Growing threat from North Korea fuels debate over billions in missile shield spending

After meeting with his national security team in Bedminster, N.J., last month, Trump vowed to increase overall defense spending by “billions of dollars,” and indicated he was no longer satisfied with the funding levels for America’s multi-layered missile shield.

“As you know, we reduced it by 5 percent, but I’ve decided I don’t want that,” Trump said. “We are going to be increasing the anti-missiles by a substantial amount of billions of dollars.”

Like many of the president’s pronouncements, it’s heavy on intent, but light on details.

So far no plan has been submitted to Congress to boost missile defense spending, although the Senate version of the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act includes a requirement to buy an additional 28 ground-based interceptors, to be based mainly in Alaska.

That’s understandable but misguided, argues Tom Collina, policy director at the Ploughshares Fund, which works to reduce the threat from nuclear weapons.

“We have to ask ourselves the question: There is only so much money to go around, should we be continuing to spend our money on systems that are simply not proving to be reliable?” Collina asked.

But Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a group that advocates for more spending on missile defense, says that’s a tired old argument that is refuted by the most recent successful intercept tests.

“We do have capability today that’s tested and proven against the North Korea threat,” said Ellison, citing a successful test in May in which a U.S. interceptor shot down a mock North Korean missile in a scenario designed to be an exact replica of North Korean ballistic missile attack.

Still, he says, the technology is in its infancy. “There’s no way we have invested enough, tested enough, or made our system reliable as possible, and resources have not been focused on homeland defense.”

The latest success argues that the test was “scripted for success,” Collina said. “Even though the last test was closer to what you would expect to see, none of them really come very close to the kind of threat that North Korea could really pose.”

But Ellison points out that in a real world scenario, the U.S. wouldn’t fire just one interceptor at incoming missiles. It would take launch multiple interceptors at a single warhead, increasing the chances of destroying it in space.

But both Collina the critic, and Ellison the advocate agree on one thing: The U.S. should be spending more on developing systems to destroy enemy missiles in their boost phase when they are slow, fat targets, laden with fuel and therefore easier to destroy.

“We have zero boost phase capability today. Nothing that we can do,” Ellison said.

The U.S. experimented with a laser-mounted interceptor in a Boeing 747 that could destroy a missile shortly after launch, but the program was killed in 2010

But Collina says it’s time to kick-start research and development of the next generation of laser defenses because the benefit of destroying a missile over enemy territory before it can release its deadly payload is far more promising than trying to hit a bullet with a bullet.

But he cautions against deploying any future laser system, without proof it really works.

“Yes R&D is good as long as we can resist the temptation to deploy things prematurely,” Collina said.

Ellison says the combination of the increased threat from North Korea, and recent successes with both the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense ground-based system and the Aegis ship-based system has created an unstoppable momentum to invest far more money into hardening the U.S. missile shield.

“You gotta have it. There’s no political division on this one,” Ellison said. “They [North Korea] have got a capability with a hydrogen bomb right now that can kill a million people on a little missile. There’s no way that we are not going to invest in missile defense.”