Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  On December 3, 2004, the prototype ABL aircraft had its first two-hour flight aborted by Missile Defense Agency officials after twenty-two minutes because of a false warning from on-board instruments of an air-pressure problem. Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin share the work with the agency. The ABL’s price is now in the range of $5.1 billion for one fully equipped airplane, twice the original estimate. On March 9, 2005, Lieutenant General Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told the press that the ABL “is not out of the woods yet. I can’t declare that [it is] a totally risk free program.”49 His remark was a major understatement.

  Leaving aside the fact that putting a high-energy laser aboard an aircraft involves fitting an incredible array of sensors, computers, chemicals, and mirrors into a constricted, dusty, vibrating space, a major problem is weight. The original plan called for fourteen SUV-sized modules working in tandem to generate laser light that would be projected through a telescope mounted in the 747’s nose. However, that idea proved to be impossible, so the number was cut to six modules. Even the six-module system weighs about 180,000 pounds—5,000 pounds more than the original design weight for the fourteen-module scheme—and still puts pressure on the airframe. The Boeing 747-400 freighter, the largest commercial cargo transport in service, can carry a maximum of 248,000 pounds, but this weight has to be distributed throughout the aircraft. The laser consists of six large machines lashed together on the main deck plus chemicals and crew to monitor the laser resonators. In addition, it was discovered on the 2004 test flight that the laser beam ignites dust particles in its path. These produce flickers of visible light called “fireflies,” which weaken the beam’s overall energy. The Missile Defense Agency has decided that the ABL cannot be used at lower altitudes where dust is plentiful, which of course radically reduces the time available for an interception. Similarly, the first flight revealed problems of airframe vibration and atmospheric turbulence that generate what is called “jitter,” which also impedes the laser beam and produces wear and tear on the delicate equipment.

  Finally, the heavily laden Boeing 747 lumbers through the sky at a slow speed and is incapable of defending itself. It would thus require fighter aircraft protection in a combat situation, which in turn would necessitate the presence of aerial refueling tankers. It seems likely that any organization adept enough to build an ICBM carrying a weapon of mass destruction could also field a surface-to-air missile, such as the one that, on May 1, 1960, shot down Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk, Russia, at 70,500 feet.50 It is hard to imagine how an ABL lurking within the necessary hundreds of miles of a launch site with a boost-phase interception in mind could be effectively protected, something that will not be lost on an ABL 747’s aircrew.

  Terminal-phase interception is not much more promising than the ABL, but at least it is not so esoteric. The chief problem is not detecting the warhead as it re-enters the atmosphere, which is comparatively easy, but designing a missile fast enough to catch it and collide with it in the one or two minutes available. The main weapon the United States proposes to use for this purpose is the Patriot PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability), manufactured by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control of Dallas, Texas. The PAC-3 is an improved version of the Patriot missiles used during the first war against Iraq in 1991 with such dismal results. (They failed to bring down any Scuds Iraq fired at General Schwarzkopf’s forces or at Israel.) The new one is, however, much faster and without the heavy explosive warhead of its ancestor. PAC-3, however, was never designed for defense against an ICBM warhead but rather for downing shorter-range tactical and cruise missiles. Using a solid propellant rocket motor, the PAC-3 flies at great speed to an intercept point specified by its ground-based fire-solution computer and destroys the target by colliding with it.

  According to former assistant secretary of defense Philip Coyle, “Although [the PAC-3] appeared to be doing well in development tests— hitting ten out of eleven targets—those early tests involved the usual artificialities of preplanned intercepts. In more realistic operational tests conducted [in 2002], the PAC-3 hit only three targets out of seven tries, or less than 45 percent.”51 The main problem with terminal defense is that it can, by definition, protect only a limited area, such as a city. To be effective we would have to deploy innumerable terminal-defense systems all over the country. The deliberate destruction of an atomic weapon over a city or other site might also produce massive nuclear fallout, which could be extremely damaging to the defending country.

  By the end of 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that while any planned defense against missile attack would be inadequate, the United States would nonetheless soon have a “modest capacity.”52 Two devastating investigations into procurement and testing practices—one by the Missile Defense Agency itself and one conducted by the Government Accountability Office—concluded that the Pentagon had actually sacrificed rigorous testing and quality control in order to meet President Bush’s pledge of a 2004 deployment, and both called for much greater accountability and an end to flagrant cost overruns.53 In October 2005, the Senate Appropriations Committee quietly disclosed that the Pentagon was giving up on trying to make further improvements in its GMD interceptors and that the first generation of ground-based exoatmospheric kill vehicles would also be the last.54 Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported on the results of this internal criticism: “There is no evidence the GMD system would have any military utility, which is why it has not been declared operational. It is a little-known fact that the Pacific and Strategic military commands, which perform their own assessments separate from those of the MDA, have refused to make it operational.”55

  In fact, the whole Pentagon effort has been devoted to meeting a non-credible threat from rogue-nation ballistic missiles while ignoring a genuine challenge to the very concept of missile defense—that of Russia and its Topol-M ICBM. As Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-90) and later in Iraq (1991-98), has observed, “On Christmas Eve 2004, the Russian Strategic Missile Force fired an advanced SS-27 Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This test probably invalidated the entire premise and technology used in the National Missile Defense (NMD) system currently being developed and deployed by the Bush administration.”56

  The Topol-M was Russia’s original answer to President Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However, on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in killing off the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei Arbatov, one of Russia’s leading experts on military affairs, advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base in the Volga River’s Saratov region. He was commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms, which he declared to be “capable of penetrating any missile defense system.” The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat service in 2006.57 It is a truly formidable weapon.

  Among its features are high-speed solid-fuel rockets that rapidly lift the missile into the atmosphere and make boost-phase interception inconceivable unless a defense system were located practically next door to the launcher; hardening and reflecting coatings to protect it against laser weapons; up to three independently targetable warheads and four sophisticated decoys; an ability to maneuver to avoid midcourse or terminalphase missile attacks; and a range of over 6,250 miles. There is no known defense against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence are the only means to ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tool of
American foreign policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack.58

  There are so many things wrong with the missile defense program that it is difficult to think of it as merely an ambitious scientific effort having start-up problems. From space debris to the inability to identify clearly a hostile launch or sort out the decoys, its failures suggest that if Congress had even a slightly prudent commitment to fiscal integrity, it might well have scuttled the project long ago. That its members did not even discuss the possibility raises disturbing questions. Did the Bush administration and its Republican associates in Congress actually intend to build a missile defense system or were they only interested in a plausible public relations cover for using the defense budget to funnel huge amounts of money to the military-industrial aerospace corporations? As a cash cow, missile defense goes on enriching its sponsors precisely when it is not working and they have to go back to their drawing boards.

  America’s imperial project to dominate the space surrounding our planet has provided a nearly perfect setting for official corruption. The air force and the military-industrial complex interests meshing with powerful congressional lobbies that want to bring space-oriented industries to their districts and perpetuate their own safe seats in Congress, as well as unimaginable sums of money protected from public scrutiny by “black budgets,” “special access programs,” and other forms of secrecy, all add up to a prescription for legal thievery on an unprecedented scale. Norman Ornstein, a specialist on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed that when individual members of Congress have the ability to earmark—that is, privately attach—federal funds for pet projects and slip them unopposed into the Pentagons budget, “You are creating the most fertile environment for corruption imaginable.”59

  During the first years of the new century, an array of experienced Pentagon and congressional budget officers began sounding the alarm that the purchase of weapons systems is now totally beyond public control—or often even public visibility. Of all the weapons systems, the most expensive and most prone to misuse and abuse has been the whole project to create an intercontinental-ballistic-missile defense system. At $8.8 billion, it was, after all, the largest single weapons request in the fiscal year 2006 defense budget. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington estimated that “black budget” requests for fiscal year 2007 amounted to $30.1 billion, the highest level since 1988 during the Cold War, 75 percent of them going to the air force mostly for space programs and new satellites. William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan, Michelle Ciarrocca, and Jonathan Wingo of the World Policy Institute have summed up our military ventures in space and space defense as “Pork barrel in the sky.”60

  The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech to 2006, depending on which expert you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight—and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.61 One comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballistic missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of completion in 2015—and excluding its most expensive and problematic component, a space-based laser—is $1.2 trillion.62

  There can be no question that the whole system is surrounded by an environment of corruption that has been much aided and abetted by the way Defense Secretary Rumsfeld vastly increased the Clinton administration’s missile defense spending, moved virtually all missile defense projects into the classified budget, and ended normal reports to Congress concerning failures to meet delivery dates, cost increases, and the actual performance of equipment. He also cut some two thousand auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency.63 “The Pentagon’s new approach to missile defense testing is a contractor’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare,” writes the World Policy Institute’s Ciarrocca. “Pumping in more money while reducing outside scrutiny is an invitation to corruption and cost-overruns.”64

  In December 2003, Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, a former air force officer and for thirty years a budget analyst in the Pentagon, spoke to journalist Bill Moyers about what he called the “moral sewer on the Potomac.”65 Perhaps Spinney’s most important insight is that the primary emotion driving this system is not patriotism, greed, or need, but fear. The attacks of 9/11 unquestionably generated real fear, but continuous air force hyperbole in favor of ultra-high-tech projects, presidential statements tying 9/11 to missile defense, and alarmist claims that our dependence on orbiting satellites leaves us no choice but to defend them militarily all capitalize on prevailing fears and undermine a realistic defense.

  President Bush is, in this sense, the fear-monger-in-chief. In a speech to the cadets of The Citadel on December 11, 2001, exactly three months after 9/11, the president said, “The attacks on our nation made it even more clear that we need to build limited and effective defenses against missile attack. (Applause) ... Suppose the Taliban and the terrorists had been able to strike America or important allies with a ballistic missile. Our coalition would have become fragile, the stakes in our war much, much higher. We must protect Americans and our friends against all forms of terror, including the terror that could arrive on a missile.” But neither the Taliban nor the 9/11 terrorists had missiles or the knowledge or industrial base to build one. And there are other, far cheaper, more accessible, and more effective ways to deliver a weapon of mass destruction than by missile. For example, one could be secretly imported in a cargo container on a transport ship, or fired from an offshore vessel using a short-range cruise missile, or constructed domestically as did the bombers of the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building in 1995, or sent as a priority package via FedEx.

  But what if some terrorists really had access to an intercontinental missile? Given that we have in continuous orbit the world’s most effective intelligence satellites devoted to tracking missile launches, as soon as we had determined that such a launch was not an error, we would retaliate instantly and catastrophically against whatever nation had allowed a missile to be fired against us. The government’s own experts agree that a long-range ballistic missile is the least likely way a hostile state or terrorist group would choose to deliver a weapon of mass destruction against a U.S. target.

  Why then did the Bush administration increase spending on missile defense in fiscal year 2002 by 43 percent? The answer lies in a complex amalgam of neoconservative ideology, the influence of right-wing think tanks, air force desires to protect what it sees as its “turf” while expanding its share of the DoD budget, powerful congressmen devoted to enriching their districts, lobbies of arms manufacturers who supply virtually unlimited funds to re-elect their friends, and the interests of places like Huntsville, Alabama, which has lived off missiles ever since rocket scientist and former Nazi SS major Wernher von Braun arrived there after World War II to lead the U.S. Army’s rocket development team.66

  Missile defense has almost nothing to do with defense and nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. ABM weapons may actually prove to be useless against incoming ICBMs, but they might be highly effective offensive weapons against other nations’ satellites, and this is why almost nothing said officially by the administration, the Pentagon, or the Congress on the subject of missile defense can be taken at face value. These dual-use weapons are less likely to be employed for missile defense than as a stealthy way to introduce weapons in outer space with the intent of dominating the globe.

  On December 14, 2004, General Lance Lord, head of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, repeated to the press what has become an air force mantra: “The war in space began during Operation Iraqi Freedom.”67 This overstatement is based on the claim that, at the outset of our invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein attempted to jam the reception of radio signals from U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. His men al
legedly used six commercially available jammers based on Russian designs and available for purchase on the Internet to try to interfere with our “precision-guided” bombs.68 The U.S. military has many uses for the GPS, a system of satellites capable of precisely locating any object or spot on Earth. It is ideal for guiding so-called smart bombs to their targets. Iraq’s handheld jammers turned out to have no influence on the GPS satellites or ground stations and were quickly taken out using GPS-guided munitions. (Jamming instantly reveals the location of the jammer, painting a bull’s-eye on him.) Even if jamming had been successful, the U.S.’s munitions have backup systems, which deliver the bombs only slightly less efficiently to their targets.

  “To get big-bucks Congressional funding for space-control schemes,” comments Mike Moore, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “a threat to U.S. space assets must be manufactured, and Hussein’s pathetic attempts to jam GPS signals seem to be the best (and only) evidence space warriors can produce to prove’ that space war is already underway. . . . [General Lord’s assertions are] part of a sophisticated public relations campaign waged by the Air Force and Defense Department to persuade the public that space war is here.”69