April 27, 2000 Missile Defense Is a Bargain By James T. Hackett. Mr. Hackett was a national security official in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and now is a defense consultant in San Diego. Opponents of the National Missile Defense program used to argue that the technology wouldn't work. But after decades of development, the key hit-to-kill technology now is successful. Over the past year there have been seven direct hits of dummy warheads in tests of four different missile interceptors, including the first flight test of the NMD interceptor. Since the technology is working, the critics have come up with a new objection: cost. A series of recent articles complain of prices ranging from $30 billion to $60 billion for the NMD program. The Congressional Budget Office this week came up with an estimate of nearly $60 billion. These numbers are much too high. The Pentagon says it actually will cost $12.7 billion to build the planned NMD from 1999 to 2005. That includes flight testing, development and procurement of 100 missile interceptors, construction of interceptor silos in Alaska, a battle-management center, a new X-band radar, and the upgrade of five existing early-warning radars. The $30 billion figure that often is cited came from a Defense Department spokesman, who said the total cost of designing, developing, producing and operating the whole system from the beginning of the current program in 1991 to 2026 would be $30.2 billion. That covers 35 years, 10 of which already have been paid for. To satisfy its critics, the Pentagon is including all costs. But when you buy a house, do you include as part of the purchase price all expenses for operating and maintaining it for 30 years? Of course not. In any case, is $30 billion too much to pay? Over 35 years, that averages less than $1 billion a year, out of an annual defense budget of nearly $300 billion and a total federal budget of $1.83 trillion. In fact, NMD is only the ninth most expensive defense program. Considering that intercontinental ballistic missiles are the only direct threat to the U.S. against which there is no defense, and that a growing number of countries, including unfriendly ones, are acquiring such missiles, an average of less than $1 billion a year to defend against them is reasonable. But what about the CBO figure of nearly $60 billion? It seems that the CBO and the Defense Department are in close agreement on the cost of the planned program to deploy 100 interceptors at a site in Alaska. But the CBO then estimates the cost of constructing and operating two ground-based sites with 250 interceptors, and adds $10.6 billion for the planned 24 low-altitude satellites of the Air Force's Space-Based Infrared Sensor program. Those satellites will provide important tracking data for NMD interceptors, but they are not part of the program. The planned NMD is designed to use tracking data from ground-based radars without any data from low-altitude satellites. The Air Force plans to use those satellites for theater missile defense, target classification, space surveillance, intelligence on foreign missiles, and other missions as well. While they will improve the capability of the NMD, the satellites are not essential to it. So the CBO and the Pentagon are comparing apples and oranges. The 2001 budget now before Congress has in it a total of $4.7 billion for missile defense. But that includes money for several programs to develop and test improved theater missile defenses to protect U.S. forces overseas from the short- and medium-range missiles that now threaten them. It also includes funds for research and development in futuristic technologies such as airborne lasers and space-based lasers. The amount actually applied to defending this country is only $1.9 billion, or less than 1% of the annual defense budget. That is more than the 35-year average of less than $1 billion annually for the NMD, because the program now is entering its most expensive phase, with flight tests under way and the buying of initial hardware about to begin. But once the interceptors are produced and the site built, the annual cost for its operation and maintenance by the National Guard will be much less. Critics of defense programs complain about spending in the billions because it sounds like so much -- never mind that when Microsoft stock goes down Bill Gates sometimes loses billions of dollars in a single day. From that perspective, government spending of $1 billion to $2 billion a year to defend the country is not much. And the stakes are high. In a nuclear Pearl Harbor, a single weapon could kill millions. The real value of a missile defense is deterrence. A defense will deter missile threats and blackmail as well as a missile attack. It will diminish the value of nuclear weapons and the missiles that deliver them. What dictator will spend billions to acquire such weapons when there are effective defenses? Long-range missiles are spreading today precisely because there are no defenses against them. Considering all this, a national missile defense that costs less than 1% of the defense budget annually is a real bargain for the American people. Copyright � 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. #### P.S. 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