The Navy has been reluctant to jump into the national missile defense fray—and for good reason. In an era of zero growth in force structure and the specter of decline in the budget out-years, a new mission would tax an already stretched fleet. Nevertheless, some study groups maintain the Navy must participate in U.S. missile defense, and they propose systems built on the Aegis combatant fleet. Obviously, using surface ships to carry maritime interceptors in a widely dispersed architecture has inherent attractions, including mobility and the ability to leverage years of investment in the Aegis program. The Aegis ships would be the progenitors of the maritime missile defense capability that evolves into the naval segment of a homeland missile defense system.
These strengths notwithstanding, the greater challenge in using surface combatants for ballistic missile defense (BMD) may be political. Homeland defense has not been their mission, and the concept of operations for a Pacific missile defense role puts them in areas far away from deployments to the Persian Gulf and in the seasonally rough waters of the northern Pacific Ocean.
The BMD concepts are driven heavily by the kinematic performance of interceptors. Combining a threat missile launch site and a fixed interceptor launch site creates a set of predictable engagement calculi that our adversaries could exploit. Vary the interceptor launch point and this relationship turns quickly to our advantage.
Submariners have developed a plan to use Trident submarines as cruise missile carriers. The proponents cite inherent stealth, sunk costs in the platforms, and sharing of the regional commanders-- in-chiefs' Tomahawk requirements with the surface fleet. Critics point to the huge Trident infrastructure cost for employment of a $500,000 cruise missile. Nonetheless, the concept is valid. At last June's Naval Academy graduation, President George W. Bush said, "Fifteen years from now ... a President may stand here and describe a far different range of deployments. .. He—or she—may speak of Aegis destroyers protecting entire continents from the threat of ballistic missile attack or modified Trident submarines carrying hundreds of next-generation smart conventional cruise missiles."
Plans to keep Tridents operating are admirable—but what is needed is greater vision. They should combine the naval role in national BMD with justification for continued employment of one of the Navy's greatest assets: Trident submarines as launch platforms for ballistic missile interceptors. Justifying a homeland defense role for Tridents before Congress is easier than explaining subordination of mobile naval forces to commands intent on tethering surface ships to interceptor launch stations in the far reaches of the Pacific. Because BMD patrols would not be too different from current strategic deterrence tasks, core skills would be maintained. More important, avoiding use of surface combatants in a strategic role and focusing them on theater level would sidestep thorny strategic and theater interpretations of weapons under the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Tridents would not require new mission interpretations for the BMD role. Surface combatants would complicate interpretations considerably—and create challenges for our allies with respect to their participation in future BMD projects.
Establishing a 12-to-14-year goal of fielding four to six Trident submarines for BMD will justify the short- and mid-term funds needed to make cruise missile carriers out of them. For the foreseeable future, cruise missiles will be launched from the Mk 41 vertical launching system carried by surface combatants and submarines. The Navy's region-wide system employing the SM-3 Block IT missile will use variants of the same launcher. Trident commitment to BMD will enable surface combatants to continue fleet operations: forward engagement in the littorals, lower-tier ballistic missile defense of harbors and ports, and upper-tier regional missile defense of U.S. and allied forces.
There are major technical challenges in missile and submarine interface. Assuming the Navy can develop a surface or near-surface capability for launching missiles in rough seas and can carry missiles that were not designed for launching from submarines, it must invest in a command, control, communications, computer, and intelligence (C4I) system that can offer cooperative engagement capability (CEC) to the Tridents. Work on fusion of vastly separated and dissimilar sensors has been done at the Pacific missile range facility in Hawaii. Taken further, it could be the basis for building a C4I tool that BMD Tridents would need—situational awareness of threat missile activity. The Navy's CEC program has proved that highly accurate data can be passed with very high fidelity between missile shooters. Advances in antenna adaptability to submarine sail and hull designs would be necessary, and reliance on space-based assets for missile updates would be likely. Combining these concepts with the existing strategic communications backbone would provide tremendous flexibility to the naval BMD fleet.
Mr. Vaughn is the Japan political-military affairs officer and fleet theater missile defense integration officer at Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu, Hawaii.