ArmsControlWonk.com

The Missile Defense Agency released a new logo yesterday. I was contemplating some witty commentary regarding alternate logos, maybe two streaks of light just seeming to miss one another, or maybe just moaning that it would be best if they gave the dough to Raytheon for the SM-3 instead of some design firm.

I was even planning on tracking down that Bloom Country strip in which the Defense Department sends Opus $900 million, mistaking him for “Mr. Spock, chief science officer for ‘Star Trek’ defense research.” Opus designs “Net Wars”, a strategic defense concept in which the earth is covered with a “space net” comprising $500 billion in small bills, and testifies before Congress.

(The strip helped Berke Breathed win the Pulitzer Prize. If someone could scan the strips from Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, I’d love a copy.)

But no commentary on the new MDA logo could best this little wonder from Frank Gaffney (with help from another nut-job), who has taken the whole “Obama as secret Muslim” thing where no wing-nut has gone before:

Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives … seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Christopher Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.

[snip]

Even as the administration has lately made a show of rushing less capable sea- and land-based short-range (theater) missile defenses into the Persian Gulf in the face of rising panic there about Iran’s actual/incipient ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.

Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.

Seriously, Frank Gaffney believes that Barack Obama has a secret plan to subject the United States to Shariah, which he has decoded based on the logo for the Missile Defense Agency.

This is not, as far as I can tell, Juvenalian satire. Indeed, an aspiring satirist could hardly go as far as Gaffney without inviting the criticism that his caricature was too crude.

Wow.

Update | 12:54 I just noticed that Media Matters, Al Kamen in his In the Loop column in the Post and Max Bergmann at Think Progress all beat me to it.

Comment [14]

The February 11, 2010 test of the ALTB (the small, slightly horizontal blip on the right) against a target missile, the larger blip on the left. The target blip size is dominated by the exhaust plume.)

On February 11th, 2010, the Air Force successfully tested its Airborne Laser Test Bed (the new name for what was developed as the Airborne Laser or ABL). Since the ABL was how I got into this business, I feel a certain interest in its continued development. Others, especially Jan Stupl who is a Science Fellow at Stanford’s CISAC, have done a more complete analysis since I did my study (also as a CISAC Science Fellow ) on the ABL. Jan’s thesis at Hamburg University involved authenticating a finite element simulation of a laser heating up a rocket’s airframe by actually comparing it with experiments he did. I consider his study to represent the current state-of-the-art knowledge in the nongovernmental community. (While at CISAC, Jan has extended that study with a very important analysis of using lasers as anti-satellite weapons.)

I think my most important contribution to the ABL discussion was in presenting a way of thinking about laser missile defense engagements. This is summarized by this graph, which shows the two important curves for determining a laser’s effectiveness, which can be characterized by the length of time it takes the laser to heat up the rocket’s skin enough for internal stresses to break the missile apart. (See Jan Stupl’s work for more accurate time estimates.)

An example of how to think about laser engagements. It depends on the nature of the target missile as well as the laser’s energy; both of which are uncertain.

One graph, the “visibility” curve, shows how long the missile is visible to the ABL while it is under power. (The ABL’s kill mechanism requires that there be a large axial load on the airframe that is only there while under power.) As the ABL gets farther away, the Earth’s curve hides more and more of the powered flight either behind the Earth’s limb or, perhaps more likely, behind a large barrier of atmosphere that disrupts the laser beam. On the other hand, the farther away the laser is, the long it takes to deposit enough energy to cause a failure. That is represented by the graphs that are increasing dramatically with distance. The distance at which these two types of curves cross is the maximum range of ABL.

Videos of the February 11th test have been altered to mask the time of the actual engagement. (That is what they say at the start of each video segment.) My guess, based on how fast pieces seem to fall away, is that they have been sped up. Which, of course, makes the laser seem more effective. Another apparent feature of the videos is how close the target and the ALTB are. This has two effects. Most importantly, the engagement is much farther down the “time required” curves. But it also means a given change in the missile’s position, as it accelerates along its trajectory, will produce a bigger angular displacement as viewed from the ALTB. That should mean it is easier for the onboard targeting systems to follow the target. It also appears that the ALTB is pointing down when it fires. This could, of course, be an artifact of the position of the camera. However, if it is true, it means both that the laser is firing through more atmospheric turbulence (an impressive achievement) and that the rocket is moving slower than it would if it was allowed to gain altitude. The later means, of course, that it is easier to shoot down.

Comment [21]

click on the image for a larger version

These two views show a target warhead 350 km directly above the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:45 pm (local time) on 11 January 2010. The image on the left shows what the target warhead (with an altitude of 350 km) would see if it looks at the Sun and the right shows the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and target warhead at at that instant.

I am starting to conclude that the “eyewitness” to the Chinese missile defense test is probably real, the reported time (7:45 pm, “local time”) is reasonable, and the target vehicle was most likely a relatively short range missile such as the DF-21. The slower the target vehicle, the more reasonable the streak seen on the camera phone’s image becomes. One very important question can still be addressed: was the target illuminated by the Sun? The answer to this question is vastly important. If the target could not be illuminated by the sun, it would mean that the Chinese have developed much more sophisticated infrared sensors than they have flown previously. If, on the other hand, it could be illuminated by the sun, perhaps by selecting an intercept point high enough for the sun to illuminate the target, then we are not forced to conclude a dramatic improvement in IR technology.

7:45 pm sounds pretty late at night. (Especially during the winter!) However, we must not forget that China is a very large country that uses a single time zone. That means that when it is 7:45 pm in Beijing, it is also 7:45 pm local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center almost 1,400 km west. On 11 January 2010, that corresponded to11:45 UTC. How high up would the target have to be to still be illuminated by the Sun?

At that time, the Sun was 17.4 degrees below the horizon at Jiuquan SLC. It’s a simple exercise in geometry to show that an object needs to be at an altitude of 305 km or greater if it is to be illuminated by the Sun. That is easily achievable by a DF-21 flying a maximum range trajectory.

I suppose that some people will still want to believe that China has achieved a quantum leap in IR technology. I cannot prove them wrong. However, I believe that such improvements come in systematic ways; especially if the developing country wants to master the technology for the long term. This test is still consistent with the Chinese hit-to-kill technology using a visible light tracker.

Comment [4]

click on the image for a larger version

I’ve been working on a rather long piece about the recent Chinese Ballistic Missile Defense test but persistent reports of an eyewitness (complete with photos) have sidetracked me. These reports purport to be from a Chinese citizen who appears to have witnessed multiple flashes/explosions. (The original English translation seems to have disappeared, luckily I printed it out to pdf, which can be viewed here.) The question is: are these credible reports/photos?

For the moment, let us assume the photograph is associated with the interception. What could it be? My guess is that it is not the initial interception. The eyewitness seems to have watched a number of phenomena in the sky before taking out his cell phone and taking a picture. (That is certainly believable. In fact, it would be too incredible a coincidence for him to capture the interception.) Also, the first things he witnessed do not appear to have been the plume from the interceptor rocket. He certainly would have reported an initial streak of light if that had been the case rather than “moons” appearing.

Instead, the image above could be a large fragment from the target burning up in the atmosphere as it reenters. Using a typical camera phone field of view of 50 degrees implies that the streak is about 1 arc second long. If it originates at about 50 km altitude—somewhere around the altitude where the atmosphere starts to get fairly dense—then that corresponds to about 0.8 km long. Of course, it has been foreshortened by some unknown amount.

For the moment, and for the sake of continuing to speculate, let us assume there is no foreshortening. We might expect a target velocity (depending on the unknown range of the target rocket) to be somewhere between 3 and 6 km/s. With no foreshortening, that implies a “shutter” time of between 0.15 to 0.3 seconds. (Shorter range target rockets would imply longer shutter times.) I’m not an expert on cell phone cameras, but that seems to be somewhat longer than I would expect possible. (Readers?) The inevitable foreshortening would lengthen that shutter time still further and assuming a higher altitude would imply an even longer shutter time. These same arguments rule out this being an image of the initial interception. So the credibility question comes down to: how long does a cell phone camera integrate over a scene at night?

There is still some wiggle room here. I need to try to calculate where in its trajectory (ie what altitude) a piece of debris would become visible but my initial reaction— subject to a lot of further work —is that this is not directly associated with the interception. It is still possible that it is a piece of debris burning up.

Comment [11]

On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country. (Xinhua File Photo)

Greetings from Andalo.

China announced that it has conducted a missile defense test. The announcement was very brief:

BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) — On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country.

The Foreign Ministry Spokesperson made slightly more detailed comments, including noting that “The test would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

That China might move some of its “hit to kill” research into the missile defense arena is hardly surprising — Geoff Forden has a post appropriately titled, Told you so.

I am surprised, however, at how smoothly the Chinese have handled the announcement. China is handling this test completely differently than the January 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test — though it is possible the system is the same. In January 2007, China was silent for nearly two weeks following the test, including five days of awkward silence after word leaked to Arms Control Wonk and Aviation Week and Space Technology.

In the aftermath of that debacle, Gregory Kulacki and I were told, and wrote in the Nonproliferation Review, that China had instituted a new procedure for vetting “future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences”:

In the wake of the test many foreign governments criticized the Chinese government for authorizing the test, for not informing them before hand, for failing to respond to requests for clarification, and for blithely dismissing the potential impacts on the future peaceful use of space. Chinese leaders in both the Foreign Ministry and Central Military Commission have struggled to cope with the intensity of the international reaction and the failure of their subordinates to anticipate and respond effectively to foreign inquiries and concerns, a dysfunction that continued for months. A long-planned conference of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, scheduled to be held in Beijing in April 2007, three months after the test, was abruptly canceled without explanation just days before it was scheduled to begin. In retrospect, the Party leadership maintains (and multiple sources confirm as accurate) that the relevant agencies, military and civilian, failed to coordinate well. Somewhere along the line the paper stopped flowing, and responsible individuals at the lower levels of the bureaucracy who had no prior knowledge of the program or the decision to go forward with the test but who did have responsibility for crafting and delivering the post-test message never got their instructions.

[snip]

There seems to be no dispute about the profoundly negative consequences of the Chinese government’s long-delayed response to the unanticipated, intense, and immediate international reaction to the ASAT test. All our sources agree that the delay reflected a significant breakdown in coordination within the Foreign Ministry, and between the Foreign Ministry and the military. In the wake of this failure, according to one source, the leadership will institute a new interagency review process that will be applied to future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences.

It looks like that procedure was in place, and worked very well in this case.

- China announced the test itself, rather than letting the US officials leak the information to Craig Covault at AvWeek.

- China had a prepared Foreign Ministry spokesperson ready to deliver talking points, rather than waiting almost five days to confirm the test with a not very convincing statement.

- China described the test as for missile defense — though it is not clear whether China flew an interceptor against a target — which is very difficult for the United States to criticize, especially in a week in which the US announced the sale PAC-3 interceptors to Taiwan.

- And, for good measure, China made sure to point out that the test “would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

This is progress, though not exactly the sort I had hoped for.

It Might Not Have Been An HQ-9

I suspect this was the same sort of interceptor used in January 2007, though that is simply a guess at this point. (The reference to space debris, however, strikes me as particularly notworthy link to January 2007.)

Xinhua carried the announcement with the above photo — of an HQ-9 air defense missile [of a Chinese air defense missile]. Some colleagues have assumed (quite reasonably) that the test must, therefore, have used [Chinese air defense missile, such as the] HQ-9 missile, which in many ways resembles the Russian S-300 air-defense missile.

I would not/not, however, conclude China used an HQ-9 on the basis of this image. The caption, which I have reproduced with the image, describes it as a “file photo” and the Xinhua photo gallery contains file photos of an HQ-9, an HQ-12 and a DF-21C.

One thing I notice about the statement and selection of pictures is that the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to appear to be providing information, but there really is nothing there at all about the interceptor, the objective of the test, and so forth.

China really could have tested anything at all, though my default assumption would be that the missile defense test mirrored the January 2007 ASAT test and its predecessors.

Spread of Hit to Kill Technologies

The event in China is interesting in light of another recent development: India has announced its ABM program will be expanded to include an anti-satellite program.

While China is migrating its anti-satellite research into the missile defense arena, India is doing the opposite. In both cases, however, the technology is fundamentally the same: the development of kinetic energy interceptors — so called “hit-to-kill” technologies that use a bullet to hit a bullet.

In 2007, I tried to make the argument that we were making a mistake to focus on “anti-satellite” weapons — which is a mission. The real danger was the increasing availability of the specific technology — hit-to-kill — that would inevitably spread for both missile defense and anti-satellite applications:

First, once uncommon hit-to-kill technologies are now at the early stages of spreading around the world. Second, the broad focus on space weapons and ASAT technologies, many of which are quite unrealistic and exotic, distracts from the technological challenge posed by the proliferation of hit-to-kill systems. Third, partial arms control measures, such as a ban on kinetic ASAT testing, may mitigate the most threatening aspects of hit-to-kill technology while avoiding some of the difficulties associated with more comprehensive agreements.

I think that is precisely where we are today: The US has pioneered a technology — and encouraged its spread to allies like Israel, Japan and Taiwan among others. Now China and India are racing to join the club. The result, I think, is going to be a significant increase in the vulnerability of space assets.

Upated | 12:49 pm Sean O’Connor, judging by the TEL, suggests that the missile is a Chinese S-300 rather than an HQ-9. Looking at images from the National Day parade and rehearsal, the TEL seems to look different. The most likely candidate is an S-300, but I can’t find a really reliable picture. And, frankly speaking, I haven’t spent much time staring at Chinese air defense missiles, though I suspect that is about to change. Comments are invited.

Comment [44]

click on the image for a larger version

Slide from a talk I gave on Capital Hill (sponsored by the AAAS) in March 2008.

Media reports today indicate that China has tested “ground-based midcourse missile interception technology.” Details necessary for evaluating exactly what system has been tested have not emerged yet. Nevertheless, it bolsters a prediction I made soon after the 2007 ASAT test: that China would continue testing its hit-to-kill technology in the form of a missile defense system. After all, there is no functional difference between an ASAT and a missile defense system; the closing speed is the only important parameter for classifying any exoatmospheric interceptor.

Comment [8]

Scores.

No, not Scores. Scores, as in, “four score and seven years ago …”

Or, as in, the US will deploy “scores” of missile defense interceptors in Europe. Bob Gates defends the Obama Administration’s shift in missile defense architecture in the New York Times, sizing the number of missiles with an archaic measure normally reserved for livestock:

All told, every phase of this plan will include scores of SM-3 missiles, as opposed to the old plan of just 10 ground-based interceptors.

The archaic usage is deliberate. On Monday, a “senior government official” gave a background briefing at the Arms Control Association in which he also deployed the same term to describe the number of interceptors. When asked to clarify “scores,” the senior government official said Administration officials “have a number in mind” but haven’t discussed it with our allies yet. (Indeed, since “burden-sharing” figures so heavily into the discussion, the final number will be negotiated within NATO).

For those of you who, like me, do not normally find ourselves counting sheep and cattle, a “score” numbers 20. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “score” derives from the practice of marking your shephard’s crook while inventorying your herd:

Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a ‘score’ (sense 9) or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty.

Um, ok. So, that also works for missile defense interceptors. I guess.

Administration officials couldn’t really use the awesomely appropriate “boatloads” of missiles — though that would have been perfect — because an an Aegis ship has 90 or 96 VLS tubes and the Navy isn’t keen to put more than two dozen interceptors per ship.

So, instead, we get Bob Gates doing Abe Lincoln.

Comment [5]

Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President Obama put the focus on April 5 when he said, “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

That last word, “proven,” helps to explain the several mentions of testing in the White House’s fact sheet. Note the added emphasis in this description of current plans:

• Phase One (in the 2011 timeframe) – Deploy current and proven missile defense systems available in the next two years, including the sea-based Aegis Weapon System, the SM-3 interceptor (Block IA), and sensors such as the forward-based Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance system (AN/TPY-2), to address regional ballistic missile threats to Europe and our deployed personnel and their families;
• Phase Two (in the 2015 timeframe) – After appropriate testing, deploy a more capable version of the SM-3 interceptor (Block IB) in both sea- and land-based configurations, and more advanced sensors, to expand the defended area against short- and medium-range missile threats;
• Phase Three (in the 2018 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the more advanced SM-3 Block IIA variant currently under development, to counter short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missile threats; and

• Phase Four (in the 2020 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the SM-3 Block IIB to help better cope with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and the potential future ICBM threat to the United States.

If you are wondering about that “current and proven” in Phase One, the manufacturer claims 15 successful SM-3 intercept tests. (Update: MDA has a test record fact sheet. CDI has a detailed rundown through June 2008. And here’s Wikipedia.)

By contrast, when the decision to deploy the previous version of a European defense system was announced in October 2007, not only had the system not been tested, but no plans for testing had been made; so stated an October 2007 report of the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E). A test plan was later accepted at the insistence of Congress.

As much as anything else, then, the change from 2007 to 2009 expresses a different philosophy about the need for “proven” systems, meaning ones that have been tested.

In fairness, though, we don’t know what a similar DOT&E report would say today about the new “Phase One.” How fully applicable is past Aegis/SM-3 testing to the proposed deployment? It’s not entirely clear.

Testing Against What?

We’ll also have to wait and see just how rigorous the testing programs are for Phases Two through Four. A nagging problem in the BMDS test regime has been the absence of what MDA calls “complex countermeasures” from its midcourse intercept tests. (The midcourse category includes both GBI—the basis of the discarded European proposal—and SM-3.) David Wright of UCS alluded to this issue in his statement that the new system, like the old, “does not square with technical realities.”

UCS is well-known as a tough critic of midcourse defenses. The organization sponsored the Countermeasures report of 2000, which argued that midcourse systems, which intercept warheads above the atmosphere, can be flummoxed by the attacker’s use of certain technologies, including the creative use of balloon decoys.

MDA’s initial response to this problem was to argue that adversaries like North Korea actually were not yet capable of mastering this level of countermeasures technology. Later, it initiated development of the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) system, designed to overcome decoy deployment with large numbers of interceptors.

Unfortunately, MKV is being canceled. According to the Secretary of Defense, it turned out to be “plainly unworkable, prohibitively expensive and could never be practically deployed.” This could be a problem, since surprisingly sophisticated missile developments in Iran, which have led to revised intelligence assessments, make it that much less likely (on the face of it) that challenging countermeasures are still many years away.

So what does the new intelligence estimate say about countermeasures? And how will this issue be reflected in future SM-3 development and testing? Something tells me that we’ll be circling back to these questions at some point.

Update. David Wright and UCS colleague Lisbeth Gronlund now have an essay in the Bulletin laying out the argument against an Aegis-based defense at somewhat greater length. It would be interesting to know what sort of defenses they would prefer for NATO Europe: terminal-phase systems like Patriot? Boost-phase systems like those advocated by Richard Garwin or Ted Postol? Both of these? Nothing at all? There are serious arguments to be made for any of these positions.

Comment [12]

Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter. A second edition of this fine book was published in 2006.

A key chapter, which also appeared as an article in the October 1972 issue of World Politics (“The Decision to Deploy the ABM: Bureaucratic and Domestic Politics in the Johnson Administration”) dealt with President Johnson’s decision to deploy a “light” ABM defense against a minimal Chinese ballistic missile threat.

The announcement of the Johnson administration’s decision came in one of the strangest speeches ever given by a Secretary of Defense – Robert McNamara’s address to the United Press International in San Francisco on September 18, 1967. Halperin was working in the Pentagon at the time, and had intimate knowledge of the pressures at work on McNamara and Johnson.

This was the speech in which McNamara railed against the “mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry.” McNamara went on to say,

If a weapon system works – and works well – there is strong pressure from many directions to procure and deploy the weapon out of all proportion to the prudent level required. The danger in deploying this relatively light and reliable (sic) Chinese-oriented ABM system is going to be that pressures will develop to expand it to a heavy Soviet-oriented ABM system.

McNamara was strongly opposed to ABM deployments. So why go down this slippery slope? Because, as Halperin recounts, the Secretary of Defense “was not prepared to push the issue to the point of a break with the President” and because “the ABM was rapidly becoming a symbol of defense preparedness.” Since the Joint Chiefs unanimously supported deployments, as did defense-minded Members of Congress, Johnson and McNamara were in a bind. They didn’t want to destroy prospects for arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, but neither could they allow the Kremlin to pursue BMD without a rejoinder. Johnson and McNamara threaded this needle by devising the thin veneer of an anti-Chinese deployment.

BMD architectures are especially suitable to hidden agendas – not just because for bureaucratic, domestic, and geopolitical reasons, but also because their symbolism can far exceed their capabilities.

Comment [5]

The Obama Administration has replaced the ground-based missile defense architecture in Europe with a series of theater missile defenses centered on the Aegis system.

I think this makes a lot of sense, as regular readers know, on both technical and political grounds. SECDEF Bob Gates and General Cartwright, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a detailed briefing on the technical rationale for the shift to theater defenses:

Since [2006], two important developments have prompted a reassessment of our approach in Europe. First, a change in our intelligence community’s 2006 view of the Iranian threat: The intelligence community now assesses that the threat from Iran’s short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, such as the Shahab-3, is developing more rapidly than previously projected. This poses an increased and more immediate threat to our forces on the European continent, as well as to our allies.

On the other hand, our intelligence assessment also now assesses that the threat of potential Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities has been slower to develop than was estimated in 2006.

The second development relates to our technology. Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles. We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors.

These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.

We have also improved the Standard Missile 3, the SM-3, which has had eight successful flight tests since 2007. These tests have amply demonstrated the SM-3’s capability and have given us greater confidence in the system and its future.

Based on these two factors, we have now the opportunity to deploy new sensors and interceptors, in northern and southern Europe, that near-term can provide missile defense coverage against more immediate threats from Iran or others.

In the initial stage, we will deploy Aegis ships equipped with SM-3 interceptors, which provide the flexibility to move interceptors from one region to another if needed.

The second phase, about 2015, will involve fielding upgraded, land-based SM-3s. Consultations have begun with allies, starting with Poland and the Czech Republic, about hosting a land-based version of the SM-3 and other components of the system. Basing some interceptors on land will provide additional coverage and save costs compared to a purely sea-based approach.

A lot of “smart” people around town will adopt casual cynicism of saying this decision is really about Russia. Don’t believe them.

Gates described the decision as “driven … almost exclusively by the changed intelligence assessment and the enhanced technology.”

Those who would say the decision was about Russia have it backwards — for exhibits A and B check the quotes in stories by WaPo’s Michael D. Shear and Ann Scott Tyson and the NYT’s Peter Baker and Nicholas Kulish.

The Bush Administration placed a midcourse interceptor site and X-band radar within the former Warsaw Pact precisely to make a political point to the Russia, not because it provided the best defense. Aegis was always a better technical option.

Once the White House was no longer motivated to be churlish toward Moscow, that allowed technical considerations at the front of the debate. The fact that this may also open up a world of possibilities with Moscow (and I stress may) is nice, but is not the reason to put theater missile defenses into Europe. The reason is to give NATO allies a defense that works against a threat that exists.

What the Obama team has done is to take Russia out of the equation, not to put it in.

As regular readers know, I’ve long thought the Aegis-based architecture represented a much better solution to defending NATO allies against Iranian ballistic missiles. (See: How Many Aegis Ships To Defend NATO? June 12, 2007 and 4 Aegis Ships to Defend NATO July 16, 2008 ).

Aegis is “probably the one well-run missile defense program” in the US arsenal. Nice to see I am not alone.

Guess How Many Ships?

One little detail — the new architecture includes 2 or 3 Aegis ships in theater. Here is what Gates said:

But on a day-in, day-out basis, we’re looking probably for what we would call a 2.0 presence, maybe a 3.0 presence, so three ships at any given time in and around the Mediterranean and the North Sea, et cetera, to protect areas of interest, and then we would surge additional ships. And part of what’s in the budget is to get us a sufficient number of ships to allow us to have a global deployment of this capability on a constant basis, with a surge capacity to any one theater at a time.

Some of you may recall that General Obering tried to claim that 40 ships would be required, as a way of making more attractive the interceptor in Poland. I found that, um, hard to believe:

[MDA Director General Trey] Obering was obviously aware of the proposal, because his prepared statement included a long dismissal of the mobile systems that asserted the Navy would need 40 Aegis ships to defend Europe:

[snip]

When I read this, I thought 40?

As in FOUR ZERO? Is this like the biblical 40? As in “We don’t know how many, because we only have eyes for ground-based midcourse”?

The Aegis defended area or footprint is supposed to be much, much bigger than Obering’s remarks would suggest.

I suggested that 4 was a more reasonable number than 40.

MDA later admitted that 4 and even 2 were plausible numbers.

Now, here we are with a planned architecture of 2-3 ships (and some supplemental coverage). No wonder some people found Obering to be less than forthright. And, nice to see that those burnout velocity estimates weren’t so far off.

Comment [33]