U.S. military researchers “are on the cusp of some pretty major breakthroughs” in missile defense that are necessary to win potential wars with China and Russia, according to a leading Republican lawmaker.
“It’s better to win an arms race than lose a war,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told the Center for the National Interest on Monday.
Cotton, an Army infantry veteran who sits on the Armed Services Committee, anchored that statement in Russia’s ongoing violation of arms control treaty governing the development of intermediate-range nuclear weapons. But that violation is emblematic of a broader problem. Technological advances have rendered the Cold War principle of mutally-assured-destruction insufficient to avert the nuclear war. Russia and China, he said, have already developed plans for “limited” use of nuclear weapons to win conventional wars. And that requires an overhaul of U.S. defenses, according to the lawmaker.
“We need to be able to stop an attack from near-peer adversaries as well,” Cotton said.
A bipartisan group of senators, including Cotton, has proposed legislation to ramp up the development of intercontinental ballistic missile interceptors and even space-based sensors to detect launches. Cotton also called for a repeal of the defense spending caps that Congress adopted in 2011, as part of a standoff over debt ceiling and spending legislation. “The Budget Control Act was passed in 2011 in a very different world than we face now,” Cotton said.
Lawmakers and national security experts cite North Korea and Iran as the threats that require missile defense development, but China and Russia have often insisted that U.S. officials were hiding their true intentions. Cotton’s admission that he’s concerned about Russia and China could strengthen their resolve to oppose the deployment off ballistic missile defense systems in South Korea, for example.
But the Arkansas lawmaker argued that the ground has already shifted, as Russia is in violation of a nuclear weapons treaty negotiated during the Reagan era, while much of China’s nuclear capabilities remain hidden from the United States.
“If our adversaries are contemplating the use of nuclear forces as part of normal warfare, then I would suggest we’d be best advised to develop ballistic missile defenses instead of clinging to a deterrence framework that they have already discarded,” Cotton said.
Some of the proposals evoke the Ronald Reagan-era Strategic Defensive Initiative that, at the time, was derided by Democratic leaders as a “Star Wars” fantasy. Cotton, for instance, suggested the development of long-range, high-endurance drones armed with lasers that could intercept and destroy nuclear weapons over the nation that fired them.
“The experts who do this work at the Missile Defense Agency and more broadly within the Pentagon or outside experts are pretty confident that with higher levels of investment … we are on the cusp of some pretty major breakthroughs,” Cotton said.
