The Obama administration has an opportunity to turn its decision — which so far seems tentative and even reluctant — into a unilateral display of U.S. strength and confidence, and thereby seize the high ground on arms reduction while warning one of the world’s most recalcitrant proliferators that the game will soon be over. Hopefully, this is an opportunity the president and his advisers will seize.
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OK- I can buy into this scenario, that it was objectively the right thing to do, I just don’t think that we’ve seen any indication that the Obama Foreign Policy Team is capable of turning this into a win. Their reason and their off the cuff alternatives bespeak a certain desperation to get some props from Russia and Iran.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
@Barbara – I don’t suppose that you’ve read the Pentagon fact sheet about the decision.
It talks about putting up defenses closer to Iran as a counter to the shorter ranged missiles that they actually have instead of the ICBMs that they don’t have.
Those shorter ranged missiles are the ones that worry everyone in the ME.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
@Barbara: As I’m sure you suspected, but just to underline the fact, I put this CotD up because it sounds such a contrary note amidst the chorus of denunciations from the right, including at the Corner – like someone screeching WE ARE DEVO! in the middle of the Hallelujah chorus you tubed a few posts ago.
I agree that, given the Barack track record so far, it’s hard to have much confidence. Nichols does make me want to look before I leap too far out on the limb, if you know what I mean.
September 17th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Yes, this was posted in the NRO site in fact, so even amongst their denuciations they put up a credible contra position, to their credit.
I am suspicious as is Barbara so that is my first inclination. My bigger worry is more how Poland, etc. feel about it. Then this becomes a backstabbing of them and bowing to Russia that concerns me. We don’t know what other provisions have been bandied about behind the scenes to placate their concerns, but Obama’s history does not lend us to consider that as a possibility. I also want to watch and see what Russia does over the next few months. Even if Obama got something, they will be slow to show it so as to save face. If that is the fact, then hooray Obama. I also want to see where the short range and medium range interceptors are going to stop the capability that Iran does have on a shorter range missile.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@JEM – Yes: contrast with Reagan, who used SDI in the midst of a HUGE chorus of “can’t work” to excellent effect diplomatically and strategically against Russia. With this missile defense, the Russians have turned the tables. Were they really worried about THE MISSILES (that’s for you, fuster): no. They were concerned about American troop presence in Poland. Poland should be, by culture and all that is good and geographic, one of our great allies in Eastern Europe. BO consistently shows the value of a degree in International relations by the way he ignores that stuff.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
@fuster – Read that in the WSJ at 6 this morning.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
@Barbara – Then you understand that this is a measure against Iranian missiles and not Russian ones and that the Poles concerns about Russia were tied to this only to the extent that the Poles were demanding Patriot missiles and extra NATO bases in exchange for allowing the US to install this stuff in Poland.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Poland knows if we have a presence there, they don’t need to fear Russia again. Remember, Poland and Czech have been overrun, conquered, split, etc, often in the last 100 years. Russia won’t attack us, they aren’t that dumb.
September 17th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
The Iranians were able to launch a satellite, so their long-range capability is not that far away.
I wonder if the background ofr this decision was a conversation with the military alon gthe lines of, “We can afford either this or that. Which do you want now?” We will have the quicker, cheaper capability, that doesn’t mean its long-term effectiveness against both Russia and Iran won’t be less than the slower, more expensive one.
September 17th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
@Margo – They’re still pretty far away from reaching us and it’s said that it’ll take years of test flights.
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_10/Mistry
September 17th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
fuster,
An interesting article, but containing a couple very broad conditional statements in it’s final conclusion paragraph. And it is, of course, based on publicly available information about the Iranian effort, which presumably is being conducted in some secrecy.
Per Wikipedia the U.S. successfully launched an Atlas ICBM within 12 years of inheriting German technology for a 200 mile range rocket, and that was by dint of working to develop new technologies. All that technology is now 52 years old.
I’m rather surprised the Iranians haven’t cracked the problem by now. To think they might break out anytime doesn’t seem very far fetched.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
@Sully – You’re not gonna get much more or much better info. (sans JED)
I was pretty taken with the idea that the Iranians put in the development effort in the medium-range stuff. Possibly plausible to me because that’s the stuff I find most worrisome.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
@Sully – however old the technology is, unless the Iranians are getting critical and reliable help from someone who’s already done the deeds, there are numerous technical challenges, especially for multi-stage transatmospheric delivery. Even if they were getting the help, they’d have to demonstrate the results just to satisfy themselves and the world that they really did possess a threat/deterrent.
It’s all well and good, and arguably prudent, to entertain worst case scenarios, but, from my reading, what the article fuster linked says regarding India, Brazil, and North Korea and the slowness and uncertainty of their work is much more typical than diverse “sprint to strategic threat” scenarios that you occasionally read about.
It’s also true that the history of our own intelligence estimates on nuclear and missile capabilities have been only slightly better than Ouija board work, and have frequently led to wild and embarrassing miscalculations. The penchant among some otherwise rational, thoughtful, and well-informed people on the right – Gaffney, Pike, Glick, some but not all of our old Contentionista friends – to buy into and hype various theoretical threats and treat them as just over the horizon is annoying and I believe counterproductive. They sometimes come across like apocalyptic cultists always prediction TEOTWAWKI by some date certain…
I certainly don’t include JED in this group, btw. I’ve yet to see her indulge in hype of this type: She instead sticks to the actual political ramifications of sometimes merely notional threats. She does have a current piece up at NZ Contentions that maybe we should link to, maybe after I get back from walking the dogs. You might, if you dare, disagree with some of the assessments, but at least they don’t turn on IRAN TO LAUNCH SEABORNE EMP NUCLEAR ATTACK BY NEXT MARCH scenarios.
September 17th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
All BS, Mr. Nichols. I won’t rehash my whole Not-Zombie contentions argument here (feel free to read it for yourselves), but of course OSlash is wrong here.
The argument that we’re going to stop the planned NMD installation to put assets closer to Iran is, I’m sorry, pure and unadulterated bull feces. We don’t need to stop the planned NMD installation in order to do that. The speciousness of this argument is breathtaking. People are only buying it because they have no clue whatsoever what they are talking about.
Look at a map of the globe. Find Vandenberg AFB in California, and Fort Greeley in Alaska (near Fairbanks). Draw a big arc facing west, south, and north from an axis between these two sites. This is the coverage we have with our ground-based, always-ready national missile defense system.
What the alert observer will notice right away is that there is no coverage of the EAST coast of North America by this system. Ding ding ding ding ding!!!!! Give that observer a kewpie doll. That coverage, ladies and gentlemen, is what your president has just announced we will not have.
There are a number of good points to make, and you can read them at NZC. But this one is one of the biggest. On the fudged and slurred, carefully undefined mumble-mumble excuse that “Iran’s not moving toward having a long-range missile ‘so awful darn fast,’ and no, we’re not going to tell you what that means,” OSlash has decided not to complete the NMD system for North America.
Betcha didn’t know that. I know for sure OSlash didn’t tell you that.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
@J.E. Dyer – We don’t need to stop the NMD installation for that is right. We need to stop the NMD installation because we don’t need the NMD installation.
Obama and co. did tell us that.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
CKM — I also honor you as not being among those who fetishize achieving a sort of homeostasis in predictive commentary. This leads too often to hedging it about with so many caveats that it becomes meaningless.
The thing about the estimate of how fast Iran is moving to a long-range ballistic missile capability is that there has been no change to the key estimate that Iran’s ballistic missiles could range Europe as early as 2015. Citing people making vague statements about “Iran not being there yet” is shifting the argument. No one says Iran IS “there yet.” What the prediction has been is that Iran COULD “be there” by 2015. The latest estimates from both governnment and civilian analysts say exactly that.
Here’s the other thing. Fielding an anti-missile system with the capability we have long outlined for our layered missile defense concept requires continuing to work on the program between now and when Iran could have long-range missiles. What OSlash has announced is that we will not do that. He has announced a major change in our policy, not just a decision against a particular installation.
Not putting the missile defense sites in Europe, and focusing instead on a deployment concept for existing tactical capabilities, IS a decision to forego a mid-course, extra-atmospheric intercept capability against long-range missiles that come west at NATO/North America, from Iran or Russia or Russian submarines in the North Atlantic.
Who here is convinced we don’t really need a long-range missile intercept capability to protect the East coast? Show of hands, please.
Who here thinks Iran’s missile program is the only thing on earth that might pose an over-the-horizon threat to Europe or the US East coast?
This is an indefensible decision.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
fuster — please explain, in your own words, why we don’t need the NMD installation in Europe.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
@J.E. Dyer –
It don’t work good.
September 17th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
Was this installation designed to protect the US east coast against missile strikes launched by Russian forces? Is it even possible that it could serve to do that, even in the event that Russia strikes from it’s own soil?
September 17th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
@fuster – though I’m more willing – maybe because I just don’t know enough – to entertain your side of the argument, I’d say that a system that “works bad” might still be very useful if it introduces a significant element of uncertainty into a potential aggressor’s calculations, and what we lose is potentially much more than the particular physical structures and capabilities of the installation. Proponents sometimes disclaimed political justifications – that the installations concretized a commitment to the defense of former East Block countries and a constriction of the Russian sphere of influence – but the truth of the matter might be something very different.
In other words, the Russian arguments against the NMD installations might have been right, properly understood, and those might have constituted some of the best justifications for going forward – regardless of how you judge the potential Iranian threat.
My personal guess is that the NMD would very likely not have turned out to have been useful, or, to put it differently, that we probably won’t miss NMD much in any future confrontation with Iran.
What we don’t know, but which informed critics of the decision have tended to discount to near-zero, is how much more there is to the story than the headline – not just what secret deals we might have made, but what we expect to happen to the Iranian program sometime between now and whenever.
The other thing we don’t know is whether this is a preview of an eventual reversal on Afghanistan or in some part a predicate for the escalation that McChrystal and Petraeus are said to be requesting.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
@fuster – No.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Let me amend that: Supposedly not aimed to deal with any Russian threat, and, JED may differ, not able or likely to impinge meaningfully on a calculation involving nuclear warfare toe to toe with the Russkis.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
But JED – no one has been making the argument that the installations are aimed potentially at Russia except the Russians. I’m skeptical for other reasons regarding the system as planned, but if I fully accepted the implications of your argument, then wouldn’t I have to accept that the Russians were even more right than they typically claimed about the “real” purpose of NMD and its destabilizing potential under prior understandings of the strategic balance?
September 17th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I just fail to understand Dyer’s argument here.
She knows that is doesn’t work well and also knows that that what it doesn’t work well against doesn’t exist.
In reality, her main point is that she thinks that we’ve abandoned all efforts at research and development of an improved or better missile defense system.
This, though, seems to point out the lack of a point in building this thing.
But she doesn’t tell us that.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Actually, it was never asserted that the NMD site in Europe “is not aimed” to deal with any Russian threat, in the sense of not having that capability. It in fact quite obviously would have had that capability, which is why Russia has opposed it with such determination. What Bush said was that the political intention for installing it was not to interdict Russian missiles.
I always thought that was a weak-hand way to approach Russia’s concerns. It was rhetoric of convenience, and in a sense we are paying the price for that today, since so many Americans have no idea that the European site was to be Site No 3 in our national missile defense, and was to be capable of defending us against a generic threat, on a vector toward the US East coast. That generic threat could easily include missiles from Russia. Indeed, the position of the interceptor launch site in Poland would have been better suited for intercepting missiles launched from Russia than for intercepting missiles launched from Iran, unless the latter were aimed at Scandinavia.
If you do the research yourself you will find that this is 100% accurate. It’s not a matter of opinion or interpretation, but of geometry, geography, and easily-researched documentation of the intentions of the layered global missile defense concept our SDI program has been working off of. The technical ground truth here does matter.
The testing and development of the high-altitude ground-based interceptors that form the core of the NMD has not been as extensive as that of either Aegis or Patriot. Both tactical systems intercept missiles at lower altitudes, and closer to the intended target. They have gotten the lion’s share of the testing, and have reached the program goals faster than the NMD GBI missiles.
This does not, however, mean the GBI “doesn’t work.” That’s a biased political characterization, not a programmatic or technical one. GBI has not met all its program goals yet, but then, it wasn’t expected to by now either. It HAS hit to kill, and with continued testing and improvement would be almost certain to achieve the same success Aegis has. Obama has, however, decided to “shift our policy” to emphasizing tactical intercept of shorter-range missiles. He has issued no assurances that we will continue testing and developing a high-altitude intercept capability. The latter is the only capability we can establish that is ready on-call 24/7, and has a hope of being comprehensive — everything else requires warning, and tactical response and deployment to specific areas where coverage will be limited.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
CKM — re your #23, see my last. The Russians have been right all along that the East European missile site COULD intercept missiles launched from Russia. No honest (or knowledgeable) commentator has denied that. Bush never said the interceptors couldn’t interdict Russian missiles, he said they weren’t intended to.
I don’t defend that rhetorical or diplomatic approach. But what I’ve just said is an accurate picture of reality, even if it’s news to some folks herre.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
But JED, there’s a difference between being able to intercept some missiles launched from Russia and from being able to intercept enough of them to alter a strategic calculation favorably. If they COULD achieve the latter, if they even had a chance of achieving the latter within decades, then that would represent a new chapter in our strategic relations with the Russkis (and others).
September 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
… and so we get to “first strike capability” and “overwhelm the defense” and lots of other late Cold War SDI-related arguments, without the Reagan proposition of pivoting from a shared SDI capability to a nuclear-free world.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
@J.E. Dyer – It HAS hit to kill very rarely, very, very rarely.
Is 10% kill rate about right?
September 17th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
(having trouble believing that I’m discussing nuclear missile defense with a spring-tailed green bat and an uppity frog – I’m beginning to realize how Alice might have felt in Wonderland)
September 17th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
@CK MacLeod – Tsars are lucky to get jobs as waiters in third-rate Parisian cat houses. Take what ya can get.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
CKM — have you read John Bolton’s book and its chapters about negotiating the Treaty of Moscow with Russia in 2001-2? It’s a good primer. The Bush administration operated for eight years on the assumption that national missile defense was meaningful in the way you imply: that in its fully-realized incarnation, it would, precisely, alter the strategic calculation in our favor.
Bush’s unwillingness to give up that perspective on SDI was the reason Russia made exceptions to the START drawdowns intended to be encapsulated in the Treaty of Moscow. (The Treaty of Moscow was the new basis for strategic relations with Russia, after Bush officially repudiated MAD with the abrogation of the old ABM treaty.) Russia elected, in signing the Treaty of Moscow, NOT to draw its ballistic missile inventory down as far as originally negotiated for START II; and the reason for that was that Bush would not relinquish the concept of SDI actually protecting the US and our allies from a Russian first strike.
It was always a diplomatic fiction that the question of interdicting Russian missiles was really moot, since us and Russia are BFFs now in this wunnerful post-Cold War thang we got goin’ on. But Russia played along with that fiction enthusiastically. Bush never said, “This NMD site could intercept your missiles,” and Putin never said, “That matters because we might want to launch some at you.”
The tacit acknowledgment that a fully-realized SDI concept would alter the strategic calculation in our favor has been out there for years. Bush, like Reagan, offered repeatedly to share our SDI technology with Russia. That would basically make both of our arsenals redundant. But it’s not the case that either longstanding US policy or George W. Bush was deceptive about the ultimate purpose of SDI. American pundits have not been good at covering this very esoteric area. The thought that’s in your head has been out there for quite a while. It may be that you don’t agree with the policy of altering the strategic calculation — but the prospect of doing so was justified eight years ago when the ABM treaty was abrogated.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
fuster – “She knows that is doesn’t work well and also knows that that what it doesn’t work well against doesn’t exist.”
J.E. can well speak for herself, but you’re being ridiculous on this point. I don’t like that we’ve become so slow and bureaucratic and tentative as we have; but it’s a simple fact that complex military installations like the NMD now take several years to build, test, implement, etc. So the threat of today is not an issue. The system is designed to handle the system that may exist in several years.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
@Sully – I’m all for putting the money into developing that system so that, if possible, it does exist.
I’m real clear on the concept of lead time, but
If you build it, it will work
is not best practice.
September 17th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
@J.E. Dyer – No, I haven’t read John Bolton’s book, but have just ordered one from Amazon.
The thing is, JED, a “fully realized SDI capacity” – close enough to perfect (nothing else will do) defense against nuclear missile attack – isn’t taken anywhere that that counts politically as a near- or near-middle term potential, mainly because it’s not considered likely to be feasible in that time frame, if ever.
I suspect that it’s largely for for that reason that nowhere publically other than right here at ZC anyone is holding a discussion about this decision in that context. Virtually the entirety of the (rest of the) discussion is instead about 1) the complex of Iran-related concerns, 2) US credibility and relations vis-a-vis EE, the Russian sphere of influence, 3) US interests worldwide to whatever extent they may be shaped or influenced by perceptions of 1 and 2.
For instance, when missile defense was discussed during the presidential campaign, it was never from the perspective of “one day, we’ll have a shield against a first strike.” In prior years, in public political discourse, NMD was also justified in terms of protection against rogue nation or mistaken launch, with true strategic defense at most a hazy “someday” kind of notion. If a commitment to the real shield was involved on any level, it wasn’t a political commitment: If people like I assume yourself were pursuing that commitment, it was virtually a secret. I mean, the idea of a nuclear war-winning strategy being “esoteric” already tells you that “what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Call me old-fashioned, but in a democratic republic shouldn’t the people be consulted on such matters? It’s easy to blame Ø for failing to inform us about what he’s giving up, but don’t Bush and other proponents of the system deserve an at least equal share of blame for not having taught us – including even Ø himself – to value it?
There’s of course the related but independent question of whether or not pursuit of full SDI is desirable and doable given the available military and political countermeasures. If we can’t discuss and decide it openly, then a second argument might be whether pursuit of it is compatible with democracy.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Actually, that’s not too far from the ONLY practice that has made cutting edge nuclear and rocket technology possible. Up to a few months before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, they weren’t 100% sure what the surface of the Moon was made of, and whether it would support the vehicles. Or look at the Manhattan Project, or all of the difficulties the superpowers and others had actually producing workable ICBMs and related systems. The only way to find out what can be done is to do it, with some things.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:14 am
@CK MacLeod – We’ve been testing it quite a bit.
I don’t know how many times we would have sent men to the Moon if they didn’t succeed in coming back. I suspect after a couple of failures, we would have reverted to test flights without committing more people.
Where are the people anywhere in the military, government or industry saying that it works or should be working soon?
September 18th, 2009 at 12:28 am
@fuster – The reason we didn’t know fersure that the Moon wasn’t made of green cheese until a few months before Apollo 11 landed was that the the long series of unmanned ships sent up to investigate failed one after another. I don’t remember the exact number. Initial US efforts to put up a satellite were famously humiliating, but the same things happened at many different stages of every aspect of the space program and related ballistic missile programs.
In the late ’50s, during the time that the CIA was chillingly informing us of what JFK eventually called the “missile gap,” the Russkis had at most a handful of operational missiles, and didn’t really know whether they would work (probably not) because they still hadn’t mastered re-entry heat shielding for the warheads. They kept the secret and benefited mightily from the perception that they were so far ahead of us. It also had tremendous influence on our politics and policy.
I highly recommend ROCKET MEN, published this year – information-dense as opposed to an authorial performance, but a very interesting view of the space program as third main element of our Cold War strategy, with a heavy emphasis on the technical challenges. I’ve been a space fan my entire life, but never realized what a close-run thing Apollo 11 was, and how much of it was first-time-ever, no choice but to get it right.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:47 am
“It” “works” – whatchu talkin about, Willis? There are multiple systems, multiple “layers,” multiple performance measures.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Craig Nelson? OK
I ordered it up just now.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:55 am
@CK MacLeod Ah. Willis was talking bout the NMD system that was going into Europe.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:06 am
@fuster – cool, I hope you’ll have a book report for the class – or at least tell me what you think.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:29 am
@CK MacLeod – I’m usually too shy to offer an opinion, but I’ll make an exception after reading this.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:37 am
CK writes:
During the recent campaign, both candidates hoped to mollify the Russians. But I thought from its inception the goal of NMD was to defend against missile attack, from whoever attacks. Wasn’t that understood? As far as raising it as an issue during the election, Obama certainly didn’t state his opionion that it should be cancelled.
Its incompleteness as a defense doesn’t make it worthless. Making an enemy uncertain about success, or making an enemy see as SDI did to the Soviet Union that an arms race has entered another dimension into which they cannot afford to go is valuable.
I think the big factor here is the miserable diplomacy. The US is about to enter talks with Iran–at Iran’s stipulation, not about its nuclear program. Russia has hastened to support Iran’s position, and has made it clear that it considers itself entitled to hegemony over Georgia, Ukraine, and perhaps Poland and the Czech Republic. So why give up a bargaining chip right before talks begin?
September 18th, 2009 at 8:23 am
CKM — one did have to follow SDI and NMD from a rather wonkish perspective to have an in-depth understanding of all these things. I do think Margo is right, that there has been a recognition from the beginning that the NMD layer of SDI is, precisely, intended to defend the US against a Russian (or Chinese, or any other) strategic missile salvo.
You’re quite right that the whole issue hasn’t been discussed by politicians in those terms since early in Bush’s first term. Not loudly and often, anyway. I heard three different GOP senators on Fox yesterday, articulating exactly what I’ve outlined here (but more briefly and generically). But there’s no momentum with that message, and hasn’t been since the MSM ceased lamenting the abrogation of the ABM treaty — because 9/11 took center stage.
Bush actually outlined very clearly what the layered defense concept of SDI was about. Eight years ago. SDI and the concept of repudiating MAD were big topics for a few months. My own opinion, on why the clarity on this has declined in the public debate since then, is that it’s a combination of a seminal shift in the American perception of what the threat is — terror-sponsoring states — along with the national policy that we “need Russia” as a GWOT partner. The multiple black eyes national intelligence has received since 9/11 haven’t helped either. Too many discussions spin off into either a rehashing of the arguments on that head, or a layman’s poorly-informed misgivings about what intelligence “knows” or “doesn’t know.”
But that Russian missile arsenal is still out there, as is China’s. With North Korea and Iran doing all the missile R&D they can manage, we can’t say this is a declining threat. As Sully points out, you target your own R&D on the threats of the future, and there is no basis for assuming away the threat of long-range missiles, or the need for a national missile defense to protect our homeland.
September 18th, 2009 at 10:52 am
All I know is that whenever I hear the words “seize the high ground” in a political context I gulp and reach for my ear plugs.
September 18th, 2009 at 10:52 am
An Oh BTW on SDI: its capabilities envisioned for the mid-2010s are not all it’s ever supposed to have. No, what we could install and have working by 2015 doesn’t represent comprehensive coverage, by any means. But it’s an initial network, one that, at least under presidents from Reagan to Bush, was intended to be improved and expanded over time.
The implication of critics that we should somehow turn out a perfect, comprehensive system without ever having to develop and test its components, or deploy it initially and evaluate performance and doctrine, is ludicrous. Nothing ever happens that way. This is the same old human world we’ve inhabited for millennia.
There were people passionately opposed to deploying a lot of weapon systems in the past, and those whose opposition is primarily political always use the same old arguments: it “doesn’t work” and we “don’t need it.” No one else here would remember that these arguments were used against deployment of the Tomahawk cruise missile in the fleet, in the 1980s. And there was indeed a time when the Tomahawk didn’t work nearly as well as it does now (and it’s dated technology today). And if you didn’t think we needed to be able to prevail in a theater conflict with the Soviet Union, you could argue that “we didn’t need it.”
But the buried political premise was the important element of that argument — as it is with arguing against NMD today. If one’s political premise is that the US should not be able to defeat an incoming missile salvo and avoid being struck, then no SDI/NMD proposal is ever good enough.
September 18th, 2009 at 11:05 am
You guys have a much different sense of the discussion than I do.
Here’s David Satter at the Corner yesterday:
The above is, to me, a much more familiar version of the argument. Can either of you point me to a major or even relatively minor speech, statement, or even editorial that discusses these installations in the context of a full strategic defense against Russia, China, or any large nuclear arsenal?
Or check out the lead on the WaPo op-ed today:
How do 20 interceptor missiles represent more than an annoyance to a Russian strategist planning nuclear war involving, potentially, 1000s of warheads and the destruction of civilization? I don’t think they do – in themselves – even if Satter is wrong and they would have a chance of catching an ICBM on a transpolar trajectory.
If the European installations had a strategic meaning it was symbolic and provisional: The idea that the US was making a step and adopting a stance that implied an eventual fully realized strategic defense and strategic superiority over the Russkis and anyone else. But how far off “eventual” would be in this case is, I think, closer to anyone’s guess than to anyone’s projection, and in neither case something for the 2010s: We are or were looking at elements of a defense that could cope with a few missiles or accidental launch, not one that represented the nullification of someone’s strategic nuclear arsenal.
I understand that such a capability has to be built step by step, if at all; that its elements can serve diverse purposes along the way; and that even as a potential it can have very significant present-day effects, as we have seen (this can be both a plus and a minus). But if and when we have it, it would have to go very far beyond 20 ground-based interceptors in EE.
I’ll add that true strategic defense used to be very popular whenever it was put to the test. Reagan had the people on his side vs. the majority of defense intellectuals, as I recall. The perception of strategic threat has greatly subsided, and not only because the Russkis were supposed to be such big buds of ours. Whatever they are, neither they nor anyone else is seen as an enemy on the level of the Soviet Union. I still think that Americans would view a robust SDI program worth supporting, and our unwillingness to call this particular spade a spade (if that’s what we’ve done) has robbed proponents of the NMD installations of popular support.
In other words, if Bush, McCain, and others had said, clearly and loudly and repeatedly, “we need this to reach the goal of defense against nuclear missiles,” we might have re-played the Reagan era SDI argument, with similar results. If the results were dissimilar, at least they would have been a choice the people made with eyes open.
We could say a lot more about the nature and emergence of strategic threats to the US, and the problems with actually developing and deploying real SDI. I can see these installations, at most, as potentially playing a role in the eventual development of real strategic defense, even a critical real on some technical and political grounds, but, if on some level they were the test, it was a very poorly handled test, and not just by Obama.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Well, CK, I have no expertise in this field so I yield to JE Dyer. But as my grandfather used to say, the pig that squeals is the one that got hit. Russia is very unhappy about the system; Russia has been threatening its near neighbors recently; Russia has been backing Iran recently. This system clearly cramped its style against Europe, and if they wanted leverage over Europe and ultimately the US using Iran as a cat’s paw, the system was bad for that too. I don’t think a merely symbolic friendliness with Poland and Czech Republic accounts for Russia’s vehemence on this issue.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
@Margo – You might think that our building military bases ever closer to Russian soil might be something that Russia would find objectionable.
Saying that we’re building them to stop Russian threats against Poland or the Czech Republic, at a time when such threats are non-existent, doesn’t put much sugarcoating on it.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Margo – what I’m referring to isn’t a question of expert-level deductions and pronouncements but rather the character of the debate. You can go through all of the commentary on the Obama decision, and the most you’ll find is a passing reference to potential strategic implications of the decision. And even among the very few who take those into account other than to dismiss them completely concede that the installations aren’t indispensable to any long-term development of a strategic missile shield. Much, much more common, to the point of being pervasive and near-unanimous among Obama’s critics – present company excepted – are opinions like the ones I quoted above, or like the ones expressed in Rich Lowry’s new column:
That to me is the familiar basis of this argument for the last 10 years. Regardless of what Bolton may have thought, even when Bush was preparing to withdraw from obsolete ABM treaty obligations, he was always at pains to claim it had nothing to do with present or future strategic-level confrontation with the Russians, but was rather about providing limited defense against emerging threats. If he had something else in mind, then he was dissembling, and that’s no way to run a democratic railroad.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
@fuster – well, I’ve got to get to some other tasks, but I’ll just pause to say that geography and relative power, not to mention energy economics and a long history, including some very recent chapters, mean that the Czechs and especially the Poles are always already under threat from the Russians. After a couple of centuries of freedom and non-interference, the Czechs and Poles might possibly begin to lower their guard a little. Maybe. The other thing about that 1939 anniversary that raised so many eyebrows was that the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland was just the culminating event of a step by step sellout of the Czechs and Poles by their pusillanimous benefactors and sponsors in the West – who finally went to war with the Nazis, but were compelled to put off the freedom of the two nations for 50 years. They’ve been free of the Russian empire for only about 20.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
CKM — your quotes indeed reflect the familiar parameters of the debate, and the proposition that they do so is not one I’m arguing against.
The debate, however, is poorly framed, and has probably been left that way as a means of postponing a showdown with Russia over missile defense.
The argument that 20 interceptors are meaningless against Russia’s mighty missile inventory is BS. It’s a position assumed because it is temporarily unassailable.
The larger truth is that our SDI program is intended to, in fact, and without apology, be a meaningful counter to however many missiles Russia — and anyone else — may ever have. The few handfuls of missiles to be put in Poland were a downpayment on that, not an end-state.
This truth has been explicitly available to the American people for decades. It’s just not what politicians talk about. As with every other kind of issue, they go for the terrain from which they can most effectively snipe at their domestic opponents, with the least vulnerability to counter-fire.
Emphasizing our long-term objective would guarantee an immediate showdown with Russia over every next step in the program, so presidents and policymakers have not routinely done that. Pundits are usually focused on making that temporarily convincing argument — and of course many of them never took a long-term, strategic view anyway.
But did the other readers here really think that all along, we didn’t intend for SDI to protect us against Russian missiles? Our avowed policy has always been that. The Russians certainly believe us on that head. That’s why every step forward that we take, in implementing SDI, is one they will try to stop. They know as well as we do that 20 missiles in Poland won’t stop 4000 ICBMs and SLBMs. But 20 missiles in Poland will lead to dozens more positions around Europe, and perhaps hundreds more, and dozens in Canada, interceptors in Japan, and a tethered, dedicated-platform sea-based missile defense (not on warships but on floating platforms), and to a space-based strategic missile defense, and on and on.
It’s because our politicians have wanted to implement SDI without provoking a showdown with the Russians that they have basically focused on the theme that this particular deployment is not aimed at Russia. And it wasn’t. But it’s part of our long-range plan to make Russia’s missiles ineffective against us.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
JED, accepting your argument in its totality, without quibbling on any of the particulars, the bottom-line would be that, in seeking to avoid an open confrontation on the deeper issue with the Russians, we – all of us – have managed to lose the actual confrontation. You can argue that the Obama decision is indefensible, but the strongest argument against it, your argument, was and remains for all intents and purposes held in reserve and never deployed. Indeed, we continually denied it. To extend the tactical metaphor, we might as well have disarmed the troops and sent them home.
It would appear that the Russians completely outmaneuvered us, and not beginning January 21, 2009.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
The Russians know that the missiles and radar are no threat to them. They chose to be annoyed as a tactic. A hostile tactic.
This administration chose to take Russian tactical annoyance as proof of our failure, showing more regard for Russia than for their domestic opposition.
Unsurprisingly, Russia will continue to find reasons to be annoyed while working against our humane policy aims. And others will watch and learn.
Only a “realist” could be so obtuse as to believe that this is a winning strategy. Obama, of course, is something worse than a realist.
September 19th, 2009 at 6:09 am
This sounds like one of those Woodrow Wilson hang ups wherein Americans are psychically incapable of admitting to even slightly adulterated motives. Caging Russia was always morally suspect for the Left, and, since the Berlin Wall fell, has seemed a less than wholly pristine objective to the Right as well. So we feel compelled to articulate more easily palatable goals. Thus, one might surmise that placing missile defenses in Poland raised certain logical questions,but one should never underestimate the capacity of the pure of heart to evade them.
September 19th, 2009 at 11:21 am
@Seth Halpern – This would have been less a cage than a scarecrow.
September 19th, 2009 at 11:33 am
CKM at #54 — agreed. That’s why I never liked the approach of acting like little ol’ us would never, ever want to have missile defense sites that could intercept Russian missiles… why, honey chile, who could even think of such a thing???
We, WE did. And yes, for now, we have lost this round. We fought it on defense, trying not to get our hair mussed, instead of deploying our powerful right arm.
We can talk ourselves into believing we had no other choice, and maybe we didn’t. But the fact is, we put down a stake that could be whacked to splinters and jerked out by any change of political orientation toward Iran’s missile program; and one that, by rhetorical argument, specifically eschewed the premise that there were other missile threats we had to worry about that the European sites could address.
So here we are. A number of GOP senators, along with John Bolton, have recognized this situation for what it is. I’m not even sure Obama does understand it. But we’ve certainly shown the foolishness of using a bad argument to justify something to the Russians, and then electing a radical-leftist community organizer who never met a national defense posture he didn’t want to undermine.
September 19th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
We must make every gesture, no matter how useless to us or transparently stupid to our enemies (or potential enemies).
And anyone not willing to do so isn’t fit to be carved from a banana.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
btw – just as a public service – I incidentally changed the number of interceptors from 10 to 20, counting 10 for each site, when I believe that the number is/was 10 for the Polish site, with the Czechs hosting the radar facility and no interceptors. Please don’t get caught using my bad number. Will need to double check the details unless someone can nail them down for me/us.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
@CK MacLeod – Usually written of as 10 in toto.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
@fuster – indeed, 10 is the number that’s used, a nice ominously round Commandments and Rights and fingers and toes 10. Having boo-booed once, I hate to risk doubling it, so out of an abundance of caution, I revert to uncertainty, while wondering if we had planned 9 or 11, or even something radical like 7 or even 13 (!), the whole debate would have been different… Mea culpa, omnia mea culpa.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
@CK MacLeod – Don’t worry about it. It;s just as easy to not build 20 and no reason not to say that we’re not building twice the number that we aren’t.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
@fuster – a cage went looking for a crow?
Saying that the installations might soon be superseded technologically or otherwise isn’t the same thing as saying they had no value and no potential use either in themselves or as a stepping stone – or might not have had a different value within a different negotiation.
No one’s saying, I don’t think, that this was the equivalent of opening the city gates and letting the invaders in, but that doesn’t mean it’s without potentially very serious negative ramifications.
As I suggested earlier, it would seem to raise the stakes on several issues – Iran, Afghanistan, Georgia & Ukraine, and, since everything relates to everything, the list goes on and on, though the first two seem most pressing, for now.
Though that order of priorities can change, or the items themselves can transmogrify: My simultaneously most pessimistic and most optimistic view of the decision is that our fearful leaders are much more aware than they let on about how much scheissdreck is coming at the fan and from how many different directions over the next year or so, in a way that may render much of our debate and discussion about these issues completely irrelevant – that is, planning for 2015 may be as useful today as planning for 1945 would have been in 1939. Not to say we’re on the verge of a world war… exactly.
Or maybe I’ve just been sicklied over with a pale cast of thought – too much dismal economics and dismaler history…
September 19th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@CK MacLeod – The only thing that we all probably do agree on is that there’s a plenitude of poo winging toward a couple of fans.
Lotta troubles, lotta places. We might be well-advised to take arms against three or four large lakes at a time, especially when we have an adversary already committed to making us defend all over the board.
The best point made by certain parties is to question whether we’ve abandoned the r&d for a missile shield.
September 19th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
CKM — the number of silos in the ground in Poland was to be 10. Any number of missiles could be present, but the max one-shot volley would have been 10, followed by re-load.
Again, however, that was not an end-state but an initial capability.
September 20th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
@J.E. Dyer –
Designed to kill up to 5- count ‘em -5 missiles at best.
This was absolutely a defense against the Russians it was, it was.
September 20th, 2009 at 12:39 pm