Breaking Defense:
Minds are changing inside the Pentagon when it comes to the best ways to stop missile attacks, the Army’s top missile defender said this morning. It’s not just that the Joint Staff is conducting a major study of the subject, due out next month, said Lt Gen. David Mann. It’s that a “holistic” array of new options is on the table, from lasers to cyber attack tojamming to preemptive strikes.
Particularly tricky are actions taken “left of launch,” before the enemy missiles leave the launchpad. The best defense may be a good offense, but that raises the unsettling possibility that the US might strike first. Now, Mann told an Air Force Association breakfast, the reluctance to discuss such options is going away.
“When you talk about left of launch and taking actions in a proactive manner, that comes fraught with a lot of policy issues,” Mann said. “[But now] we’re seeing a lot more openness to really discuss that especially at the department level, to really look across the whole spectrum of options.”
“I see a lot more interest and willingness to discuss left of launch than I’ve ever seen before,” Mann went on. “When you hear the Joint Staff and others talking about holistic, non-kinetic, left of launch [options], you know you’re gaining some ground.”
That said, no less a figure than the outgoing Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, has urged caution. “While we would obviously prefer to take a threat missile out while it’s still on the ground, what we would call left-of-launch, we won’t always have the luxury of doing so,”Winnefeld warned at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in May. “We don’t want there to be any doubt about our commitment to having a solid right-of-launch capability.”
“Of course, it’d be great to do, to the extent we can,” CSIS’s Tom Karako told me. “[But] SCUD hunts are hard, requiring lots of intelligence and speed: just ask the Saudis and other coalition partners, 50 of whom died last week from a Yemeni missile strike that they missed hitting on the ground. And…it can look like preemption, so policy could impede fully employing such capabilities.”
“All we’re doing is we’re adding more arrows to the quiver and more capabilities for the warfighter,” Mann told me after his public remarks. Left of launch is just meant to be one option among others — but we really need more options…
