . . . This is not difficult."

Rempt indicated the Navy hasn’t been permitted to develop sea-based national or global missile defense systems, because they are banned by the 1972 ABM Treaty: "What we've been told so far is don't do this, don't do it at all; so there has to be a change in direction here." Hopefully, the President’s commitment to moving beyond the Treaty will change such arbitrary constraints so that the Navy can move ahead at a technology limited pace – but that hasn’t happened yet.

Rempt outlined three systems that could use the Standard Missile and ships equipped with the Aegis combat system and exploit the development activities of the Navy Area and Navy Theater Wide theater missile defense systems:

· An "emergency" global missile defense, designed to intercept missiles from North Korea, could be ready in 12 to 18 months at a cost of $150 million to $200 million.
· An enhanced system, which could intercept missiles from Libya as well as North Korea, could be ready in 4 to 5 years at a cost of $1.4 billion to $1.8 billion.
· An even more advanced system, which could shoot down Iranian missiles and more capable North Korean missiles could be tested within 6 years at a cost of $3.5-4.5 billion.

A global missile defense system using a new type of ship and missile and addressing all known future threats would require nine years of development at a cost of $8 billion to $12 billion, according to Rempt.  Each ship would cost $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion.

European allies are willing to move ahead with cooperative efforts on theater systems, Rempt said. The British and Canadian navies, for instance, are already observers on Navy Theater Wide, and the Navy hopes to sign agreements with European countries within the next year to do research and development and co-production work on the Standard Missile.

Missile Defense: Unprepared For Manifest Peril
By The Honorable Paul Wolfowitz

Imagine this scenario: A rogue state with a vastly inferior military, but armed with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction, commits an act of aggression against a neighboring country. As President George Bush sends U.S. forces into the region to respond, the country's genocidal dictator threatens U.S. allies and deployed forces with ballistic missile attack.
Suddenly, almost without warning, missiles rain down on U.S. troops and pound into the densely populated residential neighborhoods of allied capitals. Panic breaks out. Sirens wail as rescue crews in protective gear race to search the rubble for bodies and rush the injured to hospitals. Reporters wearing gas masks attempt to describe the destruction, as pictures of the carnage are instantaneously broadcast across the world.

That scene is not science fiction. It took place 10 years ago during the Gulf War.

I have a particularly vivid recollection of those events. When Saddam Hussein was launching Scud missiles against Israel, I was sent there to help persuade Israel not to get drawn further into the war, as Saddam was seeking. With those missiles he terrorized a generation of Israeli children and almost succeeded in changing the entire strategic course of the Gulf War.
This year brings the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. combat casualties from a ballistic missile attack. In the waning days of Desert Storm, a Scud missile fired by Iraq hit U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers and wounding 99.

Today it is appropriate to ask how much better able we are to meet a threat that was already real and serious 10 years ago. The answer is, hardly any better. The United States is still virtually not yet able to defend against ballistic missile attacks, even from relatively primitive Scud missiles. U.S. forces in South Korea, and the civilian population they defend, have almost no means of protection against North Korean ballistic missiles armed with chemical or conventional warheads. Without missile defenses, an attack by North Korea could result in tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties.

To those who wonder why so many of the regimes hostile to the United States, many of them desperately poor, are investing such enormous sums of money to acquire ballistic missiles, I suggest this possible answer: They know that we don't have any defenses. The time has come to lift our heads from the sand and deal with some unpleasant but indisputable facts. The short-range missile threat to U.S. friends, allies and deployed forces arrived a decade ago. The intermediate-range missile threat is now here. And the long-range threat to U.S. cities is just over the horizon. It is a matter of years, not decades.
A growing number of countries are pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, advanced conventional weapons and ballistic missile technology. In 1972 the United States knew of nine nations that had ballistic missiles; today we know of 28. In just the last five years more than a thousand missiles of all ranges have been produced. And those are only the cases that we know of.

Dangerous capabilities are being developed at this very moment that we do not know about, and which we may not know about for years – perhaps only after they are deployed.

For example, in 1998 North Korea surprised the world with its launch of a Taepodong-1 missile over Japan, with a previously unknown third stage. The intelligence community tells us that this launch demonstrated a North Korean capability to deliver a small payload to the United States. North Korea is currently developing the Taepodong-2 missile, which will be able to strike even deeper into U.S. territory and carry an even larger weapons payload.

Other unfriendly regimes, like Iran, Syria and Libya, are also developing missiles of increasing range and sophistication. A number of these countries are less than five years away from being able to deploy such capabilities. These regimes are collaborating with each other, sharing technology and know-how.

If the United States does not build defenses against these weapons now, hostile powers will soon have the ability to strike U.S. and allied cities with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. They will have the power to hold our people hostage to blackmail and terror. They may secure, in their estimation, the capability to prevent America from forming international coalitions and force it into a truly isolationist posture.

The Bush administration intends to develop protection capable of defending against limited missile attacks from a rogue state or by accidental or unauthorized launch. We intend to develop layered defenses to intercept missiles of any range at every stage – boost, midcourse and terminal. We have designed a program to develop and deploy as soon as is appropriate.

Developing a proper layered defense will take time. It requires more aggressive exploration of key technologies, particularly those that have been constrained by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. So we plan to build incrementally, deploying capabilities as the technology is proved ready.

To accelerate the program, we must first broaden the search for effective technologies before we can move toward deployment. We must dust off technologies that were shelved, consider new ones and bring them all into the development and testing process.

Today, ballistic missile defense is no longer a problem of invention – it is a challenge of engineering. It is a challenge we are up to.

From July 12 Testimony by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Stop The MADness: The Case For Missile Defense
By Charles Colson

President Bush is back in the U.S. from Europe with a wonderful trophy in hand. It's called "a surprise breakthrough," and the president apparently has an agreement to begin new negotiations with Russian President Putin concerning the future of missile defense.

Previous US-Russia negotiations were stymied by disputes over the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- a treaty I worked on when I was in the White House. It appears now that the parties may have found a way to get past this Cold War relic, and they've taken a giant step towards making the world a safer place.

While Putin didn't endorse a specific plan, he did agree to work toward strategies whereby the ABM Treaty would be replaced, allowing the U.S. to develop defensive missiles and both sides could make large cuts in offensive weapons.

The goal, Bush said, is for the leaders to forge "a more peaceful world." For his part, the Russian president said that he had no doubt that Russia and the U.S. would find a way to implement the two leaders' agreement.

I'm impressed at how the president pulled this rabbit from the hat. For months critics, here and abroad, have insisted that the administration's missile defense program would only spawn a new arms race. Well, they were wrong. Instead the Bush-Putin deal would produce a two-thirds reduction in nuclear stockpiles.

But I'm also excited by the possibility we could get rid of an immoral, nuclear deterrence strategy we've embraced for four decades. During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence was based on a policy called Mutual Assured Destruction (or MAD). With MAD, we held Soviet cities and population hostage while they held our cities and population hostage. The threat of nuclear holocaust stopped either side from attacking.

Now nobody liked the idea and many thoughtful people questioned its morality. They rightly pointed out that the Just War Theory -- as articulated by St. Augustine -- demands that civilians not be targeted or attacked. In addition, they pointed out that threatening to commit an immoral act is, itself, immoral.

The problem was that there were no workable alternatives, so we had to do it to keep the peace. But now all that's changed. The Soviet Union is gone and the principal threat to security today is from rogue states like North Korea and Iraq.

Developing a missile defense that can counter that threat -- along with large reductions in the number of warheads -- enhances both American and global security. And it does so in a way consistent with Christian moral principles.

So instead of all the media carping and political sniping -- particularly from the Senate -- that we've witnessed the past two weeks while the President has been in Europe, I say it's time for all Americans to get behind what promises to be the most important initiative for peace since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Americans, beginning with our elected representatives, need to understand that the issue here isn't parties or politics; it's life and death. And at its heart it is a profoundly moral question.

Christians need to make this argument -- in our communities, our churches, and everywhere we have a chance to speak. We can make the case for a policy that leaves Cold War MADness behind and makes the world a safer and saner place.

Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Weldon Proposes U.S.-Israeli-Turkish Cooperation On Boost-Phase Defense

High Frontier applauds Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), Chairman of the House Armed Services Military Readiness Subcommittee, for proposing that the U.S. and Israel jointly develop a boost-phase missile defense system.  In a July 26 press conference with Israeli Minister of Public Security Uzi Landau, Weldon said he believes seed money could come from the fiscal 2002 defense budget now under consideration in Congress.  HASC member Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) also expressed interest in the initiative at the press conference.

The program would be modeled after past and continuing U.S.-Israel efforts to develop the land-based Arrow missile defense system, which became operational in Israel last year. Neither the Arrow nor the Tactical High Energy Laser, another land-based missile defense system that the U.S. and Israel have been jointly developing, could shoot down missiles in their boost phase.

Weldon correctly observed, "The Arrow program is good, but it's hitting the missile in the descent phase. The debris is going to continue to come in and reign terror on the people. We have to take the missile out in the ascent phase. It's time to move to the next generation."

Weldon believes that European nations, Turkey and Russia should be considered for participation in such a system, but that the U.S. and Israel should still lead the program.

This initiative could fit into the current U.S.-Israeli joint program Congress has supported to combine the Arrow terminal defense with Unpiloted Air Vehicle (UAV)-based sensors and interceptors to detect and destroy mobile launchers. Current work is focusing on intelligence-gathering, data fusion, and command and control technologies to link such a system together. Israeli officials have said a system architecture should be completed by the end of the year.

Such a system would be similar to the Raptor-Talon boost-phase intercept system pioneered by the SDI program during the first Bush Administration – and canceled by the Clinton Administration.  It could indeed have broader application than for Israeli interests – e.g., the Italians have also been interested in developing a UAV-based defensive architecture.

Landau said Israel favors a layered missile defense system so it has several chances to shoot down an incoming missile. He added that a boost-phase system is more likely to deter an attack because a successful intercept would cause the debris to fall "on top of the aggressor."

This initiative fits well with a July 16 Aviation Week report that the U.S., Israel and Turkey have been secretly discussing for six months a joint project to develop a missile defense system to protect against the threat of ballistic missiles.  During an earlier visit to Ankara, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said that both governments had made a joint appeal to Washington to approve the sale of the Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile interceptor to Turkey.

Stronger strategic ties between Turkey and Israel could lead cooperative defenses against common threats, including Iran's Shahab series of missiles. With a range of up to 2,000 km. (1,240 mi.), the Shahab-4 would threaten Turkey and Israel's vital centers.

Ben Eliezer also claimed Iran was developing nuclear weapons as part of a project to be completed by 2005, adding that this was a threat not just for Israel but the whole region. "We are more than worried about the very rapid development in Iran of nuclear weapons or non-conventional weapons," he said. "Countries concerned should join our efforts as soon as possible in order to see what can be done, to avoid any possibility that Iran reaches a level where in 2005 it will produce non-conventional weaponry."

High Frontier strongly supports Congressman Weldon for taking this initiative and notes that an effective boost-phase intercept capability based in Turkey could protect the entire world against ballistic missiles launched from much of the Middle East—particularly from Iran and Iraq.

Kozyrev: NMD System Offers Russia Hope

High Frontier applauds Andrei Kozyrev for his excellent article, titled as above, in the June 16 Taipei Times – on the eve of the Bush-Putin Summit in Slovenia.  Kozyrev was Russia’s Foreign Minister between 1992 and 1996.  He was instrumental in beginning the “Ross-Mamedov” talks that were working out arrangements for U.S.-Russian cooperation in building a global defense, as Boris Yeltsin proposed in his January 31, 1992, U.N. speech.  He was one of those advocates for Yeltsin’s initiative who were sharply undercut by President Clinton when, in his April 1993 meeting with Russian President Yeltsin, he refused to continue the Ross-Mamedov talks and instead advocated a return to the Cold War rhetoric that the ABM Treaty was the “cornerstone of strategic stability” – code for Mutual Assured Destruction.

Notably, Kozyrev’s article was subtitled: “Opposition to defensive missile systems creates a climate in which innocent citizens are hostages to blackmail.”  His article began with a startling question to focus his argument: "We have lived like pigs for half-a-century, so why not keep living like that for another 50 years?" His answer:

In essence, that is what those who stonewall in defense of the 1972 ABM Treaty are saying when they reject all options to create anti-ballistic missile defensive systems.

By opposing the development of such systems, however, the pro-ABM Treaty position creates a situation in which unsuspecting and peaceful citizens in Russia, the US, and other countries are held permanently hostage to nuclear blackmail.
The "ABM at any cost" view could only have "guaranteed peace" during the insanity of the Cold War. It certainly did not prevent an accelerated arms race. Indeed, the first strategic nuclear arms reductions were not agreed until two decades later with the START-2 treaty of 1993, a time when relations between Moscow and Washington had become more reasonable and realistic. . . .

Today, it is not only the superpowers who are capable of blackmailing the world with "super-murder." Mini-powers and even terrorist groups can adopt mass blackmail as their policy. Russia is as vulnerable as any country to such blackmail. So standing in support of the ABM Treaty and its ban on all national missile defenses is of no help to anyone.

Despite this, Russia automatically opposes change. Why? When will Russians stop being manic and obsessive about the US? The inferiority complex of Russia's derzhavniki (advocates of a powerful, effective state) displays only weakness, not strength. It is similar to the fanatic feelings of a mouse who thinks that there is nothing more fearful than a cat. But with its gigantic financial, economic, and technological resources, the US can be an exceptional partner for Russia as well as a nemesis. It is to that positive partnership that Russia should look.

For example, everyone knows how hard it was for Russia over the past decade to maintain its image as a space power. Today, due to US cooperation, Russia can do things in space that only yesterday seemed impossible. Tourists are going into space! The Russian goes for free, the American pays a fee of $20 million. As strange as "space tourism" seemed two months ago, what seems like a fairy-tale today -- cooperation with the US to develop systems to prevent nuclear and missile terrorism -- can become a reality tomorrow if Russia acts in its own interests.

Those interests are crystal clear. Today, Pakistani generals, who are notorious for organizing coups and helping the Taliban, possess atomic bombs. Tomorrow, Iranian generals may acquire atomic weapons. North Korea already assists them with arms. Russia is threatened by this as much as anyone.

It is in Russia's national interest -- in the interest of its territorial integrity, the development of its military-industrial complex, the stoppage of a "brain drain" of its best minds to the West -- to find the means to participate in this US "project of the century" -- the National Missile Defense. But if we want to be partners in the development of modern defensive systems, we must negotiate in good faith, not bargain hard just to walk away in a pre-planned way at the end. Indeed, it is important not to overplay our hand. Otherwise, Russia may look like a country whose main interest is in maintaining an option where all of the U.S. is vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. . . .

The door to partnership is open. Russia need not break it down. From his first mention of the ABM Treaty, President George W. Bush has suggested that it is crucial for the US to cooperate with Russia. Of course, we must make sure that he means what he says, but it is time for both sides to overcome Cold War militancy. . . .

Instead of engaging in bitterness and spy mania, it is time for Russia to find its “place under the capitalist sun.’ The competitive fight between Russian industries and businesses around the world for commissions and contracts should have started “yesterday.”. . . Pragmatism – not old-fashioned and outlived stereotypes – should form the heart of Russian/US diplomacy. . . .

Missile Defense Advocate: DoD Approach Too Narrow
By Robert Holzer and Gail Kaufman

The Pentagon’s revamped missile defense program is seriously flawed because it does not place enough emphasis on exploiting sea- and space-based capabilities, according to one of the nation’s leading missile defense advocates.

In a single-page July 16 letter sent to senior defense officials, Henry Cooper, former head of overall Pentagon ballistic missile research, warned that the Pentagon’s program places too much reliance on ground-based capabilities, which might foreclose more promising, near-term deployment options using sea-based platforms.

“A serious danger is that developing even that limited capability will fall under the weight of serious technical criticism and escalating costs . . . without any clear effort at a better alternative,” Cooper said in his letter, which was addressed to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary.

“My candidate is making Navy Theater Wide all it can be as soon as possible—and restarting serious development of space-based interceptors,” Cooper wrote.

Considered one of the intellectual godfathers of missile defense, Cooper and his letters are influential in the debate over missile defenses and the pace and scope of development.  A space arms control negotiator for President Ronald Reagan and head of the first Bush administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, Cooper now heads Arlington, Va.-based High Frontier, a missile defense advocacy organization.  His opinions carry weight with missile defense proponents in Congress.

“Cooper knows these programs intimately,” said Baker Spring, a research fellow on missile defense at the Heritage Foundation here.  “He knows what their strengths and capabilities are, both near and far term.  I think there are some very focused proposals that are made that, if carried through, could strengthen the administration’s program even further.”

Other defense experts said, however, that Cooper wants to resurrect the outdated thinking that characterized the Star Wars era of the mid-1980s.

“What has begun to happen is there is some agitation on the [part of extreme missile defense proponents] about Bush’s plan not going far enough,” Theresa Hitchens, senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, a think tank here, said July 26.  “There are people hoping that he was going all the way back to Star Wars.”

In his letters, Cooper expresses concern that sea- and space-based capabilities continue to receive substantially less funding, and hence priority, in Pentagon planning than they should.  The focus on ground-based systems, he says, could foreclose promising near-term options for missile defense developments.

The Pentagon plans in 2002 to allocate $1.04 billion for sea-based systems; aerospace capabilities are slated to receive $1.06 billion; while land systems would garner a whopping $5.03 billion.

“Let’s level the playing fiend among the basing options and let the devil take the hindmost,” Cooper said in a 19-point position paper sent to Air Force Lt. General Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
Kadish’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, had no comment on Cooper’s letter to the director.

Cooper argues that the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) system shows promise to bringing down missiles in both their boost and mid-course flight phases, and it could be deployed in 2004, at least four years earlier than planned.

Cooper said he could not understand why a sea-based system would take twice as long to build as a land-based one.
NTW should intercept ballistic missiles in the exoatmosphere using modified versions of the Aegis radar and the Standard antiair missile.  It is a test program, pending future intercept success. It has yet to intercept a ballistic missile in flight.
The Bush administration needs more time to plan, other experts said.

“We need an evolutionally program, and I don’t see anything wrong with [the Bush administration] getting a first step done in 2004,” David Smith, former chief negotiator to space talks with Russia, said July 27.

Reported in Defense News, July 30-August 5, 2001.  Reprinted with permission.
 

The Month That Was: A May to Remember!
by Ambassador Henry F. Cooper

May 2001 will be a month to remember, for all who seek to end America’s vulnerability to even a single ballistic missile. May began with President Bush’s first major speech on his intended program to build effective defenses "at the earliest possible date," as he promised during his presidential campaign, and with Congress poised to follow his lead. It ended with the U.S. Senate leadership in the hands of those who favor giving Russia, China and others a veto over America building any effective defense.

May Day Initiative

In his May Day speech at the National Defense University, the President again announced, with little specificity, his intention to protect America and our overseas troops friends and allies from ballistic missile attack. It was a positive start—but only a start, which he just as well could have announced on day one, rather than three months into his first term.

President Bush recognized the critical problem: No effective defense can be built within the constraints of the ABM Treaty, about which he observed, "This treaty does not recognize the present or point us to the future. It enshrines the past. No treaty that prevents us from addressing today’s threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends, and our allies is in our interests or in the interests of world
peace."

However, he took no real step to end the Treaty’s constraints that preclude America’s engineers from applying America’s best technology to develop, test or deploy the most effective defenses—for ourselves and our overseas troops, friends and allies. Instead, as the clock ticked out the rest of the month, senior U.S. officials traveled around the world, consulting allies, friends, Russia and China about plans to make a plan—while regrettably leaving America’s engineers bound by the ABM Treaty.

I’ve heard it all before, as Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative during the first Bush Administration and President Reagan’s Chief Negotiator
at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union. It shouldn’t take a lot of study to identify the most effective defenses that can be built
quickly. Been there, done that—over a decade ago. And we should know from sad experience how entangling can be ‘consultations’ that can give
others a veto over U.S. defense programs.

In his May 1 speech, President Bush correctly recognized that there exist near-term deployment options, including sea- and air-based defenses that could intercept attacking missiles as early as in their boost phase when they are most vulnerable. And he noted that land- and sea-based defenses could intercept attacking missiles in their midcourse phase above the Earth’s atmosphere and during their reentry.

A New Space Corps?

Then on May 12, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced welcome decisions to reorganize how the Defense Department manages all the nation’s military space programs. Most notable were his decisions to charge the Air Force as Executive Agent for all military space programs and to elevate the Commander of Air Force Space Command to a four-star position, with responsibility and resources to execute space research, development, acquisition and operations—and to manage the Air Force space career field. The Secretary of the Air Force will realign headquarters and field commands to more effectively organize, train, and equip for prompt and sustained offensive and defensive space operations.

Army and Navy participation will continue in all aspects of the space mission area, including enhancing professional military education to facilitate integration of space activities into all military operations; maintaining a cadre of space-qualified officers to research, develop, acquire, and deploy space systems unique to each service; and enabling their officers to aspire to the highest levels of command of U.S. space forces.

It is not a surprise that these decisions implemented most of the recommendations of a bipartisan Commission, led by then "private citizen" Donald Rumsfeld, which was the brainchild of Senator Bob Smith (R-NH).

While they fall short of establishing a "Space Force" as a separate Service, the decisions constitute a logical first step, not unlike when the Army
Air Corps became the prelude to today’s U.S. Air Force. This important step is none too soon. Rumsfeld’s Commission observed the U.S. is more dependent on space than any other nation—and an attractive candidate for a "Space Pearl Harbor." Warning signs: 1) a 1998 Galaxy IV satellite malfunction which shut down 80 percent of U.S. pagers, as well as video feeds for cable and broadcast transmission—requiring weeks to fully restore satellite service; 2) a 2000 ground station computer malfunction, causing loss of all U.S. satellite information for three hours; and 3) a July 2000 Xinhua news agency report that China’s military is developing methods and strategies for defeating the U.S. in a high-tech and space-based future war.

Senator Smith should be applauded for promoting the need to better organize and operate U.S. space forces and Secretary Rumsfeld’s decisions, steps to assure America retains the high ground of space to support our peaceful and military activities—in space, in the air, on land or at sea.

Among other things, this step could revive the space defense programs advanced during the Reagan and first Bush Administrations—and abandoned by the Clinton Administration. Space-based defenses offer the most effective, least expensive way to defend America and our overseas troops, friends and allies from missile attack. Furthermore, space-based defenses could begin operations within five years, if President Bush has the political will to abandon the ABM Treaty and establish a high priority, fully funded program under streamlined management to rapidly achieve that needed capability.

End of the Honeymoon

Then came an event on May 24 that shook Washington. Senator James Jeffords of Vermont left the Republican Party to become an Independent, and control of the Senate returned to the Democrats for the first time since 1994—and President Bush’s honeymoon with Congress was most definitely over, as unified Republican control of the federal government ended after only four months.

All the Senate leaders—who set the agenda for considering the President’s plans, programs and budgets—now will be people who often oppose the President’s agenda. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of his campaign promise to build effective ballistic missile defenses.

For example, the new Senate Majority Leader, Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD), responded to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s announcement reorganizing how the Pentagon will acquire and operate offensive and defensive military space programs by calling space-based defenses—easily the most cost effective global defense—"the dumbest idea" he had heard. And since becoming Majority Leader, he has announced his opposition to building any defense at all.

Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Joe Biden (D-DE), who will now chair the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, have repeatedly claimed that the President’s missile defense plans will lead to instability, end arms control, and create an arms race in space—reminiscent of the shrill cries of the 1980s about President Reagan’s SDI program. These arguments by the arms control elite and the freeze movement were discredited by Reagan’s successful dealings with the Soviet Union and our allies, and they are again wrongheaded—but they will present a formidable challenge to the Bush Administration.

Perhaps the most onerous of the challenges posed by Senator Levin is his opposition to "unilateral measures" that would change the ABM
Treaty—that Cold War relic which prevents building any effective defense for the American people. He will surely use the considerable powers of his new position to seek legislation locking the President into a posture that gives Russia, China, and others a de facto veto over U.S. programs to build effective defenses. Indeed, they could veto not only programs to build sea-based, air-based, and space-based defenses, but even those to develop and test these most effective defense concepts.

Such political pressures from Senator Levin already encourage the Russians and others to believe that they can frustrate the President’s efforts by not agreeing to his agenda—as he and his representatives continue to consult around the world on plans to build a global defense—one that could protect Americans at home and our overseas troops, friends and allies.

The President still wields the power of the veto over Acts of Congress, and Congressional supporters maintain the votes to sustain that veto. So the
President can win if he hangs tough in demanding the key elements of his program to build the most effective defenses—which cannot be done under the constraints of that Treaty which should have gone away with the Soviet Union. But make no mistake; his job became considerably more difficult today.

In his commencement speech to the graduating Navy ensigns and second lieutenant Marines at the U.S. Naval Academy, President Bush again reiterated his vision for a future military revolutionized by evolving high technology, including in particular space- and sea-based elements. Hopefully, he will stand and fight on the key issue of assuring viable programs to develop sea- and space-based defenses. And hopefully he will emphasize his determination to build such effective defenses in his Summit meeting with Russian President Putin in mid-June—a key test of his resolve.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was up to such a challenge—in the face of a much more potent negative public affairs campaign and in the face of much opposition in the Congress. Hopefully, that will be so for George W. Bush.

The President’s Vision for Innovation in the Military

During commencement exercises at the Naval Academy on May 25, President George W. Bush said America’s military must draw on new technologies and strategies in the 21st Century, but those forces will only be used in accordance with bedrock American values.

The President told the graduating Navy ensigns and Marine second lieutenants that he is committed to building a future force defined less by size and more by mobility and swiftness. That force will be easier to deploy and sustain and will rely heavily on U.S. advantages in stealth, precision weaponry and information technologies.

President Bush said he is committed to rewarding visionary thinking in building and operating that future force—and to beginning that process
now: "Building tomorrow's force will not be easy. Changing the direction of our military is like changing the direction of a mighty ship. All the
more reason for research and development and all the more reason to get started right away." He noted that new technologies need new ideas and,
more importantly, a willingness to experiment. "We cannot transform our military using old weapons and old plans," he said. "Nor can we do it
with an old mindset that frustrates the creativity and entrepreneurship that a 21st Century military will need."

The President emphasized the need for new ideas and, more importantly, a willingness to experiment. "We cannot transform our military using old weapons and old plans," he said. "Nor can we do it with an old mindset that frustrates the creativity and entrepreneurship that a 21st Century military will need."

He urged the military to use creativity and imaginative thinking that have always been America's great competitive advantages: "Today, I call upon you to seize and to join this tradition of creativity and innovation." And wisely observed, "Our national and military leaders owe you a culture that supports innovation and a system that rewards it."

He observed that efforts to think "big thoughts" and examine new approaches to problems will sometimes fail, "but we need to give you this freedom and we will. . . . As President I am committed to fostering a military culture where intelligent risk-taking and forward thinking are rewarded, not dreaded. And I'm committed to ensuring that visionary leaders that take risks are recognized and promoted."

But application of military power must rest on American values. Bush said the academy experience has prepared these new officers to call on these values in times of crisis: "You leave here ... knowing a great truth that some in life never discover, that values are important. You understand that life cannot be lived by casual commitments and shallow creeds. You understand that no one can be neutral between right and wrong, tyranny and freedom, cynicism and honor. And you know that sometimes the greatest victories are won on the private battlefields of conscience.

"Over time your weapons and methods will change, but your values will not. And because of this you contribute, not only to the military might of our country, but to its meaning and conscience and soul."

In a speech short on specifics, President Bush committed himself to "building a future force that is defined less by size and more by mobility and
swiftness, one that is easier to deploy and maintain, one that relies more heavily on stealth, precision weaponry and information technologies."
Such a future, he said, may well include Aegis destroyers providing defenses for entire continents against ballistic missile attacks. Indicating what
he has in mind for today’s nuclear missile-carrying Trident submarine fleet, some of whose ballistic missiles may be unilaterally eliminated, the
president envisioned the world’s most powerful ships one day carrying hundreds of next-generation smart conventional cruise missiles. Taking
advantage of the revolution in space-based sensors, Mr. Bush envisioned "global command-and-control systems providing near total battle-space
awareness in real time to on-the-scene commanders."

This vision is entirely consistent with the global defense long advocated by High Frontier—most notably in its call for the use of space-based and
sea-based systems. And he gave a specific nod to giving the Aegis system a ballistic missile capability—hopefully his more specific guidance will be
to begin operating such a capability as soon as possible.

A May 26 Washington Times editorial observed, "The President’s father, the 41st president of the United States, frequently displayed obvious discomfort with what he called ‘the vision thing,’ a factor that undoubtedly contributed to his political demise. Judging by the Annapolis commencement address, the nation’s 43rd President will not have any problems with ‘the vision thing.’ Far more likely, to the extent that Mr. Bush is successful in his transformational quest, ‘the vision thing’ will be a problem for America’s future adversaries."

High Frontier hopes this prognosis is correct—and notes that an important indication will be provided by how the President fares in his discussions with the Russians in mid-June, and how effectively he advocates to the Congress—now led by hostile forces—his programs to build effectives defenses at the earliest possible date. This summer should tell the tale.

"[Some future President addressing Annapolis graduates 15 years from now] may speak of Aegis destroyers protecting entire continents from the threat of ballistic missile attack."

President George W. Bush
Addressing the 903 Graduates of The U.S. Naval Academy
May 25, 2001

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When Will America Respond To China's Space Challenge?
By James Hughes

China's bold interception of a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace south of Hainan Island on April 1, 2001 is a sign of China's growing military strength, aggressiveness, and claims to the South China Sea, and Taiwan.

China's growing military strength is aided by its purchase from Russia of Sovremenny destroyers equipped with supersonic SS-N-22 "Sunburn" cruise missiles, stealthy Kilo submarines, wake-homing and Shkval rocket torpedoes, Su-27 and Su-30 jet fighters, and beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles.

Worrisome evidence is China’s wholesale acquisition of U.S. advanced technology, including ballistic missile and nuclear weapons secrets.  China is flight testing its new solid-fuel, road-mobile DF-31 ICBM and JL-2 SLBM derivative, and developing its new DF-41 ICBM, which will have a longer range than the 8,000-km (5,000-mile) DF-31.

China, incidentally, has built two launch sites for its DF-31 ICBMs in its southeastern provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian, and plans to build more launch sites as part of its "Long Wall Project" for building ballistic missiles aimed at U.S. forces in the Pacific.  Except for its missile base at Leping, these launch sites for its DF-31 are in addition to its missile bases at Xienyu, Pingtan, and Lienchen that are for launching short-range M-9 or M-11 ballistic missiles at Taiwan[1].

The implication of China's DF-31 missile launch sites is startling.  China is not just "modernizing" its ICBMs, often described as a force of 20-24
older, liquid-fuel CSS-4 (DF-5) ICBMs.  China is expanding its ballistic missile forces, and pointing them at the United States.  China, moreover,
plans to use its ballistic missiles and information warfare capabilities in a 21st century blitzkrieg[2].

China's growing information warfare capabilities are closely tied to its burgeoning information technology and telecommunications sector.  The
January 2001 U.S. bombing raids against Iraq, for example, were directed at a fiber-optic air defense communication network being installed by
Chinese technicians.

China's growing information warfare capability may be seen in the training of its officers to win in any high-tech conflict, or its new Qu Dian battle
management system for coordinating and supporting its aircraft, ships, submarines, and ground forces.

Qu Dian relies on satellites such as China's Feng Huo-1, the first of several military communication satellites, which China launched on January 28, 2000 and boasts a "secure, jam-resistant, high capacity data link communication system for use in a tactical combat[3]."

Qu Dian illustrates China's increasing use of satellites.  As explained by the director of China's National Space Agency and Deputy Commissioner of its Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND), Luan Enjie: "Presently the development of space technologies and the level of their applications becomes an indicator of a nation's united power and development of its civilization[4].

Luan pointed out that China's space program will push its development of science and technology, and fulfill its economic and defense needs.

China's growing presence in space is part of its growth in military strength. China's decade-long military modernization program, highlighted by its
17.7 percent increase in defense spending announced in March 2001, includes long-term goals for space as part of its "863 Plan," a national
commitment to develop strategic technologies including aerospace, materials, and other areas related to space.

China's goals for space include plans to attack U.S. satellites with high-energy lasers, electromagnetic weaponry, or "parasitic" satellites weighing
a few kilograms or less (tens of pounds or less) that would attach themselves to a host satellite, and engage in jamming or destruction of the host
satellite upon a pre-arranged signal.  China has ground-tested its "parasitic" satellite[5].

China's growing presence in space may be seen in the test launch, orbit, and recovery of its Shenzhou II manned spacecraft in January 2001.  China's approach to space is focused on its "211 Plan" for the early 21st century that will establish a common satellite platform, build new launch vehicles, establish a combined satellite applications system, and continue space research and exploration[6].

Under its plans, China will modify its existing space launchers to increase reliability and payload in two to three years, develop non-toxic, non-polluting launchers, and increase low-earth-orbit payload capacity to over 20 tons in five years.  It plans to research and develop a reusable launch vehicle to lower launch costs, including a Single-Stage-To-Orbit, and develop an advanced technology base for use in deep space exploration[7].

China aspires for its astronauts to turn the Moon into a "natural space station," beginning in 2005, with pressurized modules, power generating facilities, and roving vehicles[8].   It foresees a heavy reliance on robots[9].

China vehemently opposes a U.S. ballistic missile defense.  China's top arms control official, Sha Zukang, Director of China's Foreign Ministry's
Department of Arms Control and Disarmament, argued: "Any effective national missile defense," Sha said, "would risk negating China's limited
arsenal and upending the 'strategic stability' that ensures deterrence around the world . . . China wants . . . to focus instead on a treaty to limit or
control space-based weapons systems, which could be part of an expanded, multi-tiered missile defense scheme[10]."

Yao Yunzhu, an official with the PLA Academy of Military Science, has said, "The consequence will be a dangerous arms race in space[11]."

China is challenging the future of the United States.  China wants to deny the United States the advantages of a space-based ballistic missile defense, and it wants to develop space for its own benefit.  (The advantages of a space-based defense include global coverage, boost phase interception capability, and multiple opportunities for intercepting an attacking missile.)

In contrast to China's plans for space, in March 2001 the United States canceled its X-33 and X-34 reusable launch vehicle programs, which followed its cancellation nearly a decade ago of the DC-X Single-Stage-To-Orbit program. The United States refuses to take advantage of the benefits of a space-based ballistic missile defense.  In 1993 it terminated the successful Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor program and refuses to re-start it.  It funds its Space Base Laser program at a level of about 10 percent of what is needed.

Yet, a U.S. space-based ballistic missile defense would defeat China's plans for aggression.  It would upset China's plans for economic growth and increasing military strength, and undermine the legitimacy of its communist leaders.

When will Washington respond?

References

1. Brian Hsu, "China builds new missile platforms to deter US forces," Taipei Times, May 7, 2001.
2. Major Mark A. Stokes, USAF, China's Strategic Modernization: Implications for the United States, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, September 1999.
3. Bill Gertz, "China's Military Links Forces to Boost Power," The Washington Times, March 16, 2000.
4. Wei Long, "China Reiterates Goals For Human Spaceflight, Lunar and Mars Exploration," SpaceDaily.com, October 11, 2000.
5. Cheng Ho, "China Eyes Anti-Satellite System," SpaceDaily.com, January 8, 2001.
6. Wei Long, "China Reiterates Goals For Human Spaceflight, Lunar and Mars Exploration," SpaceDaily.com, October 11, 2000.
7. Wei Long, "China To Develop New Generation of Rockets With View To Moon Landing," SpaceDaily.com, September 19, 2000.
8. Wei Long, "Chinese Scientist Envisages Moon City In Early 21st Century," SpaceDaily.com, October 23, 2000.
9. Wei Long, "Chinese Scientist Denies Moon Landing Plan," SpaceDaily.com, October 23, 2000.  Wei Long, "Chinese Robots To Land On Moon Before Yuhangyuan," SpaceDaily.com, October 18, 2000.
10. John Pomfret, "China Threatens Arms Control Collapse," Washington Post, July 9, 2000.
11. AFP, "Military Official Says China Should Prepare For Space Conflicts," SpaceDaily.com, February 13, 2001.

This article is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book, Space, Freedom, and Missiles, to be published by the Council for Social and Economic
Studies.

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Reagan’s Science Advisor Speaks Out For A Global Defense

Dr. William R. Graham, who was President Reagan’s Science Advisor, recently spoke out for a layered global defense, including space-based interceptors and lasers. His comments came at a Capitol Hill breakfast meeting on the morning of President Bush’s May 1 speech urging moving beyond the ABM Treaty and building an effective defense at the earliest possible date.

The Clinton Administration’s heavy emphasis on ground-based systems during the past eight years, Graham said, limited near-term deployment options to ground-based and sea-based defenses. He emphasized that sea-based defenses offer the "best opportunity to have a forward deployed system." However, he observed that the "excellent vantage point" of a space-based defense makes it an indispensable long-term goal.

Graham, who recently served on the Rumsfeld Space Commission, argued against "tinkering endlessly" to develop the perfect defense before deploying something to protect the U.S. and its allies. "Keep it simple and rapidly deployable," he said. The usual Pentagon requirements process results in "enormously complex systems that take 10 years" or more to deploy. "If the Wright brothers had to go through the requirements process, the first aircraft would have been a Boeing 707," he said.

Gradual development and deployment, beginning with ground- and sea-based systems followed by space-based systems would best serve two primary goals of missile defense: deterring certain hostile countries from commandeering their neighbors and regions and a "higher goal" of dissuading these adversaries from developing threatening weapons. These nations faced with a robust global defense would inevitably find the ballistic missile mission "futile," according to Graham.

Dr. Graham was a member of the Heritage Foundation’s Missile Defense Commission (led by High Frontier’s Chairman, Ambassador Henry F. Cooper), which first recommended in 1995 a strategy of building a global defense, "first from the sea and then from space." That strategy—which Heritage and High Frontier continue to support—is consistent with Graham’s vision for the future.

The President has already indicated his intent to emphasize building sea-based defenses. Hopefully, he will revive the space defense programs that were scuttled by the Clinton team in 1993.

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Pssst.. The ABM Treaty Is Dead!
by Jack Spencer

A funny thing is happening in the debate over a missile defense. The president is getting more cooperation from Russia than from liberals in Congress.
Indeed, a number of nations that for years pleaded with the United States to retain the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which banned so much as testing a national missile defense, are now open to the idea of sending the treaty to the ash heap of history. That leaves American liberals largely alone in their fervent campaign to deny the United States and its allies a missile shield.

Take Joe Biden. The Delaware senator argues that to abandon the treaty, as President Bush proposed earlier this month, "would damage the security interests of the United States." However, Moscow the other party involved in the treaty has said it’s interested in Mr. Bush’s plan to scrap it. What makes the president’s plan so attractive, according to Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, is that it "opens up the possibility for jointly seeking solutions to those [ballistic missile proliferation] problems." Mr. Ivanov also says the president’s proposal would be in "the interest of preserving strengthening strategic stability."

This is amazing talk from a country that liberals such as Mr. Biden claim would be incensed by Mr. Bush’s proposal.

Meanwhile, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle alleges that protection from missile attack could "undermine our nation politically, economically and strategically." The South Dakotan also suggests that "there has not been a shred of evidence that (ballistic missile defense) works." Yet NATO’s Secretary General Lord George Robertson said he listened "with great interest" to Mr. Bush’s speech, "including the requirements on missile defense," which says a lot. A top leader of one of the most successful military alliances in history wouldn’t waste his time listening to ideas that don’t work.

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt argues that Mr. Bush "is jeopardizing an arms control framework that has served this nation and the world well for decades." But British Prime Minister Tony Blair who, ideologically, is closer to Mr. Gephardt than Bush said "that the issues raised by the American administration are real and correct to raise in respect weapons of mass destruction."

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer also recognizes Mr. Bush’s plan as an opportunity to restructure our strategic forces for the modern era. He pointed out that Mr. Bush’s speech "held out the prospect of quick and far-reaching reductions of strategic offensive weapons." Germany’s support for missile defense also is notable, considering that those running the country today are the same people who largely opposed the United States deploying Pershing II nuclear missiles on its lands during the 1980s.

One country shares the views of Messrs. Biden, Daschle and Gephardt. The China Daily an official state-run communist newspaper argues that Mr. Bush’s plan "will trigger a new arms race and destroy what has been achieved so far with international disarmament efforts."

So here’s the lineup in the great ABM Treaty Debate: On one side you have the United States, Russia, Great Britain and Germany countries that don’t always agree on everything. On the other, you have liberal leaders in Congress and communist leaders in China. Maybe this is the "new world order" that President Bush’s father talked about when he was in office. But even the elder Bush couldn’t conceive the reasons for such odd pairings.

After all, it’s not as if the world has much to show for its "international disarmament efforts" over the last decade. During that time: Pakistan and India built nuclear weapons, North Korea tested a long-range ballistic missile and Iran is very close to having its own ICBM. And China? Oh, China began building nuclear missiles and exporting missile technology as fast as it could.

All of this occurred while the ABM Treaty was in place and a missile defense was not. In fact, during the 20 years that followed the signing of the treaty, the United States and Soviet Union expanded their nuclear arsenals from around 2,000 warheads each to about 10,000 each.

If that’s arms control, the world can live (quite literally) without it.
It’s about time congressional liberals realized that.

Jack Spencer is a policy analyst at the Davis Institute for International Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Reprinted with permission from the May 27, 2001 Washington Times.

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Kyl Urges Administration Not To Bargain Away Space Option In Missile Defense

Hopefully, Mr. Spencer is correct in his assessment that all is well in the consultations with the Russians and others. But we at High Frontier are concerned that things may not go so smoothly. Apparently, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) is also concerned. This leading Senate advocate of missile defense has called on the Bush Administration not to give away the right to pursue space-based missile defenses in exchange for political support for a limited system.

Sen. Kyl asserted at a May 17 Capitol Hill seminar that space-based weapons, including some under development during the first Bush Administration, have shown too much promise to use as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Congress or foreign policymakers. He said he won't be surprised if Russia says it will agree to renegotiate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limits missile defense testing and deployment, if the U.S. commits not to deploy weapons in space.

"Space is where it's going to be, and if we're not careful, we're going to get shut out of space for political considerations only," Kyl told the
gathering. "It would be my concern that we not get ourselves in the box that in order to get something, we give up the most promising thing of all,
which is our ability to go into space."

On the 18th Anniversary of Reagan's SDI Speech: Poised to End America's Vulnerability!
by Ambassador Henry F. Cooper

"I have become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must he capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence... One of the most important contributions we can make is, of course, to lower the level of arms... If the Soviet Union will join us, we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance. Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the spectre of retaliation, or mutual threat. And that is a sad commentary on the human condition."

"Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intention by applying all our abilities and ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability?"

"I think we are. Indeed we must... Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embrace a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive... What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy ballistic missiles before they reached our soil or that of our allies?"

"I know this is a formidable task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it is reasonable for us to begin this effort... Isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war?"

"My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There are risks, and results will take time. But I believe we can do it." -President Ronald Reagan, March 23, 1983

When history is recorded by future generations, they will long remember that Ronald Reagan ended America's Cold War with the Soviet Union with his "peace through strength" agenda.

His favorite ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot." She also noted the profound impact of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. She observed, "SDI, widely criticized on the grounds that it threatened to undermine the peace, helped foreshorten the life of an implacable adversary, bringing an end to the Cold War and giving millions of citizens in Central Europe and Russia the chance of freedom and a better future."

But historians will also record that America remained defenseless even a single ballistic missile into the 21st Century, in spite of the great strides made by the SDI Program during the Reagan and first Bush Administrations. A footnote may record that the Clinton Administration scuttled the SDI program-and perhaps even Clinton's Defense Secretary Les Aspin's memorable 1993 phrase, "taking the stars out of Star Wars."

Hopefully, the new Bush Administration will make history and, in its first term, end America's vulnerability. He promised in his campaign for the Presidency to build effective defenses, "by the earliest possible date," and he has repeated that pledge since taking office. And he shows no retreat from his campaign pledge to remove the obstacle of the ABM Treaty, which he called "an artifact of the Cold War confrontation."

Although there are still only a few of his appointees on the job, they have uniformly supported his stated intention to build effective defenses as soon as possible.

And guess what? Allied leaders and others are beating a path to the White House, now interested in finding a way to cooperate on building defense that can be used to protect their citizens as well as Americans. It seems like only yesterday, they were so concerned about retaining the ABM Treaty as the "cornerstone of strategic stability"--as the Clinton Administration called it.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has substantially softened his negative stance about improving Britain's Fylingdales radar to support a defense for America-no doubt influenced by domestic political pressures generated by British conservatives who strongly support the Bush agenda. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said, "Differences over [National Missile Defense] are not decisive in the German-American relationship." Even Mr. Putin seems to have gotten a bit of the message, since he has acknowledged the growing threat and proposed to work with the rest of Europe to build a defense for against medium and short-range missiles-to protect Europe but not America. NATO's Secretary General, Lord George Robertson quickly responded that NATO will act in concert on missile defense-for all of NATO, on both sides of the Atlantic.

On March 8, following Lord Robertson's comment to the press that "Theater Missile Defense" against short-range missiles is as important to many nations as "National Missile Defense" against long-range missiles is to America, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld emphasized his view that we must move beyond talking about "Theater" missile defenses (which can be built under the terms of the ABM Treaty) and "National" missile defenses (which cannot). Robertson responded positively and noted, "the alliance has no intention of being divided or split in any way."

"We are keen to get right down to the promised consultations on missile defense-on the 'how' and the 'when' rather than on the 'whether’ --which has been decided by the will of the American people." -Lord George Robertson, March 8, 2001, NATO Secretary General

Hopefully, Mr. Putin now understands that his efforts to split NATO will go for naught-and that the ABM Treaty in its present form must go.

There are positive developments in the U.S. political scene, too. Democrats are no longer uniformly negative about building missile defenses. Late last year, John Deutch and John White (Bill Clinton Deputy Defense Secretaries) and Harold Brown (Jimmie Carter's Defense Secretary) supported the idea of building sea-based defenses-long advocated by High Frontier. Perhaps this apparent epiphany was related to the November election and an attempt to remove missile defense as a campaign issue-but at least some support for defenses continue from former senior Democrat officials. For example, Stansfield Turner, CIA Director under President Carter, argued in the March 6 Christian Science Monitor that the United States should "abrogate unilaterally the Antiballistic Missile Treaty."

Still, the fight for defending America is not over- the apostles of the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) theology, embodied in the ABM Treaty, continue to fight efforts to build defenses for America. Recent articles by National Security Advisors for President Clinton and Vice President Gore make this clear-as do many editorials in the liberal press. See Frank Gaffney's article on page 3.

"We'd like to make it clear that the ABM Treaty should not stand in the way of doing an effective job of research

and ultimate deployment of limited defenses, and that we're prepared to move as aggressively as we can to develop a ballistic missile defense." -Vice President Dick Cheney

We can also expect a fight on Capitol Hill. Senators Car Levin (D-MI) and Joseph Biden (D-DE) made clear in Washington conferences last summer that, while there is no longer a debate over the growing threat, there will be much debate over the ABM Treaty and what kind of defense we should build and how fast we should build it. As ranking members of the important Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both will play very important roles in that debate.

Meanwhile, the American people are very positive about building an effective defense, as President Bush wants. For example, a recent Los Angeles Times poll showed that nearly 60-percent back the President's plan. This is only the most recent poll to make this point, of course. Most Americans believe they are already defended-and become angry when they discover they are not.

So the coming debate is a potent political issue, and High Frontier supporters should make their views known to their friends and mobilize this latent public support.

In his 1988 campaign for President, Vice President George Bush observed that building effective defenses was a matter of political will. He pledged to continue Ronald Reagan's SDI agenda, to choose the right architecture within four years-and to end America's vulnerability by the end of a second Bush term. High Frontier urges George W. Bush to fulfill his father's pledge.

The right architecture was chosen on my watch as SDI Director. We were on track, and our friends and allies were on-board-even Russia was cooperating. Then the Clinton Administration derailed the train. The new Bush Administration needs only to revive that basic agenda. We need to build a global defense for America and our overseas troops, friends and allies-first from the sea, and then from space, as we have argued frequently in these pages.

If the Pentagon moves smartly in this direction, then the current Bush Administration might finish what the first Bush Administration began within George W. Bush's first term.

Let the debate begin! Let's win one for the Gipper!

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Self-Deterred From Defending The U.S.?
By Frank J. Gaffnev, Jr.

On two separate occasions in recent weeks, top Clinton administration officials have published OpEd articles in The Washington Post largely echoing the strong misgivings about President Bush's commitment to defend America against ballistic missile attack that are being heard from Moscow, Beijing and various allied capitals.

Interestingly, the essays by former President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, and former Vice President Al Gore's national security adviser, Leon Fuerth, do less to justify continued inaction on this front than to explain why the United States has so little to show for the more than $20 billion spent on missile defense during Messrs. Berger and Fuerth's eight years in office: Neither they nor the president they served actually wanted to develop and deploy effective anti-missile systems.

Tellingly, Leon Fuerth exposed how this high-level predisposition translated into expensive inaction as he critiqued a study of the U.S. nuclear force posture lately commissioned by President Bush, claiming that its floutcome may well be preordained, written months ago." In fact, the outcome of all of the Clinton-Gore administration's work on missile defense - from the first year when Defense Secretary Les Aspin "took the stars out of ‘Star Wars’" by shutting down the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, to President Clinton's decision last Fall not to initiate deployment of a limited National Missile Defense (NMD) in Alaska - was "preordained" by the deep-seated antipathy Mr. Berger and Mr. Fuerth shared with their respective bosses and other Clinton administration officials toward anti-missile programs. Mr. Berger warned against a "bureaucratically driven technology" leading the Bush team to deploy missile defenses. In fact, such a deployment was precluded on his watch by bureaucratically impeded technology.

The policy attitudes that proved so fatal to efforts to develop and deploy effective missile defenses are much in evidence in these two articles. Unfortunately, they are rooted in a few mistaken premises:

First, Messrs. Berger and Fuerth espouse a concept of "strategic stability" involving U.S. and Russian nuclear postures inextricably tied to the bipolar, Cold War world that simply no longer exists. This suits the Kremlin, of course, which is anxious to retain the last vestiges of superpower status and which, under Vladimir Putin, rarely misses an opportunity in American elite circles and allied nations to threaten increased tensions, or worse, if the United States abandons its present posture of absolute vulnerability to missile attack.

The truth of the matter is that Mr. Putin's Russia is actively exacerbating the risks of our vulnerability by joining in the wholesale proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. While Mr. Berger suggests these threats could be alleviated by "pre-emptively taking out any long-range missiles the other side might have," this is hardly a formula for the strategic stability he purports to want to protect. Neither is it likely to be a reliable form of protection in light of the United States' very limited success in finding and destroying Saddarn Hussein's Scud missiles in Operation Desert Storm.

Second, Messrs. Berger and Fuerth are convinced that arms control is a more certain basis for security than defenses. Specifically, their administration viewed the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty as the "cornerstone of strategic stability." They strove to protect it from, as Mr. Fuerth put it, "radical changes" so as to safeguard the U.S.-Russian relationship and various other strategic arms reduction accords predicated upon the ABM Treaty.

This obsession was all the more extraordinary since it required the Clinton-Gore administration to ignore the most radical changes of all.

(1) The other party to the treaty was formally dismantled in 1991, making this sort of accord null and void under international law.

(2) The international environment of today bears no resemblance to that of 1972.

(3) The Kremlin has long had a comprehensive missile defense of its territory.

The truth of the matter is that the ABM Treaty is legally defunct, strategically ill-advised and inequitable in its application. We continue at our peril to remain subject to its constraints on developing and deploying effective missile defenses.

Third, if Russian objections were not sufficient, the Clinton team treated the possibility that China might embark on a missile buildup if the United States deployed defenses as a showstopper. Never mind that China is doing everything it can to amass more nuclear weapons and delivery systems even though there is no American missile defense. More to the point, Chinese leaders have powerfully, if unintentionally, made the case for a U.S. anti-missile system by repeatedly threatening this nation with nuclear attack in the event we interfered with Beijing's efforts to bring Taiwan to heel.

As long as the United States remains absolutely vulnerable to such threats, they are sure to be the shape of things to come - not only from China and Russia (assuming Mr. Putin continues his efforts to reconstitute a hostile authoritarian regime in Moscow), but from their rogue state clients. After all, under such circumstances, long-range ballistic missiles enable even poor Third World states to demand First World treatment just by having them.

The Bush-Cheney administration is to be applauded for rejecting the misconceptions that kept its predecessor from building and deploying effective, global missile defenses. The new team now needs to do just that. It should get started by adapting the Navy's fleet of 55 Aegis air defense ships - an approach that can provide far greater protection, at substantially less cost and far faster than the ground based missile defense system the Clinton-Gore team pretended to support but, as Messrs. Berger and Fuerth make clear, never had any intention of actually fielding.

Reprinted with permission from the March 7, 2001 Washington Times.
Frank J Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy

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An Urgent Threat
By Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara

Mid the debate on what kind of defense should be built and when, the threat inexorably increases-a trend exacerbated by continuing proliferation of technology from Russia and China. Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence community,-CIA Director George Tenet, DIA Director Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, and the State Department's Intelligence Chief Thomas Finger- testified in February to the Senate Special Committee on Intelligence that:

Long-range missiles are a growing threat beyond the strategic arsenals of Russia and China;

Russia, China and North Korea are the most active suppliers of missiles and weapons of mass destruction;

Pakistan and Iran and other states are "secondary" suppliers-transferring to third parties weapons technology gained from others.

All three intelligence officials acknowledged under questioning from Chairman Richard Shelby (R-AL) that China does not appear to be living up to pledges made to the Clinton Administration to halt dangerous missile sales and nuclear transfers. And in the same hearing, CM Director Tenet acknowledged that Russian President Putin is reverting to a Soviet-style government in several areas that undermine democracy.

Russia, of course, continues to build and deploy its new ICBM, the SS-27--or Topol-M, And a Janes defense analyst reports that China's missile development program is actually ahead of Russia’s-directed toward the DF-31A (or the DF-31, Mod 2), which will be smaller and lighter than Russia's Topol-M,

North Korea's continuing developments are aided by technology from Russia and China-and then passed to others. President Bush was right to question whether North Korea is "keeping all terms of all agreements" and not to continue the Clinton negotiations on unverifiable agreements with that "secretive" government.

Meanwhile, Iraq may already have several nuclear weapons, if the London Sunday Times is correct-based on their seemingly credible source, a "military engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. " Note, Saddam Hussein said in 1990, "Our missiles cannot reach Washington, but if they could we would hit there."

The 1998 bipartisan Commission on the missile threat, chaired by now-Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, unanimously concluded that nations other than Russia and China could threaten the U.S with missile attack within five years of deciding to do so. It now seems clear that several nations had decided to do so.

Five years after 1998 is 2003-and building a defense by that date is a daunting challenge. But by then---and perhaps sooner-is when defenses could be needed, and the Bush Administration has no time to lose in establishing an urgent, top priority development program to end America's vulnerability to even a single ballistic missile.

Tokyo Governor Supports NMD For Japan

"Japan should develop its own National Missile Defense system. We have the technological capacity to do so.

"A Naval defense system-ship-16-ship and ship-to-air missiles-should be deployed throughout Japan's territorial waters to defend ourselves not only against North Korea but also China. And building such a system would boost the Japanese economy--as military spending in the United States has done for decades.

"When I first heard of the development of North Korea's missiles, I, of course, understood their threat to Japan. At the same moment, I realized that if a North Korean missile were to hit Japan, it might be a good thing over the long term because Japan does not wake up unless it is stimulated by the outside world At last, the Japanese people would come to understand just how defenseless we are, particularly if missiles form North Korea carried nuclear warheads or, more likely, biological weapons.

"The Japanese people are living in a dream world where they think they are 100 percent safe because they will be protected by the United States. Unless they are confronted with the cold reality of an external threat, in their illusion they will be happy to leave everything in the hands of the United States. To me the idea that the Americans will use all their forces to come to Japan's defense given any contingency is groundless. "

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara

The Daily Yomiuri, 8 March 2001

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Does Russia Already Have A National Missile Defense?
By Melanie Kirkpatrick

 Bad treaties are bound to be violated.

The current flap over Russia!s underground testing in the Arctic is one example: Some U.S. intelligence officials believe Russia is detonating small nuclear blasts in violation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Understanding that it was all too easy to violate, the Republican Senate was right to reject the CTBT in 1999.

But there is no better example of this treaty-violating rule than the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, subject of so much debate today. The most clear-cut violation was the Soviets' Krasnoyarsk phased-array radar, which by the '90s even the Russians agreed was a violation.

Curiously, in all the current talk about the ABM Treaty - to withdraw or not withdraw, to amend or not amend, is it Ila relic" or a "cornerstone of strategic stability" - no one seems to be talking about violations anymore. Which is why it's a good time to take a look at the work of William T. Lee.

Mr. Lee is a retired spook, one of the guys in white hats whose unsung efforts helped the West win the Cold War. From 1951 until his retirement a few years ago, he toiled in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence organizations. His specialty was Soviet military and economic affairs.

Like Mr. Lee, the Soviet generals whose Cold War adventures he used to follow from afar are now also retired. Many are spending their golden years writing their memoirs, proud of their work in building one of history's great military powers and, in the new openness that prevails in Russia, finally able to tell the story of their accomplishments and even brag a little.

Their reminiscences provide a stack of interesting reading material for Mr. Lee, who, in his own golden years, has plenty of time for perusing such Russian-language volumes as "The Rocket Shield of the Motherland" and "Soviet Military Might From Stalin to Gorbachev." The writers include: G.V. Kisunko, chief designer of the Moscow ABM system; Gen. Col. Yuri Votintsev, commander of ABM and space-defense forces from 1967­85; and B.V. Bunkin, designer of the SA-5 and SA-10 surface-to-air missiles. There are many others.

Along the way, having pieced together information from memoirs and recently declassified material, Mr Lee says he has discovered hard evidence of something the U.S. long suspected but was never able to prove: Russia already has a national missile defense. Started by the Soviets even before the ABM Treaty took effect, the original defense was pretty rough. But, as Mr. Lee says, unlike the Americans, the Soviets realized that "some defense is better than none, " and kept upgrading its NMD even after it signed the ABM Treaty. Russia has continued to modernize the NMD system over the past decade, he adds. If true, all this would make a mockery of the ABM Treaty, which explicitly forbids the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia) from developing any national defense against ballistic missiles. It would also make a mockery of Russian President Vladimir Putin 's call for President Bush to abandon his plan to build a national missile defense- Mr. Putin can hardly denounce an American defense when Russia has one of its own.

Mr. Lee's analysis is complex. To vastly simplify, he says he has evidence that Russia’s surface-to-air interceptor missiles (SAMs) carry nuclear warheads and therefore are capable of bringing down long-range ballistic missiles, not just aircraft and shorter-range missiles, which is their stated purpose. Russia has 8,000 of these missiles scattered around the country, and Mr. Lee says he has found numerous Russian sources that describe how successive generations of SAMs were in fact designed with the express intention of shooting down ballistic missiles, which is illegal under the treaty.

Mr. Lee also says he has evidence that Russia’s early warning radars are much more capable than the treaty permits. In addition, he says, they are illegally interlocked into a battle-management system that allows Moscow to track incoming missiles and pass the targeting data to command posts, which in turn hand the data over to the SAMs.

Krasnoyarsk, now closed, was one such radar; the only reason Moscow was caught out on it was because of its inland location, which is illegal under the treaty. It was a battle-management radar, passing along tracking and targeting information to a command-and-control system in Moscow - precisely what the radars on Russia's periphery are doing today, Mr. Lee says. He cites the 1991 visit of an American inspection team to the Pechora radar in the Arctic Circle, when inspectors learned that the radar was passing along target-tracking information to a central command. The U.S. objected at the time but didn't follow through to the logical conclusion: that all the radars were networked.

Mr. Lee wrote up his research in a 1997 book, "The ABM Treaty Charade" and in a series of subsequent articles in scholarly journals. Henry Cooper, former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, says of Mr. Lee: "I think he's got a very good case." Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan defense official, calls Mr. Lee's work "scrupulously documented" and says that while some aspects of Mr. Lee's analysis aren't new, "Bill stitches it together for the first time."

In particular, Mr. Cooper calls Mr. Lee's evidence on the radars "pretty compelling." This issue has been raised before, he says, "but we never got to a point that we called them on the treaty." The Russians, he says, intentionally improved their radars, taking "advantage of the ambiguities in the treaty." In the U.S., on the other hand, "we restrained our engineers" in order to stay within the limits imposed by the treaty. In other words, the U.S. is honest.

There are many good reasons for the U.S. to exercise its option to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, as Article XV permits. Proof of continuing violations by the Russians would surely be one of them.

 Reprinted with permission from the March 6, 2001 Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones and Company, Inc. All rights reserved Ms. Kirkpatrick is the assistant editor of the Journal's editorial page.

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Cooperation with Russia?

On January 31, 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed in a U.N. speech that the SDI program he redirected to take advantage of Russian technology and that the U.S. and Russia work together to build a global defense for the world community. In the same speech, he proposed deep reductions in offensive nuclear arms-that became the START II Treaty, yet to enter force.

This was a historic event because Russia reversed its longstanding position, adopted from the Soviet Union, that defenses would make offensive nuclear reductions impossible. Yeltsin accepted Ronald Reagan's long-standing proposal to do both-reduce offensive nuclear arms and together build defenses against ballistic missiles.

Presidents Bush and Yeltsin instituted high-level discussions on how to implement this proposal. Progress was made in the last half of 1992-agreement might have been reached within another six months had President Bush continued in office. But when Yeltsin proposed to continue these talks in an April 1993 meeting with President Clinton in Vancouver, he was met with blank stares. In short, the Clinton Administration abandoned these talks, took the Reagan-Bush positions off the table, and declared its allegiance to the ABM Treaty, which bans all effective defenses.

This backsliding undercut our Russian friends who had persuaded Yeltsin to take this historic initiative-and strengthened the hand of Russia's "Cold Warriors. " For most of the next seven years, Russia played along with the Clinton Administration's advocacy of the ABM Treaty as the "cornerstone of strategic stability, " code words for Mutual Assured Destruction-which had been the Soviet and later Russian position since the advent of SDI

But MAD is a "confrontation" model of the relationship between Cold War adversaries-hardly an appropriate model of the friendly relationship aspired to by U.S.' and Russian leaders, according to their statements.

Last year, then candidate George W. Bush made plain that, if elected, he would build effective defenses "by the earliest possible date, " and he rightly called the ABM Treaty an "artifact of Cold War confrontation. " To counter mounting pressures for building missile defenses in response to an obviously growing threat, President Clinton feigned interest in building a National Missile Defense, though he balked at making a deployment decision last fall.

But this increased U.S. interest in building defenses caused angst among America's friends and allies, because the Clinton Administration had abandoned earlier U.S. positions of working cooperatively on defenses for both the U.S. and our allies and friends.

Then, last summer, Russian President Putin proposed that Russia cooperate with European nations to build a European defense-and he has recently restated this proposal, but not in any clear way. According to Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) following a recent trip to Russia, Putin's recent proposal is just a way of "trying to back America into a corner and drive a wedge between Europe and America." After discussing missile defense in 41 meetings with senior Russian officials and members of the Russian Duma, Mr. Weldon said it is "time for us to call their bluff. "

Mr. Weldon said he told all parties the U.S. was waiting on Russia's response to President Bush's offer to work together. He believes Putin just wants NATO to help Russia develop its S-500 (surface to air missile), which would be a follow-on to the S-300 that Russia has been marketing around the world as being "better than Patriot. " Russia's marketing adds to the proliferation problem, which threatens the U.S. and Europe.

Meanwhile, some of the states of the former Soviet Union are showing interest in working with the U.S. Mr. Weldon said, "I met with the Ukrainian Defense Minister for two hours, he wants to work with us on missile defense. And a number of NA TO and other nations are thinking positively about working together with the U.S.

Perhaps Russia will again join in serious discussions about how to build the Global Protection System as then Presidents Boris Yeltsin and George Bush agreed in 1992. Stay tuned!

"Russia is an active proliferator. They are part of the problem They are selling and assisting countries like Iran and North Korea and India and other countries with these technologies, -which are threatening people, including the United States and Western Europe and countries in the Middle East. So why they would be actively proliferating and then complaining when the United States wants to defend itself against the fruit of those proliferation activities, it seems to me, is misplaced."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, February 14, 2001

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Space: Battlefield of the Future?

China and Russia are working on a wide range of weapons capable of attacking U.S. satellites and space sensors, the Pentagon's top intelligence official told the Senate Special Committee on Intelligence on February 7.

The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Vice Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, stated, "A number of countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counter-space capabilities. China and Russia have across-the-board programs under way, and other smaller states and non-state entities are pursuing more limited-though potentially effective-approaches."

Adm. Wilson predicted that, by 2015, "future adversaries will be able to employ a wide variety of means to disrupt, degrade or defeat portions of the U.S. space support system."

At the same hearing, CIA Director George Tenet said that information warfare and space weapons are a growing threat----~'Our adversaries well understand U.S. strategic dependence of access to space. Operations to disrupt, degrade, or defeat U.S. space assets will be attractive options for those seeking to counter U.S. strategic military superiority."

Mr. Tenet also observed that "foreign countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counter-space capabilities." He also observed that no other nation is so dependent on computer information systems: "The great advantage we derive from this also presents us with unique vulnerabilities. Computer-based information operations could provide our adversaries with an asymmetric response to U.S. military superiority by giving them the potential to degrade or circumvent our advantage in conventional military power."

This first public discussion of space warfare threats by U.S. intelligence officials is in contrast to recent official Russian and Chinese objections to a U.S. Air Force war game involving a simulated future conflict with China. They disputed press accounts that mock Chinese forces attacked U.S. space systems during the exercise-not implausible, if the U.S. intelligence officials are taken seriously.

In fact, common sense alone suggests such scenarios are plausible. It is well known that the U.S. military is reliant on satellites for communications, intelligence, reconnaissance, and command and control of forces around the world. Precisely locating critical assets and precision guidance for "smart weapons'~-not to mention the air traffic control of civilian and military aircraft-is dependent upon the highly touted space-based Global Position System. Today, anyone can have a GPS sensor for his car.

The great "force-multiplying" capability of such systems was demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War, called the first space war by Air Force Chief of Staff Tony McPeak. Anyone who watched CNN was impressed with America's high tech.

Thus, that foreign military leaders would view any and all vulnerabilities of U.S. space systems as primary targets to be exploited in a future conflict with the U.S. is not surprising. The real issue is what shall we do about this growing threat?

Since the advent of the space age, many policymakers have sought to keep space as a sanctuary-free from man's intrusion with weapons. This is a delusion, of course, because any rocket capable of launching a satellite into orbit can also launch a weapon into space. Indeed, several Soviet space launchers were also intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could carry nuclear weapons through space to their targets in America.

Nevertheless, the international arms control community has opposed the "militarization of space" and sought to prevent placing "weapons in space"-precluding even non-nuclear defenses against the nuclear weapons that traverse space on the way to their targets. In this imaginary world, space "sensors" are good, but space "weapons" are bad whether used offensively or defensively.

Thus, Article V of the ABM Treaty bans development, testing, and deployment of space-based defenses-which are the most effective defenses we could build-and, as has often been noted in these pages, we might already have built such defenses except for these political constraints.

Now, modern technology is becoming so advanced and relatively inexpensive that other nations-and even wealthy individuals-will soon be able to exploit the obvious military advantages of space, both offensive and defensive. The question is, "Will the U.S. take full advantage of its past technological advantage and maintain its superiority in space?"

Shortly before assuming his present responsibilities, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld led a congressionally mandated Commission to assess how the U.S. organizes and manages its space programs. The Commissioners unanimously concluded that America's security and well being, and that of its allies and friends, depend on the nation's ability to operate in space. They ominously pointed out:
 

An attack on elements of U.S. space systems during a crisis or conflict should not be considered an improbable act. If the U.S. is to avoid a 'Space Pearl Harbor' it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on U.S. space systems. The nation's leaders must assure that the vulnerability of the United States is reduced and that the consequences of a surprise attack on U.S. space assets are limited in their effects. Now Secretary Rumsfeld can implement his own recommendations to reorganize America's space programs and assure that the U.S. develops the means "both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space." High Frontier recommends he begin with an accelerated program to revive the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor program, canceled by the Clinton Administration in 1993, and put it on an accelerated schedule to deployment within five years.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

Army's "Made in China" Beret: A Disgrace

High Frontier agrees with and applauds Ray G. Smith, National Commander of the American Legion, who wrote to the Washington Times: "The Army must reverse its plan to outfit its total force with the distinctive black beret of the Army Rangers. Trampling on Ranger tradition is, at best, an ill-conceived attempt to improve morale. Bypassing 'buy America' laws and having the hats made in China is the last straw."

"I cannot imagine our underpaid and overemployed brave defenders of freedom wearing headgear made in the nation that swiped U.S. nuclear secrets, engineered a destabilizing military buildup, attempted to buy American political influence, enhanced the arsenals of rogue states, repudiated human rights, and threatened the independence of Taiwan. This move fails to address the real quality of life and operational tempo issues central to troop moral-matters that the Bush Administration is beginning to address."

"All the spin-doctoring in the world will never explain this."

Maggie Thatcher calls for Global Defenses

In receiving an award from the Royal United Services Institute, Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called for a global missile defense as a ('matter of urgent necessity." After calling the ABM Treaty "an outmoded relic," she chided Europeans for lining up with Russia and China in opposing U.S. missile defense plans and said, "I applaud the vision of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld in seeking to create a missile shield which would protect American allies and our deployed forces, as well as the American homeland I hope the European allies can now jolt themselves from their mood of grumpy isolationism. We need a global missile defense."