More Advanced Missile Defense Programs Would Receive Solid Budgetary Support
The incoming president and Congress to be elected next month may make major cuts in the ballpark of “at least $1 billion,” centered in less-advanced ballistic missile defense programs, as federal finances are poised to become much tighter, a Senate panel staffer said.
Missile defense programs in the Missile Defense Agency and others amount to a total roughly $11 billion in the current fiscal 2009 that began two weeks ago, Rob Soofer, professional staff member with the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. He stressed he expressed his own views, not those of members of Congress.
He responded, during a Heritage Foundation panel symposium on Asian missile threats to a question from Space & Missile Defense Report as to how the massive $700 billion financial rescue package may tighten funding for programs such as missile defense, especially less-advanced BMD programs such as the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor.
He made clear that there will be no wholesale savaging of overall ballistic missile programs, regardless of whether Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican presidential candidate, or Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic hopeful, wins the White House Nov. 4.
Soofer noted that Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for the past two years, and there have been no immense cuts in missile defense efforts, with a reduction of only about 3 percent in the current fiscal 2009.
But he said that what funding cuts are made will fall heavily on less-advanced programs, while supporting more advanced programs such as the Patriot Advanced Capability interceptor, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, program, the Aegis-SM system, and the Ground-based Midcourse Defense shield.
“Buy stock in Aegis,” he said wryly, a Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] missile defense weapons control program that guides a Raytheon Co. [RTN] Standard Missile interceptor. “Sell stock in Airborne Laser,” a program involving a heavily-modified 747-400 jumbo jet aircraft by prime contractor The Boeing Co. [BA], a laser system by Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC] and a beam control/fire control system by Lockheed.
“Funding has to come down,” Soofer said.
His comments parallel views of financial analysts, who say federal finances will be severely pinched next year as plunging stock markets and a rapidly cooling economy mean costs of government aid to the unemployed will soar and revenues from taxes on business activity and personal incomes will plunge.
“The next administration is likely to reduce missile defense” funding, regardless of who is elected, Soofer said.
But he said the amount of the decline will be tempered by the fact that the United States faces genuine missile threats from North Korea and other nations that were outlined in the Heritage forum.
In some areas, in fact, funding might even increase, he said, because the missile shield, confronting ever-more numerous potential enemy weapons, may need more SM-3 interceptors, and more funding for the THAAD progam.
That will crowd out some other missile defense programs that are not so far along in development, such as ABL, a space-based system and more.
Those less-advanced systems may become “more like technology demonstration programs,” rather than moving rapidly to full development, he said.
For the more-advanced systems, “I don’t think Congress would like to ignore” emergent missile threats, he said. But meeting the threats fully in the near term might not be immediately possible.
To counter just the missiles wielded by North Korea and China, he said, “we are just so outnumbered” by their missiles, versus U.S. interceptors, that if the United States were to procure immediately sufficient interceptors to counter them, there would be no funds remaining to support other missile defense programs, he said.
Soofer said during his presentation at the forum that clearly the U.S. armed forces don’t have enough Standard Missile-3 interceptors. They are used on such ships as Aegis- equipped anti-ballistic-missile vessels.
But costs are relative, and Soofer said funding for missile defense programs must be viewed in context: if all the funds for missile defense programs are compared to the price tag on a catastrophic loss that just one enemy missile with a nuclear weapon could inflict on a single U.S. city, “then ballistic missile defense is extremely cost-effective.”