Prepared Statement for the House Armed Services Committee Hearing on Ballistic Missile Defense
by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Thursday, July 18, 2001
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Introduction
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify on the Administration’s 2002 budget request for Ballistic Missile Defense.
Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: A rogue state with a vastly inferior military, but armed with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction, commits an act of aggression against a neighboring country. As President Bush sends U.S. forces into theater to respond, the country’s genocidal dictator threatens our allies and deployed forces with ballistic missile attack. Suddenly, almost without warning, missiles rain down on our troops, and pound into the densely populated residential neighborhoods of allied capitals. Panic breaks out. Sirens wail, as rescue crews in protective gear race to search the rubble for bodies and rush the injured to hospitals. Reporters, mumbling through their gas masks, attempt to describe the destruction, as pictures of the carnage are instantaneously broadcast across the world.
Mr. Chairman, the scene I have described is not science fiction. It is not a future conflict scenario dreamed up by creative Pentagon planners. It is a description of events that took place ten years ago – during the Persian Gulf War.
I have a particularly vivid recollection of those events. When Saddam Hussein was launching SCUD missiles against Israel, I was sent there with Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to help persuade Israel not to get drawn further into the war, as Saddam Hussein was seeking to do. We saw children walking to school carrying gas masks in gaily decorated boxes -- no doubt to try to distract them from the possibility of facing mass destruction. They were awfully young to have to think about the unthinkable. With those missiles, Saddam Hussein terrorized a generation of Israeli children, and almost succeeded in changing the entire strategic course of the Gulf War.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the first U.S. combat casualties from a ballistic missile attack. In the waning days of Desert Storm, a single SCUD missile hit a U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, killing 28 of our soldiers and wounding 99. Thirteen of those killed came from a single small town in Pennsylvania called Greensburg. For American forces, it was the single worst engagement of the Gulf War. For thirteen families in Greensburg, it was the single worst day of their lives.
Today, ten years later, it is appropriate to ask how much better able are we to meet a threat that was already real and serious ten years ago – and has become even more so today? The answer, sadly, is hardly any better. Despite this tragic experience, here we are, a decade later, still virtually not yet able to defend against ballistic missile attacks, even from relatively primitive SCUD ballistic missiles.
Today, our capacity to shoot down a SCUD missile is not much improved from 1991. We are still a year or two away from initial deployment of the PAC-3 – our answer to the SCUD, and an effective one – and many years from full deployment. Today our forces in the Persian Gulf and Korea – and the civilian populations they defend – have almost no means of protection against North Korean ballistic missiles armed with both chemical and conventional warheads. With no missile defenses, an attack by North Korea could result in tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties.
To those who wonder why so many of the regimes hostile to the United States – many of them desperately poor – are investing such enormous sums of money to acquire ballistic missiles, I suggest this possible answer: They know we don’t have any defenses.
It cannot have escaped their notice that the only weapons that really permitted Saddam Hussein to make American forces bleed during the Gulf War -- the only weapons that allowed him to take the war into the territory of his adversaries and murder innocent women and children -- were ballistic missiles.
We underestimated the ballistic missile threat ten years ago – and today, a decade later, we are underestimating it still.
Mr. Chairman, the time has come to lift our heads from the sand and deal with some unpleasant but indisputable facts: The short-range missile threat to our friends, allies, and deployed forces arrived a decade ago; the intermediate-range missile threat is now here; and the long-range threat to American cities is just over the horizon -- a matter of years, not decades, away – and our people and territory are defenseless.
Why? The answer has four letters: A-B-M-T.
For the past decade, our government has not taken seriously the challenge of developing defenses against missiles. We have not adequately funded it, we have not believed in it, and we have given the ABM Treaty priority over it. That is not how America behaves when we are serious about a problem. It is not how we put a man on the moon in just 10 years. It is not how we developed the Polaris program or intercontinental ballistic missiles in even less time.
The time to get serious is long past. Today, the number of countries pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is growing. The number of countries pursuing advanced conventional weapons is growing. The number of countries pursuing ballistic missile technology is growing. The number of missiles on the face of the earth is growing.
Consider these facts:
In 1972, when the ABM Treaty was signed, the number of countries pursuing biological weapons was unknown; today there are at least thirteen.
In 1972, ten countries had known chemical weapons programs; today there are sixteen (four countries ended theirs, but 10 more jumped in to replace them;)
In 1972, we knew of only five countries that had nuclear weapons programs; today we know of twelve;
In 1972, we knew of a total of nine countries that had ballistic missiles; today we know of twenty-eight, and in just the last five years more than 1000 missiles of all ranges have been produced.
And those are only the cases that we know of. There are dangerous capabilities being developed at this very moment that we do not know about, and which we may not know about for years – perhaps only after they are deployed.
For example, in 1998 North Korea surprised the world with its launch of a Taepo Dong 1 missile over Japan, with a previously unknown third stage. The intelligence community tells us this launch demonstrated a North Korean capability to deliver a small payload to the United States. North Korea is currently developing the Taepo Dong 2 missile, which will be able to strike even deeper into U.S. territory and carry an even larger weapons payload.
Other unfriendly regimes, like Iran, Syria, and Libya, are also developing missiles of increasing range and sophistication. A number of these countries are less than five years away from being able to deploy such capabilities. And these regimes are collaborating with each other, sharing technology and know-how.
The countries pursuing these capabilities are doing so because they believe they will enhance their power and influence; because they believe that if they can hold the American people at risk, they can prevent us from projecting force to stop acts of aggression, and deter us from defending our interests around the world.
If we do not build defenses against these weapons now, hostile powers will soon have – or may already have -- the ability to strike U.S. and allied cities with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. They will have the power to hold our people hostage to blackmail and terror. They may secure, in their estimation, the capability to prevent us from forming international coalitions to challenge their acts of aggression and force us into a truly isolationist posture. And they would not even have to use the weapons in their possession to affect our behavior and achieve their ends.
But we cannot be sure they would not use these weapons in a crisis. If Saddam Hussein had the ability to strike a Western capital with a nuclear weapon, would he really be deterred by the prospect of a U.S. nuclear strike that would kill millions of Iraqis? Is he that concerned about his people? And would we really want our only option in such a crisis to be destroying Baghdad and its people? A policy of intentional vulnerability is not a strategy to deal with the dangers of this new century.
While we have been debating the existence of the threat for nearly a decade, other countries have been busily acquiring, developing and proliferating missile technology. We can afford to debate the threat no longer. We are in a race against time -- and we are starting from behind. Thanks in no small part to the constraints of the antiquated ABM Treaty, we have wasted the better part of a decade. We cannot afford to waste another one.
Development and Testing
President Bush has declared his intention to develop and deploy defenses capable of protecting the American people, our friends, allies and forces around the world from limited ballistic missile attack. The 2002 amended budget requests $8.3 billion for missile defense.
We intend to develop defenses, capable of defending against limited missile attacks from a rogue state or from an accidental or unauthorized launch. We intend to develop layered defenses, capable of intercepting missiles of any range at every stage of flight – boost, mid-course, and terminal.
We have designed a program to develop and deploy as soon as is appropriate. Developing a proper layered defense will take time. It requires more aggressive exploration of key technologies, particularly those that have been constrained by the ABM Treaty. So we plan to build incrementally, deploying capabilities as the technology is proven ready, and then adding new capabilities over time as they become mature.
We have designed the program so that, in an emergency, we might, if appropriate, deploy test assets to defend against a rapidly emerging threat. This has been done a number of times before with other military capabilities, both in the Gulf War and in Kosovo. But barring such an emergency, we need to consider the operational deployment of test assets very carefully – because such deployments can be disruptive, and can set back normal development programs.
However, we have not yet chosen a systems architecture to deploy. We are not in a position to do so because so many promising technologies were not pursued in the past. The program we inherited was designed not for maximum effectiveness, but to remain within the constraints of the ABM Treaty. As a result, development and testing programs for defense against long-range threats were limited to ground-based components -- ignoring air, sea and space-based capabilities with enormous potential.
In order to accelerate the program, we must first broaden the search for effective technologies before we can move forward toward deployment. We must dust off technologies that were shelved, consider new ones, and bring them all into the development and testing process.
To do this, we have designed a flexible and strengthened research, development, testing and evaluation program to examine the widest possible range of promising technologies, of which there are many. We will expand our program to add tests of technologies and basing modes, including land, air, sea and space-based capabilities that had been previously disregarded or inadequately explored.
Notwithstanding the delays of the past decade, the capability to defend America is within our grasp. The technology of 2001 is not the technology of 1981, or, for that matter, 1991 – the year we suffered our first losses to ballistic missile attack by a rogue state.
Last Saturday we conducted a successful test intercept of an intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean. [General Kadish has a short film clip of the intercept to show the Committee]. This successful test is another step forward on the long road to developing and deploying effective defenses to protect the American people from limited ballistic missile attacks. It underscores the point that today, ballistic missile defense is no longer a problem of invention – it is a challenge of engineering. It is a challenge America is up to.....
....What The Program Is Not
We have discussed what the program is; we must also discuss what the program is not.
It is not an effort to build an impenetrable shield around the United States. This is not Star Wars. We have a much more limited objective to deploy effective defenses against limited missile attack. Indeed the change in the threat -- from the thousands of missiles in the Soviet arsenal to handfuls of limited missile attacks – makes deployment of effective defenses more realistic than ever before.
It is not a threat to anyone. It will be a problem only for those rogue states that wish to threaten our people, our allies or our deployed forces, with ballistic missile attacks.
It will not undermine arms control or spark an arms race. If anything, building effective defenses will reduce the value of ballistic missiles, and thus remove incentives for their development and proliferation. Since they will have virtually no effect on Russia’s capabilities, there is no incentive for Russia to spend scarce resources to try to overcome them. And China is already engaged in a rapid modernization of its missile capabilities, and will continue this modernization whether or not we build missile defenses. To the contrary, the Russians and the Chinese will be able to see that we are reducing our offensive nuclear forces substantially and there is no need for them to build up theirs. In this budget proposal alone, with Peacekeeper, Trident, and B-1 reductions, we will be reducing START-countable warheads by over 1000. We plan to reduce our nuclear forces no matter what Russia decides to do, but we believe it is in their best interest to follow the same path.
It is not a "scarecrow" defense. We intend to build and deploy effective defenses at the earliest possible moment. Those defenses will grow more and more effective over time, as we deploy an increasingly sophisticated mix of capabilities that provide "layered defenses" against all ranges of missiles at all stages of flight. The more capable the better, but the defenses don’t have to be perfect to save lives and reduce casualties. As imperfect as the PAC-2 system was during the Gulf War, there wasn’t a single ally or commander who didn’t clamor for more.
Will our defenses be 100% effective? Mr. Chairman, no defense is 100% effective. Notwithstanding the billions we spend on counter-terrorism, we failed to stop terrorist attacks on the Khobar Towers, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, or the World Trade Center. Yet I know of no one who has suggested that we stop spending money on counter-terrorism because we have no perfect defense. Moreover, defenses won’t need to be 100% effective to make a significant contribution to deterrence.
It will not cost the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. The money we propose to spend on missile defense is comparable to other major defense development programs, and comparable to other elements of our security strategy. We are proposing $8.3 billion for missile defense in 2002. That is still a large amount, but the consequences of the failure could be enormous.
It does not divert attention and resources from other, more pressing threats. Some have argued that we should not spend money on missile defense, because the real threat comes from terrorist using suitcase bombs. That is like arguing that you should not lock your front door because a burglar can break in through your window. Both threats are real -- but for the last decade, work on countering the terrorist threat has proceeded aggressively, while work on ballistic missile defense has been hamstrung by an obsolete theory. We are correcting that.
As we move forward with accelerated testing and development, Mr. Chairman, there will certainly be bumps along the way. We expect there to be test failures. There is not a single major technological development in human history that did not begin with a process of trial and error and many of our most successful weapons developments have been marked by testing failures:
The Corona satellite program, which produced the first overhead reconnaissance satellites, suffered 11 straight test failures.
The Thor Able and Thor Agena launch programs failed four out of five times.
The Atlas Agena launches failed 5 out of 8 times.
The Scout launches failed 4 out of 6 times.
The Vanguard program failed 11 of its first 14 tries.
The Polaris failed in 66 out of 123 flights.
Mr. Chairman, from these failures came some of the most effective capabilities ever fielded. Failure is how we learn. If a program never suffers test failures, it means someone is not taking enough risks and pushing the envelope. Intelligent risk taking is critical to any advanced development program -- and it will be critical to the development of effective ballistic missile defenses.
Conclusion
Mr. Chairman, let me conclude where I began. This threat is not fictional. It is not limited. It is not remote. And it is not going to disappear if one or another troublesome regime disappears.
If there were a war in Korea tomorrow, our best intelligence estimates are that North Korea missiles would wreak havoc on population centers and our deployed forces in South Korea, even if armed only with conventional weapons, and North Korea now poses a significant threat to Japan as well.
And we know that it is a matter of time before Iran develops nuclear weapons, and may soon have the capacity to strike Israel and some NATO allies.
Think about what kind of hearings we would be having three or four years from now if Iran demonstrates intermediate-range capability to strike Israel or U.S. troops deployed in the Gulf -- or if North Korea demonstrates the capability to strike the U.S. with long-range nuclear missiles. I, for one, don’t want to have to come before this Committee and explain why we ignored the coming threat, and didn’t do everything we could to meet it.
This is not a partisan issue. We do not now know whether the President who first faces a crisis with a rogue state capable of striking Los Angeles, Detroit or New York with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons will be a Republican or a Democrat. But we do know that individual will be an American. And that is how we too must proceed – not as Republicans, or Democrats, but as Americans.
Let future generations who look back at this period not see partisan bickering, but statesmen who rose above party to make sure America and its allies and deployed forces were protected against this real emerging threat.
Thank you very much.
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