President Trump’s new missile defense plan is misguided. It will drain money from Pentagon priorities, provoke aggressive Chinese and Russian countermeasures, and fail to restrain large-scale nuclear attacks.
Still, the plan announced on Thursday isn’t totally flawed. Trump’s pledge to improve the speed of military research and development efforts is welcome. As is Trump’s commitment to the next generation of nuclear weapon platforms. As Trump put it, “We can’t forget offense either, can we? We have the finest weapons in the world, and we’re ordering the finest weapons in the world.” These new programs will deter China, Russia, and other adversaries well into the 21st century. Democrats such as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., entertain delusion and endanger America by rejecting these plans. That said, Trump’s new “space-based missile defense layer” system lacks strategic foundation and tactical sense.
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For a start, it’s far from clear that the technology in this system is feasible. It will rely on a new generation of satellites that must be integrated in near-seamless communication with ground relay stations. That’s complicated enough. But consider the escalating efforts by China and Russia to build their own space-warfare capabilities to destroy U.S. satellites and/or trick them into chasing missile ghosts. These Chinese-Russian capacities are stronger than many assume. Most crucially, I strongly doubt Trump’s space satellites could credibly defend against a nuclear saturation strike of the kind that China and Russia would employ were they ever to wage nuclear war against America. If the satellites can’t, it’s a big deal. After all, we must recognize that the defense pot is large but not bottomless. This new program will drain resources from other programs. And considering that a network of integrated satellites and new missile killing vehicles is the linchpin of this program, we can assume that it will cost tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars.
There’s another problem here. Namely, the fact that this new U.S. effort will only encourage China and Russia to escalate their own advances in nuclear warfare technology. Both China and Russia view relative nuclear war-fighting parity with the U.S. as an exigent, unimpeachable demand of their security. They will throw vast resources at overcoming the U.S. missile technology, even if they believe it would only knock down a few of their missiles in any major war. And ultimately they will likely succeed. While President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system had the corollary benefit of bankrupting the Soviet Union as Moscow sought to match U.S. capabilities, that opportunity isn’t present here. Russia and China already retain high-capability missile systems, in some cases more advanced than America’s. Either separately or collectively, they will be able to bridge the gap here by building new and better nuclear delivery systems. And we’ll be left with a very expensive and pretty useless satellite system orbiting Earth.
We have a better alternative. The U.S. should focus on the current missile defense system that centers around ground-based interceptor vehicles. That system will soon be able to credibly deter a nuclear strike from a low-warhead count state such as North Korea. But in its limitations against Chinese and Russian scaled up attacks, it ironically makes us safer by restraining an escalated arms race.
The key here is what makes America safer. I believe the answer is continued development of new offensive weapons such as the Columbia-class ballistic missile fleet, and the existing missile defense system. We don’t need a new son of ‘Star Wars.’ It will cost a lot, but give us little or negative results. There is no problem with the military industrial complex when it delivers what we need. But this is an expensive fantasy in the stars.
