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December 18, 2008
Protecting America in the New Missile Age – Chapter Four: The Cost of Missile Defense
Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Ph.D.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in an 18-part series of excerpts from Protecting America in the new Missile Age – A Reader. Published by The Heritage Foundation with a number of prominent contributors, its purpose is to inform and educate all Americans about the security challenges we face in an ever-changing world.
Missile defense represents a relatively small part of the total U.S. defense budget: just over $8 billion out of a total 2008 defense budget of $700 billion. This is less than one-70th of national defense spending, and defense spending is only about 4%of gross domestic product. By reasonable standards, missile defense is a modest national security investment that pales in comparison to the consequences of a ballistic missile attack against even one U.S. city. Instead of the few thousand fatalities resulting from the 9/11 attack, we could lose hundreds of thousands and suffer vastly greater physical destruction from the detonation of a single warhead comparable to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. One need only read the obituaries published by the New York Times in the weeks following 9/11. They make somber reading for anyone in doubt of the human tragedy caused by such an attack.
Nevertheless, we are entitled to ask what we are receiving for our investment in missile defense. As other contributors to this reader have pointed out, the United States has had a missile defense research program for several decades. President Ronald Reagan, in his seminal address on March 23, 1983, challenged the scientific and technological community to produce missile defense concepts to defend against the growing Soviet missile threat.
In the decade following Reagan’s address, the United States invested $34 billion in missile defense research and development that produced promising technologies, including Brilliant Pebbles, a system of space-based interceptors that could have been deployed in the 1990s if not for the Anti-Ballistic Mis-sile (ABM) Treaty. One thousand Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptors, if produced and deployed, would have cost an estimated $425 million in 1991 dollars and could have intercepted and destroyed as many as 200 warheads at a cost of about $400,000 per interceptor – a relatively modest cost for a major deployment.
To the extent that the Reagan-era missile defense program contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union by demonstrating the superiority of American technology, the result was a dramatic shrinkage in the U.S. defense budget after the Soviet empire disintegrated. We can never know whether the Soviet Union would have fallen apart even without the missile defense program, but we do know that its collapse brought freedom to hundreds of millions. How does one put a price tag on this accomplishment as well as the fact that we avoided a devastating nuclear war?
The cost of missile defense also involves the type of defense capability deployed and the threat. For example, if missile defense is confined to land-based systems, the deployment area is limited by the fact that oceans cover more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. A land-based defense may not be deployable close enough to intercept the missile at its most vulnerable point: just after launch. Furthermore, moving fixed land-based missile defenses from one place to another is difficult and expensive.
Although they may protect broad areas of the Earth’s surface, land-based systems are obviously not as mobile as sea-based and space-based systems. Because of its greater operating area, a sea-based missile defense inevitably provides greater intercept opportunities. However, only a space-based missile defense is truly global in nature; its missile interceptors can be moved quickly to wherever they are needed because they can maneuver easily in space.
Space-based missile defense interceptors would also give the best return for our investment because they provide the greatest potential for defense against ballistic missiles at the lowest cost. Another consideration is the synergistic relationship among the various deployed missile defense capabilities. For example, a multi-tiered missile defense places a lesser burden on each individual layer, lowering technical requirements and therefore the cost of each layer. If one intercept attempt fails, another may succeed.
The cost of missile defense also depends on the threat against which it is deployed. During the Cold War, a missile defense would have had to destroy large numbers of Soviet war-heads. The missile defense that the United States is now deploying is not designed to intercept even the reduced numbers of Russian missiles and warheads or the nuclear force being deployed by China. Instead, it is configured against a few missiles and warheads that North Korea or a nuclear Iran might launch.
Whether the United States should build a more robust missile defense to counter Russia and China is a strategic question that needs to be addressed separately. If we wished to build such a defense, we could do so, especially if we added a layer of space-based interceptors. The decision to build such a defense would entail other costs that could best be minimized by deploying space-based interceptors, such as the Brilliant Pebbles.
For the moment, however, as we consider cost, it is important to link missile defenses to nonproliferation and counterproliferation. The numerous countries that have acquired missiles see them as relatively inexpensive avenues to military power. Together with nuclear warheads, such missiles may give a proliferant state “more bang for the buck” than it could get by deploying more costly conventional forces, such as armies. Missiles give longer-range reach to an emerging regional power such as Iran and are often regarded as potent “power projection” instruments. As long as the United States lacked any missile defense, missiles were an even more attractive option. The deployment of a robust U.S. missile defense increases the costs to any would-be proliferant and therefore may make missiles a less attractive option. In the absence of a U.S. missile defense, a would-be missile possessor would have little disincentive to forego such a capability.
For many years, the cost of missile defense was compared to the cost of building missiles that could penetrate such a defense. Many assumed that the construction of missile defenses would simply lead to more sophisticated and more numerous missiles and warheads designed to negate missile defenses. This is a flawed argument. Missile defense has advanced to the extent that defenses can be deployed faster than an enemy could build more and better missiles. We can afford to deploy missile defenses beyond the capacity of adversaries to over-come them.
As in most other fields, cost depends on the type of system and the threat against which it is deployed. However, cost is also directly related to the consequences of failure to protect against an event that could have catastrophic consequences. In the final analysis, the cost of missile defense rests on the question of whether the United States is prepared to make a modest investment to ensure that its population will be safe and secure or is willing instead to remain defenseless against the possibility of an attack far more devastating than 9/11 – an attack from which the nation, or large parts of it, might never fully recover.
Next week: Chapter Five – Minutes After Midnight: Effects of a Missile Attack on New York City, by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.
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