THAAD Deployment

Aaron Stein 0:01

Look, a golf course, you know, there could be worse places to sit up there and man a THAAD battery.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:10

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron 0:26

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Bifurcatory Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:32

We don't have Scott, and the technology gods have cursed us.

Aaron 0:35

That's true. We had some recording issues, and Scott, you know, who donates a lot of his time to the Earth Control Podcast, had to be out today, so we're floundering around all by ourselves.

Jeffrey 0:48

Oh, my goodness. Speaking of floundering, we're also floundering for a topic because we really should talk about Thad, and I am tired of talking about North Korea. Yeah.

Aaron 0:58

As I say over and over again on this podcast, I think they like hearing us talk about them. We get some weird-ass downloads from North Korea.

Jeffrey 1:07

I'm so exhausted. So yes, we are going to do yet another North Korea episode.

Aaron 1:11

How could we not? I mean, they're in the news every single day. There's collective hysteria about them.

Jeffrey 1:17

We're going to focus on the THAAD deployment and the things North Korea can do in response. We'll try to keep it light and airy, but I'm tired. I am tired of talking about Kim Jong-un.

Aaron 1:34

Your day must be inundated with him and see this overwhelming mass of information that comes through you and your team and finding him wherever he is. I think he likes to troll you guys, too.

Jeffrey 1:47

It is a potent melange of... Real stories that are breaking, whether it's something the North Koreans do or a leak of something that the U.S. says the North Koreans are doing. Plus this just background level of nonsense.

Aaron 2:10

Yep. Yeah, no, that's a good way to put it. Background level of nonsense. I like that.

Jeffrey 2:16

Yeah, I mean, we were actually, we were debunking, Dave and I were debunking something yesterday, and we had some other thing that was due, and so we had to stop the debunking. And, like, I just had to say, you know what? This will still be stupid tomorrow. Like, we just, like, yes, someone is wrong on the internet.

We don't need to do that today.

Aaron 2:38

Yeah, no, probably not. But we have a golf course.

Jeffrey 2:41

We have a golf course?

Aaron 2:42

Yeah. For... It's on a dog leg, too, I think.

Jeffrey 2:51

That's right. So we thought we would talk about the U.S. deployment of the Theater High Altitude Area Defense. It's now Theater High Altitude Area Defense. It used to be Terminal, and they changed it.

Aaron 3:02

Do I have that right, Aaron? I cannot.

Jeffrey 3:04

No! Wait, maybe they've changed it to Terminal from Theater.

Aaron 3:07

That's what's happening. We talked about the submissive defense. It was Theater, now it's Terminal because Terminal Stage.

Jeffrey 3:14

Oh, yeah, that's right. All right. So the United States has deployed this particular missile defense in South Korea, and it's gotten a little bit of buzz because we got the first pictures of it. We had been watching the deployment here on the Middlebury Team OSINT ship. Side of things by looking at stuff going in and out of the parking lot in Planet Labs images.

But then someone released really nice ground truth pictures showing that they had actually set the batteries up on one of the fairways.

Aaron 3:47

Yeah, I think it was Joseph Dempsey at IISS who found it on the fourth hole of the lot, Sky Hill. And then some name I can't pronounce, Country Club in South Korea. Yeah.

Jeffrey 4:00

Yeah, you know, so we knew it was going to be at the golf course. The original site was going to be this spot nearby that actually has a surface-to-air missile system. But there was that weird public protest where people were worried about the radiation from the radar. I don't... I mean, people get weird. And so Latte coughed up this...

I think pretty looking golf course, which I guess wasn't making them that much money in a land swap with the South Korean government. You know, there's a video. Of somebody touring the golf course when it was still like a going concern.

Aaron 4:41

I think you mentioned this on a previous podcast. I just know where the US had to set up like down in Turkey when they were manning Patriot batteries. It's out in the middle of nowhere, like on top of a muddy hill. And so when I saw the images, I was like, look, a golf course. There could be worse places to sit up there and man a THAAD battery.

Jeffrey 5:00

Yeah, I mean, the clubhouse and all the accommodations look pretty nice. And really, all you need is a relatively flat piece of terrain on top of a hill.

Aaron 5:12

Yeah, you want it elevated.

Jeffrey 5:14

Golf courses have... Flat areas, and and this particular golf course is on top of a hill, and it's not terribly near anyone who's going to complain and and so, and so the the Latte Company made it happen for a small fee, right? You know, and I think that the fee came into question, you know as this plays out against the whole backdrop of what's going on inside of South Korea.

Yeah, well, I mean, Latte had a ton of trouble in China as a consequence of this, and we should talk about the Chinese response. But it isn't, yeah, clear to me that the man who is going to win, in all likelihood, the South Korean presidential election, he does not appreciate the THAAD battery.

Aaron 6:03

No, and that's fascinating, you know, because... I'm sitting downstairs. We have CNN playing on mute right to the left. It's like this juxtaposition of the CNN breaking news hysteria where everything is breaking news. The ticker never comes off the bottom. And then North Korea is dominating the news cycle, hence all of our podcasts. Then juxtapose that into South Korean domestic politics.

It's a hot button issue and the likely winner of the election does not want this thing there. So the threat perceptions are obviously different.

Jeffrey 6:36

Yeah, I find it's kind of interesting when we talk about extended deterrence, we sort of assume that South Korea is a hawkish pro-US country, which is true when conservatives get elected, but they don't always win, right? And they're probably not going to win this election, and it's going to be this guy, Moon Jae-in, who is... Not particularly hawkish and not particularly pro-American and trotted out a spokesman to refer to the THAAD deployment as very inappropriate.

Aaron 7:14

Yeah, I mean, as somebody who doesn't follow the domestic debate, is it something along the lines of, like, don't escalate the situation and that there are better ways to deal with this rather than, you know, using coercion or compelling to try and change North Korean behavior through the introduction of missile defense?

Jeffrey 7:35

Well, you know, I was talking to someone about this, and the way I think about it is this. Moon Jae-in was a human rights attorney, right? And so he is someone who... Came of age he's 64 right so he came of age in a South Korea that was not democratic right right he did his military service actually at the time of the 1976 axe murder incident Which I, I think is, is, is, is a kind of interesting thing, but the, you know, the point is he was a young man in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was one of the people who founded the the progressive South Korean newspaper that I can't speak Korean.

Hangria. We just call it the hanky. True art of control on fashion here. We do our best. Right, right, right, right, right, right. But, you know, so what I've often said is, if you put yourself in the mindset of someone who is a progressive democracy campaigner in South Korea in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the division of the Korean Peninsula looks artificial to you.

It's this thing that's imposed from the outside. And, yes, Kim Il-sung is a bad dude. But so is General Park and subsequently General Chun. Right. So I think that there is a kind of, I don't want to call it relativism, but I think if you're a democracy campaigner, right, you're sitting here looking at the situation and thinking like, Well, you know, I didn't like General Park and I didn't like Kim Il-sung.

And I'm glad that we got rid of General Park and General Chun and that we've now moved to a democracy and probably want the same thing to happen in North Korea. But I think they see themselves as being... Against the hostility, the mutual hostility that reinforced the military rule in South Korea and the Kim family in North Korea.

So it's kind of a pox on both houses. And when they look at the positive progressive changes that have happened in South Korea, You know, they see in that a campaign that is against the alliance with the United States and against militarism and against hostility toward North Korea. So I think that that helps inform that kind of progressive South Korean outlook, which, you know, doesn't mean they don't think North Korea is terrible and scary.

But I think they look at North Korea much the same way they looked at South Korea under military rule.

Aaron 10:29

Or maybe just a different mechanism to try and achieve the same end goal, which is maybe reunification or at least denuclearization in the shorter term. And through the introduction of this system and maybe hostilities is that you actually incentivize the building of more nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey 10:44

Yeah, so, you know, I think, I mean, none of this, I think, is to say that the, this is definitely not to say that he is going to be totally accommodating toward the North Koreans because, you know, he was very close to Noh Moo, I struggle with Korean names so much, Noh Moo Hun, right, who was the progressive candidate who committed suicide to avoid corruption charges.

Yeah.

Aaron 11:13

Well, there's that.

Jeffrey 11:15

Yeah. Progressive president. And, you know, they were positively disposed toward better relations with North Korea. But I mean, they weren't exactly pushovers. And I think that I think you'll see something similar with Moon at the same time. Right. They are understandably aggravated by the circumstances of the FAD deployment, which looks very much like it was designed to rush the system in before he could get elected.

Aaron 11:48

Yeah. And our own president sort of put his finger on the issue by weighing it.

Jeffrey 11:53

Right. Well, so there are the two pieces of that, right? One is the we want to put that in, the conservative government wanted that, and we wanted that in. And it was clear that Moon was going to win, and with Park being impeached, the U.S. government just sort of rushed everything into place.

Aaron 12:08

Yeah, well, Park was in deep, deep fecal material, and that was obvious, and so they did move fast.

Jeffrey 12:14

Right, well, because I think, you know, she was not, I mean, you're not going to make her look bad. She's done that already.

Aaron 12:23

She was in trouble, yeah.

Jeffrey 12:24

Yeah, and you're going to just do it fast and do it before Moon can get elected and stop it. But then, yeah, it doesn't help that Donald Trump comes along. I love, like, he must, I mean, God, he is an idiot.

Aaron 12:40

He's not the sharpest, no.

Jeffrey 12:43

I mean, can you imagine what it's like? So here the entire U.S. government moves heaven and earth to get this damn system into place before Moon can win the election, right? Because they're trying to hurry and get it in. Right, because it's going to be controversial. So it's like, no, no, ram it through. Like, ram it through like it's a terrible health care bill.

Got it. Just read the text. But, you know... And then, you know, Trump comes along like, oh, you're going to pay for it. Like, wait, what?

Aaron 13:14

You know, like, that is a good way to get it thrown out.

Jeffrey 13:18

You know, like, I mean, you've seen the pictures of who's the Mexican president who keeps telling Trump Mexico is not going to pay for your f***ing wall?

Aaron 13:27

It's Vicente Fox.

Jeffrey 13:29

Yeah, and poses like flipping off Trump. Yeah. So, like, walking into, like, South Korea and saying, oh, by the way, you're going to pay for this missile defense system that, you know, is despised by the front runner for your presidency. It's like, yeah, probably not a smart move. Shut up about the THAAD system.

Aaron 13:52

And it's the multi-headed foreign policy again. It prompts the more sort of the axis of adults step in and say, you know, you didn't really mean that, guys. You know, then we move on from the debate. But... Yeah, I mean – Well, right.

Jeffrey 14:03

And was it McMaster who then went to South Korea and was like, no, no, no, you're not going to have to pay for that.

Aaron 14:09

Exactly. It's a multi-headed foreign policy. And I think it also comes against the backdrop of China is trying to tweak – it's not just us who are playing domestic politics with this. It's China tries to put its finger on the pulse and use this to sort of interject itself into this issue and then South Korean politics.

Jeffrey 14:30

Right. Well, you know, I've thought long and hard about how we should explain the nature of China's objection to THAAD. Because as we've discussed on a number of podcasts, the technical objections just don't seem very compelling.

Aaron 14:42

No.

Jeffrey 14:43

You know, the radar does not add capabilities that are not already in other countries available. I mean, it's just there is nothing about that radar that should be more threatening to them.

Aaron 14:56

Well, I think we should back up and say that their chief objection is over the radar. That's what they said.

Jeffrey 15:02

Which is, I think, a good talking point because it sounds substantive and moves the conversation into a technical enough place that most people are like, yeah, okay. But everybody we know who looks at radars thinks it's silly, and I can't understand the objection. I actually think the issue is that This is the most vulnerable point for U.S. efforts to promote missile defenses in Northeast Asia because South Korea is politically vulnerable because the population is not enthusiastic about the system.

And so it's not that this system is particularly threatening to China that prompted China to throw a big fit. It's that this was an area where I think the Chinese calculated they could get a win. So basically, they're investing in low-hanging fruit. It's not the most threatening. It's the easiest for them to beat.

Aaron 15:57

Yeah, and it's not hard to figure out why they would think that. Again, because the likely winner of the election doesn't want it. And so you could foresee a sort of glide path away from what would be ostensibly a diplomatic defeat of the United States.

Jeffrey 16:11

Right, which I think just would be inherently valuable for the Chinese to be able to show that they can involve themselves in and muck things up for the United States.

Aaron 16:20

Yeah, I mean, what's wrong with that? I mean, ultimately, that is good for them.

Jeffrey 16:24

Which, by the way, is why I think all this talk about putting nuclear weapons in South Korea is insane.

Aaron 16:32

Oh, it's beyond insane. I mean, it's so short-sighted. It's so silly. There's no thinking going on here when this happens. You know, there's just no thinking. It's sort of knee-jerk, driven by hysteria that, again, that is entirely domestic in our own focus. It's our own domestic politics.

Jeffrey 16:53

Yeah, I often think, I mean, this reference is getting a little dated, but I was in South Korea right after the so-called hamburger riots. Do you remember these?

Aaron 17:05

Remind me.

Jeffrey 17:06

So there was a South Korean band. On USB oh yes I do remember these riots but keep going right which I guess was after a an outbreak of mad cow disease yeah and so I think that that ban was reversed in 2008 and people in South Korea were Freaked out. And so there were these enormous protests, hundreds of thousands of people protesting the resumption of beef imports.

And so I have always said, like, if bringing US beef into South Korea got 100,000 people into the streets of Seoul, like, what do you think announcing that US nuclear weapons are coming back would do?

Aaron 18:09

Yeah, no, it's a good point. I don't know. Maybe they'll welcome them. I'm just kidding. No, it would obviously cause a big, big counter push, you know, probably similar to, to some of the protests we saw in the 1980s in European countries. And again, that would be a net benefit for China. Yeah. If you just sort of think through it.

Jeffrey 18:30

So, I mean, that's exactly the point is I, I think that while the Chinese would not like the idea of us nuclear weapons in South Korea, and they would genuinely be alarmed by that

Aaron 18:42

They would, I think, have a propaganda field day.

Jeffrey 18:46

And I suspect trying to do that would probably do more harm to the alliance and in the end end up emboldening the Chinese and the North Koreans far more than it would do anything for deterrence.

Aaron 18:57

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, it ultimately doesn't solve the problem. I mean, you still have a nuclearized North Korea and then it's up to do there. It would ultimately be to bolster What we would think of as response, absence, and deterrence. But it's largely framed domestically here within the context that it would help the South Koreans.

And I think it depends on the winds of domestic politics.

Jeffrey 19:27

Well, you know, I actually teach this in my class on U.S. decision-making about nuclear weapons in Northeast Asia because we look at the unsuccessful effort by the Carter administration to remove nuclear weapons from South Korea in the 1970s and then the successful effort by the Bush administration in 1991. And, you know, one thing that appears is, and no one ever gets this right.

In 1991, the reason the weapons were relatively easy to take out is the South Koreans wanted them gone. And in the current telling of the story, it's more like, oh, we wanted to take them out. And, you know, we like patted the South Koreans on the head and made them feel better. And they accepted, you know, our wise decision.

But in fact, it was the opposite, which is we did not want to take them out. And the South Koreans were like, no, you are going to take them out. And we made a decision to, how is it that Keith Richards describes it? Walk before they make me run. Right. And so we forget that there is this much more complicated relationship.

Now that the weapons are out, the only people who complain are the people who wanted them to stay. And so we listen to those people and we hear that squeaky wheel. But we have forgotten that there were a pretty hefty number of people who wanted them gone. And I would think that the current debate over that illustrates just how strong that view would be.

Aaron 21:00

Yeah, and I think now that the system is in on the fourth hole, you've seen – I've got to actually look.

Jeffrey 21:09

Is it the fourth hole? It is.

Aaron 21:11

I have Dempsey's Twitter feed open. I had the tweets pulled up in preparation for the recording of this podcast. So I reminded myself where it is. It's the fourth.

Jeffrey 21:21

I've really had to go through a grieving process with Dempsey to go from like feeling competitive with him to accepting that he is really, really good at this to just now genuinely adoring how good he is at this stuff. He's very good. He's very fast. He's the best.

Aaron 21:35

But, you know, there's – I think the Washington Times directed me and I think you to a Congressional Research Service report that points out something that we've talked about on the podcast before as well but I think it's worth bringing back up again. Is that North Koreans aren't going to take this lying down, is that they have capabilities to try and defeat the system.

Jeffrey 21:55

Yeah, the North Koreans have some options. And by the way, before we launch into the things that North Koreans can do, I should say, I support deploying the THAAD system. I think they need to, to deal with some of the countermeasures, at least. But I don't have a problem with the THAAD system.

Aaron 22:13

No, I don't either. I think it's important to talk through some of the counterarguments to that, but I ultimately think it's a good idea.

Jeffrey 22:18

Yeah, but it's not a magic wand.

Aaron 22:21

No. Well, you do need to. We've talked about it on a previous podcast. It's blind in the rear, and the North Koreans keep shooting off SLBMs, or at least testing what would be an SLBM capability.

Jeffrey 22:34

Oh, and we should say, I mean, I hate the way the news media covers CRS reports.

Aaron 22:39

Yeah, I mean, that's partly CRS's fault.

Jeffrey 22:43

Well, I think that's Congress's fault for not letting CRS release the reports.

Aaron 22:47

Fair. It's Congress's fault. Blame Congress.

Jeffrey 22:49

These reports are largely unclassified. I mean, there are people who have clearances, but most of the reports are unclassified. And it isn't like, I mean, I have a ton of respect for analysts at CRS, and partly that's a function of many of them being my friends.

Aaron 23:05

They're good. Their reports are good.

Jeffrey 23:08

Including Paul Kerr, who was an early blogger at Arms Control Wonk.

Aaron 23:11

That's right. Drinking buddy of mine in Vienna.

Jeffrey 23:14

Ah, Paul's the best. So, like, they're very smart and they're very talented, but it's not like CRS has its own satellites.

Aaron 23:23

No, they launch a call from open source.

Jeffrey 23:26

Yeah. So while the analytics skill is very, very good, to see it reported as, you know, a secret U.S. government report, it's like, well, meh.

Aaron 23:36

Meh. That's... Probably not fair.

Jeffrey 23:38

No. But yeah, so there's a report that Mary Beth Nikitin, an alumni of the Monterey Institute, now the Middlebury Institute, and Stephen Hildreth wrote, notes that when we look at North Korean missile tests, as we've discussed in the pod, they got some countermeasures.

Aaron 23:59

Yeah, and just quickly, I mean, THAAD set up to shoot down Let's say it's to hit missiles that are traveling faster than Patriot, a little higher, but it obviously has limitations because missiles come in really fast, or they can't.

Jeffrey 24:16

Right. So the North Koreans are practicing lofting, so they shoot things straight up, so they come straight down. So you basically get a long-range reentry speed, but a short-range missile, right? So that stresses THAAD because the thing's coming in fast, but also because it's screaming down at this really high angle, and so THAAD has to shoot nearly straight up.

They're practicing launching multiple missiles at the same time so that the battle management software for the system has to deal with a whole bunch of tracks. By the way, I was playing Missile Command over the weekend, you know, the legacy Atari game. I do, yeah. It is a perfect illustration of the problem, right? Because you are the battle management software.

Aaron 24:56

Right, you get overwhelmed when there's too many coming in. If they come too fast, you can't keep up. Right, right.

Jeffrey 25:00

It's not that you don't... I think maybe you are limited in number of interceptors, but I never hit my interceptor limit. I get overwhelmed software-wise before that. And then there is the other stuff. So yeah, we talked about submarines shooting at the THAAD system from behind the radar, which only has a 120-degree forward look. And I'm really interested in radar blackout attacks.

Aaron 25:27

So when we talked about this in the pre-pod prep session, I was uncomfortable talking about this because... I think – what's the Gaffney Institute, Frank Gaffney, the Islamophobe guy who has links in – Center for Security Policy. He got really hot and bothered I think over EMT.

Jeffrey 25:48

Also known as the Center for Sharia Paranoia.

Aaron 25:51

I was about to say the Center for Islamophobia and General Bigotry. But he's been raised in a stench as a lot of people do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 26:24

Which is can you ionize the atmosphere so that communications blackout and that radars don't work for some period of time? And actually the answer with Starfish Prime is it was a really big explosion and it wasn't everything we'd hoped for. Yeah. Whoops. Yeah. And as I should also say that radar blackout attacks don't work as well for X-band radars of the kind that that has.

They can sort of deal with the attenuation a little bit better. So I don't know that a radar blackout attack from the North Koreans would be super successful. It's a study I think we'd like to do here. But just the point is there's a lot of stuff North Korea can do to defeat a single missile defense system.

Aaron 27:10

Yeah, and CRS pointing that out shouldn't be news to anybody. Right.

Jeffrey 27:16

I mean, it's smart and correct of them to point it out.

Aaron 27:22

Oh, yes. Of course. It's good analytical skill, as we stated at the outset. But it's nothing that should focus such attention as if these problems aren't well known, even amongst advocates of missile defense.

Jeffrey 27:38

Although, you know, getting the Washington Times to note that missile defenses aren't magic wands that are perfect.

Aaron 27:47

It's a baby step. And it did direct you and I to the CRS report. Otherwise, we wouldn't see it because they don't put it out. Congress. Yeah, that's true.

Jeffrey 27:54

Yeah. CRS, you should be allowed to put your wonderful reports out.

Aaron 28:01

Yeah. Is that a happy note?

Jeffrey 28:03

I think that's a happy note. Everybody should know that in this era of partisanship and stupidity, the Congressional Research Service remains, I think, a fine institution and more people should know what good work they do.

Aaron 28:19

I think that that's a good place to leave it.

Jeffrey 28:22

Hey, Aaron, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. And listeners, thank you for joining us. If you like the podcast, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps promote the word about our little endeavor. And if you really like the podcast, consider making a donation through our Patreon page. For just three bucks a month, you can go ahead and become a member of our Slack channel, which is where all the really cool conversations about nerdy, wonky arms control stuff are going down.

In any event, thank you for listening.