How Mutual Assured Destruction That Worked In 20th Century May Fail To Protect Nation In 21st
Ballistic Missile Defense Might Be Only Feasible Response To Anonymous Strike
The United States is slipping into a vulnerable position where it might be attacked and not know the attacker’s identity for weeks, if at all.
Scenario One: If two missiles emerged from a point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and struck Los Angeles and San Francisco, back in the 1960s it would have been clear that a submarine in the Soviet Union navy had launched a nuclear attack. So the United States instantly could launch a counterattack on Soviet cities and bases, fully certain of just who attacked the American city. The Russians back then knew that, of course, and so they never attacked, proving that the deterrent of mutual assured destruction worked in those times.
But in the same scenario today, the missile could have come from a Russian submarine in the Pacific — or from a Chinese Jin Class sub with nuclear-tipped missiles having a range of almost 5,000 miles. Or, the two weapons could have launched from a cargo ship registered in some less developed country that actually was controlled by North Korea. Then the ship would be scuttled, leaving no return address for the United States to hit with retaliatory Minuteman or Trident missiles. After all, why should the United States use nuclear-tipped missiles to pound a hole in an empty ocean?
China’s military buildup means it now rivals, in some respects, the Russian military. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy has developed an integrated fleet of destroyers, “frigates, submarines, and support ships,” Michael R. Auslin, resident scholar in foreign and defense policy studies with the American Enterprise Institute, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in a hearing this month.
“Particular focus has been made on the submarine force, which contains nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, and conventional submarines,” with bases to support them, he noted. Too, China has announced “plans to build at least two aircraft carriers, and outfit a former Soviet carrier, with the goal of creating full-fledged carrier groups by 2015 that could dramatically expand the reach of China’s air and naval power.”
Scenario Two: Here, let us say two nuclear-tipped missiles launch 800 miles out in the Atlantic, striking New York City and Washington. How would the U.S. military know, immediately, whether the nuclear weapon came from a Russian submarine, or from a Panamanian-registered ship that actually was controlled by Iran, or by al Qaeda terrorists? The ship, immediately scuttled, would disappear beneath the waves, never to be identified.
In such situations, without the ability to identify the attacker, the United States couldn’t launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. Therefore, the only realistic response the United States might have is to prevent those enemy missiles from reaching the targeted American cities in the first place: workable ballistic missile defense systems.
The Missile Defense Agency is developing defenses against ship-launched missiles, including a successful FTM-14 test June 5. It involved the sea-based Aegis weapon control system (Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT]) and two Standard Missile interceptors (Raytheon Co. [RTN])from the USS Lake Erie (CG 70) cruiser taking down a target missile that was launched from another ship in the Pacific Missile Range Facility near Kauai, Hawaii, instead of the usual arrangement of the target launching from land.
Beyond that shield from short- and medium-range enemy missiles, the agency also has the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system (The Boeing Co. [BA]) that can take out long-range enemy missiles, a system that already is in place in Alaska and California.
True, a rogue nation or terrorists might decide to smuggle a nuclear weapon into an American city. But that weapon would have cost a rogue nation huge sums to produce, or would have been purchased for a huge price by terrorists. Either way, the prospect of it being seized at a U.S. Customs point of entry and the smugglers being arrested would be daunting. Such a fate befell a terrorist crossing into Washington State in 1999 with conventional weaponry (explosives, bomb components) intended to destroy Los Angeles International Airport. By launching a missile at sea, in contrast, there is no worry about customs agents foiling the attack, and there is a hope (however unfounded) that the multilayered U.S. missile defense system would fail to demolish the missiles.
Nuclear missile attacks, while they would be by far the most catastrophic and casualty causing (an electromagnetic pulse attack would kill tens of millions of people), aren’t the only ones where Washington would know the United States had been attacked, but wouldn’t have a clue as to who launched the attack.
Scenario Three: Here, an army of cyber warriors launches an all-out attack on U.S. civilian and military computer and communications systems. This could create enormous havoc, taking down the Federal Reserve Fedwire and other financial systems (they handle trillions of dollars of financial transactions involving banks, brokerages and more), credit card companies, airline and train reservations, electric and other utility computer control systems, traffic signals in major cities, and far more.
But given the anonymity of the Internet, how would the United States quickly and with certainty know who launched the attack?
“We do not have the unerring ability” to know immediately that a cyber attack has been launched, or its origin, said Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It can take weeks to determine that a cyber attack has occurred and to identify the guilty party, a process called attribution, he said. Sometimes, the source of a cyber attack never is discovered.
The best that can be done is to attempt to know quickly when an attack is occurring and to attribute it to the villain, and to develop the ability to erect defenses swiftly when such attacks occur.
He responded to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), who asked whether the United States intelligence community can determine readily whether a cyber attack is merely a random criminal act or an organized act of war.
What is clear is that there are many cadres of computer hackers, poised to strike at vital U.S. systems.
“Russia and China [possess] the most experienced, well-resourced and capable computer network operations … capabilities that could threaten the U.S., bgut they are not the only foreign entities that do,” Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the Defense Intelligence Agency director, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Other nations and non-state terrorist and criminal groups are also developing and refining their abilities to exploit and attack computer networks in support of their military, intelligence or criminal goals.”
A paper on Feb. 8 last year from The Heritage Foundation traced disturbing progress in Chinese cyber warfare capabilities.
“While the U.S. government is very reticent about the vulnerabilities of its databases to Chinese penetration, the known penetrations in 2007 alone show how widespread Chinese cyberattacks have become,” John J. Tkacik, Jr., Heritage senior research fellow, wrote. “Chinese PLA cyberwarfare units have already penetrated the Pentagon’s unclassified NIPRNet (Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol Router Network) and have designed software to disable it in time of conflict or confrontation. Indeed, Maj. Gen. William Lord, director of information, services and integration in the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration admitted that ‘China has downloaded 10 to 20 terabytes of data from the NIPRNet already’ and added, ‘There is a nation-state threat by the Chinese.’
“Richard Lawless, then deputy under secretary of defense for Asia-Pacific affairs, told a congressional committee on June 13, 2007, that the Chinese are ‘leveraging information technology expertise available in China’s booming economy to make significant strides in cyber-warfare.'”
Scenario Four: Here, a rogue state or terrorist nation has a suicide agent roam across the United States, an agent who has agreed to be infected with a horrifically contagious and deadly disease such as smallpox. Authorities might know when civilians began coming down with the disease that an attack had been launched. But there would be no way to determine which rogue state or terrorist group launched the attack, especially if the infected agent, just before dying, slipped into a hiding place and never was found.