A look now at the future of Missile Defense. The center for strategic and International Studies hosted a discussion recently with former defense officials and Global Security experts. Panelists talked about the challenges of Strategic Missile defense, the threats posed by north korea, iran, china and russia. Former defense undersecretary for policy, james miller moderated this event. Its about 90 minutes. Ready to go, okay, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here today. Im jim miller. President of the adaptive strategies. I have had involvement with Missile Defense over a number of decades. Starting on capitol hill, House Armed Services committee in late 80s and early 90s and continuing on through my time including as undersecretary of defense in the Obama Administration. We have a great panel here today. You have already met tom karako, senior fellow here in the international program, director of the Missile Defense program and tom will talk about in particular his report Missile Defense, 2020, next steps for defending the homeland. Dr. Laura grego, thank you for being here as well. Laura is a Senior Scientist in the Global Security program for the union of concerned scientists. And also has a recent report entitled shielded from oversight, the disastrous u. S. Approach to Strategic Missile defense. And well speak to that and a number of other issues, i think. And our third panelists today, major retired general fran mahon. His last posting was a j5 director of plans and policy for norad and north com and headed up several commands for army missile and air defense and at one point was director of tests for the Missile Defense agency as well. So its a great group. I want to thank you, general, especially for coming to pinch hit for keith from the Missile Defense agency who was unable to be here today due to the schedule conflict. So i want to say a couple of words to kick off. Then well turn to the panelists today. As was mentioned by senator sullivan, the Trump Administration is kicking off a major review of u. S. Ballistic Missile Defense posture and policy. If we harken back to the review from the last administration, it placed it as a number one priority for Missile Defense. S our allies and partners can control to the theater Missile Defense for defense of their own key assets and population, and to indeed to support the deployed forward processes. No one should do the job of defending the u. S. For us. It made clear the prior review of the Obama Administration that our Missile Defense system is aimed at north korea and iran. And that is not intended to affect strategic stability, visavis russia or china. One of the recommendations in toms report would say shift that focus a little bit and include as a goal the ability to engage Ballistic Missiles from russia or china and well talk about that issue and any potential implications for stability. But clearly, as we think about Missile Defense today, the driving consideration is north koreas continued missile testing. Its continued effort on the Nuclear Program and while north korea poses an uncertain threat to the United States homeland today, it does pose a threat even today and that threat is likely to grow in the coming months and years. Missile defense is not the only part of the u. S. Approach to that problem. And to our allies approach, but its got to be a fundamental part. Currently, a lot of qualitative improvements are under way. I give great credit to jim searing for pushing these along, including for modified kill vehicle. For improvements to command and control, bmcq and to the sensors as well. A lot of work under way. One of the questions to discuss is whether the pace is appropriate on the qualitative side. And if there are any places that are missed. We want to discuss as we get into the panel whether we should be looking today to grow beyond the 44 ground base intercepters that are deployed and that we would like ready for operations if ness. If necessary. So these will be among the issues we discussed. Theyll be among the issues that the new administrations Missile Defense review what have to discuss and i think well get a good start today. Well start with tom. All right. Well, good morning. So im tom karako. Also i want to thank jim and the other panelists for joining and to thank senator sullivan for coming out this morning. As jim mentioned im going to give an overview of the report of Missile Defense 2020. And on the basis of both the ndaa and president ial directive as jim mentioned, the administration will be looking at Missile Defense policy, posture and strategy and also by explicit president ial direction, the relative balance between homeland and regional. You know, every month or so north korea lately seems to be doing something new. In terms of missile development. And theres other new threats out there as well. And i think that given the circumstances we find ourself in, i would not be surprised to see a relative rebalancing in the near term in favor of homeland, at least relative to where we have been in recent years. We kind of hope that this report lays out a menu of options or a kind of road map for how one might do that. Before i get started i want to acknowledge a couple folks including my coauthors. Ian williams and wes rumba are both here. I want to thank the smart people in and out of government who let us bend their ear about this. Its been Ongoing Research for a while. And those who kindly gave us their time and finally to the csis ideas lab and particularly carolyn who put together some great graphics of helping to communicate some of this stuff. So let me say that, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to put this report together was that i think that the conversation about homeland Missile Defenses remain too polarized and underinformed or misinformed. To some extent thats pretty understandable. Its hard to keep track of all the different kinds of kill vehicles and all of the all the Different Things in development. Gbi math has its own rules as well. So one of our secondary purposes here is to kind of serve as a compilation. Maybe a guide for the perplexed on all of the kind of complexity. Bring stuff together in one place. But i think the problem with how this is frequently discussed runs a little bit deeper, including with a lot of historical baggage that tends to confuse the debate. And i think with respect to homeland Missile Defense in particular, the discussion is too frequently divided between on the one hand cheerleaders who dont take special account the difficulties and on the other side kind of a folks snickering or deriding. I think that both a better understanding of the past and the Current Program of record might help mollify some of that. So the report tries to do three things. First, to bring together a bunch of information in one place. Kind of a reference guide of where things have been. Secondly out of a menu of options for looking at the benefits of a lot of those. And third, make some of our own findings and recommendations. So i will say that i think the Current Program, both gmb and related systems need a range of reliability, capability and capacity improvements relative to where we are today. And as well some policy and budgetary adjustments would be in order in the forthcoming mdr. So theres been a lot of back and forth policy wise and programmatic wise over the last 20 years or so and in the report we deliberately try to highlight and emphasize the continuity. On the one hand the strategic continuity but also the problematic continuity. On the strategic side, i think go back and read president clintons speech in 2000. One where he said, he was not going to decide to deploy national Missile Defense, then look at the speech that president george w. Bush gave in 2001 announcing the withdraw from the abm treaty. I think theres a lot of continuity there in terms of not necessarily the exact smentsdz of the assessment of the readiness, but in terms of the strategic rationale. The idea being very simply were not unwilling to accept complete vulnerability to certain kinds of threats. Were unwilling to accept and risk deterrents failure with concern to certain actors. I think appreciating the evolution of todays program is also important. Looking at really the roots of gmd and mmd for instance. I also think one cant really appreciate the some of the reliability issues of the ekbs and silos today. If you dont appreciate that in many respects they are still the advanced prototype design, put together in the 1990s under abm treaty restrictions. And that furthermore the 2002 decision to field a limited defense capability in two years left little choice but to embrace the kill vehicle still under development and to adapt cold war systems that had not been designed for this in short order and put them to use. So ever since then were still i think kind of waiting and life extending the program in different ways. I will say i think the conversation is a result of some of these things suffers from an unfortunate and weird dynamic. An old dichotomy gets embraced. The dichotomy that regional Missile Defense is good and effective. But homeland Missile Defense is bad. And the perception extends beyond the particular systems to the mission itself. Regional Missile Defense is effective so goes the argument. You can take it as an article of faith that homeland Missile Defense is impossible. I will say that the cheerleaders who do not sufficiently i think acknowledge some of issues out there dont do the issue justice either. So what we try to do is to kind of be fair and candid in both directions. That means we get criticized from both sides so ill just say there are a lot of shortcomings, but i think that the path forward that you heard about about the rkv really is really is a good one. And that especially it begins o to that dichotomy i mentioned is important. Because the path forward is going to leverage a lot of that path testing. A lot of that development thats taking place in the regional systems and applying it forward. So thats commonalties between xo kill vehicle on the one side and xo atmospheric kill vehicle on the other side. So let me start to walk through a little bit of this. Jim mentioned the the bmbr highlighting homeland Missile Defense as the highlight. This actually is just a general overview, you know that kind of xo atmospheric intercept is taking place with an xm and sav and this is the historical emphasis between homeland and regional really going back to 1996. So its fluctuated a lot. There was a big surge especially for the capel investments in the 2002 to 04 time period. This is the overall emphasis, green being homeland and blue being regional. Well have these online for you so you can download them to your pleasure. I also want to put this in a little bit of a historical perspective. This is i think senator sullivan mentioned it. This is the relative modesty in terms of the number of intercepters we are talking about. If you look on the far right thats 2017. That will be in the ground by the end of this year. But compare that for instance to the clinton administration. The three phases of the clinton administration. 100 to 250. Before that kind of the gpals. Right, who was job it was to go after the limited threat of 10 to 100 rvs. Before that, kind of sdi phase one. Safeguard and sentinel and that sort of thing. But in terms of the overall context, i think you really see that modesty. Sorry, i keep looking for the keyboard down here. The other context here, another important context here is the legislative environment. This past Year Congress went back and updated the 1999 national Missile Defense act which by the way was 17 years old. A few anachronisms were in there. First of all, we dont talk about the National Defense anymore. This is talking in the future tense about we ought to deploy and well, we have done that. So i think congress correctly has gone in and weve updated this. I think unfortunately theres been a lot of hyperventilating about the update. That to my way of thinking proves that the schools do not sentence sentence diagramming anymore. All the focus has been on the adjectives like limited. But it is a complete sentence. And that the subjects and objects of defense in that sentence have changed. It is no longer about national Missile Defense, but also as you can read allies and forces and, you know, the word limited may not apply in the same way that we used to think about it in 1999 or sort of the gpals kind of context. So i actually think you look at these these adjectives, you compare them to the 2010 bmdr. There are a lot of a lot of continuity. The overall budget top line this goes back to 1985. Sdio, you do see that surge with mda with respect to the deployment. In the 2004 time frame. But just within the past ten years as we heard about this morning and i hope you can see this, this is specifically the homeland elements that we have broken out. This is a kind of a falling tree graph. Those are the fideps and the actual spending that you see there. As we heard this morning a 24 decline over the past decade for the top line, but then some deeper cuts for here well go deeper now into the gmd. These are the various components. That goes out into the but the trend is pretty clear. I can show you about 50 graphs here. Theyre in the book. They all kind of look like that. Now, let me im missing the key board again. Let me walk through we have a chapter on intercept develop, sensors and well blow through this. Let me just put up here the long view of interceptors, the lineage really of where we are today. One limitation of the gbi fleet today is its a lot of different kinds of intercepters going on. Its also the case, you can look here at some of the c1s, c2s, relative frankly to other deployed systems today. Unfortunately the c2s dont have the on demand communications to the ground for instance. The ekbs of today. That theres also a shortcoming of the three stage booster that the intention to go out and get a two stage booster was never done. An nba is looking for a selectable way to get at that flexibility but what that means is youre not able to buy more time and fire later. You have to fire sooner. Because all three stages have to burn out before the kill vehicle can be released. Especially if youre operating from alaska. Thats going to be thats going to limit you. Let me move to the mdas three phases. This is kind of the current road map. The current road map for going forward, enhanced robust and advanced is kind of their categories but what it really is is what we are this year, getting the 44 gbis in the ground. The cg 2s. The second one being the centerpiece of the advanced homeland Missile Defense. Although rkv is not a dramatic departure its that kind of design turn that should have happened a decade ago but never did. The good news is theyre not starting from scratch. Theyre going back and leveraging a lot of the parallel work thats been going into other programs but the idea is to make ek 4 cheaper and have fewer points of failure. These are the kind of reliability issues that have come up again and again. Getting to that rkv will also reduce kind of the did versety diversity in the fleet. Ill show you a chart that shows how many different types are in todays gpi fleet. The rkv in particular will draw the seeker, kind of the telescope, a lot of discrimination algorithms have been floating around and draw upon all of that. So its not going to be starting from scratch. Then further out in the future to the advanced section is the mlkv which we heard about this morning. That again is, you know, quite a bit far behind. Relative to where the plan was, multiple kill vehicles, atop a single booster to kind of compensate for some of the discrimination challenges and really improve your effective magazine capacity. Unfortunately the time line is currently 21 plus. Its really pretty far out to the right in terms of that. This chart right here is actually kind of the center piece of whats going on and what the agency currently plans. We call this the skittles chart. You can taste the rainbow and kind of see a lot of different muscle movements of whats happening there. The green at the bottom is the ce 1. Thats kind of the oldest kill vehicle put in place in 2004. The red is the ce 2. The blue is kind of the ce 2 plus or ce 2 block one. The orange, Pay Attention to the orange thats the rkv. Thats supposed to come online kind of in the 2020 time frame. Testing in 2018. Potentially deployed 2020. Now, this as i said is kind of i think the best snapshot of whats going on. Whats intended to be going on. We would point out a couple we think short falls of what mda currently plans. One of them is what is likely to be under current plans a big gap between the things that are put in place this year, the 44 by 17. After that were going to presumably wait, wait for the rkv to come around. Especially if rkv goes to the right it can kind of retard some of our efforts to increase capacity and might unfortunately hurt our rkv later on. A second limitation is that, as we heard earlier, notwithstanding a recommendation in 2013 by the department of defense to go it and buy some operational and test spares that wasnt done. After we g