Missile defense and how idolatry of the military wastes enormous amounts of public money

In my pre-blogging days, I would often makes notes on dead-tree paper. Here is a note I made on October 2, 2001, about three weeks after 9/11.

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October 2, 2001

Several old ideas that seemed obsolete or were at least half-forgotten now seem to take on new relevance. Remember the "military-industrial complex"? It was a major bogeyman of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the "New Left" of those days. Some liberal economists like John Kenneth Galbraith continued to warn of the long-term dangers it presented to democracy. Even the occasional isolationist, Libertarian-oriented conservatives would grumble about it. But the idea has been largely absent from public discussion since the fall of the USSR.

No politician - with the possible exception of my Congresswoman Barbara Lee - wants to criticize the military right now. But no one can overlook the fact that on September 11, our military not only failed to protect our cities and our people from the worst sneak attack in history. What's even more scary in terms of public confidence in their ability to defend "the homeland" as we're now learning to call it is that they couldn't even defend the Pentagon, the worldwide command headquarters for our military forces, from a low-tech but devastating terrorist attack.

When I think back to earlier this year [2002] when the military faked, outright faked, the results of the Star Wars "Missile Defense" tests, it5 seems to me a classic example of the "military-industrial complex" at work, in its most corruptive, corrosive sense. If the task of defending the homeland were the top priority throughout the command structure, the military would be the first to insist that such tests be conducted honestly. They wouldn't want anyone to be wasting military dollars on a defense system that couldn't work.

But in this case, the Pentagon was more concerned to fake the results to encourage more investment in a technology they know is not yet able to do what its marketers claim. Because of they really thought the thing could work, the wouldn't have had to fake the results, now would they?

The most generous explanation I can imagine is that it was normal bureaucratic inertia. Find excuses to build up your budget. Remind everyone how critical your function is.

The more likely explanation is the unhealthy relationship between many senior military officials and private defense contractors. Not least of these incentives is the prospect of post-military-retirement jobs as officers or consultants at defense industries, despite the restrictions currently in place.

But this was the "military-industrial complex" at work. Finding excuses to spend billions on highly questionable weapons systems. While Bin Ladin's al-Qaeda group and the nation of Afghanistan prepared a successful attack on the Pentagon.

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On that last point, my understanding now is that the Taliban government in Kabul not only tolerated but welcomed Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan. But I don't recall hearing any direct evidence that the government itself was involved in the actual planning of the 9/11 attacks.

The Star Wars boondoggle continued, of course:

• Amy Butler, U.S. Missile Defense Test An Embarrassing Failure Aviation Week Network 07/08/2013.
• Brendan McGarry, Test Failure Stirs Missile Defense Doubts Defensetech 07/18/2013
• Bob Dreyfuss, The Costly Failure of Missile Defense The Nation 07/23/2013

David Willman has been reporting on Star Wars/missile-defense for the Los Angeles Times. Two years ago he reported $40-Billion Missile Defense System Proves Unreliable.

Just this month, he reported in A flawed missile defense system generates $2 billion in bonuses for Boeing 09/02/2016:

The interceptors failed to destroy their targets in six of the 11 tests — a record that has prompted independent experts to conclude the system cannot be relied on to foil a nuclear strike by North Korea or Iran.

Yet over that same timespan, Boeing Co., the Pentagon’s prime contractor for GMD, collected nearly $2 billion in performance bonuses for a job well-done, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The Pentagon paid Boeing more than $21 billion total for managing the system during that period.

A Times investigation also found that the criteria for the yearly bonuses were changed at some point to de-emphasize the importance of test results that demonstrate the system’s ability to intercept and destroy incoming warheads.

And when were such changes made?

Early on, Boeing’s contract specified that bonuses would be based primarily on “hit to kill success” in flight tests. In later years, the words “hit to kill” were removed in favor of more generally phrased benchmarks, contract documents show. ...

In 2002, President George W. Bush ordered “an initial set of missile defense capabilities” to be put in place within two years.

To accelerate deployment, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld exempted the missile agency from the Pentagon’s standard procurement rules and testing standards.

The Pentagon’s own Operational Test and Evaluation office has documented serious deficiencies in the system. So have other government agencies and independent experts. [my emphasis]

Nice work if you can get it! And defense contractors do get it.

We're now into the fourth decade of the major Star Wars/missile defense effort. It's main purpose was to provide a missile shield to intercept nuclear missiles. Which only works if it's extremely close to 100% reliable. The strategic idea behind it was always dubious, to put it mildly, even if it had that level of reliability. Which it's never come close to having.

But who cares about that if it's generating not only billions of dollars in profit to companies that fail decade after decade to make the thing work?

The Star Wars/"missile defense" boondoggle is still doggling its boon

The new FX Cold War-nostalgia drama The Americans, in which two deep-cover KGB agents in 1981 are the protagonists, the development of St. Reagan's Star War/missile defense system has just kicked off an escalation in KGB activity, setting the stage for weekly adventures and harrowing escapes.

The Cold War is long gone, but the Long War goes on, with the Soviet Threat replacement by a phantom known as Al Qaida, which has effectively been serving the same purpose in many ways. And the Star Wars zombie shables on, still enriching military contractors without actually being able to serve its purpose 32 years after the fictional KGB agents on The Americans had to start freaking out over it.

Keri Russell as a foxy and deadly KGB sleeper agent in  the FX Cold War nostalgia series The Americans

Kingston Reif writes in Does missile defense work? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 02/08/2013:

Even if US defenses were far more effective than they currently are, their benefits against nuclear-armed missiles are often over-exaggerated. If US nuclear and conventional capabilities are insufficient to deter an adversary from using nuclear weapons, it is not clear how imperfect missile defenses would alter that adversary's calculus. Imperfect defenses could limit some of the damage that would result from a nuclear exchange, but the possibility that even one nuclear weapon could strike the United States is an outcome that no President would consider acceptable. Thus, more missile defenses are unlikely to meaningfully strengthen deterrence because nuclear-armed adversaries know that their chances of inflicting unacceptable damage on the United States would remain high -- especially since they could also employ means other than ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear weapons.

If the thing is still effectively useless after three decades plus, isn't it about time for another major rethink of this world-historic boondoggle?

Tags: missile defense, star wars

Obama and Star Wars

Pavel Podvig of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation writes on Barack Obama's missile defense challenge for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 11/11/08. He points out that the Russians' recent threat to move nuclear missiles into the Kaliningrad area to counter the stationing of the Star Wars "missile defense" system in Poland has already "presented Obama with his first major foreign policy test - how to handle the issue of missile defense in Europe, the biggest irritant in U.S.-Russian relations."

Podvig explains that Obama has left himself some real flexibility on this issue:

So far, the Obama team has shown great care in dealing with the thorny issue of missile defense in Europe. During the campaign, they deliberately avoided making any critical statements on the European system to avoid alienating Polish voters in battleground states such as Pennsylvania. And now that the election is over, we're hearing that they're telling the eager Polish government that their general position on missile defense--it should be deployed only "when the technology is proved to be workable"--applies to the European part of the system as well. This isn't good news for missile defense in Europe, since its technology is "workable" only in a narrow sense, if at all.

Of course, this story is far from over. If the Obama administration decides not to deploy interceptors and radar in Europe, it opens itself to a charge of yielding to Russian pressure--especially from Republicans, for whom missile defense is a signature issue. The plan to deploy missile defense in Europe also has supporters in Poland and the Czech Republic; both governments seem to believe that the presence of U.S. personnel on their soil would provide them a security guarantee far stronger than NATO membership. Finally, Russia isn't exactly interested in seeing the issue disappear: The system presents no threat whatsoever, but the controversy allows the Kremlin to score lots of rhetorical points. [my emphasis]

This last point is an interesting one. The Russians know, like everyone else who has paid some reasonable amount of attention to this issue, that "missile defense" is a boondoggle on a world-historical scale. Rummy when he was Defense Secretary even changed the standard testing procedures for the system so that it would never have to be proved to actually function as designed in order to be deployed and further developed.

The problem with anti-ballistic missile systems is not some complicated physics issue. The problem is that counter-measures to such a system are far easier and far less expensive than the anti-missile system itself.

But the "missile defense" system doesn't have to be completely cancelled in order to strike a mutually acceptable deal on the European deployments with Russia. Podvig judges the chances to be good that such a deal could be reached, involving a joint US-Russian missile monitoring system based around the Armavir and Gabala radar systems currently in place in Russia.

Assuming the Russians are willing to proceed rapidly with it, a deal like that could be an important early diplomatic "win" for the Obama administration. It would help put realistic nuclear nonproliferation back near the top of the US foreign policy agenda. And it would provide a good opening to phase out that incredible Star Wars boondoggle.

Tags: missile defense, nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear proliferation, star wars

Will the Establishment press start noticing war profiteering?

Before I gripe about Mark Shields Friday appearance on the PBS Newshour in another post, I want to point out that the same hour included the first of three segments on (gasp! choke!) war profiteering. They don't use that phrase. Too old-fashioned, I guess. But it's a good piece: Defense Department Examines Body Armor 09/21/2007.

The segment even included an interview with someone from the Center for Defense Information, a watchdog group that monitors defense spending with a critical eye for boondoggles. Of which there are plenty.

Rolling Stone magazine ran an article on Iraq War corruption called The Great Iraq Rip-off 08/23/07. The current (10/04/07) print issue has a piece called "The Truth About Missile Defense" by Jack Hitt, which is apparently not online as of this writing.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone appears in a recent interview on Antiwar.com talking about the massive corruption in the Pentagon's Iraq contracting, one subject that has been attracting a notable bit of press attention, if only because it was so big and blatant that it was impossible to totally ignore. (Caution: Taibbi has dissed Britney Spears pretty harshly so his judgment on some subjects is questionable.)

Let's hope this trend continues. Military spending needs to be debated in the context of redefining the overall mission of the US military. But these investigations of waste, questionable and outright corruption are a necessary part of that.

Tags: jack hitt, matt taibbi, missile defense, star wars, war profiteering

Star Wars, starry dreams

RS-24 missile (Photo: GlobalSecurity.org)

While we're all waiting breathlessly to hear the fate of Paris Hilton and her looming jail sentence ... the Russians claim they've successfully tested a rocket that is designed to avoid the Star Wars anti-missile shield: Russland testet neue Super-Rakete Der Spiegel Online 29.05.07; RS-24 / SS-X-29? GlobalSecurity.org 05/29/07; New Missile Successfully Test-Fired by Simon Saradzhyan Moscow Times 05/30/07 [The Moscow Times is owned by the state energy firm Gasprom].

That means that even though the Star Wars system still doesn't work, the Russians claim they have come up with an effective counter-measure in the case that after we sink more tens of billions of dollars into the thing, it actually gets to the point it might intercept an ICBM or two. According to the Russian government claim quoted by the Moscow Times reporting on the official, "The multiwarhead missile will be able to overcome any missile defense shield and will serve as the main land component of the country's strategic nuclear triad until the middle of this century, the statement said."

Which has always been the basic problem with the Star Wars concept. The shield, to the extent it's even technically feasible - something yet to be demonstrated in the real world - would be incredibly expensive, while counter-measures are not only technologically less challenging, but also cheaper. Cheaper by several orders of magnitude, in all liklihood.

And, of course, the whole thing means a spiraling nuclear arms race and more uncertainty, not less.

Somebody remind me again, just why is this supposed to be a good idea?

Tags: missile defense, star wars

"Missile Defense" for Europe? Against Iran?

I really don't know what to make of this yet. But the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung is reporting that the United States wants to station "missile defense" Star Wars systems in Europe to guard against attacks from Iran.

According to the anonymous US State Department source for the report, the US would seek bilateral treaties with European countries under which the US would pay them to allow the missiles to be stationed there. NATO as such would be bypassed in this approach. Missiles could be stationed there by 2006.

This would be the "missile defense" system that Rummy has exempted from normal testing requirements to allow it to proceed, because it couldn't pass the tests for reliability that normally weapons systems have to undergo.

What this new initiative may mean, I'm just shaking my head over. Are there contracts somewhere in there for Halliburton?

But the bottom line is not Halliburton's. It's the consequences of an accelerated arms race that will be the most likely outcome of this.

Tags: iran, iran war, missile defense, star wars