WASHINGTON, April 23 (UPI) -- Riki Ellison, one of the most prominent and influential champions of ballistic missile defense in America, spelled out the changing nature of the U.S. national debate on the subject in a letter to his support base earlier this month.
Ellison, the founder and chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, acknowledged in his e-mailed letter of April 9 that the overall U.S. BMD program had received some heavy blows, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates's decision to put a freeze on work to build 33 long-range Ground-based Midcourse Interceptors that were to have been added to those already deployed in Alaska. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is also targeted for a $1.4 billion cut in funding, according to the new Gates plans.
But even here, Ellison told his supporters that in the midst of almost unprecedented financial crisis for the United States and its government, they face an uphill struggle to defend and restore these programs "in an era of limited resources, outstanding national debt and other important needs in other fields."
The MDAA leader finished his letter by praising President Obama and his top officials for their "commitment to further the vision first put forward 26 years ago and carried forward by every president using the engineering and technical talent and expertise of the U.S. military and U.S. industry to develop and deploy a robust missile-defense system to defend America and her allies."
Ellison's letter is an important guide to the way the domestic BMD debate has evolved. Critics of the program remain implacably opposed to the continuing effort to develop defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles, arguing that the current GBI interceptor program is too primitive and unreliable to be credible or worth funding and that the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor programs are too visionary and incapable of delivering any realistic defenses within the next few years.
But they have been forced to acknowledge the ineluctable fact that BMD against intermediate-range ballistic missiles is now a widely accepted fact, not just in the United States but in other nations that have invested heavily in such systems, including Russia, Israel, Taiwan and Japan.
Champions of missile defense, including Ellison himself, continue to defend the GBI, KEI and ABL programs. The history of technological development of both offensive and defensive aircraft and ballistic missile systems suggests that they are correct to do so. But even these champions of BMD recognize that they must now learn to make their case in very different ways as the U.S. government in general and the Department of Defense in particular are forced to learn to do more with fewer financial resources in the difficult times ahead.
The U.S. national debate on ballistic missile defense is not going to go away, nor should it. North Korea and Iran in particular remain clearly committed to developing, maintaining and expanding the capabilities to produce nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to carry them. The percentage of scarce national resources that both countries continue to pour into these programs makes their intent extremely clear. Critics of the BMD programs to develop effective defenses against nuclear-armed ICBMs always come up against this grim reality.
However, despite years of massive pouring of resources into the GBI and other programs during President George W. Bush's two terms in the White House, even a limited defense against one or a handful of ICBMs launched by North Korea or Iran is far from complete and reliable. The engineering challenges of expanding the scale, reliability and capabilities of the existing GBI technology remain formidable.
Reality has produced sobering challenges to both critics and supporters of the U.S. ballistic missile defense program. The substantive arguments used by both sides are going to have to acknowledge these truths.
