What do we mean by "transformation"? An exchange - defense policy, United States

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2002 by Andrew L. Ross, Michele A. Flournoy, Cindy Williams, David Mosher

A force like this is affordable at today's level of spending. It is one that would seem to fit within the world view and the strategy embraced by the Bush administration. Though it is substantially smaller, especially in the Army and to some degree in the Air Force, it is stronger in the areas where strength will be most needed over the long term.

DAVID MOSHER

Missile defense is our future. We are headed there. It is not a matter of if, but when--and also, to some degree, how. The very things that are driving us to transformation--preserving freedom of action, concern about asymmetric threats--are compelling reasons why we need theater missile defense, national missile defense--and the term du jour--"allied missile defense," the current administration's proposal to provide missile defense to our allies.

In some sense, missile defense is at the heart of transformation: if the nation could protect itself easily from ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, the effectiveness of asymmetric strategies would be reduced significantly. In part it is the difficulty of missile defense that is driving this push to transformation. The whole effort could be significantly affected by our ability to predict accurately what missile defense will cost, what its capabilities will be, and what the timetable is likely to be.

That is what I would like to talk about here, focusing on two things--first, why missile defense costs seem to rise so inordinately quickly, seemingly faster than almost anything else, and for national missile defense (NMD) in particular; and second, why those costs matter.

Costs Grow and Schedules Slide

In acquisition programs generally, the historical cost-growth rate has been somewhere between 20 and 30 percent, but missile defense seems to grow a lot faster than that, Early in the 1990s, the cost of a single-site hundred-interceptor system was thought to be about five billion dollars. A few years later, it was eight billion dollars. Today we are talking about twenty billion dollars or more--a fourfold increase for a system that has essentially not changed. Other examples are theater missile-defense programs. The Navy Theater-Wide program is rising quickly. SBIRS-Low (*) was estimated at four billion dollars originally; now we are talking eight billion, and it will not get beyond where it presently is without a significant infusion of cash.

Why are ballistic missile defense programs fundamentally different from others? I have a theory, involving three basic factors: the ballistic missile defense debate is taking place in an extremely political environment; it is responding to what is perceived to be a very urgent threat; and, perhaps most important, the technical challenges of missile defense have been significantly underestimated. As a result of all this, costs grow and schedules slide. The implication is that if we do not get those problems under control, missile defense is going to keep sliding farther and farther to the right.

Missile defense was born in the crucible of ideological combat. Those who want missile defenses and those who are opposed to them approach the topic with religious zeal. The only other debate that elicits similar passion is that on abortion. In fact, that comparison suggests the highly moralistic and political tone of the missile defense debate and the kinds of pressures that give rise to these programs. Visionary thinking often underlies missile defense programs, but it is frequently not consistent with technical reality. Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" (Strategic Defense Initiative) speech in 1983 was highly visionary, but the needed technology was decades away. Another example is the Navy Theater-Wide System. It has never hit a target, and yet there is a core of people, some in the Navy but most of them outside, who say that it can do not only theater defense but national defense, boost-phase defense, midcourse defense, ascent-phase defense. Any one of those capabilities will cost, they claim, only two billion dollars.