OPINION:
Now buried amongst the rubble that has been the year 2020 so far was the story that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had died.
For three weeks in March and April, governments around the world speculated on the health and well-being of the head of a nuclear power. His sister, Kim Yo-jong, is said to have become his alter ego, his top aide. Would she take over if he died? Would the generals who run the Korea Workers Party, which runs North Korea, allow that?
If not her, then who? And what would that mean for the Hermit Kingdom’s relationship with the rest of the world?
These are not inconsequential questions for American policymakers, especially as appropriations legislation begins to make its way through the coronavirus-slowed Congress.
The Senate is about to take up the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military spending bill, and already 29 Democrats in the House have called for cuts to the military to address the pandemic. Rep. Mac Thornberry, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, says cuts would be “shortsighted,” but it won’t stop some from trying.
The question of who runs North Korea — and who will run it in the future — takes on greater importance in this debate because one program seemingly in the crosshairs directly addresses the threat posed by North Korea and exacerbated by uncertainty within its leadership ranks.
The issue is over whether to strengthen or abandon the ground-based missile-defense program — missiles stored in the ground at bases in California and Alaska that are used to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as those fired from North Korea, while they are outside the Earth’s atmosphere and far from their targets, then use their unique technology to destroy the debris with kinetic heat.
Critics point to a series of failures in tests of the missile intercept system from its inception in 2004 through July 2013. But in May 2017, it intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile in a live-fire exercise, using radars positioned to monitor the Pacific Ocean, and has passed every test since.
The Pentagon redesigned the kill vehicle of the intercept missile and was set to begin testing the new model in 2018, but it was delayed by budget cuts at the end of the Obama administration, then canceled abruptly last August at the urging of Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin.
The plan was to equip all 64 ground-based interceptors with RKVs (Redesigned Kill Vehicle), but the Department of Defense said “technical design problems [with the RKV] were so significant as to be either insurmountable or cost-prohibitive to correct” and Mr. Griffin said the program did not meet his goal of gaining “full value from every future taxpayer dollar spent on defense.”
Others are not so sure.
Sen. Dan Sullivan, Alaska Republican, said “the continued evolution of advanced adversaries’ missile capabilities and still uncertain and unpredictable nature” of North Korea’s leadership meant the U.S. “cannot afford to wait possibly a decade for a new and still conceptual kill vehicle,” as opposed to the present vehicle, which does work.
A Pentagon Review Board looked into Mr. Griffin’s decision and rejected the recommendation because it would have set the United States back several years in terms of missile defense development. Iran soon will join North Korea as a nuclear threat, which means the U.S. not only must preserve its ground-based systems on the West Coast but also must consider such systems to defend the East Coast. We don’t need less missile defense, these experts say; we need more.
Given the record of the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle now in use and the need to update it, the Pentagon needs to not only put the Redesigned Kill Vehicle back on track, it needs to request accelerated funding to make up for the time already lost — two to four years — in the view of most experts.
What Mr. Griffin is asking is that we abandon a system that seems effective, forego its already-in-the-works logical successor and shoot for a fourth-generation solution when second-generation solutions have not been achieved. The money to keep the program going — the last budget request before Mr. Griffin attempted to kill the program was for $410 million — is a rounding error in a $21 trillion economy.
But the program that money funds remains our only real defense against an intercontinental ballistic missile attack from North Korea or elsewhere in Asia. It likely will be our only real defense when Iran develops similar capabilities. This is a time to grow it, not eliminate it.
• Brian McNicoll, a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., is a former senior writer for The Heritage Foundation and former director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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