ABM TREATY COSTS

PREPARED TESTIMONY OF HENRY F. COOPER
BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1996

Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to provide my personal views on the threat to Americans at home and abroad posed by continuing adherence to the ABM Treaty--a Cold War treaty with a nation that no longer exists, a treaty out of step with realities of the new world disorder.

Today, I do not intend to dwell on policy issues surrounding the ABM Treaty. I have summarized my views elsewhere, and have attached for the record a reprint of a recent Orbis article.

My main purpose is to discuss, from a technical perspective, the impact of ABM Treaty on constraining design, research, testing and deployment of effective ballistic missile defenses-and the major costs for strict adherence to "perceived" restrictions of what are, in fact, ambiguous terms of that treaty. Also, I shall comment on the additional dangers to America and our overseas troops, friends and allies because our continued attachment to the ABM Treaty precludes building the most effective defenses--which, incidentally, are also the least expensive and can be built fastest.

Let me begin by elaborating a specific example that illustrates the inherent ambiguities of the ABM Treaty and the double standard applied to U.S. and Soviet--now Russian-interpretations in view of these ambiguities.

Including External Sensors-A Case Study

President Bush's March 1992 Report to Congress on Soviet Non- Compliance explained that the U.S. Government judged it probable that the (formerly Soviet) Pechora-class Large Phased Array Radars (LPARS) supported the Moscow ABM system with handover data suitable for target acquisition by the Pill Box engagement radar. Such LPARS are permitted only if pointed outward on the country's periphery--a provision of the Treaty violated by the Krasnoyarsk radar, as then Soviet Foreign Minister Shevardnadze finally admired in October 1989 after five years of denials. If integrated with the Soviet's Moscow ABM system, they could provide data on attacking ballistic missiles to enable the Moscow command system to launch Moscow-based interceptors before Moscow-based ABM radars could gather information needed for that purpose.

The U.S. had judged such an activity to be a significant Treaty violation and limited U.S. activities accordingly, but the President's 1992 report noted that the ABM Treaty wasnot explicit regarding this activity--and no violation was charged. After a year of internal review and discussions with the Russians, the President, in his January 1993 Report to Congress on Soviet Non-Compliance concluded-- and I quote:

In light of the ambiguity of the Treaty language, and based on further review of the issue and on the probable Soviet practice--which amounts to the use of precise target handover data in support of an effort to counter strategic ballistic missiles--the USG now judges that the support of ABM systems by early warning radar providing precise handover data will not constitute use of the early warning radar as ABM radar in violation of the ABM Treaty.

Specifically, the USG will not consider as prohibited the handover of precise state vectors of properly located and oriented early warning radars to ABM systems or ABM components. Such operations or test support to ABM systems or ABM components does not cause those early warning radars to be themselves considered ABM components or considered to have been given the capability to counter strategic ballistic missiles. While the handover of these data allows the ABM system or ABM component to initiate its ABM functions, the actual capability to counter strategic ballistic missiles remains exclusively with the ABM system of ABM components. Consequently, such handover would not constitute "testing in an ABM mode" nor giving of "capability to counter strategic ballistic missiles."

This committee drafted lawyerly gobble-de-gook was composed to conform to Treaty terms-of-art not clearly defined in the ABM Treaty negotiations--nor since. What it means, in this instance, is that Soviet--and presumably Russian--broad interpretations of the Treaty could not be called cheating even though we had--for 20 years-- considered such actions to be violations and had restricted our activities accordingly.

Whatever had been the prior U.S. interpretation, the U.S. should fully exploit the same ambiguity following this Soviet/Russian precedent-- rather than continuing to restrict its own activities as though nothing had happened. Clearly, we can upgrade our own Early Warning Radars to support any future National Missile Defense system. By direct analogy, we should also be able to design our NMD systems to exploit precise target handover data from any sensor not otherwise precluded by the Treaty and not colocated with ABM interceptors, including space-based sensors.

The Costs of Corrupting TMD

Nevertheless, the Clinton Administration is precluding the use of such handover data even for Theater Missile Defenses, which were never supposed to be limited by the Treaty. To repeat, the Clinton Administration is precluding the exploitation of target handover data from any sensor other than a radar co-located with the TMD interceptors--in system design, research, testing, and deployment. And it is negotiating with the Russians to include such inhibitions as de facto amendments to the letter and purpose of the ABM Treaty, turning it into an ATBM Treaty--and the ClintonAdministration has made dear it intends to do so without the approval of the Senate, ignoring the Senate's Constitutionally mandated treaty-making responsibilities.

The major potential costs of this narrow interpretation were discussed by my colleague Dr. Bill Graham in his SASC Testimony last year, and I'd like to build on a graphic he provided in responding to questions for the record. He defined a system performance parameter by the area on the surface of the ground, or "footprint", that a ground-based interceptor can defend. The Clinton Administration's ABM Treaty- related prohibition on exploiting the advantages of external sensing can be summarized by showing the ratio of defended area with external sensing to the defended area without external sensing. In this way, the largest Surface area that could be defended by an interceptor under no ABM Treaty constraint (the kinematic limit of the interceptor) can be compared to the area that can be defended under the ABM Treaty-related prohibition on external sensing now being imposed on System design and implementation.

The attached figure shows this ratio for a family of interceptors with velocities varying between 2 and 5 kin/second plotted against the range of existing offensive theater ballistic missiles. This defended area ratio, which is significantly larger for longer range offensive missiles in all cases, increases approximately as the square of the defensive interceptor's velocity.

The 3 km/second interceptor velocity case is of particular interest because the Clinton Administration and Russia are reported to have agreed that lower velocity interceptors are Treaty compliant. Since the THAAD interceptor's velocity is between 2 and 3 km/second, THAAD is compliant--but the Navy's Upper Tier interceptor's velocity is between 4 and 5 km/second--which the Russians have not agreed is Treaty compliant.

Restricting TMD interceptor velocities to 3 km/sec, as the Russians are demanding, would deny the improved coverage that could be provided by a higher velocity advanced THAAD or Navy Upper Tier interceptors. And not permitting handoff data from sensors other than a co-1ocated radar-as the Clinton Administration is doing'imposes a large penalty for all velocties but most of all for the higher velocities.

This area ratio for a given velocity interceptor currently represents an unrealized potential defense coverage capability because the Clinton Administration is imposing its perceived ABM Treaty constraints on our development of these theater defenses, e.g., it is not permitting the use of data from sensors other than co-located radars to enable the interceptor to achieve its potential effectiveness. To compensate for this lost potential, additional interceptor sites could be deployed to gain the area coverage. Thus, the area ratio also is a first order estimate of the "treaty-related" costs for defending a given area.

For instance, against a 1500 km range missile, the lost potential for a 3 km/second interceptor is more than a factor of ten, i.e., over 10 times the number of sites--at over 10 times the marginal Cost--would be required to defend the area that could be defended by a single interceptor site with hand-off data from external sensors. If a faster interceptor were employed, the lost potential would be substantially greater.I have dwelt on the discussion of the importance of using a network of sensors to maximize the performance of missile defense systems--and in particular TMD systems-because the Clinton administration is deliberately restricting designs to preclude this architecture for ballistic missile defense. This is particularly ironical given our inability to conclude that the Soviets/Russians were violating the ABM Treaty by adopting precisely this same architecture when including LPARS in the Moscow ABM system.

I emphasize that this is a policy decision, not a technology based one. The Navy's Cooperative Engagement architecture has demonstrated cruise missile intercepts beyond the range of the radar on the Aegis cruiser that launched the interceptor. And the Navy's "engage on remote" capability is but an example of the system-of-systems open architecture so widely touted for other applications in the Pentagon.

Such policy constraints--I call them a deliberate "dumbing down" of our fighting capabilities--are a direct consequence of an excessive commitment to the ABM Treaty and, by extension, to its underlying idea that intended victims of ballistic missiles are most safe when vulnerable to attack. We can work hard to shoot down cruise missiles- as we have since World War II, but as a matter of theology, our policy is that we must not do all we can to defeat ballistic missiles. That is a matter only for arms control.

Whatever one's view of continuing the ABM Treaty--and I shall share my own later, I believe a clear lesson from this experience--and others as well--is that we should not impose upon ourselves restrictions in excess of those that can be verifiably imposed on the systems of the former Soviet Union. Taxpayers should be offended by the excessive costs of "dumbing-down" our military capabilities. More than that, American, allied and friendly lives are literally at stake; we should deploy defenses that are all they can be.

Some Other Case Histories

There are many other examples that I could give of how our devotion to the ABM Treaty has cost and is costing us capability, time, money and operational effectiveness. Let me list a few for the record without elaboration.

• In the 1970s, no ballistic missile defense capability was given to SAM-D, now called Patriot. In the mid-1980s, many opposed giving Patriot the limited ballistic missile. defense capability demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War--and notable arms control experts testified that doing so would violate the ABM Treaty. While the U.S. body politic was reluctantly improving Patriot, the Soviets were building the SA-10 and SA-12 systems--now marketed by the Russians as being better than Patriot. In any case, the Patriot development program limped along with an annual Congressional fight until late 1990 after Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, when production lines were turned on before the upgrades were fully tested. Every Patriot fired in the Gulf War was built between August 1990 and the War which began in January 1991.Since then, there has been plenty of money for Patriot improvements--whatever their technical merits when compared to other TMD programs.

• In the 1980s, software was constrained to assure the Aegis radar could not track attacking ballistic missiles. A recent fix to this software on the oldest deployed Aegis cruiser enabled the Bunker Hill to track all of the ballistic missiles China launched at Taiwan in last Spring's crisis--they could have been intercepted if capable interceptors had been on-board. Such interceptors might have been available had the Clinton Administration executed the Aegis upgrade program I left in place and fully funded on January 20, 1993--but these programs were severely cut. Now deployment of the Navy Upper Tier could begin as early as in the year 2000 if the Clinton administration executes the programs as directed and funded by the Congress. But the Administration has continued to procrastinate while conducting at least six internal reviews this last year--all of which yielded positive recommendations, by the way. These delays were, I believe, related to the Administration's concerns about the Treaty and whether a Navy Upper Tier system "dumbed-down" to meet perceived Treaty constraints can be justified as meeting a military need--and even so, the "dumbed-down" system makes sense.

• The Clinton Administration is restraining the Aegis radar so that it can track only targets that travel slower than 5 km/second and restricting the Aegis interceptor sensor suite so that it can "see" only warm attacking RVs--because if we gave the system the capability to track faster missiles and see cold RVs, the interceptors might have capability against Russian ballistic missiles. It is impossible to deny rogue states faster missiles and cold RVs. Retrofits to counter these inevitable developments will be much more expensive than they would have cost at the outset.

• The Clinton Administration has canceled essentially all programs that could provide a boost-phase intercept capability in the near term--even though threat missiles that release multiple warheads in their boost and ascent phases of flight may and probably will appear in the near-term, perhaps before effective defenses can be built even if responsive boost-phase intercept programs were re-instituted. Such a development would defeat aH of the TMD systems currently being developed by the Clinton Administration. I believe this blind spot is related to the fact that if a ballistic missile can be destroyed in its boost phase, it doesn't matter what its range is or what its target is. Heaven forbid that we should be able to destroy missiles aimed at the United States, that might violate the ABM Treaty.

• Primarily because of political realities--largely associated with the ABM Treaty-since the early 1990s, Congress has directed that the main development and funding emphasis be given to ground-based U.S. homeland defenses--they can be Treaty compliant, at least initially. The needed multi-site ground-based interceptor system will be the most expensive, least effective defense--and, believe it or not, it will take the longest to build. (As I reported to Congress in 1992 and documented in my January 20, 1993, End-of-Tour Report, the 5-6 site Congressionally mandated system, approved by the Pentagon's acquisition process during the Bush Administration,would have cost about $35 billion and would not have been fully deployed before the middle of the next decade--had the Clinton Administration sustained that program, which it did not.) And it will have no capability to counter missiles that release their warheads early in flight--in their boost- and ascent phases.

• Ever since the Missile Defense Act of 1991--which was crafted to assure enough votes in Congress to commit to building at least some defense while accommodating ABM Treaty concerns, the most effective, least expensive, and nearest term deployment options--space-based defenses, have been put on the back burner. Previously, there had been a fully approved acquisition program to develop Brilliant Pebbles, a space-based interceptor system. In spite of the annual programmatic turbulence introduced by Congressional cuts, this was my soundest program from management and technical perspectives. Indeed, Defense Secretary Les Aspin's Inspector General in 1994 judged this program to have been managed "efficiently and cost-effectively within the funding constraints imposed by Congress" and observed that termination of key contracts "was not a reflection on the quality of program management". That the technology is sufficiently mature to deploy much more effective space-based defenses soon was demonstrated by the award- winning 1995 Clementine mission which space-qualified first generation Brilliant Pebbles hardware. Also, it is made abundantly clear by numerous industrial and civil programs now exploiting the associated technology and architecture for other purposes, including just to make money.

  I was very interested to note that Teledesic's President, Russell Daggattt, gave SDI--and Brilliant Pebbles in particular-credit for the enabling technology for their privately funded 840 small satellite telecommunications system. To quote him, "Teledesic is made possible through... SDI work done on large satellite constellations." Brilliant Pebbles died because of politics--largely associated with the ABM Treaty, not for any technical or management reason.

• On my watch at SDI, substantial risk and costs were added to our testing activities because of the requirement to conform to ABM Treaty interpretations imposed by Congress--there was never agreement with the Soviets/Russians on a "narrow" interpretation prior to this administration. Testing programs for the most effective ballistic missile concepts were contorted by lawyers and only then designed by engineers. For example, to satisfy the lawyers in testing space-based interceptor concepts we had to commit an "ground-based" interceptor in a lofted trajectory-costing hundreds of millions of dollars before launching a few million dollar target for the interceptor to hit on its way back down. This took much longer and cost much more than putting the interceptor in orbit, launching the target, and then launching the interceptor from space for an intercept attempt.

Discussion, Conclusions and Recommendations

The above examples illustrate how the ABM Treaty has frustrated--and continues to frustrate--the development of the most effective defenses against ballistic missiles of all ranges. It has accomplished its purpose--no effective defense of the United States ofAmerica can be built consistent with its terms. Furthermore, it is corrupting our programs to defend our overseas troops, friends and allies--programs which never were supposed to be limited by its terms. It costs us dearly in treasure, time and, perhaps soon, lives. Actually, it has probably already cost us lives--the 28 military personnel killed 'when an Iraqi Scud hit their barracks during the Gulf War might have been spared if Patriot had not been dumbed-down and delayed because of ABM Treaty concerns. And America's continuing vulnerability is making the ballistic missile the surest way to threaten the U.S.--the weapon of choice for state terrorists. Building effective missile defenses should have a high priority in our counter-terrorism efforts.

If the ABM Treaty constraints were removed, we could fully exploit existing technology to build the most affordable and effective defenses against ballistic missiles of all ranges. Under that condition, I would give the highest priority to building as soon as possible very effective, continuously on-station, wide area defenses against missiles that rogue leaders can use to threaten even distant nations.

As was recommended by the Heritage Foundation's Team B--which I was privileged to lead, I believe the least expensive, most effective program would provide a global defense--first from the sea and then from space. A global defense could always be present--consequently it would avoid the difficulties of deployment in an escalating crisis, such as the political constraints that delayed the deployment of Patriots to South Korea during its stand-off with North Korea a couple of years ago. All ground-based defenses will have this difficulty.

For under $1 billion/year, the Navy's Aegis system--in which we have already invested about $50 billion--can be rapidly upgraded to become an effective global defense. For $2-3 billion, 650 interceptors can be deployed on 22 cruisers around the world--with the first on station as early as in the year 2000. Then, a cruiser in the Sea of Japan, if not dumbed down to meet perceived ABM Treaty constraints, could shoot down missiles launched from North Korea toward Japan--or the United States. Similarly, cruisers in the Mediterranean Sea could intercept missiles launched from North Africa and the Middle East toward Europe or the U.S. Missiles in the North Atlantic or North Pacific could defend the U.S. against missiles launched from almost anywhere in the world.

Of course, such a sea-based system would be improved with time--within the $1 billion/year budget suggested above. The first improvement would be a more capable interceptor by the middle of the next decade to defend against more modern missiles.

As noted in the above discussion, boost-phase defenses will be necessary to defeat ballistic missiles that release their warheads early in their flight. I believe that this threat will likely develop faster than apparently is contemplated by the Clinton Administration, given its lackadaisical attitude toward programs to develop such defenses even against theater-range ballistic missiles.

Starting today from scratch with an investment of $1-2 billion/year, deployment of a global space-based system could begin as early as in 2001. It could provide multipleintercept opportunities against ballistic missiles with ranges greater than a few hundred miles--in time, under a hundred miles, launched from anyplace on earth toward any other place. As pointed out by Larry Goldmuntz in a recent Strategic Review article (attached), such a space-based defense could be placed in orbits so that the U.S. could be defended against missiles launched from rogue states but not Russia--if the U.S. were to adopt the bizarre view that it wishes to remain entirely vulnerable to Russian missiles.

To tie my discussion on the costs of the ABM Treaty together in a graphic way, consider the second attached figure which is taken from the Heritage Team B report. Here is plotted total acquisition costs as a function of the defended area. The costs of not taking advantage of external sensors is shown explicitly for THAAD, and the cost is obviously much greater for the Navy Upper Tier. Without exploiting handoff data from external sensors, the Navy Upper Tier costs would increase more rapidly with defended area than does THAAD with an autonomous radar. Space-Based Interceptors (SBIs) and the Navy Upper Tier with external sensors are global defenses and dearly the best buy. But to gain these benefits, something must be done about the ABM Treaty.

For my part, I believe that the ABM Treaty is a relic of the Cold War and that its adverse restraints on out ability to defend Americans at home and abroad should be discarded-as amicably as possible, but also as soon as possible. I am satisfied that the threat to the United States is a present and growing danger, demanding an urgent response with the best and most affordable defenses available.

For five years in Geneva, I argued with the Soviets that we should move beyond confrontation and threats of mutual annihilation to cooperation--including on missile defenses. In 1992, in the same U.N. speech in which he proposed the deeper reductions that became START II, Russian President Boris Yeltsin proposed that SDI be redirected to take advantage of Russian technology and build a global defense for the world community. The Bush Administration made progress toward agreement on that agenda, but in the final analysis it failed to capitalize on Yeltsin's initiative. And the Clinton Administration did not continue that negotiating agenda--rather it called the ABM Treaty the "cornerstone of strategic stability" and has sought to "strengthen" it by making it an ATBM Treaty as well.

This trend is, in my opinion, quite contrary to U.S. national interests. Indeed, it is even contrary to Russia's interests in the long run--if cooperation is truly Russia's objective. In any case, I urge that the U.S. clearly--unambiguously--state its intention to build the most effective, affordable defenses that current technology permits with or without Russia's cooperation. If Russia chooses to cooperate, we can work together to assure that the global defense serves our mutual interests. Otherwise, we should withdraw from the ABM Treaty as is permitted in Article XV.

Mr. Chairman, we should put behind us the era of dumbing down systems to be consistent with our perceptions of the constraints imposed by ambiguous Cold War treaty terms. And we should end America's total vulnerability to missile attack as soon as possible with the best defenses we can afford.