“The best defense is a good offense,” as the old saw goes. The nature of that “good offense” matters, though. Too often, American officials mistake “any offense” for a “good offense.” As tensions between North Korea and the United States continue to escalate, it is apparent that American policymakers haven’t yet determined what form its “good offense” will take. Sanctions on the Kim regime have not worked and will not work as a means of defending the United States against North Korean aggression—nor do sanctions appear to be restricting North Korea’s development of nuclear bomb-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). A preemptive strike would invite disaster. Empty threats and tweeted insults are an absurd counterstrategy.
For the crisis with North Korea, the best defense would be a “good defense”: The United States should develop and deploy a comprehensive antimissile defense system.
President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983 with the long-term goal of making nuclear weapons obsolete. He wanted to deploy a system that could neutralize the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal. The plan as he first proposed it was technically not feasible, and SDI opponents made much hay out of that fact.
To this day, many on the left still disdain the concept of national missile defense and continue to pooh-pooh “Star Wars” (as Reagan’s plan was derisively dubbed) as folly. They rarely mention that Reagan’s subordinate goal of protecting the United States from nuclear threats posed by lesser powers was achievable. The time would come, Reagan administration officials understood, when such ICBMs and nuclear arms would see wider distribution. It could not be expected that they would remain the monopoly of a few leading powers—and they haven’t. Today, according to the Arms Control Association, 31 countries have ballistic missiles, and 9 of those countries are known to have or are believed to have nuclear weapons.
The U.S. military has a fairly robust antimissile defense arsenal, including Patriot missiles, Aegis warships, Iron Dome technology, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems. But these systems are designed to deal with short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles. They are not capable of countering ICBMs, which come in much faster. So the missile defenses the United States now possesses are suitable for regional defenses, which is why we can share our defensive capabilities with South Korea, Japan, and Israel—allies who have adversaries or face potential threats from short- or intermediate-range missiles—but lack national coverage here at home.
Indeed, the American homeland is nearly defenseless against ICBMs. The one deployed system theoretically capable of countering ICBMs is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), which uses Raytheon SM-3 rockets to take out targeted warheads by direct impact. The GMD system, though, is much too small. There are currently only 44 GMD interceptors, with 40 located at Fort Greeley in Alaska and the remaining 4 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. There have been just 18 intercept tests of this system, of which only 10 achieved the goal of hitting their targets in flight, for a batting average of 0.556. Stats like that would be great for baseball, but not for national defense; they’d mean that if you’re facing incoming ballistic missiles and want a better than 90 percent chance of shooting them down, you’d need four anti-missiles in your battery for every incoming missile.
While Alaska is ideally situated for intercepting West Coast-bound North Korean missiles, the North Koreans could, with only modest improvements to their technology, bypass the Alaska-based system by firing directly over the North Pole, striking targets anywhere in the continental United States.
There are plans on the drawing boards for improvements to the GMD system—starting with the deployment of a “redesigned kill vehicle”—but those plans are years from becoming reality. And in the meantime, the number of GMD interceptors is expected to fall below the current number of 44 as today’s stockpile is used in planned tests or undergoes anticipatable retirement. Why, in the light of the present threat, is more not being done?
Two decades ago, there was growing consensus that the nation’s missile defenses needed to be strengthened. In 1998, a bipartisan commission reported that the missile threat was “broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly” than was generally believed. During the administration of George W. Bush, missile defense remained a priority even though in the post-9/11 years it received much less public attention than efforts to combat other threats to national security. But under the Obama administration, the budget for the GMD system and related programs shrank, and the budget for the Missile Defense Agency was cut. As former Senator Jon Kyl is quoted as saying in Peter Boyer’s recent cover article in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “In the Obama years, some extraordinary damage was done” to missile defense efforts.
America’s small investment in missile defense leaves the country vulnerable not only to existing missile technologies but also to new and emerging threats. Not least among these threats is the possibility of hypersonic, scramjet-propelled reentry vehicles that will be much more maneuverable than today’s missiles, and will be able to evade current interceptor technology like the GMD.
The North Korean threat should serve as a wake-up call. To begin, policymakers should fund the speedy production of more GMD interceptors, and deploy them to bases and mobile platforms in suitable locations to defend against all possible directions of attack. Fort Greeley alone is capable of more than doubling its current arsenal of 40 interceptors; according to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, it was originally designed with a capacity for 100 interceptors. The report also notes that the current extended GMD system was cobbled together from a great variety of subsystems, raising questions of reliability and interoperability that need to be addressed.
Second, there’s an urgent need for new systems, including revolutionary directed-energy weapons capable of destroying enemy missiles in their boost phase and dealing with the hypersonic re-entry threat. For example, the Airborne Laser system—a laser mounted on a Boeing 747—proved capable in 2010 tests of shooting down missiles during ascent. This program, begun during the Clinton administration and advanced in earnest during the Bush administration, was shut down by the Obama administration. It would certainly be a nice capability to have available now. We need to rebuild it, deploy it, and develop even better airborne-laser antimissile systems that are small enough and light enough to be placed aboard tactical aircraft or drones.
Watching the unfolding war of words between the American and North Korean leaders, we might all breathe easier if the United States were much further along on the path toward reliable missile defense. Let’s avoid repeating the last generation’s shortsighted mistake by preparing now for the missile threats of tomorrow.
Robert Zubrin is the president of Pioneer Astronautics and the author of The Case for Mars. His latest book is Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudoscientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
