Tuesday, December 26, 2000 The CIA's Scary Christmas Message Undiplomatic
Dispatch: The CIA's 'Global Trends 2015' has mixed messages on missile
defense. But it warns that the primary threat to the U.S. is 'asymmetrical,'
as the Cole attack showed. Part 2 of a two-part special by TIME.com's Tony
Karon...
BY TONY KARONIf you build it, they will come — some other way. And they're
probably going to come some other way, anyway. That appears to be the bottom
line in U.S. intelligence community thinking on the vexed question of missile
defense. "Global Trends 2015," a collective effort by different branches of
Washington's intelligence community, offers a wide-ranging assessment of the
military threats facing the U.S. over the next two decades. And the bad news
is that while America will have no rival on the battlefield, it will be
increasingly dogged by unconventional enemies against whom technological
superiority isn't the same guarantor of victory. Threat-assessment is always
political, playing into battles over funding for the pet projects of various
securocratic fiefdoms. It's hardly suprising, therefore, that the umbrella
study that is "Global Trends 2015" offers competing scenarios rather than a
definitive set of choices. What is clear, however, is that Cold War–era
military threats have clearly abated in the minds of the keepers of national
security, while the relentless march of globalization enhances the threat
from "rogue" states and non-state actors for whom it increases access to
lethal technologies. But while there's plenty in the report to fuel the
missile-defense lobby's claim of mounting danger from the likes of North
Korea, Iran and Iraq, the report contains just as much material that could be
marshaled to argue that missile defense is a diversion of resources better
spent elsewhere in terms of the more plausible threats. President Clinton
fudged the issue by committing to a limited version of National Missile
Defense (NMD) designed primarily to counter North Korea's missile potential,
and the failure of the technology thus far to pass basic tests led him to
leave the decision to his successor. But President-elect Bush has been a
sanguine backer of missile defense, and his secretary of state nominee, Colin
Powell, warned last weekend that the U.S. would press ahead regardless of
objections from Russia and European NATO members and build a system far more
comprehensive than the one shelved by Clinton. What now for missile defense?
The debate over the wisdom of spending hundreds of billions, or even
trillions, of dollars on missile defense will be a leitmotif of the early
years of the Bush administration. But with or without it, the intelligence
community has no doubt that for the foreseeable future the U.S. will remain
the 800-pound gorilla of world military power — with everyone else measured
in chimpanzee dimension by comparison. Even now, the U.S. military is more
than double the size of the combined strength of all its NATO allies, and
positively dwarfs the combined legions of the world's second and third
largest military powers, Russia and China. American economic and
technological advantages ensure that no plausible challengers to its
dominance will emerge on the world stage for the next two decades at least —
indeed, it is this logic that has allowed the Bush team to talk about
"skipping a generation" of weapons to march far into the future, because no
adversary has come close to matching the present generation of U.S. weaponry.
To be sure, the principles of "symmetry" in force development no longer
really apply. During the Cold War, the U.S. would develop weapons systems
designed to combat Soviet conventional strength, and vice versa. If the
Russians had more tanks ready to roll across the plains of Europe, NATO must
have the airborne tank-killing power to eliminate that advantage — and so on.
But today, as "Global Trends 2015" warns, the threat to U.S. forces is
"asymmetrical," which dramatically undercuts U.S. technological advantages.
Consider the following: "The ship is equipped with the Aegis Combat System
which includes: the AN/SPY 1D phased array radar, which scans in all
directions simultaneously to detect, track and engage hundreds of aircraft
and missiles while continuously watching the sky for new targets from wavetop
to the stratosphere; the MK 41 Vertical Launching System, which fires a
combination of up to 90 Standard surface-to-air, Tomahawk surface-to-land or
surface-to-surface and Vertical Launch ASROC antisubmarine missiles; and the
AN/SQQ 89 Antisubmarine Warfare System, with a bow-mounted AN/SQS 53C sonar
and AN/SQR 19 towed array. [It] will have deck-mounted Harpoon anti-ship
missile launchers and MK 32 torpedo tubes, MK 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon
Systems and a five-inch, rapid-firing deck gun. [The ship] also has the LAMPS
MK III Antisubmarine Warfare Control System, with landing and replenishment
facilities for SH60B antisubmarine warfare helicopters." Technology vs. a
suicide bomber The formidable warship described above in a 1996 Navy press
release is, of course, the USS Cole. And despite carrying one of the most
advanced electronic warfare platforms in the Navy's arsenal, it was nearly
blown out of the water by a homemade bomb delivered on a tiny skiff by two
men who welcomed death. Thus asymmetrical warfare. The enemy, in instances
such as the Cole attack, has no military assets worth speaking of, and his
command and control structures are almost undetectable. Washington's ongoing
struggle to find an appropriate response to such attacks was highlighted in
1998, when the Clinton administration retaliated for the East Africa embassy
bombings by firing cruise missiles in the general direction of Osama Bin
Laden. The Tomahawk cruise missile is a precision high-tech weapon whose
pinpoint targeting capability was designed originally to neutralize Soviet
ICBMs inside their silos. They cost in the region of $750,000 each, which of
course is cheap for an ICBM-killer. And yet firing some 20 of these at a
complex of tent camps in Afghanistan and at a factory in the Sudan produced
little if any tactical gain for the U.S. in this particular war, although it
did boost the prestige of the designated enemy in his designated support
base. Not surprisingly, "Global Trends 2015" notes that asymmetrical warfare
is the "defining challenge for U.S. strategy, operations and force
development" over the next 15 years. The threats of yesteryear appear to be
abating. Russia is viewed as in a state of irreversible decline, and the
report predicts that it will be driven to cut its strategic nuclear forces to
a sustainable minimum. In an interesting aside on Moscow's likely response to
a U.S. missile defense system that neutralizes Russia's fleet, the report
predicts Moscow will "invest scarce resources in selected and secretive
military technology programs, especially WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction),
hoping to counter Western conventional and strategic superiority in areas
such as ballistic missile defense." Taiwan remains a potential problem China,
"Global Trends" predicts, will likely be so consumed by the titanic challenge
of maintaining domestic social order in its perilous journey through an
economic transformation that its appetite for military adventures will likely
be curbed. Nonetheless, Taiwan remains a flash point that necessarily
involves the U.S. under current commitments, and China will certainly look to
expand its regional influence. The report suggests instead that the states
challenging U.S. security interests are more likely to be some of those that
have traditionally assumed a lower profile on the U.S. strategic radar —
North Korea, Iran and Iraq top the list right now, although the first two are
doing their best to appear as unthreatening as they possibly can, driven by
their domestic woes to reintegrate themselves into the international
community. So what is the nature of this challenge, and how can it be
defended against? NMD advocates will seize on the report's assessment of the
fact that globalization has dramatically enhanced the access to technology of
rogue elements and states. It's increasingly possible now for hostile states
to acquire earlier generations of missile technology in the hope of some day
being able to top them with nukes or biological weapons, the report warns.
And it has become considerably easier for both these states and stateless
terrorist groups to develop chemical and biological weapons programs. The
report warns that China, Russia, "most likely North Korea, probably Iran and
possibly Iraq have the capacity to strike the United States, and the
potential for unconventional delivery of WMD by both states and non-state
actors will also grow." Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut? The latter
reference cuts to the core question over missile defense, which is not
whether there are malefactors out there who would attack the U.S. or its
troops abroad with WMD given half a chance, but whether they'd mount such
weapons on missiles. On balance, right now, the evidence suggests that a
biological or even nuclear bomb being aimed at the U.S. is a lot more likely
to arrive on a skiff or in the back of a van than atop a missile. That
probability is tacitly acknowledged in the report, although the intelligence
community is not about to pooh-pooh NMD. While "asymmetrical" means of
delivery are more plausible right now, the report argues, "Non-missile
delivery means, however, do not provide the same prestige, deterrence and
coercive diplomacy associated with ICBMs." Well, yes, but it's only
deterrence if you have enough ICBMs to match the other guy's capacity, which
is impossible for any rogue state. And as for "coercive diplomacy," the 1994
standoff with North Korea made abundantly clear that the U.S. is prepared to
preemptively blow away any hostile power that may be in the process of
developing nuclear weapons to fire at Americans — Washington is unlikely to
allow any "rogue" state to even come close to deploying a nuclear capability
that could be use to coerce the U.S. There's no question, of course, that if
Washington spends hundreds of billions of dollars on a missile defense system
that actually works, the U.S. will be safer from any real or hypothetical
threat of attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But a better missile
umbrella won't be much use against an incoming dinghy.
