Congress launches new missile defense push as North Korea advances

President Donald Trump reportedly told his Filipino counterpart that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is a “madman with nuclear weapons.” As Kim gets closer to having the missiles to deliver those weapons, Congress is launching a new push to dramatically expand missile defense inside the United States.

“It’s no longer a matter of if but when North Korea will have the capability to hit the United States with an intercontinental nuclear ballistic missile. That should startle people,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, told me.

Sullivan led a bipartisan effort this week to introduce new legislation that would call on the Trump administration to increase investments in almost everything the United States is currently building for missile defense.

Expanding missile defense has long been a priority of some lawmakers, especially those whose states are closest to the threat and would also benefit from the investments in new infrastructure. But if what Trump says is true, and Kim is an irrational actor who can’t be deterred, that’s a new reason to build more now, Sullivan said.

“It’s an insurance policy in the event he wants to go out in a blaze of glory,” he said. “It would be the height of irresponsibility if we saw this coming and did not take action to guard against it.”

The president’s budget request for fiscal 2018, released Tuesday, doesn’t provide funding for the massive expansion of infrastructure that Sullivan’s bill would authorize. The Missile Defense Agency is requesting $7.9 billion next year, $379 million more than in fiscal 2017.

Sullivan and his colleagues are pushing for authorization for the Pentagon to spend billions more each year. They want to increase the number of interceptors in Alaska and Hawaii from 44 to 72, with an eye toward reaching 100. They want the Pentagon to develop new kill vehicles, sensors in space and airborne lasers on unmanned aerial vehicles. They also want the Pentagon to speed up consideration of a new missile defense interceptor site on the East Coast or in the Midwest.

Sullivan said he hopes to add the legislation, which has co-sponsors from both parties, to the next defense authorization bill. That means it wouldn’t likely have a policy impact until next year at the earliest. But there are signs the Trump administration could take the legislation’s ideas to heart earlier than that.

Rob Soofer, a former top congressional staffer who worked on the legislation, has recently joined the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy. He will be integral in the ballistic missile defense review the Pentagon has just begun and part of the team that crafts the Trump administration’s nuclear posture review, which is being coordinated by National Security Council senior director Christopher Ford.

Some arms-control experts warn that if Trump follows Congress down the road of doubling down on missile defense, he would be investing more in a system that has not proved reliable in testing and would therefore provide a false sense of security

“If the president of the United States devises policy dealing with North Korea based on a system he believes will protect the U.S. from a missile attack from North Korea, he is operating on false information,” said Philip Coyle, who was an assistant secretary of defense and director of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001.

Moreover, missile defense skeptics have long argued that any missile shield, even it does work, could be easily overwhelmed if an adversary simply builds and fires more missiles. In fact, Coyle said, countries such as China would use it as an incentive to greatly expand their missile arsenals in response.

“What any enemy does in response to that is just build more and more offensive missiles, exactly the opposite of what we would want,” he said.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that the overwhelming advantage the United States and its allies have militarily over Kim is what keeps him from attacking the United States.

“He knows that North Korea would be utterly destroyed,” he said. “We will continue to rely on conventional and ultimately nuclear deterrence.”

For Sullivan and his cohorts, that’s not comforting.

“That assumes you have a rational actor in Kim Jong Un,” Sullivan said. “Is that an assumption we want to make? No.”

According to what he told the Filipino president, Trump agrees.

AHN YOUNG-OON — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A South Korean man watches a TV news program showing an image published in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun newspaper of North Korea’s ballistic missile believed to have been launched from underwater, at Seoul Railway station in Seoul, South Korea.