Responding to Rocket Man

An excellent suggested response to the North Korean nuclear threat comes to us from the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer in a very informative piece written for National Review Online. In his essay, Meyer denies that there are no good responses to Kim Jong-un (whom President Trump has dubbed "Rocket Man") and his regime's determination to acquire nuclear missiles and to launch them against the U.S. and its allies.

Meyer opens with a prologue:

Many analysts have assumed that the U.S. has only three basic options for addressing the North Korean threat: an offensive first strike, diplomatic initiatives involving China and sanctions, or acquiescence. But the United States has other options that do not require either starting a war, waiting for help from the unwilling, or accepting the vulnerability of U.S. and allied cities to a North Korean missile attack.

Rather than initiating a military strike or continuing to pursue ineffective diplomatic initiatives, the United States can take advantage of recent technological advances to deploy a more effective multi-layered missile defense, including one system perfectly suited to defuse the North Korean crisis.

The American ability to project power abroad through its conventional forces — carrier groups, fighter and bomber squadrons, cruise missiles, ground troops, and special forces — remains unrivaled despite sequester-driven budget cuts and the erosion of capability they have caused. Nevertheless, at home American cities stand vulnerable to attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as shorter-range missiles launched from submarines or even small ships offshore.

Though North Korea has not yet definitively demonstrated the ability to track and deliver ICBMs on target, the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes that Kim Jong-un has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear device and place it inside an ICBM. Once Kim also acquires more precise targeting capability, cities across the western United States will be vulnerable to his missiles and the president to his nuclear blackmail.

Indeed, current ground-based missile-defense systems, though necessary, are not sufficient to protect U.S. cities from the first-strike capability of several potential adversaries, including soon North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and Aegis ship-based missile-defense systems have demonstrated an impressive accuracy in defending against short-and medium-range missiles of the kind that North Korea could fire at South Korea or Japan.

Nevertheless, these ground based systems cannot stop Chinese, Russian, or North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles from hitting U.S. cities. Russia alone has 1500 sophisticated ICBMs, more than enough to overwhelm the several dozen existing and unreliable ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

So, then, given this bleak prospect what should we do? Here's Meyer's proposal:

Consequently, the United States urgently needs to develop and deploy higher altitude and space-based systems for missile defense. Arthur Herman of the Hudson Institute has taken the lead on advocating one such high-altitude system with particular promise for neutralizing the North Korean threat. Known as High Altitude Long Endurance Boost Phase Intercept (or HALE BPI), this system would offer another option besides acquiescence or a high-risk first strike against North Korean missile launchers.

As conceived by Len Caveny, the former director of science and technology at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the HALE BPI system would host anti-missile missiles on existing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have the capacity for continuous flying for 18 to 40 hours or more (thus, the term “long endurance” in the HALE acronym).

Using sophisticated radar, infrared detection, and “data fusion” technology, these missile-equipped UAVs would circle the Sea of Japan outside North Korean airspace at an altitude of 45,000 feet or more. Upon detection and verification of a missile launch from North Korea, the HALE BPI UAV’s operator on the ground would have time (perhaps a minute or more) to fire a purely kinetic missile, i.e. a missile without an explosive warhead, at the missile in its “boost phase.” Using already existing guidance systems and the pure kinetic energy that can be generated by even a small object moving at an extremely rapid velocity, the missile would destroy a North Korea missile almost as soon as it leaves the launch pad.

Caveny [has] explained that most of the modular technological elements of such a system already exist and that an effective kinetic BPI system could be developed and deployed in two years, or within 12 months if the development of the system were put on an expedited war-prevention footing. Herman, in a series of compelling op-eds and position papers, has argued that such a system offers many benefits for addressing the North Korean crisis and multiple advantages over existing ground-based missile-defense systems that attempt to destroy missiles during their downward “terminal phase” of flight.

The advantages of this kinetic antimissile system are several. Meyer lists five, here are his first three:

First, rising missiles in their boost phase are easiest to detect and destroy. During boost phase, missiles are moving at their slowest velocity, making them easier to shoot down. They also burn more fuel at this point in their trajectory, giving them their hottest infrared signature and making them easier to detect at long range. In addition, missiles in boost phase cannot employ evasive maneuvers or deploy multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (or MIRVs) — unlike descending ICBMs in terminal phase.

Second, destroying missiles in the boost phase ensures that the debris from the kinetic collision and destruction of the warhead will fall safely over the Sea of Japan or even on North Korean territory, a poetically just way of enhancing deterrence and effectively boxing Kim Jong-un’s threat into a confined airspace.

Third, the BPI system currently envisioned by Herman and Caveny would represent only a near-horizon defensive weapon system — one that would not directly threaten the nuclear deterrent of the Chinese. Hosting a boost phase system on a UAV rather than in space would not, therefore, protect against ICBMs launched from countries with large land masses such as China and Russia.

Nevertheless, in the immediate context of the North Korean crisis, such a system would have the advantage of representing a defensive response to a clear provocation. As such, it should not antagonize the Chinese, precisely because it does not compromise their own nuclear deterrence (or offensive capability). Even so, its deployment, like that of the THAAD system, will clearly not please the Chinese. But given that they cannot reasonably object to such a purely defensive system, especially in the current crisis, their displeasure could incentivize them to distance themselves from North Korea or even to pressure their client state to stop further testing of nuclear weapons.

There's much more in his article for those interested in national defense issues and I urge you to read all of it. The proposal to use kinetic munitions to intercept ICBMs during the boost phase is not new. It's been talked about since at least the 1990s, but what's new is that we now have a president who may be inclined to spend the money to implement it.

As Meyer's article makes clear these weapons would only be appropriate for use against a country with a small land area, but that's what North Korea is, and right now they're the biggest threat to the United States.

Because all the R&D has already been done and most of the technology is already available the cost of building such a system would be a measly $25 million out of a $639 billion annual defense budget, and it could be operational in a year if pushed. Can we really afford not to go ahead with it?