Global Beat Syndicate:missile defense

By Richard F. Kaufman – Global Beat Syndicate
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration’s "layered" missile defense program is set to become America’s most expensive white elephant, costing us as much as $1.2 trillion, according to a study by a team of economists and military analysts.
Entitled "The Full Costs of Ballistic Missile Defense," the new study raises critically important questions about the affordability and effects of BMD on the federal budget – and about whether it will work.
Soon after taking office, President Bush expanded missile defense from the limited program of the Clinton administration to a more comprehensive "layered" program. The Defense Department continues to avoid providing cost information for this program that is almost always provided for new weapons, making it difficult for taxpayers to know what the final costs would be.
The Pentagon has become especially secretive about missile defense costs, possibly because it fears the sticker shock would jolt the American public. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will only acknowledge that a layered program, with systems based on land, sea, air and in space, will be very expensive. In December he announced that the first 20 land-based missiles will be deployed in the next two years at a cost of $1.5 billion. But that is only the top of the tip of one of several large icebergs.
The Pentagon eventually will pay as much as $185 billion for the land-based missiles likely to be based in the United States, and when the sea-based component is completed the figure will rise to about $276 billion. These components are to be part of what is called the "midcourse" defenses, designed to destroy attack missiles still traveling in space. The other systems in the layered program are directed against attack missiles when they are in the "boost" phase (during and immediately after launch), and in the "terminal" phase (re-entering the atmosphere from space). Each of these systems will cost nearly as much or more than the midcourse system.
It can be argued that missile defense is worth whatever it takes because it will protect us against attack by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. But that assumes two things: that the end product will be effective, and that there is no better way to use the resources. Both assumptions need to be challenged.
Tests of the land-based missile interceptors have not dispelled the many doubts and uncertainties about the program. While this "mid-course," and future systems, might be made effective at some point, they are so far unproven. Despite some successes in missile defense technology, we are a long way from demonstrating that an impenetrable missile shield can ever be built.
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, we do not have unlimited resources, and we cannot afford to waste vast amounts of resources that might be better used in other ways to improve our national security. If we spend heavily for one thing, we have to give up something else – and we will have to give up quite a lot if the missile defense program goes forward in its present unproven condition.
Present plans call for deploying most of the systems now under development by 2015. To meet that schedule, missile defense spending will have to rise very high, very quickly. Half of the estimated total costs – about $500 billion – would be spent by then. By 2007, the Pentagon would be spending $50 billion annually just on missile defense, and spending would remain at that level for several years. A program costing $1.2 trillion over 30 years or a bit more will have serious budgetary and economic consequences.
If the Bush administration prevails on this controversial decision, missile defense will be financed by additional defense spending increases and by cuts in non-defense spending. And it is also likely that the defense budget would not increase enough to fully accommodate missile defense without crowding out planned increases in other military programs. The long-awaited transformation of our military has already been delayed and could be further delayed to make way for missile defense.
The largest sacrifices will be made on the non-defense side of the budget, in programs equally vital to our national security. In the past, our leaders seriously neglected programs that have come to be known as homeland defense, including security measures at our airports, coastlines, and borders, and in as such areas necessary to the nation’s physical and economic well-being as public health, the power grid, and the water supplies.
Despite the recent sound and fury in Washington about the problem, homeland defense is still insufficiently funded. Meantime, we spent $8 billion for missile defense last year. What else will be underfunded as missile defense spending balloons?