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U.S. Overcommitted on Missile Defense, Expert Says By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is funding the development and production of too many major systems, and would need to spend twice its projected annual budget to be able to afford it all, a defense expert said here yesterday (see GSN, June 10). The Bush administration, nevertheless, has rightly chosen to pursue numerous long-range missile defense technologies with the goal of creating multiple layers of defense, said RAND Senior Policy Analyst David Mosher, appearing on a panel hosted by Women in International Security. “In a sense, given how difficult the challenge is for missile defense, it’s the right approach. … It provides you some mitigation in case certain aspects of the program fail,” he said. “Unfortunately, although it’s the right approach, I think the administration has too many programs in its budget. … If you really wanted to do it right, I think you’d have to double the budget, or something like that, to fund all of those programs,” Mosher said. A major reason why the agency is overcommitted, he said, is that it has been buying and deploying significant amounts of missile defense equipment, such as ground-based interceptor missiles in Alaska and California. Those costs have sapped money from the development and testing of those and other systems, Mosher said. “What’s happened is the piece represented by the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system has essentially been consuming resources, it’s become somewhat of a black hole. In order to get it done, it’s taken more and more resources, because the original budgets weren’t put together very well and they’ve had unanticipated challenges. And as a result, what’s happened is it’s tended to starve off these other programs,” he said. The Bush administration has justified early and recurring deployment of systems as necessary to have at least some capability in the event an ICBM threat emerges from North Korea. Mosher said, however, that what has been deployed so far is not providing much defense against such a threat. “Often the systems that are deployed are of unproven … capabilities or perhaps no capability,” he said. “Nobody is expecting this system to be fully functioning or intercept anything at this point,” Mosher added. Mosher suggested cutting some programs and possibly scaling back short-term procurement plans. “We have to recognize that this is really difficult, is going to cost large sums of money, is going to take a well designed, fairly stable approach including research, development and testing in order to get something like this to work. [Not] taking shortcuts and compressed schedules,” he said. The Bush administration and Congress have begun to react to increasingly competitive missile defense budget pressures. The administration, as Mosher noted, cut $870 million for ground-based boost phase defense development from it’s the fiscal 2006 budget request in order to focus on an airborne laser program. Key senior lawmakers, meanwhile, have spoken of a need for reordering missile defense spending priorities, particularly in favor of the most developed system, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (see GSN, May 12). There has been no sign of interest in Congress or the administration to massively increase or decrease Missile Defense Agency funding, though the agency is forecasting a climb from the $7.8 billion budgeted this year to more than $10 billion by fiscal 2009 (see GSN, April 22).
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