By the end of 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld acknowledged that while any planned defense against missile attack would be inadequate, the United States would nonetheless soon have a “modest capacity.”52 Two devastating investigations into procurement and testing practices—one by the Missile Defense Agency itself and one conducted by the Government Accountability Office—concluded that the Pentagon had actually sacrificed rigorous testing and quality control in order to meet President Bush’s pledge of a 2004 deployment, and both called for much greater accountability and an end to flagrant cost overruns.53 In October 2005, the Senate Appropriations Committee quietly disclosed that the Pentagon was giving up on trying to make further improvements in its GMD interceptors and that the first generation of ground-based exoatmospheric kill vehicles would also be the last.54 Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists reported on the results of this internal criticism: “There is no evidence the GMD system would have any military utility, which is why it has not been declared operational. It is a little-known fact that the Pacific and Strategic military commands, which perform their own assessments separate from those of the MDA, have refused to make it operational.”55
In fact, the whole Pentagon effort has been devoted to meeting a non-credible threat from rogue-nation ballistic missiles while ignoring a genuine challenge to the very concept of missile defense—that of Russia and its Topol-M ICBM. As Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in the Soviet Union (1988-90) and later in Iraq (1991- 98), has observed, “On Christmas Eve 2004, the Russian Strategic Missile Force fired an advanced SS-27 Topol-M road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This test probably invalidated the entire premise and technology used in the National Missile Defense (NMD) system currently being developed and deployed by the Bush administration.”56
The Topol-M was Russia’s original answer to President Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies. It was designed during the late 1980s, but Russia did not produce it immediately because of the collapse of the USSR and because it discovered that Star Wars itself could be rather easily defeated by decoys and large numbers of conventional ICBMs. However, on June 13, 2004, the very day that George W. Bush succeeded in killing off the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, Aleksei Arbatov, one of Russia’s leading experts on military affairs, advocated in parliament that Russia respond by speeding development of the Topol-M. A year and a half later, on December 24, 2005, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, attended a ceremony at the Tatishchevo missile base in the Volga River’s Saratov region. He was commissioning a new set of Topol-Ms, which he declared to be “capable of penetrating any missile defense system.” The Topol-M was first put into service in December 1998 but was deployed only in silos. An off-road mobile version entered combat service in 2006.57 It is a truly formidable weapon.
Among its features are high-speed solid-fuel rockets that rapidly lift the missile into the atmosphere and make boost-phase interception inconceivable unless a defense system were located practically next door to the launcher; hardening and reflecting coatings to protect it against laser weapons; up to three independently targetable warheads and four sophisticated decoys; an ability to maneuver to avoid midcourse or terminalphase missile attacks; and a range of over 6,250 miles. There is no known defense against such a weapon. Diplomacy and deterrence are the only means to ensure that it will never be used, and the Bush administration has repeatedly rejected diplomacy as a useful tool of American foreign policy. The conclusion is unavoidable: Washington has given us at best the illusion of protection against a nuclear attack without reducing the odds of such an attack.58
There are so many things wrong with the missile defense program that it is difficult to think of it as merely an ambitious scientific effort having start-up problems. From space debris to the inability to identify clearly a hostile launch or sort out the decoys, its failures suggest that if Congress had even a slightly prudent commitment to fiscal integrity, it might well have scuttled the project long ago. That its members did not even discuss the possibility raises disturbing questions. Did the Bush administration and its Republican associates in Congress actually intend to build a missile defense system or were they only interested in a plausible public relations cover for using the defense budget to funnel huge amounts of money to the military-industrial aerospace corporations? As a cash cow, missile defense goes on enriching its sponsors precisely when it is not working and they have to go back to their drawing boards.
America’s imperial project to dominate the space surrounding our planet has provided a nearly perfect setting for official corruption. The air force and the military-industrial complex interests meshing with powerful congressional lobbies that want to bring space-oriented industries to their districts and perpetuate their own safe seats in Congress, as well as unimaginable sums of money protected from public scrutiny by “black budgets,” “special access programs,” and other forms of secrecy, all add up to a prescription for legal thievery on an unprecedented scale. Norman Ornstein, a specialist on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, has observed that when individual members of Congress have the ability to earmark—that is, privately attach—federal funds for pet projects and slip them unopposed into the Pentagons budget, “You are creating the most fertile environment for corruption imaginable.”59
During the first years of the new century, an array of experienced Pentagon and congressional budget officers began sounding the alarm that the purchase of weapons systems is now totally beyond public control—or often even public visibility. Of all the weapons systems, the most expensive and most prone to misuse and abuse has been the whole project to create an intercontinental-ballistic-missile defense system. At $8.8 billion, it was, after all, the largest single weapons request in the fiscal year 2006 defense budget. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington estimated that “black budget” requests for fiscal year 2007 amounted to $30.1 billion, the highest level since 1988 during the Cold War, 75 percent of them going to the air force mostly for space programs and new satellites. William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan, Michelle Ciarrocca, and Jonathan Wingo of the World Policy Institute have summed up our military ventures in space and space defense as “Pork barrel in the sky.”60
The raw monetary figures have been literally astronomic. From Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech to 2006, depending on which expert you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight—and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.61 One comprehensive analysis of the ultimate cost of the entire ballistic missile defense system by its distinctly theoretical date of completion in 2015—and excluding its most expensive and problematic component, a space-based laser—is $1.2 trillion.62
There can be no question that the whole system is surrounded by an environment of corruption that has been much aided and abetted by the way Defense Secretary Rumsfeld vastly increased the Clinton administration’s missile defense spending, moved virtually all missile defense projects into the classified budget, and ended normal reports to Congress concerning failures to meet delivery dates, cost increases, and the actual performance of equipment. He also cut some two thousand auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency.63 “The Pentagon’s new approach to missile defense testing is a contractor’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare,” writes the World Policy Institute’s Ciarrocca. “Pumping in more money while reducing outside scrutiny is an invitation to corruption and cost-overruns.”64
In December 2003, Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney, a former air force officer and for thirty years a budget analyst in the Pentagon, spoke to journalist Bill Moyers about what he called the “moral sewer on the Potomac.”65 Perhaps Spinney’s most important insight is that the primary emotion driving this system is not patriotism, greed, or need, but fear. The attacks of 9/11 unquestionably generated real fear, but continuous air force hyperbole in favor of ultra-high-tech projects, presidential statements tying 9/11 to missile defense, and alarmist claims that our dependence on orbiting satellites leaves us no choice but to defend them militarily all capitalize on prevailing fears and undermine a realistic defense.
