U.S. Rebuilding Its Crumbling Air Defenses

Last February, just nine days after the Defense Department had successfully conducted its most ambitious “Star Wars” experiment, Lt. Col. Robert Durkop, a U.S. Air National Guard pilot, was performing a less high-tech defensive maneuver off the New England coast.

The claxons at Otis Air National Guard Station in Falmouth, Mass., had sent him scrambling into the skies in search of Bears, the code name for Soviet Tu-95 bombers. A pair of Bear-D reconnaissance bombers, headed inward from 200 miles off the Massachusetts coast, had tripped the newly revitalized U.S. continental air defense system.

Proceeded to Cuba

The encounter did not prove violent. When Durkop’s F-4 Phantom appeared off the left wing of one of the Bear-Ds, a Soviet crew member brandished a sheet of paper bearing the score of the Soviet Olympic hockey team’s 7-5 victory two days earlier over the U.S. team. Durkop returned home and the Bear bombers, closely monitored down the coast by a succession of Air National Guard escorts, proceeded to Cuba.

Durkop’s aerial confrontation dramatized the fact that, even if “Star Wars” can build a roof over the nation to protect against Soviet rockets, the United States will still be vulnerable to low-flying nuclear weapons coming through the windows and the back door.

In response, the Reagan Administration has moved to rebuild U.S. continental air defenses, both interceptor aircraft and radar facilities, which had largely crumbled since their heyday during the bomber scares of the 1950s.

And more than that, the Pentagon has launched a multimillion-dollar program, the Air Defense Initiative, to nurture technologies designed to detect and destroy the stealthy and low-flying nuclear weapons systems that the Pentagon’s intelligence analysts believe the Soviets could deploy in the next decade.

Begins to Make Sense

The effort to revitalize U.S. air defenses has begun to make sense only as “Star Wars” has raised the possibility that the nation could protect itself against enemy missiles.

“For 20 years, the United States has allowed its air defenses to deteriorate on the argument that if you have no missile defense, why bother?” said Loren B. Thompson, deputy director of Georgetown University’s national security studies program. “Now, on the threshold of deploying missile defenses, we’re suddenly rediscovering the link between the two.”

Air defenses aim to provide a measure of protection against bombers and low-flying cruise missiles launched from submarines close to the American coast. And the Soviets, in the Defense Department’s view, are looking increasingly to these back-door avenues of attack.

Creeping Up to Coasts

Soviet submarines, which began this year to deploy the SS-N-21 cruise missile, have begun creeping up to American coasts with unprecedented boldness in recent years, according to Pentagon intelligence experts. And Moscow, these experts say, is designing and deploying several new generations of cruise missiles to be delivered by bombers as well as submarines.

Any immediate threat from Soviet submarines seems to have abated for now. Rear Adm. William O. Studeman, then director of naval intelligence, told a closed-door House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on March 1 that the Soviets had begun the previous December to pull its missile-capable submarines off U.S. coasts and to redeploy them off the coasts of Europe.

That appeared to be a response to the treaty signed last December that banned the intermediate-range missiles that the superpowers had deployed in large numbers in Europe. The Soviets apparently sought to use its submarine-launched cruise missiles to fill the void in Europe--but it could send those submarines back to North America at any time.

More Soviet Flights

Besides deploying submarines, the Soviet Union appears to have stepped up its flights of bombers off the North American continent in recent years.

Between 1981 and 1984, the Alaskan Air Command intercepted a total of 36 Soviet aircraft approaching within 200 miles of U.S. territory. Since then, however, 143 Soviet aircraft have borne down on the North American continent, in some cases conducting mock cruise-missile launch maneuvers.

As recently as May 12, two Bear-Gs sent U.S. F-15s scrambling from Alaskan bases, bringing the number of Soviet aircraft intercepted this year to 23. The East Coast shows a similar upturn, though on a smaller scale.

It was to meet the perceived threat of nearby Soviet bombers and submarines that the nation’s continental air defenses, roughly three-fourths of which are manned by Air National Guard pilots like Durkop, have been considerably modernized in recent years. Within two years, half of the guard’s 22 fighter-interceptor aircraft units will have traded in their aging F-4 Phantoms and F-106 Delta Darts for the Air Force’s top-of-the-line F-15s and F-16s.

Replacing Old Equipment

At the same time, the Defense Department is replacing the 25-year-old equipment that makes up the Distant Early Warning line against bombers with a $1.1-billion network of radars based across Canada and Alaska by 1993.

Besides the North Warning System, as the new network is called, new radar systems designed to watch over the horizon for the arrival of bombers and the launch of submarine-based missiles are to be placed at four spots along the other edges of the country.

But Defense Department officials say that even the revitalized air defense system, which has declined from 2,612 aircraft in the early 1960s to 252 today, remains little more than a “tripwire” against any determined Soviet attack by bombers or submarine-launched cruise missiles.

And they concede that the Air Defense Initiative, as ambitious as it may sound, will do little to change that for the foreseeable future.

Distinct From ‘Star Wars’

The Air Defense Initiative, which appeared as a new item in the Defense Department’s budget last year, is distinct from its Strategic Defense Initiative, the formal name for “Star Wars.”

But it springs directly from SDI, which critics complain would be useless by itself as long as the United States could not defend itself from nuclear bombs and missiles coming in under the proposed anti-missile shield.

“It’s not particularly wise to build a house with a reinforced roof and then leave the doors and windows open to intrusion,” Air Force Gen. John L. Piotrowski, commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said early this year.

U.S. officials concede that, for the foreseeable future, planned improvements in the nation’s air defenses will do little more than provide U.S. bombers and missile-carrying submarines enough warning to evade a Soviet attack.

Billions More Needed

It would take several decades and many additional billions of dollars to protect the nation’s population, or even its principal cities, from attack by low-flying Soviet nuclear weapons. According to one 1987 study by Barry M. Blechman and Victor A. Utgoff, Washington-based analysts, it would cost at least $100 billion to build and operate a comprehensive continental air defense system for 10 years.

Although Pentagon officials speak of the Air Defense Initiative as a sister program to SDI, there is a fundamental difference. While SDI aims to deploy not only a network of sensors to detect incoming nuclear missiles but also a series of futuristic weapons systems to shoot them down, the Air Defense Initiative consists of little more than the radars and other sensors necessary to give the nation’s offensive nuclear forces early warning of an attack.

Advanced Fighter Aircraft

This year, for instance, only $2.5 million of the $50 million to be spent on the Air Defense Initiative is going toward the so-called “engagement technologies”--the advanced fighter aircraft and high-speed missiles and bullets that are intended to destroy incoming weapons before they reach their marks. In next year’s proposed $213-million budget, engagement technologies would get $21 million.

Moreover, added Frank Kendall, the Air Defense Initiative’s manager, the limited interceptor forces available to defend the North American continent in the future would probably be used not to protect cities but to defend SDI’s critical ground-based components.

“At a minimum,” Kendall said, “you’d want to protect the SDI assets so that they couldn’t be attacked by cruise missile subs.” Beyond that, he said, the radars and sensors of tomorrow’s continental air defense system would assure the nation’s political leaders time to reflect upon their response to a Soviet attack, even if cruise missiles already had begun their short flight from enemy submarines lying just off shore.

A Hair-Trigger Alert

“The fundamental bottom line is a strategic stability problem,” Kendall said. American offensive forces might have to go on a hair-trigger alert, he said, unless they could count on receiving timely warning that such potentially bolt-from-the-blue attacks were under way.

In the distant future, Kendall said, the Pentagon’s Air Defense Initiative is to include large investments in the weapons necessary to shoot down incoming bombers and cruise missiles. But he said funding for that future depends strongly on a successful SDI.

Others, however, believe that the Air Defense Initiative is critical even if SDI cannot protect the United States against enemy missiles.

Georgetown’s Thompson contends that SDI has already had the effect of turning the Soviets away from reliance on their gigantic land-based missiles and toward the use of cruise missiles launched from bombers and submarines. Those weapons now threaten the survival of U.S. forces, he said. And it is those U.S. forces that, according to the theory of mutual assured destruction, are supposed to deter a Soviet attack in the first place.