[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 71 (Friday, June 9, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4918-S4920]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2001--Continued
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Mr. COCHRAN. Mr. President, when we were debating the authorization
bill earlier this week, it had come to my attention that there would be
an amendment offered dealing with the testing program of the National
Missile Defense System and that some criticism was going to be cited in
support of that amendment attributed to Mr. Ted Postol, who is a
physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That amendment has not yet been offered. We are now on the
appropriations bill. I expect we will hear, during the debate on this
bill, suggestions that we are either appropriating too much money for
national missile defense or the program is flawed or in other ways
criticism of this program on various--some imagined, some maybe real--
bases, complaining about the national missile defense appropriations
and theater missile defense appropriations contained in this bill.
I am rising today almost as a preemptive debate against these
criticisms which I expect will be made by some Senators. They will use
Mr. Ted Postol from MIT as the authority for their arguments. So I wish
to give the Senate some background, particularly in view of the New
York Times article this morning as an example of merchandising, again,
of a lot of these arguments that have been made by Mr. Postol.
On May 11, Mr. Ted Postol, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, wrote to a number of Clinton administration officials
claiming to have discovered evidence that the National Missile Defense
system now being tested will be easily defeated by simple
countermeasures, that the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's own
data proved this, and that BMDO and its contractors conspired to hide
this information by tampering with flight test data. Mr. Postol also
claimed that BMDO had altered the National Missile Defense flight test
program in order to hide the truths he claimed to have discovered.
Mr. Postol says he discovered the fatal weakness in the NMD system
after studying BMDO data from Integrated Flight Test 1A, which was
conducted in June, 1997, and was a test of a prototype kill vehicle
built by the Boeing Company for the NMD interceptor missile. The test
was not an attempt to destroy the target, but only to understand the
seeker's performance. It was intended specifically to understand how
well the infrared sensor on the kill vehicle performed, compared to
expectations, when it encountered a target warhead and a number of
decoys and other penetration aids.
Mr. Postol contends that the results of Flight Test 1A showed that
the NMD kill vehicle could not distinguish between a simple balloon
decoy and an actual warhead, and that the entire test program,
beginning with Integrated Flight Test 2, was restructured using far
simpler targets to cover up this deficiency in the capacity of the
vehicle to operate properly.
This contention by Mr. Postol is just not true. The facts are that
Flight Test 1A involved a kill vehicle built by the Boeing Company.
Flight Test 2 was conducted with a kill vehicle built by Raytheon, and
used exactly the same target complex as Flight Test 1A, contrary to Mr.
Postol's claims. Simpler targets were used in Flight Tests 3 and 4
because these tests had different objectives. Flight Tests 1A and 2
were intended to characterize the performance of the competing seekers;
Flight test 3 was the first attempt to intercept and destroy a target
warhead. Just as testing of any new aircraft begins with a taxi test,
then a simple takeoff and landing, the first NMD intercept testing
began with a single warhead accompanied by a balloon decoy. Subsequent
tests will become progressively more difficult, an approach which
follows the recommendations of a panel of experts headed by retired Air
Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch. In fact, the Welch panel recommended
that the Defense Department attempt its first intercept without
countermeasures of any kind, in order to begin the testing as simply as
possible, but BMDO believed it was worth the risk to attempt a more
complicated test.
Mr. Postol appears to be unaware that the Boeing kill vehicle is no
longer being used in the flight test program. The competing kill
vehicle built
[[Page S4919]]
by Raytheon, which has independently developed software, was selected
for the NMD system and has been used in every test since Flight Test
1A.
Mr. Postol claims to have discovered in the data from Flight Test 1A
that--and I quote--``the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) will be
defeated by the simplest of balloon decoys.'' The fact is that in
Flight Test 3, on October 2, 1999, exactly the opposite happened, when
the EKV disregarded a balloon decoy and successfully destroyed its
target.
This isn't the first time Mr. Postol has been notoriously wrong about
our missile defense program. In 1994, when the United States was
preparing to conduct the first flight test of its Theater High Altitude
Area Defense--or THAAD--system, he and some of his colleagues at MIT,
in an article in Arms Control Today, claimed to have demonstrated that
theater missile defenses like THAAD would--and I quote--``almost
certainly have significant capabilities against strategic RVs [reentry
vehicles]'' and that any agreement permitting such capabilities would--
I quote--``significantly erode the ability of the ABM Treaty to control
strategic defenses by allowing systems that could defend areas of tens
of thousands of square kilometers.''
As it turns out, in spite of that suggestion by Mr. Postol and his
colleagues from MIT, even the government of Russia never complained
about THAAD or similar systems which Mr. Postol said would so upset the
strategic balance. And when other technical experts challenged his
conclusions, Mr. Postol adopted the tactics of questioning the
competence and integrity of his critics. A technical team under
contract to the Defense Department reviewed Mr. Postol's THAAD findings
and found they contained errors. Mr. Postol's response was to write a
series of letters to government officials, accusing the technical team
whose findings differed from his of ``spreading false and misleading
information'' that ``impugns the scholarly reputation of myself and my
colleagues.'' He accused the general officer heading the Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization of mismanagement and of ``providing false
information to members of the Russian Duma'' in an attempt to--in his
words--``influence the Russian debate through subterfuge.'' Mr. Postol
demanded that the Defense Department retract its study and issue a
letter acknowledging its errors. DoD did none of this because they were
right all along and it was Postol and his MIT colleagues who were wrong
again.
Two years later, in 1996, Mr. Postol's campaign against missile
defenses had taken a new approach. In addition to arguing that systems
like THAAD would undermine the Russian strategic deterrent, Mr. Postol
argued that they would be easily defeated by countermeasures. He said
in effect that U.S. TMD systems were so good that they would threaten
the Russian strategic force and at the same time so bad that they could
be easily defeated by even the simplest of countermeasures. Both those
claims could not be true.
Nonetheless, Mr. Postol continued to promote this argument, and
created detailed drawings illustrating how an aspiring missile power
might go about deploying countermeasures to U.S. defensive systems.
These ideas were elaborated in an 80 page document which Mr. Postol
distributed widely and which was eventually made available on the
internet, so that anyone--including those who would benefit most from
measures that could defeat U.S. weapon systems--could obtain it.
The claims that Theater Missile Defenses would both threaten
deterrence and at the same time be overwhelmed by simple
countermeasures is now being made by Postol and his co-authors for
National Missile Defense. He is arguing that any nation which can build
a long-range ballistic missile can necessarily build in measures that
will allow it to penetrate missile defenses.
At the same time, these scientists believe, or say they believe, that
deployment of a limited NMB system--even though they believe they can
scientifically prove it will not work--will cause Russia to maintain
higher force levels and China to construct a strategic buildup. All of
this is contained in an elaborate, glossy, 175-page document which Mr.
Postol and his colleagues have distributed widely.
It is relatively easy to conceive of devices that are theoretically
possible using scientific principles. The best science fiction employs
just such an approach. But it is another thing altogether to transform
those concepts from the realm of ideas into hardware. Actually
engineering a complex device like a weapon system is far different from
merely imagining it. For every idea that is transformed into hardware
and subjected to the real world's trials, many others, thought up by
smart people with Ph.D.s from the best universities, are discarded as
impractical. Countermeasures are no less subject to this reality than
are the weapon systems they are intended to frustrate. Imagining is one
thing; designing, building and testing is quite another.
Countermeasures aren't free. Every countermeasures which someone
attempts to put on a ballistic missile costs real money.
Countermeasures also consume weight and space, which mean lowered
performance or less payload. Countermeasures introduce complexity,
which means more things can go wrong and engineers must spend more time
trying to ensure they go right. Engineers trying to perfect
countermeasures are diverted from other activities they could be
working on, such as extending a missile's range or improving its
reliability. In short, successful pursuit of countermeasures means
sacrificing something else, and some may not choose to make that
sacrifice.
Countermeasures are an issue that must be taken seriously by the
designers of our missile defense systems. And, fortunately, they are.
Whether the weapon is an artillery piece or a ballistic missile, it
will have to confront efforts to counter it. In fact, missile defense
is itself a countermeasure to the ballistic missile. Missile defense
should not be abandoned because of the probability that someone will
attempt to develop a countermeasure. The talented men and women of our
National Missile Defense program--who are operating in the real world
in which ideas must be translated into hardware that works--are
anticipating and preparing for countermeasures. This is a point that
has apparently been lost on Mr. Postol and his concerned colleagues,
who would have us believe that new capabilities materialize because
they can imagine them.
I believe we are going to see more not less criticism as we move
forward to implement the provisions of Public Law 106-38 and deploy our
national missile defense system. Some of the critics have impressive
academic credentials. Fortunately, however, people who are impressive
experts in the design and construction of our modern weapons are
working hard to carry out the mandates of our government to build
missile defense systems that will protect our country and all our
American citizens.
An interesting article was published this week in the June 5 issue of
National Review, written by John O'Sullivan, entitled ``By Winding
Stair,'' which discusses missile defenses and its antagonists. This is
an interesting article and is relevant to the subject I have discussed.
I ask unanimous consent a copy of that article be printed in the
Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
By Winding Stair
(By John O'Sullivan)
Although at a glacial speed, and obstructed at every stage
by the Clinton administration, America is moving steadily
toward the deployment of a national system of missile
defense. Public opinion has always been in favor of a
commonsense protection against missile attacks from rogue
states or accidental launches. Most Americans believe,
indeed, that they already enjoy such a defense and are
shocked when pollsters inform them otherwise. It was the
politicians who needed convincing.
A growing sense of U.S. vulnerability led Congress to pass
legislation in May 1999 mandating the deployment of a limited
national missile-defense system as soon as technically
possible. President Clinton signed the legislation, though he
continues to drag his feet, insisting that a final decision
to deploy will not be made until later this year on the basis
of interceptor tests. Given that 2000 is an election year,
however, and that there is growing bipartisan support for a
decision to deploy, it looks a foregone conclusion.
If this progress is a reminder of Bacon's dictum that ``all
rising to a great place is by winding stair,'' it is at least
spiraling in the right direction. But among America's NATO
[[Page S4920]]
allies, a very different mood prevails. Europe as a whole has
not fundamentally rethought its view of missile defense since
the morning after Ronald Reagan's ``Star Wars'' speech, when
it collectively decided that such schemes were technically
impractical, strategically destabilizing, and a threat to
arms control. To these earlier criticisms it now adds
the post-Cold War complaint that an American decision to
build missile defenses would alienate the Russians. Thus,
Europeans on the NATO conference circuit regularly snipe
at the proposed U.S. missile defense.
What is curious about this frozen attitude is not so much
that it neglects the new risks from rogue states as that it
ignores the fact that they especially threaten Europe. As
seasoned defense expert William Schneider Jr. points out:
``Current developments will enable proliferators in the
Middle East and Asia to place all of Europe within range of
ballistic missiles [possibly armed with mass-destruction
warheads] within five years.'' And this threat is growing--
with 36 nations possessing ballistic missiles, 17 nations
thought to have chemical- and/or biological-warfare programs,
8 nations certainly owning nuclear weapons, and 4 nations
believed to be ``of nuclear-proliferation concern.''
Unfortunately for Europe, three of these last four are Iran,
Iraq, and Libya, all on the periphery of the continent.
When such inconvenient facts are pointed out--and they
seldom are--Europeans take refuge in the argument that
deterrence will protect them against minor rogue states even
more securely than it did against the mighty Soviet Union.
Now, deterrence may well work for the major powers like
Russia and China, which have relatively stable political
establishments and a great deal to lose--though it has to
fail only once for disaster to occur. But there are a number
of reasons for doubting this assurance in other regards. In
the first place, deterrence cannot protect against accidental
launches, the danger of which increases with proliferation
among states that currently operate unsafe airlines. Nor can
it protect against a missile launched by a terrorist group
with no return address. Nor can it provide a cast-iron
defense against the miscalculation of a megalomaniac warlord.
And there is a more subtle danger. Will European nations be
prepared to intervene to prevent the spread of Third World
conflicts if their intervention provokes threats to
retaliate with ballistic missiles? This danger is
discussed in ``Coming into Range,'' a report by the all-
party Missile Proliferation Study Group in London. As it
points out, Britain's defense planners have rightly been
praised for their proposed creation of a Joint Rapid
Reaction Force, built around two new aircraft carriers.
The JRFF is intended to enable Britain to intervene
swiftly and in force around the globe, and it is doubtless
especially welcome to the Pentagon and the State
Department as both potential military assistance and
political cover. But the absence of a missile-defense
system covering Britain may render the force largely
useless. ``The reality,'' says the study group's report,
``is that in the absence of protection the crisis might
literally come to us as the result of dispatching our
forces to the crisis and, that being so, no decision to
deploy those forces could be made.'' And if that is true
for Britain, which, like France, still retains a culture
of military patriotism, how much more likely it is that
largely debellicized nations like Germany and Belgium will
shrink from military actions that entail such heavy risks.
If Saddam Hussein had had long-range ballistic missiles
capable of hitting Berlin, Paris, and London in 1990, how
many European nations would have taken part in the Gulf
War?
The implications of this for Europe are very serious. If no
Western power deploys missile defense, which is what the
Europeans now seem to want, then within a short time every
NATO member will be a potential target of nuclear, chemical,
or biological attack. Yet if only the U.S. has such a system,
that might lead to rogue states' threatening to strike at
European targets in retaliation for purely American military
interventions. In either event, Europeans would be hostages--
and the present system of international relations that rests
ultimately on the West's willingness to use force would
gradually unravel. The logical solution would seem to be an
American-led worldwide system of missile defense organized
and deployed, at least in part, through NATO.
Why do the Europeans not agitate for this? In part, no
doubt, the explanation is intellectual inflexibility. They
have been assuring the Americans for so long now, that ``Star
Wars'' is a pipe dream that they cannot easily bring
themselves to see that it has become a strategic necessity.
And since one thread of French foreign policy in recent years
has been to restrain what it sees as the overwhelming
``hyper-power'' of the U.S., Paris instinctively opposes
anything that buttresses it. The unspoken objection to a
missile-defense system is that it would work.
The Europeans' spoken, or admitted, objections are another
matter. One is that the continent's governments, especially
the Germans, have made arms control an unquestionable
desideratum of foreign policy. They are accordingly very
reluctant to endorse a policy that requires the rewriting or
abandonment of the ABM treaty. It would ease their
consciences if the Russians could be induced to go along with
any such renegotiation. But the Clinton administration called
off negotiations with Moscow on missile-defense cooperation
in its first term, and at present it seems to see Mr. Putin
as its ally against Congress on the issue. Both the Russians
and (therefore) the Germans can probably be won over by a
sufficiently determined president and a few sweeteners. But
that probably requires a new man in the White House.
The other big problem is the nexus of money and the
European Security and Defense Policy. The ESDP is a non-
solution to a non-existent problem. It has no military value,
but has the potential to divide the NATO alliance. In their
zeal for Euro-integration, the Europeans have committed
themselves to it, and the Americans, not wishing to confirm
the French stereotype of a hegemonic Uncle Sam, have
grudgingly gone along. Useless though it is, the ESDP will
cost money at a time when the Europeans have very little to
spare--indeed, the budgetary rules of the Maastricht treaty
actually prevent their increasing defense expenditure. So
there is great reluctance to consider any other program, in
particular anything as costly as a NATO missile defense, even
though, unlike the ESDP, it would actually provide Europe
with more defense.
Of course, there are hopeful signs. Realization of their
vulnerability is finally beginning to dawn on the British--
notably on defense secretary Geoff Hoon. Because the U.S.
wants to use British facilities such as the Fylingdales Early
Warning Station in its own system, London sees the prospect
of Anglo-American cooperation in return for military
contracts and a share of the anti-missile umbrella. And much
would change in NATO, as it did in 1981, if the next
president proved to be a determined advocate of missile
defense. After all, the Europeans have not been the only
skeptics. Missile defense has had to contend with a hostile
White House since 1993.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, on behalf of the Chairman of the Budget
Committee, who is necessarily absent, I submit his budget statement and
scoring table on S. 2593, the Department of Defense appropriations
bill.
I support S. 2593, the Defense appropriations bill for fiscal year
2001. As scored by the Congressional Budget Office without any further
adjustments, the pending bill provides $287.6 billion in total budget
authority and $178.9 billion in new outlays for the Department of
Defense and related activities. When adjusted for outlays from prior
years, the bill totals $277.2 billion in outlays.
The bill, as reported, is consistent with the level of budget
authority made available by the 2001 congressional budget resolution.
It is also within the allocation of budget authority and outlays made
available pursuant to section 302(b) of the Congressional Budget Act of
1974.
S. 2593 provides a 2.4 percent increase in overall procurement
spending, a 4.5 percent increase in research and development, and a 0.4
percent increase in Operations and Maintenance.
I support this bill, and I urge its adoption. I want to complement
the chairman of the Appropriations Committee for his work on this
legislation.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a Senate Budget Committee
table displaying the budget impact of this bill be placed in the
Record.
There being no objection, the table was ordered to be printed in the
Record, as follows:
S. 2593, DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS, 2001--SPENDING COMPARISONS--SENATE-
REPORTED BILL
[Fiscal year 2001, in millions of dollars]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
General
purpose Mandatory Total
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Senate-reported bill:
Budget authority....................... 287,415 216 287,631
Outlays................................ 276,959 216 277,175
Senate 302(b) allocation:
Budget authority....................... 287,415 216 287,631
Outlays................................ 279,578 216 279,794
2000 level:
Budget authority....................... 268,605 209 268,814
Outlays................................ 261,933 209 262,142
President's request:
Budget authority....................... 284,305 216 284,521
Outlays................................ 275,871 216 276,087
SENATE-REPORTED BILL COMPARED TO:
Senate 302(b) allocation:
Budget authority....................... ........ ......... ........
Outlays................................ -2,619 ......... -2,619
2000 level:
Budget authority....................... 18,810 7 18,817
Outlays................................ 15,026 7 15,033
President's request:
Budget authority....................... 3,110 ......... 3,110
Outlays................................ 1,088 ......... 1,088
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: Details may not add to totals due to rounding. Totals adjusted for
consistency with scorekeeping conventions.
Mr. INOUYE. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________