President Donald Trump’s dramatic surprise announcement giving priority to an advanced missile defense to protect the United States continues to generate debate. “Iron Dome” is the name of the effective anti-missile defenses protecting Israel.
Actually, missile defense is a well-established United States policy. North Korea threats led the Barack Obama administration to deploy Lockheed Martin’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense) anti-missile system in South Korea, Hawaii and the island of Guam.
The George W. Bush administration announced the deployment of ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Initially, the Obama administration planned to limit such weapons to sea-based forces, but Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and Ukraine invasion led to land-based deployment. Thereafter, a NATO summit meeting emphasized missile defense and new troop deployments in Europe.
Debate over the best balance of defensive and offensive military capabilities is as old as warfare. Technology complicates, but does not abolish, this dual challenge.
“Hitting a bullet with a bullet” is the way even proponents of anti-missile systems describe the extraordinary technical challenge. Nonetheless, there has been sustained pressure within the U.S. government for many years to build such weapons.
There also has been a remarkable success in the development of these complex weapon systems.
During the Dwight Eisenhower administration, defense spending absorbed more than half the entire federal budget, and a much larger percentage of gross domestic product than today. Eisenhower maintained control over the military primarily, though not exclusively, by putting an overall ceiling on the Pentagon budget, effectively setting the Air Force, Army and Navy against one another for available resources.
One byproduct was considerable duplication of effort. For example, each service developed a separate strategic missile program, jealously guarding research and development information from the others.
In the successor John F. Kennedy administration, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was immediately offended by the lack of formal logic in this approach, and decisively imposed organization-chart order. The Air Force was given land-based strategic missiles, the Navy sea-based submarine systems and the Army was removed from any program.
Additionally, McNamara and his civilian analysts rejected arguments for anti-ballistic missiles because any conceivable defensive systems could be overwhelmed at a relatively low cost by simply increasing the number of attack vehicles. Using strategic concepts of that time, which McNamara’s team embraced, leaving populations vulnerable was considered stabilizing, and termed “Mutual Assured Destruction.” Defending missile sites was acceptable, since that move signaled we were not planning to attack the Soviets first.
McNamara’s domineering style quickly unified the services against him. The Army eventually achieved an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) role. President Lyndon Johnson, in desperate political trouble over the Vietnam War, forced McNamara to resign. Johnson generously named him president of the World Bank, but also forced him publicly to endorse the ABM.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan promoted space-based missile interceptors, termed the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Air Force became the lead service but the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed the effort. President Donald Trump during his first term created a new military “Space Force.”
An erratic, irrational nuclear-armed government or group, actual or potential, argues for developing our defenses. Influential if eccentric nuclear war strategist Herman Kahn used exactly this argument in print to help the humiliated McNamara when the earlier ABM system was announced.
The radical rogue totalitarian regime of North Korea is precisely the sort of threat far-sighted Kahn had in mind.
The startling manner of the White House announcement distracts from this long history.
Arthur I. Cyr is the author of “After the Cold War” (NYU Press and Macmillan/Palgrave).
Contact him at acyr@carthage.edu