Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective

By Peter Dombrowski

Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective explains the origins, evolution, and implications of the regional approach to missile defense that has emerged since the presidency of George H. W. Bush, and has culminated with the missile defense decisions of President Barack Obama. The Obama administration's overarching concept for American missile defense focuses on developing both a national system of limited ground-based defenses, located in Alaska and California, intended to counter limited intercontinental threats, and regionally-based missile defenses consisting of mobile ground-based technologies like the Patriot PAC-3 system, and sea-based Aegis-equipped destroyer and cruisers.

The volume is intended to stimulate renewed debates in strategic studies and public policy circles over the contribution of regional and national missile defense to global security. Written from a range of perspectives by practitioners and academics, the book provides a rich source for understanding the technologies, history, diplomacy, and strategic implications of the gradual evolution of American missile defense plans. Experts and non-experts alike—whether needing to examine the offense-defense tradeoffs anew, to engage with a policy update, or to better understand the debate as it relates to a country or region—will find this book invaluable. While it opens the door to the debates, however, it does not find or offer easy solutions—because they do not exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804796569

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Regional missile defense from a global perspective / edited by Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Peter Dombrowski.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9064-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-9635-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Ballistic missile defenses—United States.   2. Ballistic missile defenses.   3. United States—Military policy.   4. United States—Military relations.   I. Kelleher, Catherine McArdle, editor.   II. Dombrowski, Peter J., editor.

UG743.R435 2015

358.1'74—dc23

2015005111

ISBN 978-0-8047-9656-9 (electronic)

Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/14 Minion

Regional Missile Defense from a Global Perspective

Edited by Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Peter Dombrowski

Stanford Security Studies

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

CONTENTS

List of Acronyms

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Peter Dombrowski

PART I. U.S. POLICIES AND PROGRAMS

1. Addressing the Missile Threat: 1980–2008

Susan J. Koch

2. U.S. National Missile Defense Policy

James M. Acton

3. Theater Ballistic Missile Defense Concepts

Amy F. Woolf

4. Technical Controversy: Can Missile Defense Work?

George N. Lewis

5. Congress and Missile Defense

Nancy W. Gallagher

PART II. REGIONAL DYNAMICS

6. Europe and Missile Defense

Gustav Lindstrom

7. Postcrisis Perspectives: The Prospects for Cooperation among the United States, NATO, and Russia on Ballistic Missile Defense

Vladimir Dvorkin

8. From Dream to Reality: Israel and Missile Defense

Ariel Levite and Shlomo Brom

9. Ballistic Missile Defense Cooperation in the Arabian Gulf

Michael Elleman and Wafa Alsayed

10. Ballistic Missile Defense in South Asia

Andrew Winner

11. Chinese Attitudes Toward Missile Defense

Christopher P. Twomey and Michael S. Chase

12. Japan’s Ballistic Missile Defense and Proactive Pacifism

Saadia M. Pekkanen

PART III. CRITICAL GLOBAL ANALYSES

13. Strategic Dead End or Game Changer?

Brad H. Roberts

14. Evaluating the Opportunity and Financial Costs of Missile Defense

Dov S. Zakheim

Conclusion: The Future of Ballistic Missile Defense Peter Dombrowski and Catherine McArdle Kelleher

Notes on Contributors

Index

LIST OF ACRONYMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors gratefully acknowledge the support and advice of individuals who helped in the design and completion of this volume, including:

Our contributors for their enthusiasm and patience;

Our stalwart assistant from the onset, Eric Auner;

Our talented translator, Anya Loukianova;

Our readers and project friends, Judith V. Reppy, Frank Rose, Dennis Gormley, Jim Wirtz, Jon Glassman, and Peter Swartz;

Our reviewers, including those from SUP;

Our editors, Geoffrey Burn, James Holt, and John Feneron of SUP, and Sandra Kisner;

Our participants in the two workshops held at Newport in 2011 and 2012.

They also acknowledge and thank the institutions that provided crucial support:

The Naval War College and Provost Mary Ann Peters;

The Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War College and Deans Barney Rubel and Thomas Culora;

The Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland and Director John Steinbruner;

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland and Steven Kull;

The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, including Watson Director Rick Locke, who provided an intellectual home for Peter Dombrowski during the final stages of manuscript preparation.

INTRODUCTION

Catherine McArdle Kelleher and Peter Dombrowski

A NEW WAVE OF REGIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE

Missile defense, and particularly regional missile defense, has returned to the spotlight after nearly a decade of relative obscurity. It has returned to the global policy agenda both because President Obama made regional missile defense a centerpiece of his national security strategy and because Russia’s aggressive foreign policy toward Ukraine and elsewhere has soured its relations with Europe and the United States. The new hallmark of Obama’s regional missile defense system, the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), scheduled to be operational in 2020, has become a pawn in the larger game of resetting the West’s relations with Russia.¹

Current uncertainties about missile defense in the European context have global implications, however. Regional missile defense has been a centerpiece of U.S. strategic diplomacy since the middle of the George W. Bush administration. Under President Obama the United States has pushed variants of the EPAA in the Persian Gulf and Northeast Asia as well. Meanwhile, Israel and other nations faced with missile threats are exploring both indigenous missile defense technologies and ways to link with the American systems. Greater spending on missile defense in response to renewed tensions with Russia or changes in American missile defense priorities (for example, regarding interceptor site locations or its overall systems architecture) could either spur activities in other regions or divert U.S. attention away from their specific challenges.

For the last three decades, the necessity for an active missile defense policy has been a rallying cry for its supporters, often those most convinced of the ultimate truth of Ronald Reagan’s SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars) vision. For others, it represents the primacy of technology as a response to twenty-first-century security dilemmas, a military answer that would require fewer boots on the ground but clearly an instrument to be integrated with others, capable of deterrence when needed and defense when appropriate. Moreover, regional missile defense systems may be one of the most significant Obama legacies in national security: the deployment in regions critical to the United States of workable, tested systems, available quickly for deployment and reinforcement and contributing to crisis stability. American allies and friends have come to see these as a newly potent symbol of collective defense and shared values. This was in sharp contrast to the heated discussions and stark opposition that earlier missile defense programs had encountered in the past.

Obama’s revision and expansion of George W. Bush’s plans provoked few of the dramatic congressional and electoral debates over missile defense that had taken place at several points since missile defense first entered that national security lexicon in the late 1950s. Criticism of the regional defenses and of the national homeland system came mostly from the small expert community, individual specialists, or think tanks. The range of regional attempts to explore and perhaps to establish regional defenses is near global, a tribute largely to American persuasiveness and example. Even in Europe, where debates only a decade before had raged over American withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that had blunted earlier missile defense efforts, American allies and friends seemingly view missile defense as a symbol of collective defense and shared values.

Our goal in this volume is to explain the origins, the evolution, and the implications of the regional approach to missile defense that has emerged since the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Under President Obama the overarching concept for American missile defense has focused on both a national system of limited ground-based defenses against limited intercontinental threats located in Alaska and California and regionally based missile defenses consisting of mobile ground-based technologies like the Patriot PAC-3 system and sea-based Aegis-equipped destroyers and cruisers. Eventually experts hope the entire system will comprise a set of layered conventional defensive missiles capable of protecting the U.S. homeland, allies, friends, and American forces stationed at sea or abroad from limited ballistic missile attacks. These compatible systems are bound together with advanced radars and sensors and responsive to Early Warning System alerts. They are designed to deter missiles fired from rogue states and possibly nonstate actors. U.S. regional missile defense systems have the potential to combine national systems of allies and friends, bilaterally managed forces, and NATO alliance forces in an architecture under bilateral and multilateral agreements with American systems and infrastructure.

The themes reflected here are largely familiar from earlier debates about missile defense: the important technological challenges encased in a hard problem; the question of costs, both direct and those of trade-offs versus other elements in the overall defense structures of nations; the political context at home and abroad; and acceptance or rejection of present designs and future dreams. Some touch on more fundamental strategic issues: answers within the present and foreseeable global context of offense–defense trade-offs or the requirements of credibility and capability in a framework of less than total war or shrinking strategic numbers. Still others center on the nature of alliance relationships and the weaving together of challenges in burden sharing, decision sharing, and the divisibility of risk. Each state and region, we emphasize, has a different mix of answers and questions, of present solutions and future dreams. We have tried to focus on those we and our contributors find central and hope others will see the challenges for future research we pose.

CHALLENGES TO REGIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEMS

There are fundamental uncertainties and core constraints, generally and within each region touched by the chapters in this volume. The obvious first factor is cost. In the decades since President Reagan’s famous Star Wars speech, it has become clear that even modest missile defense capabilities are drastically more expensive and time consuming to develop than was originally anticipated. As technological failures accumulate and uncertainties continue, core technical problems remain stubbornly unsolved despite continuing investments. Reagan’s purported dream of a massive shield against a major Russian or Chinese attack now seems unaffordable, as well as technologically and politically inconceivable. In retrospect, even the scaled-back plans of the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations—which envisioned hundreds of Ground-Based Interceptors to deal with limited missile salvos—seem wildly ambitious, when compared to the total of forty-four Ground-Based Interceptors currently planned for deployment in California and Alaska before 2020.

Yet, as the chapters in this volume document, the evolution of missile defense technologies has continued both in the United States and across the globe despite repeated technical failures and periodic bouts of elite political opposition. The end of the Cold War lowered the sense of risk of great power war and thus attacks from large numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles possessed by the Soviet Union and its successor states. After decades under threat, U.S. leaders and citizens have become accustomed to a circumstance in which a Russian or Chinese ballistic missile could be launched against them with little or no warning. Over time the logic of deterrence combined with arms control and other diplomatic measures, as well as advanced technologies like early warning radar, helped mitigate the sense of doom prevalent early in the Cold War. Reports of Russian and Chinese missile modernization still make headlines, but few reputable analysts believe new capabilities will upset the existing balance, much less allow for an overwhelming surprise first strike.

Susan Koch (Chapter 1) suggests that the George W. Bush administration saw an end to protracted public debate or at least the most public and contentious phase following President Reagan’s SDI speech. The Bush withdrawal from the ABM Treaty provoked little or no public Russian opposition and raised minimal public outcry in the United States or Europe; this suggested the dawn of a new post–arms control or post–post–Cold War era. The logic was clear: If Russia was a strategic partner, there was no longer the need to fear an arms race. China, while perhaps a near-peer competitor in the offing, was not yet there and probably wouldn’t be, at least at the strategic level, for many years. The basic strategic balances and the question of national defense were settled; the outlines of a relatively broad national consensus on missile defense, if not its content, fairly settled.

Moreover, the earlier wars over missile defense technologies—ranging from battles over the effectiveness of specific system components to those over alternative concepts for defeating incoming missiles—had subsided. Not least was the increasingly acknowledged fact (but not one universally accepted) that decades of effective investment in missile defense technologies were paying off in terms of allowing for limited, but credible, systems.²

The United States and its partners, however, now face two strategic risks. On the one hand, a number of potential adversaries are increasing the numbers, range, and accuracy of their missiles. As the Rumsfeld Commission emphasized in the late 1990s, the most notable risks come from the so-called rogue states of Iran and North Korea. More recent analyses also stress a parallel trend in the nondeclared new generation nuclear states, such as India and Pakistan, possessing increasingly capable delivery systems including short- and intermediate-range missiles. More states thus have, or are projected to have in the indefinite future, the ability to strike the territory and forces of the United States and its allies. Strategists and planners believe that adversaries will use missile forces to limit U.S. access to strategic regions and resources, constrain U.S. freedom of action, and deter U.S. military intervention.

For most policy makers, ballistic missile defense systems ranging from Ground-Based Interceptors to THAAD, Aegis, and PAC-3 are important tools for managing missile proliferation. They are attractive to political and military leaders because in the long run they appear to be comparatively inexpensive, depend on a limited physical footprint, are deployable at sea or on land, and are moveable and reconfigurable should new political or military circumstances arise. Most important, they offer the symbolic promise of protecting ordinary citizens without relying on the complex calculations of forces designed to ensure mutually assured destruction.

A number of high-profile nonpartisan reports released during the Obama presidency fueled expert-level debate. Critiques of the Obama administration approach in particular came from the Defense Science Board (DSB) in 2011, the National Research Council/National Academies of Sciences in 2012, and several Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports from 2008 onward. All examined and found wanting significant parts of the current plans, including the underlying concepts, individual technologies, and planned deployments. Taken together these studies affirm the missile defense mission in one form or another but provide some encouragement for those who oppose missile defense on feasibility and cost grounds. Debates are likely to continue given the many technical challenges inherent in the Obama plans, including questions on the current sensor architecture, the capability of future interceptors, and the ability of the United States and its partners to effectively integrate present and future missile defense assets into the networks of command and communication.

As the experts in this volume discuss, the most important technical controversies pose important questions. George Lewis (Chapter 4 in this volume), for example, examines how differing assessments of technological challenges, such as discriminating between rapidly moving objects and the impact of adversary countermeasures, have influenced political arguments favoring and opposing missile defense basic research, research and development, acquisition programs, and, not the least, the actual deployment of systems whether working or not. Dov Zakheim and Brad Roberts illuminate the attempts to resolve these controversies. But in the end the major political question remains: Which approach to missile defense best serves the nation’s overall strategic interests?

THE DOMESTIC CONTEXT: POLITICS AND PRIORITIES

Many officials and researchers assert that there is at present a consistent level of consensus in the United States about the broad concept of missile defense, the need first to develop and deploy protection of the U.S. homeland and second to help defend allies in critical regions. Some, as Nancy Gallagher (Chapter 5 in this volume) argues, do not. A somewhat smaller majority would agree on the relative attractiveness of the U.S. Navy’s SM-3 missile and Aegis system (both on board ships and with components based ashore) for providing a defense against regional missile threats. Technological and operational disagreements persist, of course, and there is an active debate among experts—scientists, military leaders, analysts, and politicians—on many aspects of missile defense, both national and regional. The most important question is what the balance should be of future investments against limited missile strikes between national defense programs or greater investments in layered regional systems.

Successive Congresses and two presidents (with perhaps some help from a third) have supported an ambitious range of technology development and deployment. The particular focus has been to address concerns about general missile proliferation and threats from North Korea, Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, and Hamas in particular. President Obama retained the second President Bush’s national missile defense program, which included Ground-Based Interceptor sites in Alaska and California, but scaled down both the pace of the program and the search for a third site in Europe against the threat of long-range missiles. He announced the EPAA regional system to defend allies against short- and intermediate-range missile attacks, especially from Iran. The EPAA included sea- and land-based systems based on upgraded versions of the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and the Navy’s Aegis system. EPAA promised to be smarter, stronger, and swifter. It would cover many more countries than previous regional systems planned for Europe and rely on perhaps 100 or more interceptors. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the new plan also relied more on existing and proven technology than the approach to European regional missile defense proposed by President George W. Bush: We can now field initial elements of the system to protect our forces in Europe and our allies roughly six to seven years earlier than the original plan.³

Subsequently, the 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review (BMDR) raised the significance of the regionally based systems like the EPAA to a status almost coequal to that of a national homeland missile defense and provided a fairly clear, technical perspective on the systems proposed and those under eventual consideration.⁴ Subsequent statements in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and in presidential national strategy pronouncements suggest EPAA’s role as a template of the possible and the integration of defensive systems against a range of threats and conflicts across the globe.

But defense issues in general and missile defense issues in particular did not figure prominently in the 2012 American presidential election. One exception related to missile defense and the Russian Reset. Republicans made much of Obama’s open mic comment to Russian premier Medvedev; they have used it to suggest a postelection Obama sellout to Russian interests and demands. Other partisan criticisms of the current administration are used sparingly for targeted audiences—Obama abandoning U.S. allies (Poland in particular), canceling President George H. W. Bush’s programs (the Airborne Laser and a number of interceptors that had failed testing), and inadequately funding certain programs and priorities. For a few, but increasingly articulate, critics, Obama’s real aim is the scaling down of U.S. missile defense ambitions. These criticisms may revive at any time in response to further shifts in the Obama missile program, in international crises, and in conflicts or future arms control negotiations with the Russian and Chinese governments.

Perhaps the most important domestic debate on missile defense came earlier in the public discussion of the last major U.S.–Russian arms control agreement, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). In April 2011, thirty-nine Republican senators sent a letter to the White House warning against giving the Russians a veto over American missile defense plans and expressing the opinion that sensitive data should not be shared with the Russians. The concerns expressed in this letter mirrored those expressed in the Senate debate over the 2010 New START treaty, the preamble of which contained an acknowledgment of a relationship between offenses and defenses. Republicans criticized the administration for including language that they saw as validating the Russian view that nuclear forces and missile defenses should be limited within the same framework. Concerns over cooperation and data and technology continue to be expressed by right-wing critics of the administration, with a particularly persistent and vocal group within the House Republican caucus.

But there are also Democrats in both houses attached to the concept of achieving some reliable measure of defense of the homeland and allies or with capabilities that give the president some options in a crisis other than immediate all-out war or nuclear use. To address this opposition, the president needed to articulate why an approach steeped in cooperative security principles would benefit American security interests. The more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, however, plays up the cost and technical problems involved and the deviation from what they believed was compatible with Obama’s pledge to draw down all the remnants of Cold War force posture, at home and overseas.

Neither President Obama nor his party as a whole has assigned a do or die priority to nuclear issues such as strategic modernization, much less defense against ballistic missiles. If anything, the president was initially focused on arms control and the push for Global Zero to set a path toward eventual elimination of nuclear weapons entirely.

THE GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF AMERICAN MISSILE DEFENSE POLICY

Yet, if the Obama administration’s approach to missile defense has not captured the attention of the American public, it has managed to convince leaders and security policy elites in other countries—largely allies, partners, and friends—that the American missile defense efforts have something to offer.

In pursuing a layered-approach national missile defense with a major contribution from American missile defense systems deployed in regions central to U.S. national security, the Obama administration has created the conditions for closer military, diplomatic, and military cooperation on other fronts. No longer does the U.S. desire to field missile defense systems threaten to decouple the security of the American homeland from its military forces deployed at sea or in the territories of American allies. Moreover, with the theater defense systems relying largely, but not exclusively, on sea-based interceptors and mobile ground-based systems like PAC-3 rather than fixed-ground installations or space-based programs, the political and diplomatic costs of working with the U.S. military are reduced. This is especially true for those states whose domestic and strategic circumstances benefit from being seen as less beholden to, or cooperative with, the United States.

But for others, and over the long term, increasingly successful missile defense systems, especially with dual and multiple uses (inferred by the term of art, integrated air and missile defense, for example), allow American allies ways to participate in the regional Phased Adaptive Approach or other cooperative efforts. Networking indigenous or imported early warning radars, battle management, and command and control (C2) systems with U.S. forces results in opportunities for defense industrial cooperation, technological diffusion and/or transfers, and closer military integration on issues not involving missile defense. There are pressures for continuous competitive upgrades and improvements, to match enemies but sometimes even allies or associates within the same regional grouping.

As Obama’s second term comes to a close the concepts articulated in the BMDR and NPR appear to have withstood significant changes in the international threat environment in both Asia and Europe. So too have the implementing defensive systems—perhaps even more remarkably—that have enjoyed a relatively unique protected status in a very difficult political and budgetary environment that threatens core service programs and priorities. However much the across-the-board sequestration cuts begun in fiscal year 2013 are eventually reversed, regionally oriented missile defense’s priority status seems likely to continue. The Obama administration has consistently used mobile and relocatable missile defense assets, along with cooperative programs and investments, to shore up U.S. extended deterrence commitments and manage crises. NATO’s PAC-3 deployments to Turkey in response to chaos in Syria, deployments to Japan in the face of North Korean activities, and the various cooperative efforts with Israel in a series of attacks are recent examples.

James Acton and Amy Woolf explore the Obama administration’s focus on regional ballistic defense in detail. The EPAA melded, for example, existing NATO and European national missile defense initiatives but clearly changed the focus. The concept taken broadly seemed readily adaptable to the requirements in the Middle East, Northeast Asia, and potentially other theaters as well. Moving to a largely sea-based system (Aegis) with some Navy technologies located on land (Aegis Ashore), mobilizing and sometimes subsidizing allied participation, and proposing an aggressive schedule of science and technology with research, development, testing, evaluation, and program development proved attractive factors to domestic and international supporters.

The Range of Regional Cases

Iran and its potential missile development were the explicit focus of the EPAA as the administration sought to construct defenses against a potential limited capability poised to attack the United States, its forces, and its allies in Europe. A similar, though differentiated, approach is proposed for defense against Iranian potential from another side, through new cooperation in the Gulf and the greater Middle East, examined in this volume by Michael Elleman and Wafa Alsayed. In Asia, Japan and the United States have continued and expanded the already extensive investments in regional missile defense under agreements begun in the mid-1990s. They have sought to develop compatible systems against developments in North Korea and, although rarely declared, against the potential threats from China. President Obama’s approach has indeed exploited even limited missile defense capabilities to considerable diplomatic effect within crises (such as Japanese and U.S. alerts and deployments against North Korean test launches) and the rapid reinforcing deployment of defensive missiles to various crisis regions (for example, PAC-3 batteries to Turkey in the face of both Syrian and Hezbollah threats).

Given the explicitly regional focus of the expanded U.S. missile defense strategy, the United States depends more than ever before on deep, continuous cooperation from allies and partner states. In many cases, these states must work with one another. As assessed by Gustav Lindstrom and Saadia Pekkanen, the cases of cooperation under the EPAA and the U.S.–Japan agreements are the most far-reaching and advanced. American–Israeli cooperation, based on a very different template, lags only slightly. Nonetheless, in all three cases, thorny issues relating to rising program costs in a time of constrained budgets, ongoing negotiations with Iran over the fate of its nuclear program, and the startling changes in strategic assumptions introduced by the Ukrainian crisis will almost surely lead to a more complex future set of arrangements.

The Israeli experience with missile defense is especially informative because the country has unique operational experience with what Ariel Levite and Shlomo Brom (Chapter 8 in this volume) might term a second-generation missile defense and the policy, strategy, and operational choices it forces. U.S. cooperation in technology and doctrine with Israel is advanced, with the Japan connection perhaps the next nearest competitor. It includes joint technology development and system testing, as well as significant U.S. financial support for advanced technologies like the Iron Dome antirocket system. This bond is also one of the strongest examples of how missile defense can serve as a critical factor in extended deterrence, as both a set of military capabilities and as a physical down payment of a security and diplomatic commitment to another state. But cooperation is neither total nor fully satisfying for either side, the subject of continuing negotiation and debate.

As Vladimir Dvorkin explains in Chapter 7, Russia is another special case in the context of thinking about national and regional missile defense because it possesses the largest and most capable arsenal of missiles and nuclear weapons, as well as its own extensive history of developing missile defense systems. In keeping with the assumptions of the so-called Russia Reset, the Obama administration initially saw Russia itself as a potential missile defense partner. But even the earliest conceptions stressed cooperation and joint data/warning centers rather than the integrated system preferred by the Russian leadership. Very few in Washington were ready to support this division of labor, much less the full partnership demanded as their due by the Russian hard-liners, military and civilian. Russian opposition to EPAA has been adamant almost from the beginning and has increased over the interim. In the context of the current showdown over Ukraine, neither side seems inclined to new trust-rebuilding cooperation of any kind, let alone in missile defense, which has been the leading indicator of divergent interests. But whatever the outcome of the current era of tit-for-tat sanctions and discussions of a new Cold War, both Russia and the United States may still need to face the issues of future cooperation or at least deconfliction.

We find the South Asia case offers a very different, more complex set of issues. Both India and Pakistan are modernizing their missile systems and nuclear weapons, but they have not, as of yet, pursued all-out missile defenses with any zest. Further, in many respects this is related only peripherally to the U.S.-led and dominated missile defense developments in other regions. In Chapter 10 of this volume, Andrew Winner concludes that India and Pakistan are engaging in what might be described as a slow-motion version of the Cold War arms race. Both sides are building varied and survivable nuclear forces as well as building up significant conventional land, air, and naval forces. India has embarked on its own program to develop a layered, but geographically limited, missile defense system, an endeavor that Pakistan has not yet sought to match. Although defenses are unlikely to fundamentally restrike the strategic balance between India and Pakistan—or, for that matter, between India and China—they will introduce an additional layer of complexity to U.S. efforts to engage with tensions in the region.

In East Asia, on the other hand, U.S. involvement is well established and based on alliances going back decades. China’s much-discussed assertiveness in the region is challenging traditional U.S. dominance and has included technology development efforts on the full range of military capabilities, including missile defense. How does missile defense fit into current Chinese strategic thinking? Michael Chase and Christopher Twomey argue in Chapter 11 that many in China already perceive missile defense cooperation with Japan and a potentially wider circle of Asian partners as threatening to degrade China’s relatively limited nuclear deterrent and its future evolution. U.S. protestations to the contrary are viewed with suspicion, if not outright disbelief, often paralleling the far louder assertions made by the Russian government. Indeed, there are increasing signs of joint opposition.

Global Perspectives and Questions

We end our analyses by exploring fundamental big picture questions, the focus of analyses from prominent former U.S. defense officials from the most recent administrations. Brad Roberts addresses the question of whether missile defense is a strategic dead end or a game changer. His Chapter 13 is a reminder that defenses are not just a means of defending against a particular threat; they are components of broader frameworks of deterrence and reassurance. In his words, The United States and its allies must have a credible answer to a new deterrence problem.

In Chapter 14, Dov Zakheim confronts the national/regional balance question, as well as the amount of financial resources devoted to missile defense versus other types of national security spending. He argues that theater or regional defenses have long enjoyed a high degree of bipartisan political support, whereas programs designed to defend the homeland posit both a higher standard of accuracy for success and for resilience and have been more controversial with regard to both technology and costs. Will the future be different? How should assessments of ultimate costs in future administrations take these differences into account?

We conclude with our own perspectives on the challenges we see in the near and midfuture. We argue that the future resilience of missile defense programs will depend on critical factors—unproven technologies, unapproved budgets, the vagaries of political partnerships, and the pitfalls of alliance bounds, especially those involving technological change and dependence. But, despite these uncertainties, it seems clear to us that pursuing missile defense at the national and regional levels will remain popular with a significant percentage of the general population and, more important, with powerful senators and representatives, especially given continuing tectonic changes in the post–post–Cold War international system. And so the United States will continue to pursue missile defense in ways that will affect future strategic stability, the proliferation of missiles and nuclear weapons, and the possibility of arms control.

THE GOALS OF THIS VOLUME

We undertook this volume because, despite ongoing coverage and discussion of plans and deployments, a stunning quiet has attended the more fundamental conceptual shifts that undergird the present debates over missile defense. The requirements of a new strategic age have been left largely undebated. There are dominant figures in the debate, still passionate in their views but joined by fewer and fewer colleagues, most of whom rely on them for the relevant history or strategic calculus. This has been the case even in the wake of the recent Russian upending of security assumptions in Europe. There has been remarkably little public debate on the critical issues raised by the renewed and reimagined emphasis on missile defense in the United States and across the globe. It has been nearly a decade since scholars and practitioners have assessed the state of ballistic missile defense both as an effective response to potential missile attacks and as one critical component of American and international security strategies.⁵

With this volume we hope to help stimulate renewed debates over what we see as a serious gap