My last Newsmax article retraced the “Bumpy Road to Trump’s Golden Dome,” (“Nation Needs, Deserves Golden Dome’s Global Coverage” beginning in the 1960s with my personal career in addressing the technical means of defending America from ballistic missile attack and still occurring today.
These days, too many current prognosticators don’t understand how the biases of yesteryear influence today’s debate, including even advocates for defending America, who appear uninformed of the achievements on my watch during the Reagan and GHW Bush administrations of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
For example, I agree with Michael O’Hanlon in advocating “A Realistic Path to Trump’s Golden Dome,” but disagree with important details of his May 23 OpEd in The Wall Street Journal, including his apparent assumptions from current naysayers who seemingly distort the facts from my SDI watch . . . and the Journal has historically supported defenses.
In particular, President Trump’s initial cost estimates are reasonable, if the Pentagon exploits the lessons learned from my watch as the third Director of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
O’Hanlon’s column seems oblivious to those facts.
Most important was his claim that my SDI focus was on an $87.5 Billion system of ground-based interceptors along the U.S. coasts and space-based sensors (in 1992 dollars) in a “Global Protection Against Limited Strikes” (GPALS) system . . . In this writer’s opinion, not factually accurate!
In the first place, GPALS was not focused on ground-based Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems.
It importantly initiated major advances in Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems . . . most notably initiating the Treater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD) . . . now mature and deployed around the world and potentially components of Trump’s Golden Dome.
The problem was that building space-based defenses would have violated the 1972 ABM Treaty that limited us to a single ground-based site, originally at Grand Forks, North Dakota . . . which eventually morphed into our current site in Alaska.
Key U.S. House and U.S. Senate leaders insisted on curtailing even research on all but ground-based defenses for the American people . . . though after the 1990 Gulf War Patriot-Scud battles, they acquiesced in their prior opposition to TMD systems to protect our troops, allies and friends around the world.
With the arrival of the Clinton administration, Defense Secretary (and former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee) Les Aspin took the stars out of star wars and killed all efforts of space-based interceptors . . . in my opinion, the most cost-effective product of the SDI era.
Eventually, President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty, removing those limits from our BMD development efforts . . . though his administration did not renew space-based defense efforts, as I lamented in my May 7, 2001 Wall Street Journal Article, “Why Not Space-Based Missile Defense?”
Happily, these other defenses have matured and are operating to protect our troops, allies and friends around the world . . . and potentially Americans at home.
Hopefully, President Trump will hold firm in his Golden Dome advocacy, and demand that his efforts go back to the future to exploit the SDI lessons of yesteryear.
If he does and his anointed leaders do so, the $25 Billion in the House proposed legislation should suffice to begin building a modern “Brilliant Pebbles” by the end of his presidency.
In my opinion, the rest of his proposed $175 Billion should be invested in developing space-based Directed Energy (DE) missile defenses, to be built ASAP.
Henry F. Cooper, a Ph.D. engineer was Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative during the GHW Bush administration and Ambassador and Chief U.S. Negotiator at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks during the Reagan administration. Read More of Dr. Cooper’s Reports – Here.
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