Attacking the Shield. - Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack - book review

National Review, Dec 31, 2001 by Richard Lowry

Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack, by Bradley Graham (Public Affairs, 430 pp., $27.50)

This book is what they call a "notebook dump," although it's an impressive and informative one. Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham has tracked down the most intimate details of the Clinton administration's deliberations on missile defense, and regales us with what seems to be every interoffice memo, every harsh word over a conference table, every bit of intramural diplomacy-all of which ultimately led to nothing.

It's not Graham's fault that his book ended up being about how an administration that really, deep down, didn't want to do anything about missile defense, didn't do anything about missile defense. As much as anything, then, it becomes-although Graham is by no means a Clinton critic-a devastating portrait of Clinton-administration passive- aggression, evasion, and bad faith.

There is one lesson that clearly emerges from all the Clinton maneuvering and agonizing over missile defense: the irrationality of the ABM Treaty. The treaty constantly forces the administration's plans on missile defense into the least sensible and least intuitive forms, until its strategic thinking has become a kind of cargo cult devoted to a document that Nixon and Brezhnev dropped from the sky in 1972.

As Graham recounts, the notion of missile defense is as old as the V-2 rocket, a weapon that prompted the American military to recommend developing a missile-defense system as early as 1945. The possibility of being attacked by a missile naturally leads to the idea of defending against such an attack. It took Robert McNamara, the source of so many intellectual mistakes, to defy this line of reasoning in the 1960s. McNamara argued that each side in the Cold War only needed the ability to destroy a sizable amount of the other side's population and industry ("assured destruction") to guarantee peace ("mutual deterrence").

Put the two ideas together and you get MAD, mutually assured destruction. It was this doctrine, more than the Russians, that drove the push toward the ABM Treaty. Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin told McNamara once, "When I have trouble sleeping nights, it's because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles."

It would take decades to return to this common sense, with a lot of action starting in the mid 1990s. Graham has an excellent inside look at Don Rumsfeld's work on a congressionally mandated commission to determine the nature of the "rogue" missile threat. Early on, the commission was getting stiffed by the CIA; commission members confronted director George Tenet in person about it, and he quickly relented. "If there was a single moment in the late 1990s when events began to turn in favor of those advocating a national missile defense," Graham writes, "this was it."

Rumsfeld & Co. began to get the goods. They had some debunking to do. In 1995, just as pro-missile-defense Republicans were taking over Congress, the National Intelligence Estimate-the collective work of all the nation's intelligence agencies-had reported that no rogue nation would "develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguous 48 states and Canada." (Small comfort for residents of Hawaii and Alaska.) This was convenient for the Clinton administration, which could tell Republicans there was consequently no urgent need for a defense. But only two years earlier, the NIE had said that no projections could be made reliably beyond ten years. Curious, huh?

The Rumsfeld commission found the intelligence community bumbling and excessively cautious. U.S. intelligence often lagged years behind events. The commission's 1998 report concluded that states like North Korea or Iran could-with little or no warning-develop within five years missiles capable of hitting the U.S. The report, coupled with a law passed by Congress that made it U.S. policy to deploy a missile-defense system "as soon as technologically possible" (the inspiration of an aggressive GOP Senate staffer named Mitch Kugler), put the political squeeze on the Clinton administration.

Back in the 1960s, when President Johnson was being urged by the Joint Chiefs to build a missile defense, McNamara wanted instead to "seek funds for long-lead items on missile defense but delay a deployment decision while querying the Soviets about negotiations to limit such systems." In a sign that there is almost nothing new under the Washington sun, the Clinton administration's playbook 30 years later could have been written by McNamara. At first, the administration adopted, under pressure from the Dole campaign, a plan possibly to deploy by 2003; then that slipped, and under congressional pressure, it adopted another plan possibly to deploy by 2005.

Clinton officials worked late nights trying to find clever ways to plan their system around the ABM Treaty. The treaty allowed each side only one limited missile-defense site; the American site is currently located in North Dakota. So a Clinton NSC staffer worked to find a way to defend all the nation from the North Dakota facility. When this proved impossible, the administration settled on an Alaska site that would supposedly provide national coverage from a North Korean attack (although not necessarily one from the Middle East). But there was an even more fundamental problem with the treaty: It strictly forbade any nationwide defense.