Back to the Future
Protecting America’s coastal cities, easily.
By Henry F. Cooper
One fine day, one of the world's most powerful warships moves steadily across a low sea at about 20 knots. Her crew is trained to a razor's edge, a normal state given the tensions around the world and the chance that at any time they must protect their homeland or fellow forces. The fire-control officer, one of the Navy's best, swears and barks out orders to the crew as he adjusts the settings on his interceptor-missile firing console. The old salt expects something.
Meanwhile, about 20 miles away, a red-and-white-striped rocket sits poised on its launcher ready to leap into the sky and fly beyond the reaches of the atmosphere. Suddenly, the rocket roars to life as it ignites and climbs quickly into the sky, faster than any airplane. Radar detects and tracks the missile, following it on its way. Frantic calls are made to warn those in its path.
Within seconds, the warship's crew leaps into action as the missile appears on its display. The captain orders the fire-control officer to shoot it down — he mutters to himself as he tries to aim the Navy's best interceptor (designed to shoot down aircraft) at the burning rocket. He decides on a firing solution and fires two interceptor missiles at the threatening rocket still burning and climbing higher into the atmosphere. The interceptors streak toward the burning rocket, catching up quickly, but running out of time as the rocket accelerates toward altitudes beyond their reach. The fire-control officer struggles to keep his interceptors aimed at the rocket-outthinking the computer and entering guidance commands by hand to ensure the missiles remain on his best guess of an intercept trajectory.
Forty seconds after the rocket left the launcher, it dies in a fireball seen for 100 miles when the interceptors, almost out of fuel, overtake and destroy it. Debris falls harmlessly back into the sea. The warship's crew celebrates. The captain signals a thumbs-up to the fire-control officer for a job well done.
A scene from the near future as America faces the reality of terrorists armed with ballistic missiles and warheads of mass destruction? Possibly.
The threat is real enough. The 1998 bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission unanimously concluded that "rogue states" — and I would add terrorist groups — can today threaten American cities with short-range ballistic missiles (e.g., SCUDS like those used to attack Israeli cities in the 1990 Gulf War) fired from ships off our coasts. Today, America's coastal cities are at risk of precisely the kind of attack in the above scenario.
And the Navy, if supported, can defend against such an attack — more rapidly than most realize. Rear Admiral Rod Rempt, former head of the Navy's missile-defense programs and now president of the Naval War College, said over a year ago that the Navy could, for $100-200 million and within a year, improve its existing AEGIS air-defense system to shoot down such missiles in their boost phase.
But so far — while spending billions on other longer-term, and possibly eventually better, defense systems — the Pentagon powers-that-be have chosen to ignore this much-less-expensive, already proven, near-term option. So today our coastal cities still have no defense against that possible attack — and according to published plans, they will remain absolutely defenseless against this existing threat for the indefinite future.
Admiral Rempt is right that achieving this rudimentary capability is not a technical challenge. The above scenario actually played out nearly 40 years ago, when the DDG-6 RAMAGE conducted a new type of firing operation — a mission to kill a ballistic missile while it was still burning using a standard air-defense interceptor. The Navy executed this new mission in the days when missile propulsion and guidance technology was in its infancy, in the days of slide rules and nomographs — before high-speed computers and integrated combat systems.
But the Navy did have many things in its favor — a mission and needed funding to do something never done before in support of our nation's security, an experienced crew, and a host of competent engineers focused on this one task. And there was no ABM Treaty that outlawed defending the American people against ballistic missiles.
Today, as we consider our absolute vulnerability to missile attack, we are again free of the ABM Treaty — thanks to President Bush's decision to withdraw from its terms this past June 13. There is again no legal constraint on testing and deploying sea-based defenses to protect Americans in their homes. The Navy needs only to be funded and empowered to end this absolute vulnerability within a year.
Why, as billions of dollars are being spent to invent new defense systems, do so few people consider how to use the existing Fleet surface-to-air missile, the standard missile, to destroy ballistic missiles in boost phase — as was proven possible almost 40 years ago?
Some may say it can't be done; the system wasn't designed to do that — but neither was the early version of the Terrier missile fired by the RAMAGE crew back in the mid-1960's. The recent successful flights of a prototype, exo-atmospheric anti-ballistic-missile system fired from the USS Lake Erie hit a simulated SCUD-class ballistic missile above the Earth's atmosphere, giving recent proof the Navy still has the right stuff to serve the country well in this new age.
Needed is a clear decision for the Navy to move out — the studies have been done and feasibility was demonstrated years ago. Let's go back to the future with lessons from the RAMAGE crew.
— Henry F. Cooper is chairman of High Frontier. Cooper was SDI director during the first Bush administration and President Reagan’s ambassador and chief negotiator at the Geneva defense and space talks with the Soviet Union. |
