When future historians analyze U.S. security policies during the early decades of the 21st century, they may be hard-pressed to explain what policymakers were thinking.
Between 2001 and 2019, Washington spent a trillion dollars defending Afghanistan from the Taliban. During the same period it spent 5% of that amount, $50 billion, defending the U.S. homeland against ballistic missile attack by another nuclear power.
The logic explaining why so little money went to a seemingly more important mission was that Washington had come to rely on the threat of massive retaliation to deter Russia and China from nuclear aggression. Threatening horrible consequences turned out to be cheaper than building real defenses.
Unfortunately, before the new century had progressed very far, other potential nuclear aggressors began to appear. It wasn’t clear whether a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran could be deterred in a crisis by threatening retaliation.
North Korea's long-range missiles might be no more advanced than this liquid-fueled Titan II ... [+] WIKIPEDIA
With that in mind, U.S. leaders elected to buy a modest insurance policy against a breakdown in deterrence. It was called the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD—so named because it would intercept attacking missiles in the middle of their trajectories, meaning in space.
That is where most of the $50 billion spent on homeland defense over the last two decades has gone. GMD is the only system in the U.S. arsenal capable of intercepting intercontinental ballistic missiles headed for America.
The good news about the Ground-based Midcourse Defense is that it defends the entire U.S., so it can blunt a small attack coming from any direction—including, for example, an accidental missile launch by Russia.
The bad news is that it wouldn’t be hard for an enemy like North Korea to overwhelm GMD. At present there are only 44 interceptor missiles sitting in silos, and two to four of them might be needed to stop a single incoming nuclear warhead.
U.S. intelligence figures that the time is fast approaching when 44 interceptors won’t be enough to defeat a determined North Korean attack. Congress has already directed that the number of interceptors be increased by 20, and that the new interceptors be in their silos by 2022.
But the problem isn’t just that Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal will grow. It will become more sophisticated. North Korean missiles might be equipped with decoys, or multiple warheads, or maneuvering warheads.
Intelligence analysts have identified 49 potential improvements of enemy missiles that might be a challenge to the existing U.S. defense system within a decade or two. The main weakness in GMD is its ground-based interceptors, which need to be upgraded for a new generation of threats.
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency thought it had a solution several years back: it would redesign the “kill vehicle” atop the interceptors to be more agile, and improve the rocket boosters carrying the kill vehicle to a rendezvous with attackers in space.
That didn’t work out. “Insurmountable problems” arose with the proposed design that led to its cancellation last summer. The Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Research and Engineering then proposed a “next-generation interceptor” with a new kill vehicle, a new booster, and other items to defeat the evolving threat.
That is the only viable solution over the long run. In the near term, though, there is a problem: the next-generation interceptors aren’t likely to be ready before the threat becomes too challenging for existing interceptors. Even if technical hurdles can be overcome, testing and politics will likely slow progress. What to do?
The Missile Defense Agency has two basic options: it can upgrade the existing interceptors so they are able to cope with the threat a few more years, or it can dumb down the next-generation interceptors so they are ready sooner.
Either approach would close the near-term gap in capability, but down the road as the threat becomes really stressing, neither system might be up to the job of defending the homeland.
The obvious answer is to accept that a really capable future interceptor might take longer to arrive, and do what can be done to keep existing ground-based interceptors effective.
That, in effect, is what the Boeing Company is proposing to the Missile Defense Agency. It wants to leverage technologies developed under the canceled kill vehicle effort to make GMD more capable through 2030, when a replacement is likely to become available.
Boeing, a contributor to my think tank, says it can upgrade the 20 interceptors Congress has mandated be added to GMD so that they are capable of coping with 85% of the threats that the next-generation interceptor will be able to defeat. The remaining 15% can only be addressed by a new interceptor, but those threats probably will not materialize until the mid-2030s at the earliest.
The company says it can make this adjustment for no more than the failed kill vehicle effort would have cost—about $2.7 billion. Since Boeing oversees the entire GMD program for the Missile Defense Agency, it has a detailed grasp of how this would all fit together to produce an improved defensive capability circa 2025.
That’s when analysts expect the existing system will become inadequate. But it’s also well before the proposed next-generation interceptor is likely to ready. While it is possible a highly capable next-gen solution might be ready sooner, past experience suggests it would be too risky to bet on that hope becoming a reality.
So if the Missile Defense Agency wants to minimize risk and keep up with an evolving threat, Boeing’s proposal for an interim solution seems like the most prudent course of action. The Pentagon still needs a better interceptor over the long run, but assuming that program’s early availability runs the risk of leaving the nation undefended against the greatest existential threat it faces for half a dozen years (or longer).
If this costs a little more than the Pentagon was planning, perhaps some money can be transferred from its long-running but fruitless quest to stabilize Afghanistan. Keeping America defended against nuclear attack is more important.
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