By George Landrith
The Pentagon’s decision to curtail the Airborne Laser (ABL) missile defense program is a grave mistake.
It will leave the United States more vulnerable to the growing threat of ballistic missiles possessed by our potential adversaries, especially Iran and North Korea.
ABL places a high-energy laser on a modified Boeing 747 aircraft, providing speed-of-light capability to destroy missiles in their boost phase of flight, or soon after they are launched. As a boost-phase system, ABL has several advantages:
- It can shoot down missiles before they deploy protective decoys or countermeasures.
- It spots enemy missiles when they are most easily tracked, just after launch, while they are emitting a hot, highly visible exhaust plume.
- It causes debris created by a missile intercept to fall short of its intended target and in many cases on the adversary’s country, potentially deterring a missile launch in the first place.
- It “thins the herd” for missile defense systems that intercept missiles later in their trajectories.
Despite this tremendous capability that ABL offers our nation, the Department of Defense plans to relegate this ground-breaking project to continued R&D status, rather than proceed with building a second ABL aircraft.
DOD announced this unfortunate decision last month as part of its fiscal 2010 budget proposal, even though the first ABL, a prototype, has made steady and significant progress over the past several years and is on track to shoot down a boosting ballistic missile in a test later this year.
The second aircraft would incorporate lessons learned from the first aircraft, and it would pave the way for producing a small fleet of ABLs that could deploy when and where needed in 24 hours to respond to a crisis anywhere around the globe.
With just seven ABLs, theater commanders could maintain missile defense coverage over a hotspot nearly indefinitely. ABL also has potential for several other critical missions, including defending against aircraft, cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles.
Since ABL uses a chemical laser, a few observers who are not close to the program have recommended waiting for solid-state lasers to mature. But megawatt-class solid-state lasers as needed to shoot down ballistic missiles are not yet in their infancy, and it will be well over a decade before they reach the power levels required.
ABL is ready now. And we need it now, because Iran and North Korea have both stepped up development of nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles that could deliver them to the United States within a few short years, not to mention ballistic missile threats they pose to our friends in those theaters today.
Not proceeding with the second ABL aircraft now could also cause an already fragile directed energy industrial base to whither away. Reconstituting that industrial capability later would take years.
We can’t wait any longer to defend ourselves. Congress should reverse the Pentagon’s unfortunate decision and fund the second ABL aircraft.
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- George Landrith is the President of the Frontiers of Freedom Institute — a public policy think tank founded by former Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) and devoted to promoting a strong national defense, free markets, individual liberty, and constitutionally limited government. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was Business Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Politics. As an adjunct professor at the George Mason School of Law, Landrith has taught constitutional law, appellate advocacy, and legal writing.