[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Magic Pudding

[Bill Totten]

Why is the US government still pouring billions into missile defence?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (August 18 2008)


It's a novel way to commit suicide. Just as Russia demonstrates what
happens to former minions which annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US
missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this
proposal by kindly offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This
proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will
stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and
the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The US government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed
on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to
defend Europe and the United States against the intercontinental
ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don't possess. This is why they
are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas
knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile
defence, according to the Pentagon, will "protect our homeland ... and
our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack" {1}; as long as
the Russians wait until it's working before they nuke us. The good news
is that, at the current rate of progress, reliable missile defence is
only fifty years away. The bad news is that it has been fifty years away
for the past six decades.

The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has
achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn't know it if you read the
press releases published by the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency: the
word "success" features more often than any other noun {2}. It is true
that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired
over the past five years during tests of its main component, the
Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense (GMD) system {3}. But sadly these
tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged.
The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the
test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn't have
a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are
deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified
as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of
success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency
has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it
is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to
confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the
Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are
endless means by which another state could fool the system {4}. For
every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies,
with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of
metal foil would render anything resembling the current system
inoperable. You can reduce a missile's susceptability to laser
penetration by ninety per cent by painting it white {5}. This
sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware
shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or
you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise
missiles, against which the system is useless.

Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so
cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system
work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to
bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on
decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars
of counter-measures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could
outspend the United States.

The US has spent between $120 billion and $150 billion on the programme
since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983 {6}. Under Bush the costs have
accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62 billion for the next five
year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will
be $110 billion. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a
recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the
Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile
defence programme to evade the government's usual accounting standards
{7}. It's called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because
it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that
"the end-state requirements are not known at program initiation" {8}.
Instead the system is allowed to develop however officials think fit.
The result is that no one has the faintest idea what it is supposed to
achieve or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no
fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for
slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system
can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving
what a few hundred dollars' worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail?
I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. The programme
persists because it doesn't work.

US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to
deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe.
But under Bush the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal
government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the
industries which give millions in political donations with contracts
worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the
magic pudding which won't run out however much you eat. The funds
channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service
companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the
threats from nations which have no means of nuking it and ignore the
likely responses of those which do. Russia is not without its own
corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian
generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new
deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets.
Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strong-armed
into becoming America's groundbait.

If we seek to understand US foreign policy in terms of a rational
engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of
projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's
interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists,
shift public opinion at key stages of the political cycle, accommodate
crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by
eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It
has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders.
That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no
concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is
who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Missile Defense Agency, no date given. Overview.
http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/html/basics.html

2. See http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/html/newsrel.html

3. Philip E Coyle, 16th April 2008. Prepared Remarks before the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on National
Security and Foreign Affairs, Part 2.
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/hearings/hearing41/coyle.pdf

4. ibid.

5. Philip E Coyle, 30th April 2008. Prepared Remarks before the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on National
Security and Foreign Affairs, Part 3.
http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/CoyleTestimonyApr08.pdf

6. Philip E Coyle, 16th April 2008, ibid.

7. Victoria Samson, 1st June 2008. Spiraling Out of Control: How Missile
Defense's
Acquisition Strategy is Setting a Dangerous Precedent. Defense and
Security Analysis.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14751790802125011

8. US Department of Defense,Operation of the Defense Acquisition System,
Instruction Number
5000.2. Quoted by Victoria Samson, ibid.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/08/19/the-magic-pudding/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/