On behalf of csi, i would like to welcome everyone both in person and online for a great discussion on what has become an important component of the department of defenses defense planning, their larger role of Missile Defenses. As the pentagons recent National Defense strategy, the classified version noted, missiles he become a principal means by which adversaries seek to protect conventional or nuclear power. And as such missiledefense is a core deterrence by denial component of how we contend with adversaries. We are her today to mark the 40 th anniversary of rona reagans speech announcing the strategic defense initiative. That speech, which was in march of 1983, came just a few weeks after his evil empire speech, which was march 9. They were all coordinated towards the larger strategic goal of winning and bringing an end to the cold war. One of the most recent books that i wrote was on president reagans Covert Action Program to provide assistance solidarity. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of folks within that administration and to spend several monthsverall in the reagan library, going through National Security council discussions. One of the things i always found helpful about the way he looked at the broader situation that the u. S. Was in at the time was this was a struggle between democratic governments, including the u. S. , not always perfect, but it was a relatively clear competition between that democratic u. S. And its allies and a communist and authoritarian soviet union. There clearly are parallels to the situation we find yourselves in today. We are pleased that todays conference is being hosted by the Ronald Reagan institute. You will hear from several representatives of that later today, including the director of the institute. The title of todays conference is missiledefense at 40. There were obviously a number of missiledefense efforts that proceeded the 1980s, going back to at the very least the 1940s, but what reagans speech would inaugurate is the broader institutionalization of what we call the missiledefense enterprise. It brought together various components of research, development, testing efforts from across the services, under one roof called the strategic defense initiative, and gave them a new purpose. A lot has transpired since that time. We will cover all of that today, at least a chunk of it. We will begin with a panel on congressional perspectives, then turned to scholars, practitioners and alums. We will finally conclude this broader discussion with an industryanel looking at what has changed and what kind of challenges they face today. Each of these panels is designed both to look forward but also to look backward, so be retrospective and prospective. Thank you l for coming, again, both virtually and in person. I will turn you over to the director of the missiledefense project here at the center for Strategic International studies, who together with his fantastic team on the missiledefense project putogether todays conferencend who is going to moderate our first panel. I will turn this over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks everybody for being here in person, online. We will get started with our first sets of congressional perspectives. We are honored to have both the chair and Ranking Member of the Armed Services subcommittee. We will jump right in. I was hoping you all might start off by telling us how you think about the missiledefense landscape today. How do you think about it on capitol hill and more broadly . In some respects, looking back, what has been the legacy of the past four decades of all these efforts . It is always good to be here with my counterparts on this important subcommittee. It is great to be with you and everyone here. Nald reagan articulated a vision that some derived of the time as star wars and scoffed at it. 40 years has made a huge difference. We do have the missiledefense in place against rogue countries or accidental lunches. It was never intended to deter a near peer adversary. That would be destabilizing attempts to do that. We dont go there. For these other threats, which when you look at iran and north korea and the kinds of things they say, are very real threats. Since we have multiple interceptors, multiple shots at the same thread if necessary, i feel we have a robust defense today. There are things on the horizon that we need to be giving attention to, Funding Research and development and making progress on, such as the hypersonic threat. Russia talks about it a lot and they may have more primitive capabilities, but china is the pacing threat when it comes to hypersonics. I think we will talk about that later. Thank you very much f having me and it is an honor to be here with the audience. We are a great person to work with. He has been on the subcommittee longer than i have. There is an awful lot of important work we need to do. Let me start by making two quick points. Missiledefense is pretty remarkable we think about the physics of what we are trying to do. A ballistic missi going up to 15,000 Miles Per Hour, an interceptor that can go up to almost 25,000 Miles Per Hour. You are try to hit a bullet going 15,000 Miles Per Hour and it actually works sometimes. That is amazing. The science, the Technology Behind this is pretty incredible. The second broad point i would like to make is there is a lot of bipartisan agreement on our strategy and what we are trying to do. That is something that bipartisan consensus is something doug and i work hard to find. It is important not only in this divided washington today for a lot of reasons, but because this is fundamentally about National Security, strategic stability. If we get this wrong, its about the future of the human race because a Nuclear Holocaust could result from getting this whole thing wrong. The fact that we can agree on a lot is important. Doug touched on this already, but i think of five different vels of missiledefense. There is the strategic level, lets call that number five, where you can use missiledefense to stop a near peer adversary. We dont do that. We are not trained to stop russia or china. We have mutually assured destruction as are determined as our deterrents in that realm. Next is a defense against a rogue nation. We dont know, iran and north korea primarily right now, but there could be other nations down the road. There is a lot of bipartisan agreement, that is where we are focused on missiledefense. The third level, you could say it is nuanced, but it is the accidental launch, something we dont anticipate, but russia calls us and says we have a problem, we accidentally shot a missile, we hope you can shoot it down. Level two is theater level missile events. This is not antiBallistic Missile stuff, but all the things you see going on in ukraine today. That is lowerlevel, tactical level. It is not destabilizing to the strategic situation that we are able to shoot down iranian drones or whatever else. As a veteran of the middle east, that is important. The ground level is just understanding what is going on, being able to detect hypersonics when they are coming in, it is just the eyes and ears that are critical for Missile Defense. The point is you have all these Different Levels and there is agreement that bipartisan agreement about where we are focused, but also where we are not. I think reagans initial vision was this would stop a soviet assault. We have all agreed that is not realistic, so we are not going to try. It is a Remarkable Technology and there is a lot of bipartisan consensus on how it is being used. We still have a lot of work to do. Lots of stuff tabled there. Hopefully we will work through some of those. Both of you mentioned in your opening comments the homeland, Ballistic Missile defense, or icbms, the grandchild of sdi. It was two years ago yesterday that they went forward with the acquisition of the next generation of interceptor. After the cancellation and things like that, anxiety about that, noise made with the schedule for that. I am wondering how you are thinking about the capability and the schedule of that biggest progm the missiledefense agency is working on right now. My best understanding is we are on a current timeline to have those for within operating capability within four to five years from now, 2027 to 2028. North korea meantime is not standing still and we may be facing some risk in the meantime, but we do have the 44 current interceptors in alaska and california. The First Tranche of ngis will be around 20. We have additional silos we can put those in immediately in addition. To the 44 we have now then you can start replacing the older 44 with the newer generation ngi which are much more capable and eective. That is what i believe is our best timeline at the moment. I completely agree with dougs point on the timeline. Here is the problem. Just using publicly available data, the history of the tests for the interceptors that we have so far have about 55 success rate. And therefore the public shock doctrine is that if the north koreans shoot a missile, we will shoot four interceptors at it in response. To the latest parade, the north reans had 11 missiles. 11 times four is 44. That is great. They get one more, we are overwhmed. That is a real problem. One more icbm and our system to defend against their attack is overwhelmed. We dont have the next generation of interceptor coming along for another four years. At some point we have to think about wheer north korea is at that level four or it actually gets into level five where we have to have a different theory of deterrence. That is a real challenge. I dont know what the answer is to that. I think that is a real challenge we have to wrestle with. One more point. Speaking in round numbers, 50 chance of hitting things. You can understand why it might only be 50 because something going 15,000 miles, that is pretty hard. If im sitting at the missiledefense agency and my daughter is working in l. A. And i call her up because there is an attack, and i say, listen honey, i know everyone is freaking out, i know your phone is going crazy, i know the kids are getting run over in the street with people trying to get out of town, because it is true that in 20 minutes you will get incinerated in a thermonuclear blast, but the good thing is you have a solid three out of four chance it doesnt happen. That is what we are saying. Three out of four chances it does not happen. We have to think about whether that theory of deterrence is something we want to live with. You are making some good points here, but i would like to add this is not a standing situation, this is dynamic. If north korea is lobbing salvo after salvo to the u. S. , we will not try to swap them down one by one and wait until their entire arsenal is depleted. We will have other options if it comes to that, god for bid, in the meantime. I think the north koreans know that. We would not just take it and wait for whatever they have next. We would have good things we would be doing in the meantime as well. Right, i think we would hit back at them, but that is a fferent theory of deterrence than saying we will shoot it down. I think we should use every deterrence we have. It sounds like from the bided administratios missiledefense the Biden Administrations missiledefense reviews, that they framed this problem in terms of staying ahead of the threats, but framing it as missile defeat as opposed to active missiledefense, which i think speaks to the attack operations and how we think about the theory of deterrence. That is right. One of the things doug is referring to is we are looking at other ways other than literally shooting a missile out of the sky that we can potentially defend against the threat. If said things are highly classified and north koreans do not know about them, that is not necessarily a good deterrent. The point is, at some point we will get to the level where we have to say this is they have enough missiles to overwhelm us, and we have to have a different theory of deterrence to make sure we never get attacked. That is one of the important questions i would say that i hope you wrest with today. We are just getting started. I am sure it will come up a few times. We have other issues i want to get at. The Biden Administrations signature missiledefense network, in terms of scope and size in this decade, is probably the defense of guam. You have a well armed near peer in their backyard with not just a lot of ballistics, but all kinds of things. How are you thinking about the defense of guam . I was in guam last october. I went out there because i think it is absolutely imperative that we effectively deter a war in the pacific. Guam is central to our power projection, central to that deterrent. If china thinks they can just take out guam, that does not render that piece of our deterrent very effective. I was curious to see what our guys on the ground in guam were thinking and doing. I fundamentally am trying to ask this question, are the strategies in washington being implemented on the ground . Th know in guam our officers are mainly navy personnelthey know what to do but they are mainly in. The path if you look at what xi jinping laid out for his potential timeline for invading, we need to step up procurement of missiledefense for guam. We are not talking about we dont know exactly how a war would start with china, but the expectation is they would not launch hundreds of intercontinental Ballistic Missiles at guam, so it really is in that theater level category where we have to defend it. We have various systems which has a near perfect interception record. We have a lot of effective systems that can help with this problem, but if they are not deployed yet by the invasion timeline, then we have a problem. I have been to guam several times myself and it is an island, it is not going to sink or anything like that. [laughter] we need to make the defense of it a priority. This is once again an area of bipartisan agreement we have. I agree with the Biden Administration when they came out with their missiledefense review and talked about the importance of guam. I look forward to discussions about pdi in the coming weeks in hearings. Ukraine was mentioned. Mr. Moulton, you mentioned the day to day air defense misle activities. I can remember fivyears ago, my goodness, russian Cruise Missiles are too good. We could not possibly think about that. Here we have things in ukraine on apparently a weekly basis engaging successfully. I am curious on your take on the air and missile conflict that you see going on, and the Lessons Learned for the missiledefense enterprise about what we see happening. First of all, the ukrainians have been remarkably innovative and creative and fast. They dont have time to have a years Long Development cycle. Lots of contracting disputes and finally figu out how to produce these things. They are doing in months what we have scheduled to do in years. That might be one of the most important lessons we have to learn, because when you get that specific and look at our deterrent plans, it is not going to go well for you if you start a war over taiwan or anything else, the biggest concern i have is not that we dont have the technology or the willpower or simply the plans and strategies to do that effectively, it is that we are not doing it on the timeline we need to be. There is a lot of great Technological Innovations that have come out of ukraine. There are. A lot of great lessonswe learned from that one of the most important lessons is they are doing things as quickly as we need to do in the pacific. The ukrainians are doing a remarkable job. Huge bipartisan support in congress for our friend ukraine. And right beyond their borders, our nato allies close by. Our patriots will be very effective once they get in there. They are on the way, so im excited about that. Sometimes you have lowtech weapons like drones, iranian drones working with russia to build a factory there to produce the tubes of these things. Produce multitudes of these things. An iranian drone killed soone in syria this week. Fighting drones is more of a lowtech issue compared to intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or hypersonics, but it is something we need to put our r d dollars there. Ukraine is a crash course. We are seeing in some respects the russians are a paper tiger, but nevertheless they are brutal and vicious and ruthless. We have to do what we can to defend our friends ukrainians, including learning about what is working and what not works. You both talked about the importance and utility and i would say the feasility of active Missile Defenses in ukraine. You talked about the importance and feasibility of missiledefenses for guam, yet both of these are aboutir and Missile Defenses relation to a near peer or rogue state. So much of the missiledefense conversation of the past has been focused on the rogue states, we cannot think about the near peers, because of the big threat, because it is destabilizing. How do we think about stability and the relation of active air and Missile Defense to strategic stability when it looks like russia and china are willing to overturn all sorts of tables and do all kinds of things that are destabilizing to the International Order . How do you think about that post ukraine, post crimea . Are we thinking about that friendly and terms of the last several years . I am concerned about china because their agreement they are forming now with russia, with putin, there was a picture of them having a toast together, that is troubling. China is engaged in a nuclear breakout. They are building hundreds of nuclear Ballistic Missiles and warheads. Ey have overtaken us a country in terms the number of missile launchers they have available to them. The chinese were not even a factor in