Outside View Flawed Missile War Game
 File photo: The Pentagon. |
UPI Outside View Commentator
Washington (UPI) Mar 13, 2006
The addled thinking of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency was on full display in late January when MDA officials conducted a missile defense war game on Capitol Hill.
In this war game, Midland, a fictional island nation located in the Sea of Japan, decides to attack its neighbors, South Korea and Japan. According to the formal briefing presented to participants and observers, this is because: "Tensions between Midland and Japan and South Korea have increased over oil reserves and fishing rights." In this war game, Midland is not allowed to also attack North Korea because, well, Midland is North Korea. To be politically correct, MDA just doesn't say so. Midland also attacks the United States, launching seven long-range missiles to "preclude U.S. involvement," according to the briefing.
To preclude U.S. involvement? MDA forgot to "Remember Pearl Harbor." I promise you, if someone fires seven intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States, we are going to get involved. Yet MDA postulates that without missile defenses, this action by North Korea, excuse me, Midland, will "constrain U.S. engagement."
This is the kind of fuzzy thinking that has affected so much of the U.S. planning in missile defense. MDA postulates a goofy threat -- that attacking the United States will keep us from getting involved -- and then justifies tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to counter the goofy threat.
A recent Pentagon briefing claims the threat from enemy missiles is growing and shows missiles in 20 countries. But all but two of those 20 countries -- Iran and North Korea -- are either friends, allies, or countries from which we have no missile threat, e.g. Israel, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, South Korea, Moldova, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.
Moldova? Yes, Moldova.
And, with the exception of Russia and China, none of those 20 countries -- including Iran and North Korea -- have missiles that can reach the United States anyway.
The most futuristic missile defenses we can imagine will not be effective against the ICBMs in Russia and China, so we'd better get down to business to be sure we avoid war with -- or even accidental or unauthorized launches from -- Russia or China. Or even Midland.
The purpose of the recent war game -- conducted just as President George W. Bush's new defense budget was headed for Capitol Hill -- was for members of Congress, their staffs and the press to see a missile defense fantasy, and then support that fantasy with billions of new taxpayer dollars.
To get support for missile defense, the Pentagon needs a better story. But after 20 years trying, they still don't have one.
It would be astonishing if Midland, or any other country real or imaginary, didn't know that it would guarantee our involvement by firing scores of missiles at our friends and allies, and seven more at the U.S. homeland.
What's more astonishing is that the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency doesn't know it.
Philip E. Coyle is a senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.
related report
BMD Focus: MDA War Game Taught Key Lessons
Washington (UPI) Mar 13 - It is easy to ridicule war games. For playing at war is obviously a very different thing from actually waging it. Nevertheless, the series of war games that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency carried out with members of Congress and invited journalists to in late January dramatized and clarified many fundamental issues of life or death significance for tens of millions of people.
The war game hypothesized a mass intercontinental ballistic missile launching by a supposedly imaginary or hypothetical "rogue" state that was an island in Northeast Asia threatening both South Korea and Japan named "Midland." It was not hard to re-imagine "Midland" as North Korea.
In the war game, "Midland" launched seven intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States and the players in the game held what would be real positions in the U.S. command structure, forcing them to make decisions as to which of their limited number of anti-ballistic missile interceptors they should launch to protect threatened U.S. cities and military targets.
In the Jan. 24 war game this correspondent participated in, all the U.S. interceptors that were launched worked perfectly. Skeptics pointed out that in two major tests over the previous eighteen months the U.S. interceptors being tested never even took off from their silos.
War games, it is true, tend to assume that everything will work perfectly, whereas in reality, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clauswitz pointed out in the early 19th century, war generates complexity and chaos. There is no human activity or experience more redolent of Lord Kelvin's Second Law of Thermodynamics. All things in war tend towards entropy -- a state of chaos and confusion. And they do so very fast.
Nevertheless, the MDA war game was far from being as unrealistic as its detractors have claimed. First, under the driving leadership of MDA chief Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering III, major progress has been made in correcting the very basic problems that caused the failures of the interceptors to ignite in those two tests.
The main problem had been rushed construction and deployment of the interceptors without adequate testing. But most of the senior civilian Pentagon officials who had pushed breakneck deployment without sufficient testing and quality control of key components, or sufficient inspection of the missile silos, have been removed. And, as happened with the legendary Apollo Moon program in the late 1960s after the fire that killed three astronauts on their launch pad in early 1967, the MDA has been going over the immediate reasons for the failures and flawed leadership culture that generated them with a fine toothcomb. Given the striking record of test successes that the U.S. ballistic missile defense program has racked up over the past nine months, it is not unreasonable to assume that of the relatively small number of interceptors already deployed, almost all, if not all of them, will indeed work as they are supposed to.
Second, the MDA war game highlighted a crucial lesson of modern human history. Until now, nuclear-armed missiles are about the only infernal, new weapon of war that has not yet been used in anger. Machine-guns, poison gas, and even atomic bombs have all been used to kill millions of people. As long ago as the Civil War, there were discussions among Confederate officials about trying to use biological weapons -- specifically trying to spread smallpox in the cities of the Union. It was never done. But some 85 years earlier, Gen. George Washington seriously believed that the British Empire was trying to spread smallpox among the small military forces and cities of infant America.
In other words, when a new destructive weapons capability exists -- however apparently diabolical or unprecedented it is -- the historical record overwhelmingly documents that it will eventually be used.
Therefore, given the increasingly rapid and widespread proliferation of ballistic missile and nuclear technology, sooner or later, nuclear-armed ICBMs will almost certainly fly -- to one target or another. And it is far from inconceivable that some "rogue" state leadership, if not now, then, in the future, might decide to press its button and send one or several missiles against American, Northeast Asian or European targets.
If that ever happens, other very clear lessons of the Jan. 24 war game will quickly become clear. However many ABM missiles seemed sufficient to defense planners before the crisis, once the missile starts flying they will always seem like far too few.
Also, decisions of life or death for tens of millions of people will be made by young officers and servicemen and women over split seconds. Decisions in the war games about which interceptors to fire at missiles threatening different cities had to be made in time envelopes of only a few minutes. Only 10 ground-based interceptors were available in the war game to intercept those seven ICBMS. Not very good odds. However, the current rapid deployment program being conducted will very significantly improve them over the coming months.
My old friend and colleague Bill Gertz, the legendary intelligence correspondent of The Washington Times, had to decide to let a target in the Aleutian Islands get hit in order to have sufficient interceptor resources to defend and save the huge, densely populated cities of California. Good call, Bill. A message to old friends out in the Aleutians: Sorry, folks.
Nor will any commander have all or perhaps even most of the ideal information he will require to make a certainly correct decision. Retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Dave Frost put it very well: "No operational commander can be sure he knows what he needs to know."
A picture, it is often said, is worth a thousand words. Participation in a war game against incoming ballistic missiles with nuclear war heads dramatizes and clarifies the issues and the stakes more than a hundred congressional hearing or 10,000 op-ed articles.
More than half a century ago, a despairing Albert Einstein famously said, "There is no defense against the weapons that can destroy civilization." The BMD systems we and other nations are now feverishly developing do not yet offer by any means the prospect of any sure and secure shield. But they are a lot better than nothing and a vast amount of genuine commitment and effort is going into making them a lot better than they already are. The future of this country and of civilized life around the world depends on proving Einstein wrong.
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