William Perry
Ph.D., Former U.S. Secretary of Defense;
Professor, Institute for International Studies, Stanford University

Sunday, November 19, 2000

In this talk, given prior to the general conference, William Perry set out to frame the issues surrounding the deployment of a National Missile Defense for conference participants who consisted of some of the best informed and most thoughtful scholars and practitioners in this field. Following the conference, Perry and Dr. Gloria Duffy, CEO of the Commonwealth Club, drafted a letter to the President-elect to offer not a consensus of the views of the conference participants - an impossibility due to the diversity of the views - but, in light of the discussions of the day, their best advice on what actions he should take on National Missile Defense.

My task is not to tell you what I think the president-elect should do. It is not to argue for or against any of the diverse positions on this complex topic. My task here is to frame the issue. What are the issues, and how should we be addressing them? First, is there, or will there be a threat? Because our conference is an academic meeting we will not have access to classified information, so this is not the forum to critically examine the intelligence on the threat. We start out then with a limitation, which I want to frankly acknowledge. But detailed threat estimates have been published by qualified authors who do have appropriate access to the intelligence data, and moreover there is a reasonable convergence in their estimates: They lead to the judgement that several Third World nations hostile to the United States may succeed this decade in deploying missiles that could threaten the U.S. Divergence in the national debate, then, is less over the threat than the significance of the threat and what to do about it.

Which takes us to the next issue: Do these missiles, if deployed, significantly increase the danger to our national security? If the missiles have nuclear warheads the answer to that question is certainly yes. But the answer is not so clear if they do not. High-explosive warheads, chemical warheads, or biological warheads are far easier for the presumed-threat nations to acquire. But they pose a very different threat than nuclear warheads. So it is important in our discussion to discriminate among the specific threats we are considering.

Given that we are concerned about the missile threat, we must also examine other ways of dealing with it. Throughout the Cold War we faced a much greater nuclear missile threat without a national missile defense. During that period our national security depended upon the effectiveness of our deterrence forces, which are still overwhelmingly powerful. We need to examine the extent to which we are willing to continue to make our national security dependent on deterrence. Is deterrence somehow ineffective against the Third World nations looming as future threats? If so, why, and what can be done to make it more effective?

We must also look at the issue of other threats: If we defeat the ICBM threat, do we make our nation secure from the danger posed by the proliferation in the Third World nations? Here the answer is clearly no. Those nations would still have the possibility of delivering their weapons of mass destruction with airplanes, cruise missiles, merchant ships, and delivery vans, none of which would be affected by a national missile defense system. So we should discuss the relative importance of ICBMs as a delivery means, and the relative priority our nation should give to defending against that particular delivery vehicle.

We must look quite squarely at the issue of the probable effectiveness of national missile defense. That is, what level of security we can hope to get with it? There is considerable controversy about the effectiveness of the National Missile Defense system now being developed. Much of this controversy revolves around the countermeasures that could be used against it, and the likely success of the counter-countermeasures designed into the system.

I start off by observing that there never has been a perfect air defense system. Typically, defensive systems are measured by the rate of attrition that they exact from an attacking force, and of course from the defensive system's point of view, the higher the attrition, the better. Going back in history - prior to World War II, it was thought that bombers would have an enormous advantage over any defensive system, but with the development of radar just before the Second World War, the relative advantage swung back to the defense. Indeed, early in the war, the combination of British Spitfires and ground radar inflicted such high attrition rates on the Germans that they were forced to abandon their relatively precise daytime bombing of England. With that decision, the Germans also had to abandon their hopes of winning the Battle of Britain, with all that portended for future history.

All during World War II the advantage shifted dynamically from offense to defense and then back again as new measures and new countermeasures were introduced. During this period the effectiveness of air defense systems varied from attrition rates as low as a few percent to as high as 20 or 30 percent, with the higher rates making it impractical for the other side to sustain a bombing offensive.

All during the Vietnam War the United States conducted a sustained bombing campaign against a moderately capable Vietnamese ground air defense system that exacted attrition rates of a few percent on our bombers.

By the time of Desert Storm, the United States had introduced stealth aircraft, which decisively shifted the advantage to the offense, so that Iraqi air defenses had remarkably low attrition rates, less than one tenth of one percent.

I go over this history not because I believe that air defense is the same as missile defense, but to make two general points about defensive systems. The history of attrition rates that defensive systems have been able to achieve has varied dramatically, from as low as a tenth of a percent up to as high as 30 percent. So it is reasonable to expect a significant range of variation in the attrition that a missile defense system can affect as measures and countermeasures range in a dynamic fashion. Of course, in a missile attack the dynamics will occur before the attack, and our missile defense planners will generally not know what progress the future attacker has made in countermeasures. But I will also remind you that we have never fielded a perfect defensive system, nor have we even come close to achieving 90 percent attrition rates. So we should not expect a national defense system of any design to eliminate the missile threat. The best that we can hope is that we reduce the level of damage that could be caused by the missiles. If our national missile defense system could achieve a truly impressive attrition rate of say, 70 percent, against an attacking force of say, ten missiles, we would be thankful that those seven missiles did not strike our cities. But we would also suffer serious damage from the three that did. So the value of a missile defense system should be measured in terms of the level of damage reduction we can expect from it, against expected levels of attack, and the sophistication of countermeasures available to the attackers.

Some critics of the system now under development have argued that it is fundamentally vulnerable to relatively simple countermeasures because it operates during the mid-course of the attacking missiles trajectory when decoys are difficult to discriminate from warheads. They believe that the only effective NMD system would be one that operates against the missile during its early flight stage, when the rocket engines are still burning, and before it could deploy warheads or decoys. Accordingly, those critics have proposed alternative system configurations, the so-called "boost-phase" systems. There can be no doubt that operating during boost phase is a great advantage to the defensive system; the question, of course, is how does the defense system get access to the missile during its boost phase? Different critics have different answers to that rather fundamental question. Some of them propose to base their system on ships, with one ship being based as close as possible to each of the expected launch sites. Others point out that this will not be close enough to some of the expected launch sites, and propose a land-based system which would have to be located in Russia to be close enough to some of the expected launch sites. And a third group argues that neither of those is a practical approach, and the best way to get access to all expected sites is by basing the defensive system on satellites. This last approach implies a constellation of satellites, perhaps as many as a hundred.

We must debate what the expected level of damage reduction will be for various approaches, and what it will likely cost us to get that level of damage reduction. There are blizzards of papers giving contradictory estimates of the costs of various proposed national missile defense systems. I'll give you just a sampling: Some proponents of the sea-based national missile defense system argue that an effective system can be built for a few billion dollars. The program office, and the Congressional Budget Office, estimate that phase one of the current ground-based system can be built for about $30 billion. Some proponents of a satellite-based system argue that it can be built cheaply because of recent advances in commercial satellite technology. The Congressional Budget Office, on the other hand, estimates that the space-based system would cost about $140 billion.

So we will be confronted with huge differences in estimates of what the cost of a national missile defense system will be. And perhaps we can at least narrow the range of estimates by focusing on those estimates that have been carefully worked out based on real designs and real design parameters. Whatever we conclude about dollar cost, we will also have to consider geopolitical cost. While there has been much attention to dollar cost, there has been very little thoughtful discussion of the geopolitical cost of a national missile defense deployment. For example, if Russia were to respond to our national missile defense deployment by curtailing cooperation with the United States in the Comprehensive Threat Reduction Program, it could increase the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to Third World countries. Additionally, it could open the possibility of Russia supporting some of those nations in sophisticated countermeasures. That is, the cost here is measured in terms of an increase in the threat that our National Missile Defense system would face both in terms of quality and in terms of timing. Additionally, China might respond by increasing the number of nuclear warheads in their strategic forces beyond their present plans; that is, by increasing the planned number of new generation ICBMs, and by putting multiple warheads on the present generation of ICBMs. This increase could be seen by India as an incentive to increase their planned missile force, which could in turn be seen by Pakistan as an incentive to increase theirs.

It is hard to measure the cost to the United States of this potential explosion of proliferation. But it is likely to be negative to our own security in ways that are difficult to predict. In some ways, a national missile defense program may be thought of as insurance: a protection against a contingency that has a low probability of occurrence, but one that if it did occur, could have disastrous consequences. It would not be consistent for me to argue against our country buying insurance for such contingencies; after all, I have bought earthquake insurance for my home in Los Altos Hills. Which is, again, a low probability of an occurrence, which could have high consequences. Of course, before I bought that policy I had firm data about the cost of the policy, whereas in the NMD debate there is still considerable uncertainty on the dollar cost and little understanding of the geopolitical cost. And I have a reasonable belief that I would be able to collect on my policy if an earthquake occurred, whereas in the national missile defense debate there is still a controversy over what the payoff would be if the system were needed.

Will the deployment of the proposed system really increase our security? If so, at what cost - dollar and geopolitical? And would any of the alternative systems being proposed provide a greater increase in our security at lesser cost?

British scientist C. P. Snow said, "Technology is a strange thing. With one hand it offers you great gifts. And with the other hand it stabs you in the back."

Perry Q&A

Q: One of the critical questions is the extent to which the threat is really assumed to be from North Korea, Iraq and Iran, and the threat from China and Russia. So, in framing the issues, what are we supposed to consider?

A: In the consideration of the different systems that are being considered, the alternative systems being considered, nearly all of them would have effectiveness against Chinese missiles, but some of them would have very little effectiveness against Russian missiles. And so, as we look at the threat, we have to consider the existence of those missiles as a fact; we have to also consider that the stated objective for the system that is being developed now is only Third World nations, but it has a capability also, a very substantial capability, against the missiles that China has deployed. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect a response, a reaction, from the Chinese.

Q: In the past when we have talked about providing missile defense for our country, it has been a theoretical issue, because we didn't have the capability. When we talked about Star Wars or what not, you could be for it or against it and there was relatively little penalty attached to either, because we didn't have the capability. That's very different today: we are within a very short period of time of being certain we will have the capability. If that is so, could you say a word or two how the next president, who will be the first president in that situation, would deal with the issue of having the capability, of providing a defense against a limited attack, and says, "No I don't want to do that, because of the geo-strategic danger of doing so"?

A: It may be very difficult for the president to take this point of view, but while we will be in the position of mounting some kind of a defense against ballistic missile attack, we will still not be in a position of mounting a defense against nuclear weapons coming in in cruise missiles, coming in on airplanes, coming in on merchant ships, coming in on delivery vans. So any president who suggests by deploying this system that he can defend the nation against a Third World nuclear attack would be misleading the nation. That perspective is very important in evaluating the cost-benefit aspect of this deployment. We should never delude ourselves into believing that even if we deploy this system and it works rather well, that we are protecting the nation from a nuclear attack from a Third World nation, because that would not be so, no matter how good the system is.

Q: Most of the information either on cost or performance is actually speculative, given that system doesn't exist and the experiments have been rather bleak or certainly rare.

A: You can try to specify what is needed to make an informed judgement in cost and performance parameters. Secondly, you can be doing a service by discriminating between those systems where we are rather far advanced in making those estimates in those systems where we have only what's called "view graph engineering," that is, conceptual descriptions of what a system might be. The system which suffers the most from criticism is the one that is most detailed and specific in its presentation. If and when that system gets shot down and one of the alternative systems comes forward, then that alternative system will be worked out in the same level of detail, and it then becomes subject to these kind of criticisms. At the moment, the alternative systems are not being subjected to the same level of criticism that the ones on the table is right now. That's not to speak for them or against them, it's just saying that they haven't been subject yet to that same level of detailed scrutiny. We ought to first of all to point out that difference, and then secondly lay out, if you are going to make an informed judgement about an alternative system, what level of detail and specificity is needed to come to judgements about it.

Q: Could you talk to the audience a little bit about the question of what's called "self-deterrence," and the avoidance of "self-deterrence," as one of the motives for this system as opposed to deterrence itself? The scenario that's often spoken of is an attack from North Korea on South, and that we are chastened from responding because of fear that without some form of defense North Koreans could strike us.

A: One of the arguments for the deployment of a national missile defense system is that we don't truly expect North Korea, say, to make an unprovoked attack against the United States; that's not the issue. The issue is we get into some dust-up on the Korean peninsula and North Korea calls our bluff by taking action on the theory that we will not respond even with our conventional forces, because we are now deterred by the fact that they have five or ten missiles with nuclear weapons on them. I think that if they believe that, they're wrong, and I do believe that it could be made clear to them that they are wrong. So I'm not an advocate of self-deterrence.

Q: You brought up the planes, cruise missiles and delivery vans. It seems these other systems offer one great advantage over ballistic missiles in that they don't let you know where they came from. But if I wanted to attack the West Coast of the United States, the last thing I'd want to use would be a thing with a long streamer on the end of it that told you where to shoot back.

A: I think that is a perfectly sound argument: if you were a North Korean or an Iraqi or an Iranian and wanted to do great harm to the United States, and had a nuclear bomb, you might choose to put that nuclear bomb in a merchant ship or a delivery van or a fake commercial airplane instead of delivering it with an ICBM. The point is that conceivably those methods of delivery could be kept covert; that is, the source of the bomb could be kept confusing at least, whereas there would be no mystery as to where the ICBM is coming from if it is launched - we would know that quite precisely.