Who killed SDI? We could have had a working anti-missile defense thirty years ago. We still don't. Why? - Strategic Defense Initiative

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Angelo Codevilla

If even one ballistic missile had been fired at the U.S. on March 23, 1993, it would have hit its target just as surely as it would have done ten years earlier, on the day when Ronald Reagan told the world that the U.S. Government was committed to protecting the American people against missile attack. After spending some $30 billion, Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative has produced not one weapon or sensor capable of protecting anyone against anything.

America has never lacked the technical know-how to defend itself. Anti-missile technology has always kept up with or outpaced that of offensive missiles. In the 1950s, when medium- and long-range rockets were first tested, U.S. Army radars were picking incoming nose-cones out of debris, and surface-to-air interceptors were being readied to strike them. But the anti-missile mission became a bureaucratic orphan when the Army and Air Force each failed to get exclusive title to it and split it among themselves. Then, during the 1960s, missile defense became the chief villain of a doctrine that captivated the U.S. foreign-policy establishment: the U.S. and the Soviet Union would live happily ever after if neither attempted to interfere with the other's ability to wreak nuclear holocaust. Ideology combined with the military's interest-group politics to make research into ever more advanced defensive technologies more attractive than building currently available defenses.

This coalition of ideologists and the military was responsible for the Nixon-Brezhnev ABM treaty of 1972, which prohibited defenses except within defined limits. The Soviets of course strained against those limits (and then some) and built all the elements of a nationwide defense. By contrast, the U.S. Government tried to make sure that nothing in the U.S. arsenal would have any anti-missile capacity at all. Thus among many, many other things, when the Army tried to build a system, called Patriot, to defend against both aircraft and ballistic missiles, the Ford and Carter Administrations ordered that its radar power be cut in half, its software slowed, and its fuse rendered inaccurate.

At the end of the 1970s this pattern almost broke down. The long denied Soviet strategic buildup had become undeniable, and the U.S. no longer had the option of countering it with an offensive-missile buildup of its own. Some longtime Defense executives, e.g., Eugene Fubini, and a few politicians, e.g., Senators Malcolm Wallop (R., Wyo.) and Fritz Hollings (D., S.C.) and Representative Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.), began to encourage industry to see how new technology could take a bite out of the Soviet missile threat.

Industry responded with programs to produce working models of a variety of ground- and space-based devices. There were to be big rockets fired into the path of oncoming warheads. Some would carry sensor packages to sort out the warheads from the decoys, while others would spawn multiple homing vehicles that would smash into the warheads hundreds of miles out in space. There were also plans to merge the technology that lets our spy satellites track their targets with the newfound capacity to build big chemically fueled lasers. The resulting weapons were to destroy enemy missiles soon after they lifted off into space. Then there were to be Boeing 767 aircraft fitted with sensor domes to sort out any warheads that had reached the edge of the atmosphere and direct interceptor rockets to them, much as our AWACS aircraft now vector fighter planes to their targets. These and many others were not research projects--they were deployable devices.

Even the Carterites...

The Carter Administration's unfriendliness to deploying anti-missile systems did not uniformly extend to their development. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Undersecretary William Perry, Secretary of the Air Force Hans Mark, and Director of Advanced Projects Robert Fossum were men of intellect and integrity. They funded missile defense adequately, and twice even doubled the small space laser budget. They rejected the proposals of such opponents of defense as Seymour Zeiberg, Victor Reis, John Foster, and the Defense Science Board to restrict projects to basic research or to mislead Congress about their feasibility. Hence, during the Carter Administration, advocates of defense were able to make a solid, widely reported case that defense was both necessary and available.

Despite Ronald Reagan's oft-expressed enthusiasm for anti-missile defense, the people who took charge of it in his Administration were uniformly hostile. (Martin Anderson, and Edwin Meese were strongly in favor, but neither had the knowledge or inclination to take on the national-security bureaucracy.) In January 1981 the Weinberger Pentagon turned down an allocation by the Office of Management and Budget of $500 million for space-based anti-missile weapons. Examples of any agency turning down money from OMB for any purpose are almost non-existent. In October 1981 White House science advisor Jay Keyworth told an audience of aerospace executives that he had spent three-fourths of his time since coming to Washington trying to turn off congressional pressure for anti-missile defense. He chose Victor Reis, who had been too anti-defense for the Carter Administration, to handle anti-missile matters at the Reagan White House. Director of Advanced Projects Robert Cooper drove out pro-defense engineers, de-scoped anti-missile projects, and then told Congress he was pursuing them to the max. Secretary Caspar Weinberger followed the Generals, who were opposed. As a consequence, when congressional advocates of defense went to the top to complain about the lack of honest answers out of the Pentagon, or about Administration officials working with leftist House staff to scale back the modest programs left over from the Carter Administration, they found smiles, but no one was home.