National Insecurity by Melvin A. Goodman

Author:Melvin A. Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

SEVEN

THE PENTAGON’S PHANTOM MISSILE DEFENSE

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one. —Albert Einstein

You can’t say civilizations don’t advance... in every war they kill you in a new way. —Will Rogers

There is probably no bigger bust or boondoggle in the history of U.S. defense spending than the investment in national missile defense (NMD), with annual appropriations of $10 billion, still the most expensive and least effective weapons system in the U.S. arsenal. According to John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School in California, this boondoggle has been unworkable and unnecessary, with costs that are typically uncontrollable.1 There are boondoggles that have cost more, such as the F-35 Lightning II, which is already responsible for more than $325 billion in spending since 2000. There have been boondoggles that have made less sense, such as the Global Information Grid, which is responsible for interconnecting all military networks, thus making it easier for international hackers to break into U.S. defense information systems. But no boondoggle has been around longer and will end up wasting more U.S. taxpayer money than national missile defense.

Not even the initial skepticism of the uniformed military has stopped the military-industrial complex from throwing money at strategic defense. As with other weapons systems, a constituency of defense contractors, conservative think tanks, and congressional forces has formed, making it difficult to stop its development or even deployment, no matter how little NMD contributes to national security.

Just as President Eisenhower had warned in 1961, defense contractors, conservative politicians, and scientists kept the idea of NMD alive. They formed political lobbying groups in 1978 consisting of politicians, retired generals, and industrial leaders.2 These groups were led by the Committee on the Present Danger, formed by conservative Democrats, and High Frontier, formed by Republicans. High Frontier became a kind of kitchen cabinet to Ronald Reagan and eventually moved under the institutional umbrella of the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank with close ties to President Reagan. High Frontier was established by Karl R. Bendetsen, the retired CEO of the Champion International Corporation, and retired Lieutenant General Daniel O. Graham, who formerly headed the Defense Intelligence Agency. Initially, the Pentagon had no interest in NMD, preferring to develop offensive and not defensive weapons, but it played a key role in establishing links between these groups and their military supporters on Capitol Hill. The contractors, of course, have profited obscenely from the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at NMD.

Influential members of the military-industrial complex took advantage of the American faith in technology to solve problems. This has worked in many areas of national security, but not for NMD. The United States has been chasing the gossamer of NMD for nearly sixty years. President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, began the pursuit, seeking large increases in spending to build such a defense. But even Dulles eventually concluded that the system would at best “degrade gracefully;” in other words,

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