If you stopped worrying about the bomb when the cold war ended, you were probably surprised to learn that two of the hot-button issues of the eighties, arms control and missile defense, will top the agenda at the Clinton/Putin summit on June 4-5. A central issue in Moscow will be how to reconcile Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal for deep cuts in US and Russian nuclear arsenals with the Clinton Administration's fixation on developing a National Missile Defense (NMD) system.
Clinton has pledged to make a deployment decision this fall, after the Pentagon and the White House analyze the results of the next "hit to kill" test of the missile defense system, slated for late June or early July. The system failed its most recent test, conducted in January, while an allegedly successful test conducted last October was made possible only by the fact that the kill vehicle was guided to the right spot by a large, easy-to-find decoy balloon.

The Clinton/Gore proposal is a far cry from Ronald Reagan's Star Wars scheme, which was designed to fend off thousands of Soviet warheads at a cost estimated by former Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire at up to $1 trillion. In contrast, this missile defense plan is meant to deal with a few dozen incoming warheads launched by a "rogue state" like North Korea, at a projected cost of $60 billion. But despite the NMD's seemingly more modest goals, it is every bit as dangerous and misguided as the Reagan scheme, threatening to unravel thirty years of arms-control agreements and heighten the danger of nuclear war.
NMD's surprising political revival is rooted in the three Cs of contemporary US politics: conservative ideology, Clintonian cowardice and corporate influence. These short-term pressures are in turn reinforced by an ambitious long-range military objective: the misguided quest for a state of absolute military superiority. The strongest push for missile defense has come from Reaganite true believers in conservative think tanks, especially the small but highly effective Ctr for Security Policy. On Capitol Hill, the NMD lobby is spearheaded by new-look conservatives like Sen. Jon Kyl R-AZ, who led last fall's successful GOP effort to defeat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Fresh from that victory, the NMD lobby is now seeking to destroy the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty as the next target in its campaign to promote "peace through strength rather than peace through paper," as Kyl put it in a recent speech.
The right-wing crusade for missile defense has received aid and comfort from Bill Clinton & Al Gore, who have decided that looking "tough" on defense is more important than protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction. Support has also come from the lumbering behemoths of the military-industrial complex: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, which are desperately seeking a new infusion of taxpayer funds to help them recover from a string of technical failures and management fiascos that have cut their stock prices and drastically reduced their profit margins. NMD's military boosters see the system primarily as a way to enhance the offensive capabilities of US forces, not as a defensive measure. In its revealing "Vision for 2020" report, the US Space Command, a unified military command that coordinates the space activities and assets of the Army, Navy and Air Force, sings the praises of outer space as the ideal platform for projecting US military dominance "across the full spectrum of conflict." Pentagon hard-liners have a more immediate military goal: using NMD as a shield to protect US forces in interventions against states like North Korea (whose missile development effort, it is worth noting, has been on hold for almost 2 years).

A growing number of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are also supportive of a limited NMD system. Whether or not missile defense is an effective response to alleged threats, it seems to offer a sense of security to some members of Congress, who lack the expertise & inclination to question the fevered threat projections of the US military & intelligence establishments. While at least some of the motives of NMD advocates may be understandable, They are also disastrously misguided: Even Clinton and Gore's "limited" system is unnecessary, unworkable and unaffordable. The mere pursuit of an NMD system could pose the most serious threat to intl peace & stability since the height of the cold war.

Russian President Putin has emphatically stated that any US move to withdraw from the ABM treaty will lead Moscow to treat all existing US/Russian arms agreements as null & void. And China's chief arms negotiator, Sha Zukang, has warned that if Washington goes ahead with an NMD deployment designed to intercept "tens of warheads" a figure suspiciously close to the eighteen to twenty single-warhead ballistic missiles that represent China's entire nuclear deterrent capability-Beijing will not "sit on its hands." In short, the official Clinton/Gore Administration position on NMD is that we should jeopardize the best chance in a generation to reduce the world's nuclear arsenals in order to preserve the option to deploy a costly, technically dubious scheme designed to defend against a Third World missile threat that does not currently exist and may not ever materialize.
To understand how we got into this mess, we need to take a look at the genesis, "death" and resurrection of Reagan's Star Wars dream.

A Smile & a Shoeshine
When Reagan gave his March 1983 Star Wars speech, in which he pledged to launch a program designed to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," he was acting primarily on the advice of Edward Teller, the infamous "father of the H-bomb." In closed-door meetings organized by the conservative businessmen in Reagan's kitchen Cabinet, Teller sold Reagan on a new nuclear doctrine of "assured survival" based on the alleged technical wonders of his latest brainchild, the X-ray laser. As New York Times science writer William Broad pointed out in his 1992 book, Teller's War, the X-ray laser was largely a figment of Teller's imagination, composed of scientific speculation, wishful thinking and outright deception. But Reagan was buying into the concept of missile defense, not the details, so he forged ahead unaware of these inconvenient facts, his enthusiasm reinforced by his desire to counter the nuclear freeze movement.

But, as Frances FitzGerald shows in her new book, Way Out There in the Blue (the title derives from Arthur Miller's line in Death of a Salesman in which he describes Willy Loman as "a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile & a shoeshine"), Reagan's Star Wars proposal was more than just a political con game; it was also a potent symbol that served radically different purposes for the different factions within his Administration.
For hard-liners like Caspar Weinberger, Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, Perle protege who founded his own pro-Star Wars think tank Ctr for Security Policy, Reagan's missile defense plan offered a chance to promote their two main goals: sustaining the Reagan military buildup and thwarting progress on U.S./Soviet arms control.
For White House political strategists, Star Wars was a way to boost Reagan's flagging popularity ratings, which plummeted with deepest recession since 1930s and growing fear the President's aggressive anti-Soviet stance was moving to brink of nuclear confrontation.

The most constructive response to the Star Wars speech within Reagan's inner circle came from Sec.State George Shultz. Rather than trying to convince Reagan of the manifold flaws in his pet project, Shultz treated the Star Wars speech as an opportunity to press Reagan to engage in his first serious discussions with Soviet leaders on nuclear weapons issues.
Shultz found an unlikely ally in Paul Nitze, the old cold warrior who was appointed as a special envoy to the US/Russian nuclear talks at Shultz's request. Nitze honed in on the fatal flaw that has plagued all missile defense schemes to date, which is that it is much cheaper to overwhelm a defensive system with additional warheads or decoys than it is to expand the defensive capability to meet these new threats.

As a result, Shultz & Nitze were able to prevail over the Weinberger/Perle faction and persuade Reagan to endorse historic agreements to eliminate medium-range nuclear weapons from Europe and implement substantial cuts in long-range weapons under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Star Wars was a security blanket that allowed Reagan to engage in serious negotiations with the "evil empire" without being perceived as some sort of weak-kneed liberal arms controller among the conservatives who formed his core constituency.

When George Bush took office in January 1989, Reagan's Star Wars fantasy was rapidly overtaken by the reality of sharp reductions in US & Soviet nuclear forces. Both sides ratified the START I arms reduction pact and followed up with a START II deal that called for cutting US & Soviet strategic arsenals to one-third their Reagan-era levels.
On a broader front, the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 & 1991 made spending billions on a high-tech scheme to defend against Soviet missiles seem irrelevant and absurd. Despite the decline of the Soviet "threat," however, the Bush Administration & Congress continued to cough up $3-$4 billion per year for missile defense. The project's new focus was protection against an accidental nuclear attack.

Soon yet another rationale appeared in the form of the "rogue state" strategy, developed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and based on the notion that U.S. should be prepared to fight two heavily armed regional powers like Iraq & North Korea simultaneously. In the 1991 Gulf War Saddam Hussein came to personify the rogue-state threat; Iraqi missile attacks on Tel Aviv and a devastating direct hit on a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia prompted calls for more effective defenses against medium-range ballistic missiles. But even that was not enough to sustain enthusiasm for a major new program. A few months after Clinton took office in January 1993, Def.Sec Les Aspin proclaimed the Star Wars program dead (though the Pentagon continued to spend $3-$4 billion per year on missile defense research).

Enter Newt
Newt Gingrich is gone from the political scene, but the most dangerous plank of his 1994 Contract With America remains: the section that calls for "requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems capable of defending the U.S. against ballistic missile attacks." That plan was added to the contract by Gingrich and his fellow GOP co-author Dick Armey at the urging of Frank Gaffney of the Ctr for Security Policy.
Efforts to turn the contract's rhetoric into viable legislation proved unsuccessful in the short run, but in mid-1996 the Clinton admin decided to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by offering a missile defense compromise known as the "3+3" plan, 3 years of research & testing followed by a 3 year crash program to deploy a system, if the President decided it was necessary, feasible and affordable. The "3+3" gambit allowed Clinton to push off a politically controversial decision on missile defense until a later date that fell well past the 1996 presidential election.

Unfortunately for Al Gore, that "later date" is now smack in the middle of his second run for the White House. As John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it, "This is a political decision driven by the need to defend Al Gore from the GOP rather than defend America against missiles."
While Clinton was yielding ground, Capitol Hill Republicans were regrouping for their next offensive- one result of which was an amendment in the fiscal year 1997 defense authorization bill calling for the establishment of a blue- ribbon panel to "assess the nature & magnitude of existing and emerging ballistic missile threats to the United States." The Republicans wanted their new commission to be viewed as an authoritative and objective body, not just a partisan project.

Bearing that in mind, House Speaker Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who were empowered to nominate the majority of the panel's members, chose former Ford Administration DefSec Donald Rumsfeld to head the commission, in the hopes that they could capitalize on his reputation as a moderate Republican with pragmatic views on military matters. Rumsfeld proved worthy of Gingrich's and Lott's confidence when he hammered out a unanimous final report with the appropriate aura of bipartisanship, complete with signatures from Democratic appointees such as former Carter Administration arms-control official Barry Blechman of the Henry L. Stimson Ctr and eminent physicist & longtime missile defense critic Richard Garwin.
Just 2 weeks after the report came out, Garwin placed an op-ed in the NY Times denouncing the misuse of the report by missile defense boosters, asserting, "I am alarmed that some have interpreted our findings as providing support for a new national defense system."

The Rumsfeld Commission report was unveiled in July 1998 amid hysterical cries from Gingrich that it was the "most important warning about our national security system since the end of the cold war." Hysteria aside, the report's primary finding was that given enough foreign help, a rogue state like North Korea could acquire a missile capable of reaching the United States within five years of making a decision to do so, one-third to one- half the warning time projected in the CIA's official estimates.
The Star Wars lobby finally got what it needed: an official, govt-approved statement that could be interpreted as endorsing its own exaggerated view of the Third World missile threat. While the Rumsfeld report drew heavy editorial fire in papers like Chicago Tribune & Milwaukee Sentinel, Wall St Journal applauded it as a long- overdue clarion call for missile defense, and Washington's newspaper of record, the Post, published a measured response that endorsed the panel's findings as "useful and plausible."

Inside the Missile Defense Lobby
Upon reflection, it is clear that the Rumsfeld report's Republican backers had always intended to use the panel as a tool to advance their pro-missile defense agenda. All the report actually says is that if a country like North Korea gets major foreign assistance, including the extremely unlikely possibility that a country like China would simply give Pyongyang a fully operational ballistic missile, it will achieve the capability to hit the U.S. much more quickly than if it had to build the missile without outside help.
As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for Intl Peace demonstrated in Congressional testimony delivered this past February, the Rumsfeld Commission's conservative backers have used the report as a vehicle for changing the intelligence community's traditional means of assessing the ballistic missile threat, from one that attempts to predict the likely pace of missile proliferation in a given nation in the light of political, economic and military factors, to a "worst-case scenario" approach that asks how quickly a given nation could achieve a threatening missile capability if it had no economic or political impediments.
As Cirincione also demonstrated, the "sky is falling" approach has been used to obscure the underlying reality that the ballistic missile threat to the U.S. has decreased in the last decade, not increased.

Just as the Rumsfeld Commission turned out to be less objective than it first appeared to be, so did its chairman. Far from being a moderate, Donald Rumsfeld is a card-carrying member of the missile defense lobby. Prior to his appointment to head the commission that bears his name, he was publicly singled out as a special friend in the annual report of the pro-Star Wars think tank, the Ctr for Security Policy.
As a further sign of his commitment to the missile defense cause, Rumsfeld has also given money to Frank Gaffney's group. If Gaffney's organization were just an abstract "study group," that would be one thing. But it is a highly partisan advocacy organization that serves as the de facto nerve center of the NMD lobby.
Gaffney's center, which now has an annual budget of $1.2 million, was started in 1988 with support from New Right funders like Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors. Since that time, Gaffney has turned it into a sort of working executive committee for the missile defense lobby.

The center's advisory board includes representatives of larger conservative organizations, incl Ed Feulner, president Heritage Fdtn; Wm Bennett, co-director Empower America; and Henry Cooper of High Frontier, the original Star Wars think tank, which was launched during the early years of the Reagan Administration. Other CSP advisory board members include Chas. Kupperman & Bruce Jackson, who serve as vp for Washington operations & director of planning & analysis, respectively, at Lockheed Martin; key members of Congress like Republicans Curt Weldon, Christopher Cox and Jon Kyl; and a who's who of Reagan-era Star Warriors like Edward Teller and former Reagan science adviser Geo. Keyworth.

Unlike most think tanks concerned with military issues, the Ctr for Security Policy receives a substantial portion of its funding from weapons manufacturers. 3 out of the top 4 missile defense contractors, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and TRW, are all major corporate contributors to CSP, which has received more than $2 million in corporate donations since its founding, accounting for roughly one-quarter of its total budget.
Rumsfeld's link to CSP is not his only affiliation with the Star Wars lobby. He's also on the board of Empower America, which ran deceptive ads against anti-NMD Senator Harry Reid of Nevada in the run-up to the November 1998 elections. In recognition of his service to the missile defense lobby, in October 1998, just 3 months after his "objective" assessment of the missile threat was released, CSP awarded Rumsfeld its "Keeper of the Flame" award for 1998 at a gala dinner attended by several hundred Star Wars boosters.
In accepting the award, Rumsfeld joined the company of Reagan, Gingrich and several Congressional NMD boosters.

NMD Resurgent: Fast Track to Oblivion?

Long before the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton decided that throwing money at the Pentagon was the best way to shore up his credentials as Commander in Chief and divert attention from allegations that he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. By the fall of 1998, the combination of a growing federal budget surplus and the President's perceived political weakness resulting from the Lewinsky matter emboldened congressional GOP and Clinton's own Joint Chiefs of Staff to press him for billions of dollars in additional military funds.
In mid-September, the Joint Chiefs invited the President to a closed-door briefing where they read Clinton their wish lists on everything from boosting military pay and weapons procurement to applying fresh coats of paint to underutilized military bases. Within a week's time Clinton sent the Chiefs a letter pledging a Pentagon budget increase that would insure that "the men and women of our armed forces will have the resources they need to do their jobs." In October, congressional GOP did the Joint Chiefs one better, loading up Clinton's $1 billion Pentagon supplemental appropriations bill aimed at addressing the military's newfound "readiness crisis" with what analyst John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World has described as "a $9 billion grab bag of pet projects" that included an additional $1 billion for National Missile Defense.

Clinton's apparent embrace of NMD prompted Helle Bering of the conservative Washington Times to complain bitterly that "Clinton has appropriated yet another set of Republican issues." In mid-January Cohen took the Administration's NMD commitment one step further when he made the highly provocative statement that if the U.S. deemed it necessary to withdraw from the ABM treaty in order to field an effective defense against rogue-state missiles, it would do so regardless of Russia's reaction.
Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, NMD advocates were rallying around Senator Thad Cochran's National Missile Defense Act. In March 1999, aided by the votes of moderate and conservative Democrats who had been persuaded in part by the Rumsfeld Commission's official (albeit misleading) depiction of the North Korean missile threat, House & Senate both passed bills calling for the deployment of a national missile defense system "as soon as it is technologically feasible." Clinton signed the bill into law that July. Although his signing message made it clear that the Administration will consider economic, technical and arms-control factors before deciding whether to deploy an NMD system, Star Wars boosters in Congress have been portraying the legislation as a firm national commitment come hell or high water.

The NMD Deception

But even if the next test misfires, the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) has already put forward a rationale that Clinton could use to give the green light for deployment, namely that two more "hit to kill" tests could be squeezed in between now and next spring, when construction will begin on the critical NMD radar site in Shemya, Alaska, if Clinton decides to go full speed ahead on deployment. Even one successful "hit" in any of these next 3 tests, which will occur before BMDO contractors actually break ground on the Alaska radar project but after the Administration has committed funds to long-lead-time materials and services that will be needed to meet the starting date for construction, will be offered as proof of the dubious proposition that the system will work under real-world conditions.

… but you must fear,
His greatness weigh'd, his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;

… Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster'd importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister

Baroness committed her govt to addtl $2billion in development for multi- mission aircraft Joint Strike Fighter pgm .
Missile-test item jettisoned from bill
9.20.01   Reuters

Rumsfeld says Crusader must go
5.16.02   Reuters

Crusader is a 155mm self-propelled howitzer. The Army, which spent $2 billion to develop it since 1994, considered it a top procurement priority. The 40-ton gun, tarred as a Cold War relic by critics who consider it too heavy for likely 21st century battlefields, is built by United Defense Industries Inc., which is mounting a big advertising & lobbying drive to save it.
United Defense is controlled by the Carlyle Group, investment firm led by former Pres.Reagan Def.Sec Frank Carlucci. Also on Carlyle's payroll are elder President Geo.Bush's Sec.State James Baker, and elder Bush's budget director Richard Darman. Former President Bush himself is a consultant. Lawmakers from Oklahoma, where the Crusader is assembled, urged Rumsfeld Wed. to refrain from issuing any "stop work" order on the big gun while Congress weighs what to do with the $475 million earmarked for it in the fiscal 2003 budget.

  Still relying on missile defense to make us feel safer
9.26.01   Lionel Van Deerlin, ex SD Cty, CA Cong. SD UT

… exactly 10 days after terrorist assault, U.S. Senate leaders cleared the way to spend another $8.3 billion on SDI … Amid the happily bipartisan atmosphere pervading Washington in the wake of terror, Democratic leaders let the Bush administration have every penny it had requested for SDI in the fiscal year beginning October 1. Obligingly abandoned were plans to trim the allocation by $1.3 billion. The House, under Republican leadership, would of course go along. … If SDI's sponsors ran a casino on the side, you'd want to check their roulette wheels for resin. When he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Richard Cheney dismissed SDI as "an extremely remote proposition that was oversold" by President Reagan. That was 10 years ago, at which point taxpayers already had been nicked $17 billion for this scheme. …

  Powell dismisses Putin threat ¹
  6.23.01   AP   ¹

Wash.D.C.   Sec.State Powell is brushing aside a warning by Russian President Vladimir Putin that he will upgrade his country's strategic nuclear arsenal if the U.S. deploys a missile defense system. Putin has issued the warning on several occasions, and again on Saturday, but Powell seemed almost dismissive of the Russian leader's stand when asked about it Friday in an interview with AP. "I am not in charge of Russia but I don't think that's what they would do,'' Powell said. He said he was confident that Putin would not try to enhance Russia's strategic force once he takes into account the cost. Powell added that Putin also will come to realize that a U.S. missile defense is not a threat to Russia.
Critics of the missile defense system argue that its deployment by the U.S. would touch off an arms race, with Russia and China taking steps to build up their arsenals to overwhelm the U.S. defense shield. On Saturday, Putin again threatened a nuclear buildup if the U.S. abandons the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, "This means that all countries, including Russia, will have the right to install multiple warheads carrying nuclear weapons on their missiles,'' he told reporters in Moscow. He said that for Russia, installing multiple nuclear warheads on existing missiles "is the cheapest response.''

That echoed his comments Monday that while he would try to work cooperatively with the U.S. in developing a new security framework, Russia would enhance its nuclear forces if the U.S. pursued a go-it-alone posture on missile defense. On NATO, Powell said he was not surprised that many allied countries have expressed reservations about the U.S. missile defense plan, given the fact that it represents a major doctrinal change from the current security framework. But he said there is more openness among the allies about the concept than there was before President Bush began consulting them in early May. "I think we have made progress,'' he said. …

U.S. security adv. sees progress on missile defense
7.25.01   Reuters

Moscow   U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice arrived in Moscow Wed. to put arms control talks with Russia on a fast track, saying the 2 sides had broken the deadlock on missile defense. Rice told govt leaders in Kiev that Russia and the U.S. had moved beyond their dispute over the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Ukrainian officials said. "Rice expressed her satisfaction that, following meetings in Genoa, ABM talks between Russia & the U.S. have moved beyond deadlock," a spokesman for Ukraine's presidential press service told Reuters.
Washington sees the ABM treaty as a Cold War "relic" but Moscow has been unwilling to re-write a pact it says is the cornerstone of strategic stability & 30 other arms accords. Rice has said Washington wants to pursue an "aggressive schedule" of talks on arms issues with Moscow after a weekend G-8 summit. After a bilateral meeting following the summit, President Bush & Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed for the first time to merge talks on missile defense and deep cuts in their vast nuclear arsenals.

Putin downplays breakthrough talk
Rice's upbeat remarks contrasted with comments by Putin, who denied any breakthrough had been made in Genoa. Russian media have accused him of retreating from his previous opposition to U.S. missile defense plans. Washington says it needs a national missile shield to protect against the threat from "rogue states" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Putin concedes the threat exists, but says it is greatly exaggerated. To counter it he has proposed greater diplomatic efforts and, as a last resort, a non-strategic anti-missile system which would preserve ABM and prevent a new arms race. Sunday's accord, however, also marks a shift by Bush, who had hitherto wanted unilateral cuts in U.S. arsenals outside the framework of legally-binding & verifiable accords. Washington argues that would give it more flexibility to counter emerging missile threats.

Russia & the U.S. have been jousting over the issue of missile defense for months, and Washington warned earlier this month its research could "bump into" the ABM treaty in a matter of months, not years. Bush wants to forge ahead with a $60 billion program after a third test this summer proved successful where two others had failed. But Moscow remains skeptical the scheme can work and says Washington has still failed to tell it what sort of anti-missile scheme it plans to build. The U.S. has promised to give answers soon, but Bush signaled on Monday that he would press on with the scheme regardless of Russian concerns if the two sides failed to reach an agreement quickly. "Time is of the essence...if we can't reach an agreement, we're going to implement," he told reporters in Rome.
  [ Homilies in place of reason. Why is "time of the essence? No rogue nation is threatening to bombard anyone. ]

Rice was to meet Vladimir Rushailo, secretary of Russia's Security Council later on Wednesday, ahead of meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov on Thursday. She is due to meet Putin in the Kremlin around midday on Thursday. Sec.State C.Powell & Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov discussed the timetable for security talks in Hanoi this week, on the sidelines of a summit of Asian regional states. Defense ministry officials from both sides are due to meet in Moscow & Washington next month.

Missile defense may not bring jobs
5.20.01   Associated Press

Nor might the money. perhaps as much as $200 billion over the next few decades - flow to as many states, since consolidation in the defense industry has left fewer companies positioned to do the work. "Where you might have had 5 choices to send a contract to, and geography might have ruled, today you might have only two choices,'' said Jon Kutler, chairman & chief executive officer of Quarterdeck Investment Partners, an L.A. investment bank focused on the aerospace & defense industries. Hartung said analysis of past missile defense contracts show two-thirds of the work went to just four firms: The Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Co. and TRW Inc. Although all four have facilities scattered throughout the U.S., work on developing the missile defense program is likely to stay highly focused in only a few states. That means politics may have little to do with where the contracts eventually go.

"I don't think it's going to have a lot to do with Republicans or Democrats. There's going to be a small number of people who can do it, and they'll get the contracts,'' said Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute who advised Bush on missile defense during his campaign. In fiscal 2000, 42 states shared $2.4 billion in unclassified missile defense contracts. However, just 3, Alabama, California and Virginia, captured 83% of that total, according to Eagle Eye Publishers Inc. "That's a highly stratified market,'' said Paul Murphy, president of the Fairfax VA co., which crunches govt contract data. Total spending, classified and unclassified, on the program could hit $5 billion this year. That number could increase in the next several months, when the Bush administration announces how it intends to proceed with the program, said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Rick Lehner. Even if annual spending on missile defense doubles, as some predict, it will not necessarily translate into a net increase in military spending. "I'd expect there would be some element of a zero-sum game to this: The money you spend on this program will come at the expense of other programs,'' Quarterdeck's Kutler said.

If money to fund missile defense should come from the budgets of traditional weapons programs, it could benefit California, since little of that current work is done in the state. "Anything that shifts from traditional platforms to space, to electronics, to rockets is probably advantageous to California,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution in Wash., D.C. Even limited amounts of spending could lift the lagging defense industry in Southern California, which has shed 200,000 workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties alone over the past 15 years. "You're not going to create as many jobs, but the jobs you do create will be great jobs,'' said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the nonprofit Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

  Rumsfeld charts missile defense course ¹
  7.8.01   AP

WASHINGTON   The Bush administration wants to greatly expand the number & kinds of testing it believes is needed to build effective missile defenses, and is willing to spend billions more to do it. In a sense, military planners have gone back to the drawing board to fulfill President Bush's goal of creating a reliable defense against ballistic missile attack on U.S., its allies and U.S. forces abroad. The Bush administration sees no less urgency in obtaining a missile defense capability. But after months of reviewing options and studying the Clinton administration's approach, the Pentagon has decided to explore a wider range of technologies before deciding when the system could be ready for use. "The focus of missile defense is no longer on deployment,'' says Lt.Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which manages the Pentagon's missile defense work. The focus is on testing, and lots of it. "It is going to be structured & disciplined,'' Lehner said.
  [ Implementation studies are much easier hence more lucrative than production & deployment. ]

It is also going to be expensive. Intercept tests conducted during the Clinton administration cost about $100 million apiece. The Bush administration envisions more elaborate and more frequent tests. The proposed 2002 defense budget submitted to Congress on June 27 provides $8.3 billion for missile defense, a nearly 40% increase over the current budget. It would be expected to take tens of billions more before a system is ready for use, although the administration has provided no firm figure. For starters, the Pentagon is piecing together a plan to create a Pacific "test bed'', a collection of test ranges from Ft. Greeley and Kodiak Island in Alaska to Vandenberg AFBase, CA, to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, to pursue more realistic missile intercept tests. ¹

Up to now, the only flight tests of interceptors designed to shoot down long-range missiles have involved launching an unarmed target missile from Vandenberg and trying to hit it with an interceptor launched from Kwajalein. Just such a test is scheduled for July 14, the first intercept attempt in 12 months. Last July's attempt failed, and several weeks later President Clinton announced that the technology was not sufficiently mature to go ahead with deploying missile defenses. Clinton was operating under a congressional requirement that he deploy a missile defense as soon as it was technologically feasible. His administration chose to focus the bulk of its missile defense effort on a ground-based interceptor designed to collide with a hostile missile outside the earth's atmosphere during the midcourse of its flight. It did so because that technology is more advanced than others, such as interceptors fired from ships or lasers fired from satellites or airplanes.

Def.Sec Rumsfeld has decided that the midcourse system alone is insufficient to provide global protection. He wants to build a "layered'' system, a combination of missile defense weapons. Some would be designed to attack a ballistic missile in the boost phase of its flight while it is easiest to detect, others in the descent phase and still others in midcourse. Some of these anti-missile weapons would be based on land, others at sea, others possibly aboard aircraft. "As we proceed in time, and technologies are proven or disproven, we narrow down heading toward a solution,'' the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, Pete Aldridge, told reporters late last month.
Lehner said the Pentagon is aiming for deployment sometime between 2004 and 2008, but it has not firm target date. In its new approach, the Pentagon will not only pursue different combinations of missile defense technologies, some well advanced, some largely untried, but also test them in ways not done before. For example, the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island, about 250 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska, would be used to launch target missiles over the Pacific. Kodiak also would have interceptors for test flights against target missiles launched from Vandenberg in California toward Kwajalein.

The Pentagon also would use Fort Greeley, about 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, as a site from which to launch ground-based interceptors at target missiles fired from an aircraft. The government decided in 1995 to close Ft. Greeley, but the 2001 defense supplemental bill before Congress now contains language permitting the secretary of defense to retain the base for missile defense purposes. This more aggressive testing effort reflects Bush's determination to "set aside'' the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids the testing of missile defense weaponry from other than fixed points on land. Thus the Kwajalein-to-Vandenberg approach is allowed, but not testing from aircraft or ships.
Even more fundamentally, the ABM treaty bans any missile defense that is designed to protect an entire nation. Having declared the ABM treaty a Cold War relic ¹, the administration plans to go ahead with testing without regard to treaty limitations, although it has not yet said definitely that it will withdraw from the treaty. It hopes to persuade the Russians to either amend it or to replace it with a new "framework'' in which U.S., its allies and Russia could pursue missile defenses cooperatively. The treaty's limitations are not an immediate problem because testing of the kind that would violate the limits is not likely to be ready for another year or more.

"U.S. likely to put arms in space", per USAF chief
8.1.01   Reuters ¹

WASHINGTON   The U.S. will likely put weapons in space one day to protect satellites vital for commerce, communications and military dominance, the Air Force's top general predicted on Wednesday. "I would think that eventually we're going to have to have capabilities to take things out in orbit," Gen. Michael Ryan said of the future ability of the Pentagon to destroy enemy space- and ground-based arms threatening U.S. satellites. "And we had better not be second," he said in an interview with reporters.
DefSec D.Rumsfeld recently gave the Air Force oversight over U.S. military space programs. He stressed, however, that the Bush administration had not decided whether the U.S. would become the first nation to station arms such as lasers in space. Ryan, who will retire next month as Air Force chief of staff, said Washington was too dependent on satellites for everything from spying to commerce and weather forecasting to leave them unprotected. "I would suggest that sometime in the future here we are going to have to come to a policy decision on whether we're going to use space for both defensive and offensive capabilities," he told reporters.

new space plane?
The general noted that the Air Force was developing arms including a laser based on a Boeing 747 aircraft within the atmosphere and examining the possibility of building a futuristic bomber that might fly at the edge of space to quickly reach remote land targets. "We have a huge equity in orbit," Ryan told reporters. "Wherever commerce has gone and our national interests have gone, so have gone our forces. On land, sea and in the air we tended to exploit the realm that we were dependent upon. "It (space satellites) is one of our asymmetrical advantages of this nation (for) intelligence, communications, reconnaissance, weather, navigation. We depend upon the integration of those things in orbit with what we do in the atmosphere and what we do on the ground," he said. "To the extent that should we lose them, it would be a huge blow."
The general stressed that such assets had to be protected from electronic interference or outright destruction. "I think that we have in some way be able to protect those assets, at least defensively," Ryan said. "And that leads you to the thought that if you are going to be up there trying to protect them defensively, where do you cross the line on offensive operations?"

Donald Rumsfeld, hollow man
12/29/00   Libertarian Socialist News
  p.o. box12244 Silver Spring, MD 20908

1)   Rumsfeld is known to friend for always being politically "safe". When asked policy questions, he always equivocates and never gives a policy answer. Some question whether or not he actually has any opinions. Despite that, he has a history of membership in war-mongering organizations, and is tied to several major nefarious corporations.

2)   Rumsfeld is known to friends as "Rummy".

3)   Rumsfeld is closely tied to Monsanto, and has been an outspoken advocate of genetically modified food.

4)   Rumsfeld publically criticized the Democrats in 1995 for inviting Jewish-Russia mafia boss Grigory Loutchansky to a fundraiser.

5)   Loutchansky is a board member of an anti-Soviet group known as the Jamestown Foundation, which assisted Russian dissidents in coming to America in the 1980s, and is now working on assisting "Russia's transition to a free-market economy."

6)   Rumsfeld sits on the board of the Balkan Action Committee. Fellow board members incl Elie Wiesel, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. The board recommended US ground invasion of Serbia during Kosovo bombardment. All board members except Geraldine Ferraro were involved in Committee on the Present Danger, Jeane Kirkpatrick chair, which promoted U.S. "interventions" in Central America, Afghanistan, and Angola.

7)   Rumsfeld headed a Congressional Committee that investigated the Bay of Pigs Invasion and found no CIA wrongdoing, and is seen by some as a major advocate in Congress for expanded CIA powers during the 1960s.

10)   Rumsfeld, as a member of the "Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf" has urged US support, funds, arms and intervention on behalf of the anti-Hussein opposition in Iraq. Other members of the Committee incl Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Martin Peretz (publisher of the New Republic), Casper Weinberger and Paul Wolfowitz.

The Saddam in Rumsfeld's closet
8.4.02   Jeremy Scahill ZNet

"Man and the turtle are very much alike. Neither makes any progress without sticking his neck out."

Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld's Dec. 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in 6 years. He met Saddam and the 2 discussed "topics of mutual interest," according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld later told NYTimes. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems."
Just 12 days after the meeting, on 1.1.84, Wash.Post reported that the U.S. "in a shift in policy, informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the 3-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to U.S. interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result."
In March of 1984, with the Iran-Iraq war growing m