Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Session 2 - The Offense-Defense Mix: Missile Defense Requirements for the New Triad

Address by Ambassador Henry Cooper, Chairman, High Frontier; former Director, Strategic Defense Initiative Organization; and former Chief Negotiator, Geneva Defense and Space Talks (Reagan Administration)

Amb. Cooper: Thanks, Jackie. I'm going to continue the trend and just talk without slides. The title I was given was the Offense/Defense Mix and Missile Defense Requirements for the New Triad. To have such a discussion is a pleasure in the first place because I'm pleased to see that missile defense is considered the “leg of a triad” and that we’re talking about deterrence not being focused only on the threat of retaliation. I view that as a big step forward. I'm also pleased that President Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty; so we can actually build truly effective defenses. We should be having an open discussion of the requirements in this regard, unencumbered by legal constraints that for 30 years imposed vulnerability on the United States as a matter of policy.

Some would argue that vulnerability was a reality because of limitations of Cold War technology; but others of us would dispute that argument. Perhaps even a greater problem was that the Treaty precluded even the testing of the most effective defenses – namely, space-based, sea-based, air-based and mobile ground-based defenses. These capabilities could have been effective in the Cold War and certainly would be today.

So today, what should be the requirements for missile defense? The classical questions to be addressed in funding such programs are “How much is enough?” and “What should the focus be?”

With one distinction, these are the questions I addressed 15 years ago when then Defense Secretary Cheney asked me to conduct an independent review of the SDI program – as the Berlin Wall was coming down and budgets were shrinking, not only for SDI but also for all DoD programs. People were talking about collecting the peace dividend, and so on.

The SDI program initially focused on building an effective defense against a major Soviet attack, building on President Reagan’s interest in ultimately having a very effective defense. I think those who ridiculed his views – who claimed his view of achieving a very effective defense was a fantasy – much overstated his views, but in any case, he was interested in SDI achieving a truly effective defense to protect the American people.

By the time I looked at these issues in 1990, achieving truly effective defenses remained the long-term goal, but SDI had refocused on attritting perhaps half of several thousand reentry vehicles that might be launched at the United States – then thought to be the Soviet threat; and deterrence was the name of the game. To a limited degree, providing “insurance” against an accidental or unauthorized launch of a few missiles was also a part of the defense concept; but in effect, the defense concept had evolved into an adjunct to the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction.” Its purpose was basically to introduce confusion and uncertainty into the opponent’s planning – that was the strategy, it appeared to me.

As I surveyed the issues in 1990, with the world changing rapidly, a big nuclear exchange seemed much less likely. This review was on the heels of my time with the Soviets in Geneva, where we repeatedly told the Soviets – and then later the Russians – that we should be cooperating on building defenses against common threats to all of us. And while a big nuclear exchange perhaps was much less likely, we were thinking about accidental or unauthorized launches as being a bigger concern. Senator Sam Nunn and Congressman Les Aspin were both proponents of focusing SDI on the accidental and unauthorized launch threat.

The reduced constraints that were associated with the breakup of the Soviet Union caused concern about proliferation as well. In response came the initiation of the Nunn-Lugar program, and other initiatives to help Russian scientists do something useful with their time rather than selling their wares to unsavory places.

I was also very impressed in early 1990 by a Defense Science Board study two or three years earlier, led by Joe Braddock, regarding the ballistic missile proliferation problem. It was clear that we were headed down a road to where we were going to be confronted by a lot more nations with ballistic missiles – and, about this time, the term “rogue states” came into vogue. These considerations led to considerable uncertainty about ballistic missile threats to our overseas troops and allies, and to the credibility of our key alliances, then and in the future.

These considerations led me to recommend initiating major programs we referred to as theater missile defenses – and these programs turned out to be very popular, especially to many in Congress who had opposed SDI and for whom advocacy for theater missile defenses became for some an attractive alternative to SDI. Subsequently in the Clinton Administration, they became the primary objective of the SDI program, then renamed as the Ballistic Missile Defense Program.

In 1990, we also expressed concerns more openly about China as a potential peer competitor than the administration is suggesting today, and we more freely noted a need for missile defenses against that future threat. In any case, the ballistic missile threat was becoming evermore diffuse. The strategic situation was not viewed as a standoff easily characterized by two-sided game theory calculations that operations researchers used to describe the Cold War “balance of terror.” Needed was something to address political instabilities then no longer dominated by a U.S.-Soviet standoff.

So, in addition to threats from future peer competitors, it seemed the threat could come from any number of lesser states. At that time, we focused on five: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Syria – perhaps we’d scratch a couple from that list today. We noted also, as I said, the concern about what might happen because of political instability in Russia, particularly an accidental or unauthorized launch – say, a variant of Tom Clancy’s “Red October” scenario, and also potentially in the future missiles launched from China, though China was certainly not a major threat at that time.

The bottom line of all of those considerations was that we didn't need to be concerned so much about thousands of reentry vehicles that might be coming at us – or defending against all of those in the still massive Soviet inventory. It became very difficult to specify numerically the threat for design purposes – if the threat was not thousands of RVs out of the Soviet Union, then how many and from where should be the focus of the design?

Rather arbitrarily, I took the “Red October” scenario as my sizing threat. I specified that we should defend against the threat one rogue submarine captain might pose, and that was the source of the magic number for our design goal. The Joint Staff went along with me, and we designed our systems to counter with confidence 200 RVs – the number a single Soviet submarine Captain might then control. That number may not be credible today, but that's what we did then – and I don't know what exactly should be the basis of what one might pick today to size our missile defense systems.

In 1990, I viewed the threat to be “limited strikes” from uncertain locations toward uncertain targets. I mentioned five rogue states, and threatening missiles that might be launched from mobile platforms – but they might not necessarily be launched at us, they might be launched at our allies or at our overseas troops. And so we began thinking of a global context for threat scenarios and defenses in that context. The role of U.S. defenses shifted in this context from attritting a significant percentage of a large Soviet threat to the United States homeland – a large number of reentry vehicles – to destroying with great confidence all of a relatively small number launched at the United States or our overseas troops and allies – as I mentioned earlier, we chose 200 RVs as our design threat.

Our objective, therefore, became protection rather than deterrence, per se. Even one nuclear weapon on a city is bad news indeed – whether it’s an accident or deliberate from a third country.

As I think about the issues today, it seems to me the only thing different in the wake of 9/11 is that we also have to worry about the terrorist threat.

For example, SCUDs-on-ships are a real problem today – not some future threat, but today. Don Rumsfeld’s 1998 Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat identified this SCUDs-on-ships threat, and I know that he, on at least two occasions as Secretary of Defense, has since emphasized it. It’s amazing to me that we’ve done so little, if anything, to deal with this particular threat – especially considering the EMP threat that Bill Graham described earlier: that a SCUD launched essentially straight up from a ship off our East Coast could turn out the lights and a lot of other things along the Eastern Seaboard.

So what's the nature of the best response; what's the best offense-defense mix? How do we measure effectiveness; what are the costs?

In dealing with effectiveness arguments, I think we have to be realistic about technology and that threats are going to improve, whatever may be viewed as the threat today, for example from North Korea. The papers are full of recent Topol testing in Russia, and what the Russians are doing; and that the Russians have provided their various military wares to China; and China has provided its technology elsewhere. This transfer of technology has been referred to as a “concert of proliferation,” or something to that effect. So secrets don’t last very long and technology gets around.

To deal with the growing threat, I think everybody basically agrees that we need layered defenses. Maybe it’s been less appreciated for over a decade, but I'm pleased to see an understanding coming back that we need a global defense, not just a homeland defense and not just theater defenses for one place or another, but a global defense as an integrated whole, world-wide.

And there's another issue where there seems to be a debate, but I don't understand why. Effective defenses need the capability to intercept attacking missiles in their boost phase. That's where the threat is most vulnerable; boost-phase defenses provide the best chance to defeat countermeasures that become such a horrific problem in the mid-course phase – the focus of missile defense programs since 1993. And boost-phase defenses are feasible – as they were in the late 1980s.

The results from the $30 billion spent on SDI in the Reagan-Bush-1 era, which I know most about as an insider, led me to conclude that space is easily the most effective way to have a global layered defense, one that can intercept missiles in all their phases of flight, beginning in boost space, all the way through the mid-course phase and into the reentry phase.

And while it may not strike you as reasonable, it’s also been clear for at least as long that a space-based defense is the least expensive way to do the layered defense job, based on the technology that was around at the beginning of my watch in 1990. That conclusion was backed up by numerous independent studies by the Defense Science Board, the JASONs, and a whole host of other folk in various internal government reviews, including by the formal Defense Acquisition Board.

These space-based defense programs were ended at the beginning of the Clinton Administration and have never been restarted. And when I refer to “these programs,” I don't mean just the focus on space-based interceptor acquisition programs, but also all the key technologies that made such defenses viable by the late 1980s and were scuttled by the Clinton administration in 1993-94.

Another notable thing from my watch was that the focus on a global defense and a look at the globe led me to become an advocate of sea-based defenses. This should occur to anyone who just glances at the globe and realizes that we have ships that move freely in international waters over two thirds of the Earth’s surface. I'm gratified by the progress of the Navy’s programs. Congratulations to the Navy are in order – their test record is six-out-of-seven, and sea-based defenses are nearing operational status. Even though it’s a limited defense capability, I'm pleased to see it become operational.

Personally, I believe that the current focus on ground-based defenses is a legacy of the long Cold War period when we were required to think only about defenses consistent with ABM Treaty constraints – and bureaucratic inertia, as we all know, keeps things moving in a given direction, whatever it may be. But in my judgment, ground-based defenses are the most expensive way to achieve an effective global defense in a timely way, if ever.

But politics still seem to dominate considerations of effective defenses. There's no serious effort on space-based defenses today – and hasn’t been for over 12 years – nor on exploiting space-based defense technologies, which are important also to other basing modes. Yet, it's my strong belief, that with the same management procedures employed by Motorolla to develop, deploy and begin operations of Iridium in the mid-1990s, we could have built at least a limited space-based interceptor capability, operational on-orbit within five years of a decision to do so – any time during the past 15 years and for under $5 billion.

So in planning for the future, I argue the Navy programs are most promising and I argue we should make them be all they can be. And as you think about the offense-defense mix, I urge that you imagine how to revive a serious space-based defense program. For the right numerical offense-defense mix, I don't know the number against which to design today’s global defense, as an alternative to 200 threatening weapons we selected 15 years ago. I don't know whether it’s one or ten or more – but in any case, I welcome a serious discussion of the possibilities. Thank you. [applause]

Questions and Answers

Audience: Thanks, David Roop from Global Security Newswire. We’ve heard several arguments so far from speakers leading to the conclusion that we need to broaden our strategic capabilities including possibly nuclear capabilities, global strike. But it seems like there's an issue that’s hidden behind the big curtain that isn’t being addressed, and that's the possibility that pursuing such capabilities could actually increase instability, encourage proliferation, and perhaps the risky behavior that we're trying to avoid from potential foes that seek to use their capabilities before they lose them. Could the panel please address this potential, is it a potential?

Ambassador Cooper: I just wanted to say in the case of the missile defense, if you build effective defenses and they’re affordable, I believe they will work as a damper on proliferation. But if we build defenses that aren’t effective, then the bad guys will be encouraged to build lots of missiles to threaten us. So there is a priority on getting the right technology and doing the job well from the outset. The world we’re in now is very different than when we were thinking in terms of defending against thousands of existing Soviet warheads – especially since some threat delivery systems of concern today are from threatening nations and terrorists who are just starting and effective defenses can put a damper on that whole business.

Audience: Hi, I'm Amy Wolfe from the Congressional Research Services, and although I’ve been quite amusingly distracted, I want to go back to something Keith said right at the beginning of his presentation. Keith, you were talking about using nuclear weapons in retaliation for weapons of mass destruction use by the bad guys to send a signal; not to destroy a target, not to achieve a critical military warring, but to send a signal. In other words, punish for using weapons of mass destruction and to send the signal to the next bad guys and might do it to punish him, too.

I'm really troubled by that. We’ve never used nuclear weapons to punish, or we would not have done so in the Cold War because the Soviet Union could have turned around and punished us right back. So is this change in strategy, doctrine, use theory related to the fact that we’re now looking at using nuclear weapons, or pick your buzz word, lower your threshold, raising the likelihood of use, changing our strategy because the bad guys can’t nuke us back? And what are the implications of saying we can now use nuclear weapons without fear of retaliation?

Audience: With respect to, say North Korea, not wanting to leave a paper trail, what about the issue of a nuclear device being brought in on a cargo container? Which doesn’t seem to be addressed real well ... (inaudible)?

Ambassador Cooper: What do you mean what about us not addressing the threat of nuclear weapons being shipped to the U.S. in cargo containers? The Department of Homeland Security and others are spending a fair amount of money trying to address that problem. Frankly, I’m even more worried about nuclear weapons that can be smuggled into the U.S. other ways. I'm concerned that we’re focusing too much on the “stream-of-commerce” – a legacy of the fact that we worry about protecting our commercial lines of communication; whereas if we worried more about protecting the United States and our people from nuclear smuggling, I think we would be thinking more like tourists are likely to think – I think they’ll come some way other than on container ships; they won't give up control of their prized nuclear weapon as needed to come through the stream-of-commerce.

But I believe that the nuclear problem needs to be addressed in the same context as Jim Woolsey mentioned. We can afford to worry about that problem while we're working on missile defense as well.