By Emelie Rutherford
The dynamics of Congress’ approach to missile defense has changed, with Democrats acting more accepting of national missile defense than in the past, yet also showing reticence toward longer-term options, a senior Senate Armed Services Committee staff member said.
The professional staff member, who works on the SASC’s Republican side, said “while it’s true in the past that Democrats tended to favor theater missile defense over national missile defense, that’s not the case anymore.”
“The distinction now is between near-term missile defenses and longer-term missile defenses,” he said Monday before a Capitol Hill audience.
He pointed to a policy provision in the FY ’07 defense authorization bill saying the United States will “accord a priority to near-term missile defense systems.”
“And that included things like Patriot, THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] and Aegis BMD [ballistic missile defense] — the traditional theater missile defense systems — but it also included GMD, or the Ground Based Midcourse Missile Defense system” for national defense, he said. “So the Democrats are on record supporting GMD, which is the old national missile defense program.”
“There’s clear support for the near-term capabilities,” the SASC staffer said.
Sources have pointed to Congress’ support of doubling the number of Aegis Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and THAAD interceptors for use in the near term.
“Where there’s less support by the Democrats, I think, is on the longer-term capabilities, things that won’t be available until the end of the next decade–things like the Airborne Laser or the Kinetic Energy Interceptor or the Space Tracking and Surveillance System,” the SASC staffer said. “So the distinction is a little different.”
Of course, he said, such matters inevitably have to do with money lawmakers are willing to spend.
After Democrats became the majority in Congress last year, the missile defense program received a cut of approximately 3 percent.
For fiscal year 2009, the House-passed defense authorization bill calls for roughly a 7 percent cut from the White House’s request, while the version of the legislation the Senate could take up in July includes approximately a 4 percent reduction.
An overall missile defense reduction between 4 percent and 7 percent that likely will emerge from a conference committee is short of projected cuts in the billions of dollars that some feared the Democrats would make, the SASC aide noted.
“If the Democrats want to continue to field capabilities–that is field the sea-based missiles and the THAADs and the Patriots and the GMD–they’re not going to be able to reduce missile defense funding a whole lot more,” he said.