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US Deputy Defense Secretary Speech on Missile Defence, October 24

Speech by Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of Defense, to the Frontiers of Freedom organisation, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, October 24.

The past year has marked a turning point for the Department of Defense and not only because of the events of September 11th. Indeed, one thing that is remarkable, I believe, is how much we have been achieving in the area that is generally called transformation, even while we are fighting a very difficult and unanticipated war. In short order the administration has laid out a new defense strategy and accelerated the transformation of the US military. It has adopted a new approach to deterrence that reduces our reliance on offensive nuclear weapons, and it has replaced the old nuclear triad with a new strategic triad that includes defensive capability as well as non-nuclear precision strike.

The administration launched what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, has called the most significant changes in the Unified Command Plan in his career. Those changes include a whole new command, Northern Command, which was established and given responsibility for the homeland defense of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Space Command and Strategic Command were merged into a single integrated command that was given broad responsibility including long-range, conventional strike and missile defense. The Department also adopted a new approach to defense planning, one that emphasizes what we call the capabilities-based approach as opposed to a threat-based approach, an approach that emphasizes the need to think about the capabilities that adversaries could use against us and think about the capabilities that could most effectively enhance our forces, rather than planning to try to meet a narrow range of seemingly predictable threat scenarios that could easily leave us ill prepared to deal with inevitable surprises. ...

It helps to think about the world. I've done a lot of thinking about possible threat scenarios, but I think we make a big mistake in defense planning when we base too much on single point prediction or even two point prediction. That's why we're looking at where we have vulnerabilities. Rather than who might attack us, we do think we can make a much better assessment of how they might threaten us or where they might threaten us. And clearly when you do that you cannot escape the fact that we are completely vulnerable as a continent in our homeland to attacks by ballistic missiles, and indeed that we remain highly vulnerable in the theater, our forces and our allies, to attacks by even short-range ballistic missiles.

I might add I had the experience 12 years ago of going to Israel during the Gulf War and being in a country that was under ballistic missile attack with then-Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, working to persuade the Israelis to stay out of that war. It is awful to think about the panic that a relatively small number of purely conventional, primitive ballistic missiles could cause and the way in which it very nearly changed the whole complexion, the strategic complexion of that conflict. Ballistic missiles are not a threat to underestimate. Moving forward on missile defense, particularly by taking advantage of new technological opportunities, is an essential part of a strategy to provide the range of capabilities necessary to defend against the broad spectrum of new threats and challenges that we will confront in the 21st Century.

Since May of the year 2000 during the presidential campaign, President Bush has been saying that it is critical to our ability to defend the American people and our allies to be able to develop missile defenses without the restrictions and limitations of the ABM Treaty. The critics warned that doing so would undermine what they called the cornerstone of strategic stability and lead to a nuclear arms race and a catastrophic deterioration in the United States' relations with Russia. The President's response was, to the contrary, that we could remove the restrictions of the ABM Treaty while at the same time pursuing deep reductions in offensive nuclear arms and building a new and better relationship with Russia in which the centerpiece would no longer be maintaining an unclear balance of terror that was at the center of our relationship with the old Soviet Union. Two and a half years later it is clear that the President was right, and the critics have gone on to making new prophesies of gloom without ever acknowledging the extent of their earlier failures of prediction.

But the important point is not who was right and who was wrong, although that is clear enough. The important point is that the United States is finally free to pursue missile defenses without the artificial constraints of an outdated 30-year-old treaty with a country that no longer exists. That will help us to improve our ability to defend against missiles of all ranges - tactical as well as strategic.

To those who say the threat is still a remote one far in a distant and uncertain future, the fact is that the short-range threat is here with us today even as we worry about the dangers of a possible conflict in the Persian Gulf or on the Korean Peninsula. And while a longer-range threat may still be a few years away, thanks to the historic change that the President was able to achieve, we may now be in a position to be able to respond before that threat emerges. With the elimination of the ABM Treaty constraints, we are now in a much-improved position to develop, test and evaluate ground, air, sea and space-based technologies and basing modes for the deployment of effective laser defenses. We are no longer bound by the territorial defense restrictions of the ABM Treaty and we can develop and deploy a ballistic missile defense system capable of protecting all 50 states. On June 14th, accordingly, we began construction of the ABM interceptor silos at the missile defense test bed at Fort Greeley, Alaska. Other elements of the test bed will be built starting early in 2003.

Perhaps just as important, removing the restrictions of the ABM Treaty has enabled us to test in ways that we have been prohibited from for 30 years. Already we've learned an enormous amount about how to employ missile defenses more effectively and efficiently. We are able to greatly increase the efficiency of our ballistic missile defense interceptors through the forward deployment of sensors that otherwise would not have been permitted. We are free to develop boost-phase defenses that are able to intercept missiles of all ranges, thereby addressing the short-range missile threat that we've been facing for the past 10 years. And starting in September of this year we began integrating ship-based and ground-based radars into our test against intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The early results are promising and have great potential for the development of effective good-faith defenses. For example, this past September we used an Aegis sea-based theater defense radar aboard the USS Lake Erie to track all stages of a Minuteman III ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) launched from Vandenberg. On October 14th the Navy destroyer John Paul Jones participated in the test in which the on-board Aegis radar tracked a long-range ballistic missile target-launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Both of those test events provided valuable data on the capability of the Aegis radar to acquire and track long-range ballistic missiles, data that will eventually be integrated with other sea, air and ground-based sensors to increase the overall effectiveness of our defenses.

We are constructing and testing mobile sea and land-based ABM sensors. Doing so will make it harder for adversaries to use countermeasures effectively and increase our efficiency in terms of the number of interceptors required to engage any given incoming missiles and its associated warheads. This in turn will improve our technological foundation for boost-phase intercept.

We've made progress. We've made progress in the last 10 years. We're making more rapid progress now. Our missile defense program since 2001 has demonstrated that missile technology, in particular hit-to-kill technology, actually works. We actually can hit a bullet with a bullet. We have four-for-four in long-range ground-based intercepts with the most recent successful test occurring just last Monday, October 14th. We are two-for-two in short to medium-range ship-based intercepts; and two-for-four in short-range ground-based intercepts. ...

Obviously one of the most important developments of the past year, slightly more, was this horrible attack on the United States on September 11th. What that also brought home, as the President explained in his State of the Union message where he spoke about the axis of evil, is the danger of countries, outlaw states, developing weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, who also have close connections to the network of global terrorist organizations.

When I served with Secretary Rumsfeld on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission one of the most striking observations which indeed came as a surprise to those of us who thought we knew what to expect in this area, was the extent to which these various outlaw states collaborated with one another in the development of dangerous capabilities and their lack of compunction about dealing with one another or dealing with terrorist networks. Indeed, I think one of the things that may have slowed proliferation in the early years of the nuclear age was that there was a tendency for countries once they joined the nuclear club to think that it was just about the right size and not to go out recruiting new members. Somewhere in the last 20 years that changed very much and the countries that we are most worried about today are countries that quite vigorously pass that capability back and forth, and it's one of the reasons why the threat has developed more rapidly than predictions that were based on what was called indigenous development - that is to say unassisted development. Another striking observation during the Commission's work was just how often we underestimate the tenacity, the resourcefulness and the single-mindedness of potential adversaries seeking these dangerous capabilities.

Recent history is full of surprises. While we were doing Rumsfeld Commission, to the surprise of the country, though I would say not to the surprise of the Commissioners, North Korea launched the long-range Tae-Po-Dong missile in August of 1998. That event confirmed the judgment that the Commission had issued in July of that year that the United States was at a point where we could not assume strategic warning of an adversary possessing weapons of mass destruction and a delivery means.

It is clear that potential adversaries will pursue any means they can to exploit the vulnerabilities of a free society. They will exploit the freedom and privacy rights in the West. They will exploit our reluctance to kill innocent civilians in time of war. And they most certainly will seek to exploit our near total vulnerability to ballistic missile and cruise missile attack.

While much of the discussion of the ballistic missile threat is focused on outlaw states developing long-range ballistic missiles that could reach our shores and those of our friends and allies, let me share with you another possibility. We know that North Korea, Iran and Iraq are developing long-range ballistic missiles. That is the familiar line of threat development. But what is to stop such countries from launching shorter-range ballistic missiles that they already possess today from cargo ships near our shores, perhaps using non-state terrorist surrogates to attack without fingerprints? It's not a far-fetched threat. The United States test launched a captured German V-2 rocket from the deck of a ship in 1947. And recently we have observed indications of an outlaw state attempting to do the same thing with a short-range ballistic missile from a ship. We need to ensure defense capabilities against a range of novel threats and enemy concepts of operation, not just the classic scenarios.

In the aftermath of September 11th some have questioned the importance of missile defense in relation to the obvious need to deal with the threats of terrorists. Some have suggested that we should forego missile defenses and concentrate instead on defending against the low-tech terrorist threat. But the reality is that we do not have the luxury of choosing to defend against only one threat at the exclusion of others. The horrific events of last year demonstrate the need to deal with the full range of threats that we face, to do so in a balanced way, from terrorism to the use of weapons of mass destruction by state and non-state actors, to ballistic and cruise missile attacks.

Clearly we need to do everything we possibly can to prevent terrorists from getting access to weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means and we are, and we must do everything we can to prevent outlaw states from providing weapons of mass destruction to deniable terrorist networks. But the need to close off that avenue of attack against the United States is hardly an argument for leaving other avenues of attack open.

We know the countries that support terrorism are also pouring large fractions of their national treasure - billions of dollars for countries that in some cases do not have the money to feed their own people - into the development of weapons of mass destruction and offensive ballistic missiles. The considerable investment these countries are making suggests that they certainly don't believe that such capabilities are useless.

Far from seeing these capabilities as useless, outlaw states see missiles and weapons of mass destruction as instruments with which to threaten and intimidate their neighbors, to deter foreign intervention, to blackmail their enemies in ways that anonymous terrorists might never be able to. Indeed outlaw states may see long-range ballistic missiles and terrorist means of delivery as complementary capabilities. They may believe that the possession of long-range ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction increase their freedom of action to use terrorism abroad because they give them capability to deter retaliatory attacks. Thus long-range ballistic missiles could confer a sort of sanctuary for outlaw states intent on using terrorism.

Some critics refer to missile defense as a modern Maginot Line, but in reality the principal deficiency of the original Maginot Line was that it failed to close off other avenues of attack which the French assured themselves would not be pursued. Tragedy revealed itself when Germany did the unthinkable and invaded France through the forests of neutral, unfortified Belgium. ...

As we look ahead we will continue to pursue an evolutionary approach to apply the layered defense against missiles of all ranges. That includes more effective use of sensors combined with multiple land-, sea- and air-basing modes to provide greater effectiveness with fewer numbers of interceptors and for therefore lower overall costs; increasingly stressful intercept tests to prove viability; adaptable technologies, flexible enough not only to defend the United States but to assist our allies and friends.

Three emerging capabilities will begin to emerge in the year 2004: Ground-based mid-course interceptors in Alaska as part of the test bed; sea-based mid-course interceptors on one or two Aegis ships; and an airborne laser prototype. Continued fielding of shorter-range defenses such as the Patriot PAC-3 and the introduction of the Army's THAAD Theater High Altitude Air Defense] terminal defense system. Indeed, we are looking at ways to accelerate the production of PAC-3 out of concern for near-term vulnerability.

Finally, while we have demonstrated that hit-to-kill works, as we look ahead we need to think about areas that would provide higher leverage. Nowhere is that more true than in space. Space offers attractive options not only for missile defense but for a broad range of interrelated civil and military missions. It truly is the ultimate high ground.

We are exploring concepts and technologies for space-based intercepts. If these prove successful they could offer future opportunities for global protection against intermediate and long-range missile attacks, not only for ourselves but our friends and our allies and all peace-loving nations.

Source: Transcript - Wolfowitz Outlines Missile Defense Successes, Way Ahead, US State Department (Washington File), October 25.

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