By Army Sgt. 1st Class Tyrone C. Marshall Jr.
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, May 19, 2015 – The Defense Department has not
made a decision on the establishment of an East Coast-based missile defense
site, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said today.
Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr. focused on U.S. missile
defense during a discussion on national security at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies here.
“We want our adversaries to know that not only is there a
price for attacking us or our friends,” he said, “but also that the attack may
not succeed in the first place, resulting in pain but no gain.”
No Decision Yet
In improving the entire U.S. defense missile system,
Winnefeld said a holistic view must be taken to ensure limited resources are
“wisely” invested -- not just in ground-based interceptors.
“In this light,” he said, “there has been a lot of talk
about installing an East Coast missile field. Our environmental impact
statement should be complete in the middle of next year.”
However, Winnefeld said, the only reason to make that
investment would be to provide the capability to shoot, assess and then shoot
again, which can only be done if the sensors needed to do so are in place.
“We need to put our ability to see targets at the head of
the line, and therefore, there’s been no decision yet by the department to move
forward with an additional [continental U.S.] interceptor site though we very
well could do that,” he said.
“Meanwhile,” Winnefeld added, “our current sites --
Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California] and Fort Greeley in Alaska -- protect
the U.S. homeland from the existing and the projected ICBM threat from North
Korea and Iran should either of them really emerge.”
The vice chairman noted even though an additional interceptor
site in the continental United States would add battle space and interceptor
capability and capacity, a decision to construct the new site would come at a
“significant material development and service sustainment cost, so we need to
be careful.”
He added, “While that site could eventually be necessary, …
in the near-term, upgrading the kill vehicle on the [ground-based interceptor],
improving our ability to discriminate, and enhancing the homeland defense
sensor network are higher priorities for us in improving our protection against
limited ICBM attack.”
Prioritizing Capabilities
Winnefeld explained how he and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prioritize the department’s investment
in capabilities.
Any sensible nation has to prioritize its investments in
defense along some kind of strategic framework, the admiral said.
“If we don’t do this in a sensible way, we’ll end up with a
cacophony of demands in an era of declining means,” Winnefeld said.
This has implications for the nation’s missile defense
investments, he said; capabilities are “ways” which can’t be prioritized before
“ends.”
Winnefeld said he and the chairman, and increasing numbers
of other DoD leaders “believe that our investments have to be prioritized along
the lines of what it is we’re being asked to protect.”
Some of these national security interests, he said, are more
important than others.
“It stands to reason that we need to ensure that we take
care of the highest-ranked interests first,” Winnefeld said.
Preventing Existential Attacks
At the apex of any country’s national security interests,
the vice chairman said, is its own survival -- the U.S. is no different.
“At the top of the list of threats to that interest is, of
course, a massive nuclear attack from Russia or some other high-end potential
adversary like China,” Winnefeld said.
“This is about existential attacks,” he explained, “attacks
that are extremely hard to defend against, and because we prefer to use the
deterrent of missile defense in situations where it has the highest probability
of being most effective, we’ve stated that missile defense against these
high-end threats is too hard and too expensive, and too strategically
destabilizing to even try.”
Winnefeld said the number of nations trying to achieve that
capability is growing rather than shrinking and the department’s principal
current concern is North Korea, “because they are closest in terms of
capability, followed by Iran.”
He added, “A robust and capable national missile defense is
our best bet to defend the United States from such an attack. That’s why the
Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, is going to remain our first priority
in missile defense.”
In a shrinking defense budget, Winnefeld said, “this system
will be accorded the highest priority within the missile defense share of our
pie.”
Staying Ahead of the Threats
The vice chairman praised the Missile Defense Agency for a
“fantastic” job, and noted that it is DoD’s policy to stay ahead of the threats
which underscores the importance of taking “a lot” of time and effort to
improve the capability and reliability of the entire U.S. missile defense
system.
“The Missile Defense Agency, led by [Navy Vice Adm.] Jim
Syring, has done a terrific job of this,” Winnefeld said. “It’s not easy to
hit-to-kill at the kinds of closure speeds we’re talking about, but we’ve done
it.
“It’s hard to make advancements in such a program,” he
continued, “when it’s so expensive to test the things you change in response to
the things you might find wrong.”
Winnefeld credited the MDA for understanding that concept,
and understanding “when you find a problem, you don’t stop at the first thing
you see; you wring out the whole system.”
He added, “You don’t stop at the first possible fix to what
you find wrong, and MDA has done exactly that. They’ve taken their time, and
they’ve done it right.”
Posts
