What Will It Take To Correct The Missile Defense Record?

I'm surprised by pervasive mischaracterizations and grossly exaggerated cost estimates of the most cost-effective ballistic missile defense system concepts produced by President Ronald Reagan's

Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — especially for space-based defenses.

While long-standing exaggerations by some in the scientific community who have always opposed space-based defenses are unsurprising, gross misrepresentations by folks who claim to have been closely associated with SDI 35 years ago are disappointing to say the least.

To illustrate this long-standing problem, consider an early comprehensive defense of the SDI effort offered by the first SDI Director, USAF Lt. General James A. Abrahamson, and me in our Sept. 1993 National Institute for National Policy (NIPP) report, "What Did We Get For Our $30-Billion Investment in SDI/BMD?" (I'm sure USAF Lt. General George Monahan (the second SDI Director) would have joined us, except for his untimely death several months earlier.)

Key points made by our 1993 report were:

—SDI was focused on research, not acquisition, and Congress obstructed all efforts to establish management and support structures that could constitute a normal "system program office."

Moreover, Congress insisted and explicitly directed all SDI efforts to abide by a "narrow interpretation" of ambiguous terms of the 1972 ABM Treaty, even though the Soviets violated that Treaty forward from the day it was signed.

—Furthermore, we pointed out that Congress consistently cut the SDI budget creating programmatic instability . . . particularly in 1988, when the Reagan administration sought to transition toward what could become a serious acquisition phase.

—We noted that any serious accounting effort would have observed that about $30 Billion would likely have been spent during the 1984-93 period on the missile defense research and development programs which SDI inherited.

New initiatives made up only about 3% of the SDI initial 1984 budget.

Taxpayers benefited from a much more focused mission-oriented SDI program than would have resulted from original plans. (Obviously, these facts should be borne in mind when considering recent clearly exaggerated cost estimates.

There were three reasons for this observation:

1.) SDI helped end the Cold War, as Russian Ambassador Vladimir Lukin (and later Chairman of Russia’s State Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee) observed that SDI advanced the end of the Cold War by at least five years.

Over those five years and given then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney’s 1990 recommended budget, that reorientation saved $167 Billion, including $60 Billion in 1994 alone. Britain's then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher memorably stated, "SDI ended the Cold War without firing a shot."

2.) SDI stimulated management and technological advances that benefited many other Pentagon and commercial efforts; e.g., SDI focus on affordable, survivable and cost-effective space systems led to a revolution in technology and architectural advances commercially exploited by important communications and remote sensing applications.

3.) SDI pioneering technological and architectural advances . . . e.g., in electronics, sensors and detectors, computers, propulsion, communications and power . . . stimulated important commercial and scientific advances.

A most notable example was the Clementine space probe that returned to the Moon for the first time in several decades, space qualifying all the key Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor sensor technology and discovering water in the Moon's polar regions . . . and earning several national awards and a honored place in the Smithsonian next to the Luna Lander.

Those sensors helped initially to deploy the innovative (and still operating) Iridium satellite communications constellation in record time.

All this . . . and more. And note that over half of SDI funding was spent on developing more expensive ground-based ABM Defense systems.

And as Abe and I noted, SDI research on lasers also promised relatively early developments that could have been deployed by now, were it not for congressional opposition . . . and redirection of efforts when then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin "took the Stars out of Star Wars" as his first action as President Clinton's secretary of defense.

And still, the general, though the erroneous, perception seems to be that building these effective defensive systems . . . quite affordably possible three decades ago . . . now would be enormously expensive, if they are at all possible.

Really?

Those responsible for building Trump’s Golden Dome, please pay attention!

Ambassador Henry F. Cooper, a PhD engineers with a broad defense and national security career, was President Ronald Reagan’s Chief Defense and Space Negotiator with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiator Director during the George H.W. Bush administration. Read Ambassador Cooper’s Reports — Here.