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

This political warfare is amplified by concern that there are looming threats to our forces and to the United States--the enemy is at the gates. This leads to a crash-program mentality, and that introduces some real problems. Urgency leads to optimism, then overoptimism--we can do this technically difficult thing, very quickly, and for not much money. Missile defense proposals are not fully matured, well conceived acquisition projects but ideas, concepts floated in a "crash environment." Because of the sense of urgency, however, they are treated as well-constructed programs. Rough cost estimates are assigned to them, which the budgeteers in the Pentagon and Congress accept as well-crafted figures--but they are not, because they lack the thorough analysis and pessimism needed for good cost estimates.

Particularly, there has not been enough thinking about the technical complexity of missile defense in general. The result is poorly designed programs with insufficient attention to testing, to system integration, to the reduction of technical risks. All that, in turn, leads to unrealistic estimates of what the systems can do, when they will be able to do it, and how much they will cost. A few examples are in order here. The Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) system was proposed in the George H. W. Bush administration. Its goal was to protect the United States against up to two hundred Soviet warheads launched by a rogue commander. The price tag was forty-two billion dollars for the national missile defense component, which included a thousand satellites to intercept missiles and 750 ground-based interceptors. Today, for thirty billion dollars, or three-quarters the cost, we are likely to get only a hundred ground-based interceptors. GPALS also had a theater missile-defense "underlay," which was advertised at twelve billion dollars. Today, for the Army's Theater High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3) programs alone, we are talking about over twenty billion dollars.

When William Perry, secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997, started thinking about this issue, he challenged the Defense Department and the services to develop over two years missile defense systems that could be deployed, if the threat required, in two additional years. It was an insurance program, and there was no cost estimate placed on it. The "two-plus-two" idea grew into a "three-plus-three" plan that envisioned a cost of eight billion dollars. As I mentioned, the cost today for essentially the same system has risen to twenty billion or thirty billion, depending on which version of the hundred interceptors you are talking about, and those estimates keep climbing. The Bush administration is now proposing a system with five interceptors by 2004 with no national missile defense radar, at least not initially. The goal is to get something done quickly and to worry about the details really later--another example of the rush to deal with the perceived urgent threat.