Dear Members and Friends,    

From our perspective, we’re going to have a presidential directive. That’s going to happen. The last time we had a presidential directive on missile defense was under four administrations ago under George W. Bush that put forward ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California to defeat and defend against North Korea with policy to do so. And that presidential directive gave authorities to the Missile Defense Agency to accomplish that mission. And that mission was done in three years within that time frame.  

So this looks to be another watershed moment. And it could even go back to the grander 1983 speech by President Ronald Reagan on SDI, where now the president will most likely or likely give a national speech on this with a vision and a directive to defend our nation. And why is this?  

Is that some sort of PR movement or political thing? The reason is, our nation is being threatened today, 360 degrees in all domains, and our nuclear deterrence does not deter that. So it’s great.  

Our nuclear deterrence policy is great against countries that got nuclear weapons and are threatening to use nuclear weapons. But it has failed now. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen this in all the theaters around the world.  

And we certainly have seen this in the United States, with Chinese balloons, with Chinese drones, hundreds of them in Langley Air Force Base, with thousands of drones and stuff coming across the Mexican border, with air infractions on our air with Russia-Chinese planes. So the threat is here. And it’s even greater than that.  

So I don’t spend too much time on it. From FOBs all the way down, that’s there. It has to be addressed.  

We’re going to see it on Homeland. I believe it is going to be addressed. We live with outdated policy, and I hope John Rood is going to go through this a little bit.  

But we have policy basically to defend the U.S. from North Korea with missile defense. That’s about it. And everything else is just ambiguous, with nobody defining any country or threat on what’s going on.  

So policy has to be addressed. And it can be. It can be done in two weeks.  

It can be done in six months. It’s not a hard thing to do. Well, it’s a hard thing to do.  

I’ll talk to John on that. But it has to be addressed, because we have to define who we are defending the United States of America from. Who is it?  

Is it Russia? Is it North Korea? Is it everybody?  

I don’t think you can do everybody. And then, what are we actually defending against? Because right now, we’re not allowed—some people are not allowed—our combatant commanders are told to defend against certain weapons, and nuclear deterrence is told to defend against other weapons.  

And then, what are we defending in the United States? Are we defending our public cities? Are we defending our nuclear deterrent?  

Are we defending our capital region? Are we defending our financial community? What are we going to defend?  

Because if you don’t answer those three things, you don’t have an ability to do the architecture for it. You have to create a tasking order from that. And that tasking order has to have an agency or a service or someone that’s given full authorities, which I think that’s going to happen with the presidential directive, to enable that to happen.  

So we’re here today, and we’re right on the front of this. This is exciting for us. We’re right on the front of this, and we’ve got experts.  

-Mr. Riki Ellison

“What are the threats? What’s the policy we need? And good Lord knows, it’s needed to have a refresh.  

Ballistic missiles were the focus in the Obama administration. And frankly, we reverted to that in the Biden administration, that there was a focus only in the Biden administration and guidance given to the commanders defend against North Korean, Iranian missiles, but not others, and not all types.  

And so Trump in 2019 announced it would be ballistic cruise hypersonics missiles from all sources against the United States or our troops or locations abroad to include our territories like Guam. And so I expect you’ll see a return to that. And it’s needed because from these what seem like basic policy decisions flow hundreds of subordinate decisions.  

And that’s what I really hope that we will see like an effort to recapture control of our borders, that there will be an effort to recapture control of our airspace and to defend the nation against the contemporary threats. We do need this broader definition because once you decide you want to defend against things like a Chinese or Russian attack, like in 2019, the then President Trump, who is now president again, of course, announced that we would expand where we did that, because you needed to. You could not simply rely on ground-based and sea-based defenses.  

There was a call in that missile defense review to use air-based defenses, which are, by the way, are being used in heavy effect in places like Ukraine in the defense of Israel now. But at that time, that was an unusual new decision that we put forward. And then you also need to go to space, because there are tremendous advantages to doing missile defense from space.  

It’s always been difficult to do, but the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds to make it much more affordable. And so that’s where in 2019, President Trump directed a study of the correct architecture, the most efficient architecture to do that. I think today, with Elon Musk’s involvement and others, you’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to utilizing space for the defense”.  

-Mr. John Rood

“I think we’ve all discussed, you all have discussed numerous times, but the Department of Defense doesn’t have a good process by which to deliver joint capabilities.  

And the problem is the services deliver capabilities, but the services have their own parochialism and their own agenda almost all the time. And so there’s always a little bit of bias every time they are creating something that is going to be a joint capability used by the joint force. And so I don’t think we do that.  

And I do, I’m trying, I was trying to think ever since John talked about MDA, I’ve been trying to think how to couch this, but watching MDA try to deliver a capability on Guam over the last several years, when they’re not a command, even though they do have special acquisition authorities, has not produced a result in a timely manner. And I appreciate all the folks at MDA. I think there’s some great folks there, and I think they were doing God’s work to try to do that, but they weren’t commanders.  

They weren’t in the chain of command. They weren’t an operational commander or a service command that had a lot of authority to deliver capabilities. And so I think we’ve spun our wheels a little bit over the last several years with respect to Guam and Hawaii and some of the other locations.  

And so I think we really do need to look at the joint process. There were some designations by the Office of Secretary of Defense to put the Army senior acquisition personnel in charge of that process. And still early that may be a way to do it.  

But we need really, as you talked about just a minute ago, both of you, if we’re going to throw space into this, then who really does have the authority to pull all of this together and to drive the acquisition process to deliver a capability that will sufficiently defend the United States of America and our territories worldwide. And I think we’ve a good bit of work that needs to be done so that that is moving with a little more alacrity than it has over the last several years. And then again, how are our allies and partners helping us do this?” 

-Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jamie Jarrad

“So as things now stand today, the only U.S. airspace that’s protected from cruise missiles is a stretch of downtown Washington between the Capitol and the Pentagon, and the entire country is vulnerable to a hypersonic threat. So my thoughts were that for a robust missile defense, the Department of Defense is going to need to design and build a comprehensive architecture that mixes satellites, dirigibles equipped with sensors, and long-range ground-based detectors to detect and track threats. So that’s long-range ground-based radars along with the dirigibles and satellites to detect and track threats.  

The Pentagon then needs to integrate this network of sensors with a mix of engagement systems to shoot down the incoming missiles. The cost of this homeland defense mission is going to be significant. I do think, however, we’re going to be able to mitigate it with some innovative solutions, and John mentioned one of them, maybe engaging in and through space and developing sensors that operate in the near-space region”. 

“We need to militarize space. I’m sorry. Eventually, we’re going to get the cheap stuff by shooting from space.  

We’re going to get to reasonable cost solutions, rods from God kind of future, or as John and Riki would say, back to the future. Finally, we’ve got to acknowledge the Cal-Dal disconnect. Northcom will write a Cal (critical asset list).  

That’s the guy that says, it’s everything. I want them to defend New Hampshire, but whatever. They’ve got to defend everything, countervalue, counter-targeting.  

The dal (defended asset list), what they’ll actually defend, not we wish what they would defend, is infinitesimally small at the problem start and will grow over time. Our goal long-term is to make the Dal look more like the Cal, but we’re a long, long, long way from that. We’re going to get there with innovation.  

We’re going to get there with good architecture. Most importantly, we’re going to get there with good leadership by Northcom under the direction of the Department of Defense” 

“This is a multi-tiered answer. The cruise missile hypersonic one, this could easily, because it’s the number of interceptors that can drive your cost, but this is in the $20 billion plus range. It could be much plus, like between $20 billion and $60 billion.  

Before we start to have a heart attack, the Ohio-class replacement is going to cost us $130 billion. The Sentinel replacement just jumped from $70 billion to $140 billion when we turned our head, turned back, and they said, the Air Force is like, we messed this up. It’s not $70 billion, it’s $140 billion.    

The B-21 is another nugget that approaches $100 billion. I would just say, we’re already spending $300 billion, $400 billion on the offensive weapon systems for nuclear weapons. This is not an unrealistic assessment.  

If we have to spend $40 billion, $50 billion, $60 billion on this, that may be what has to happen over time, and it’s not delivering fast-breaking”.  

“I don’t know where you take the money from. From my point of view, I could clean sheet a better defense budget, you bet, but that gets into service equities, congressional equities. It’s not a realistic discussion.  

You’re going to have to add into this. By the way, here’s what I would say. When you’re going to be a global power with near-peer adversaries who dislike you, you spend 4.5% to 5% of GDP on defense. That’s the whole Cold War, 4.5% to 5.5%, which in today’s dollars would be $1.3 trillion, $400 billion more than we’re spending right now”. 

-Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery

“Hey, it reminds me of the sleeping dog on the nail. The dog’s figured that out and getting up. And we have to go big.  

We are going to go big. We have no choice. And this, to me, I believe we’re going to have an SDI moment where this president and this administration and this Congress is going to move out on this because we’re not deterring.  

We’re not deterring adversaries on it. This is leadership, and this brings the entire community together, from Elon Musk, from innovation, from our big companies, to work on something that I think is more important than anything else. Now, we can talk about foreign operating bases, but this is homeland, and we’ve never had that movement like this since World War II.  

All our wars have been away, and I think you’ve got it. We’ve got it. It’s just making sure the leaders can pull this and bring in the diversity of great minds in this country, services and everything, to get this thing done.  

And it is worth far more than $20 billion, far more than $20 billion. You can go to the taxpayers right now on that. We’re only spending less than 2% on our DOD budget for defense.  

We’ve got to have it. It’s coming. You can’t stop what’s coming”. 

-Mr. Riki Ellison

Click here to watch the virtual event

Click here to read the transcript

Speakers:  

Mr. John Rood 

MDAA Board of Directors Member 

Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery 

MDAA Board of Directors Member, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies Former Director of Operations, U.S. Pacific Command 

Lieutenant General (Ret.) Jamie Jarrad 

Deputy Commanding General for the U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC) 

Mr. JD Gainey

MDAA Board Member

Mr. Riki Ellison 

Chairman and Founder, Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance

Respectfully,