A Turf War Only Clouds the Missile Issue

Dick Cheney had an inauspicious start as President Bush’s new secretary of defense.

First, he got lost in the Pentagon basement. Then, he got into a public dispute with Gen. Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff. Cheney accused the general of “free-lancing” when Welch met with congressional leaders to discuss a possible compromise on modernizing U.S. land-based missiles.

Welch, known both inside the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill as a highly capable officer and a team player, is undoubtedly frustrated--as are many in the military--over the effect of the long, drawn-out public humiliation of John Tower, which left civilian management of the Pentagon in disarray. With the absence of a Bush defense team for the first two months of the new Administration, and with the services facing the prospect of draconian budget cuts, it is understandable that the general was, in his words, “pulsing the system” in search of a compromise over two missile proposals--deploying multiple-warhead MX missiles on trains, or a smaller, single-warhead Midgetman missile on mobile truck launchers--competing for a large chunk of scarce funding.

In fact, Cheney’s public rebuke of a four-star general, while a rare incident in American politics since the days of Harry Truman versus Douglas MacArthur, does not indicate a growing rift in U.S. civilian-military relations. Rather, it is another episode in the sorry history of the modernization of U.S. land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Over the past decade, succeeding American Presidents have searched for ways to reduce the vulnerability of U.S. land-based missiles to increasingly accurate Soviet ICBMs. Ronald Reagan rejected Jimmy Carter’s plan to rotate several hundred MX missiles among thousands of shelters. Instead, Reagan decided to place 100 MX missiles in hardened silos--a non-solution to the vulnerability problem that was rejected by Congress.

In 1983, a presidential commission headed by Gen. Brent Scowcroft (now Bush’s national security adviser) came up with a compromise plan to proceed with deploying the MX in silos while developing a more mobile and survivable ICBM--the Midgetman.

But the Scowcroft compromise quickly ran afoul of Congress. Many Democrats opposed any deployment of MX, which they viewed as an overly provocative and destructive weapon. Republicans called Midgetman the “Democrats’ missile” and too expensive.

As House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin, a Midgetman proponent, put it recently, “We have never had a problem coming up with technical solutions to the ICBM vulnerability problem. The real problem has been coming up with solutions that are politically acceptable.”

Eventually 50 MX were deployed in silos and Midgetman development proceeded. But before leaving office, Reagan tried to kill Midgetman and instead deploy an additional 50 MXs on trains kept at military bases in the West. Indeed, Reagan’s “final” solution was cheaper: $10 billion versus about $24 billion for 500 Midgetman missiles. But it had another problem.

While Midgetman missiles on truck launchers could move quickly enough to be survivable if given only a few minutes of warning, MX missiles on trains in garrison would only be survivable if the United States received warning days or several hours ahead of a Soviet missile launch and moved the trains out. In other words, the rationale for a new land-based missile--that it be truly survivable against a surprise attack--had been discarded. Democrats in Congress balked and the result has been a continuation of the deadlock.

The impasse over ICBM modernization is important because it has represented one of the most contentious defense issues dividing the legislative and executive branches, as well as Republicans and Democrats. In the wake of the Tower affair, and with other difficult defense and foreign policy decisions ahead that will require bipartisan cooperation, we do not need another excuse to renew interparty tension.

Secondly, the indecision over ICBMs is stalling completion of a strategic arms reduction agreement that would cut the Soviet and American strategic nuclear arsenals in half. A START treaty, which has long eluded negotiators, is now finally within our grasp. But it cannot be concluded until the United States finally decides how it wants to upgrade its missile force.

How do we get out of this mess? The option being discussed that both the White House and Congress might live with would be to move the 50 existing silo-based MX missiles into rail-garrison basing while simultaneously deploying several hundred Midgetman missiles. Funding could come from reallocating some of the billions being spent on “Star Wars” or the B-2 stealth bomber. Indeed, Cheney has stated that the Strategic Defense Initiative has been “oversold” and might suffer substantial funding cuts.

Now, political and military leaders need to cease their bickering over turf and craft a lasting consensus that will provide a more stabilizing land-based missile force at reasonable cost while allowing an arms reduction agreement to proceed.