Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense

Writing about military spending is difficult.

A couple of days ago, Iran launched a major attack against Israel, in retaliation for Israel killing one of Iran’s military commanders. The attack included about 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles. But something pretty incredible happened — almost all of the drones and missiles were shot down before they could hit Israel, by a combination of Israeli, U.S., Jordanian, French, British, and possibly Saudi forces. Only a few ballistic missiles made it through, wounding one Arab Israeli girl severely and causing minor injuries to a few other people.

My thoughts on the geopolitics of this attack are going to be pretty familiar — the Middle East conflict is a distraction from far more important matters in East Asia, and we should keep our role to a minimum. The Gaza war has not fundamentally altered the balance of power in the Middle East; Israel and the Sunni powers are unofficial and uneasy partners against Iran and its proxies. Both sides are pretty brutal, and neither looks likely to dominate the other. U.S. resources and attention are far better spent elsewhere.

With that out of the way, I think the really interesting part of this story is that almost everything the Iranians threw at Israel was intercepted. Drones are slow-moving and easy to shoot down, but ballistic missiles are fast-moving and generally very hard to hit. Yet Israel’s Arrow system, jointly developed with the U.S., had little trouble knocking most of Iran’s ballistic missiles out of the sky — with some interceptions even occurring outside of Earth’s atmosphere.

That’s pretty interesting, because for most of my adult life, I believed that ballistic missile defense was a hopeless, failed cause. From the 2000s all the way through the 2010s, I read lots of op-eds about how kinetic interceptors — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” were just an unworkably difficult technology, and how the U.S. shouldn’t waste our time and money on developing this sort of system. For example, all the way back in 2006, Matt Yglesias — among my favorite bloggers, both then and now — wrote the following:

This is madness. We're spending billions of dollars to defend ourselves against ballistic missiles that don't exist. What's more, the defense system doesn't work and never has. At best, it occasionally kinda sorta passes rigged tests. I'm a "never say never" kind of guy, but the odds of it ever working seem bad. The technical challenges are daunting: Building a missile that can reliably hit another missile is simply very difficult. Missiles are small, move very quickly, and are difficult to launch within the time frame necessary to intercept one that's already in the air. What's more, unlike, say, computers or telecommunications, the general field of aerospace engineering hasn't seen any significant advances in decades…

Now, I don’t want to be too unfair to Matt here. Even the most ardent supporters of missile defense don’t think it could stop a nuclear strike by Russia or China. Briefly, ballistic missiles are grouped into four categories, according to their range — short, medium, intermediate, and intercontinental (ICBM). The longer-range a missile is, the faster it moves when it reenters the atmosphere, and thus the harder it is to hit. Our best existing anti-missile systems — Israel’s Arrow and the U.S.’ THAAD — can only handle intermediate-range ballistic missiles at best. ICBMs, of the type that Russia or China would launch against us in a full-scale nuclear war, are too fast for us to hit with current technology. Nuclear missiles also use other technologies that make them harder to stop, like multiple warheads (MIRV), and a nuclear attack might be accompanied by a large number of decoy missiles.

In short, Matt and the many other critics of missile defense were right that missile defense will probably not provide us with an invincible anti-nuclear umbrella anytime soon. But they were wrong about much else (as Matt has since acknowledged). The purpose of this post isn’t to dunk on Matt or any of the other critics — after all, I also believed missile defense didn’t work. But the way in which critics got this issue wrong illustrates why it’s difficult to get good information about military technology — and therefore why it’s hard for the public to make smart, well-informed choices about defense spending.

One big reason critics got missile defense wrong was that they didn’t understand the technological advances that were making it possible to “hit a bullet with a bullet”. No, the basics of rocketry and aerodynamics haven’t changed much in recent years. But the key to hitting a bullet with a bullet isn’t building a faster or more maneuverable rocket — it’s figuring out where the target is going to be. Advances in detection technology — better sensors, and especially better software to process the signals from sensors — have made it a lot easier to observe a missile’s trajectory to a high degree of precision. Therefore it has become more feasible to predict exactly where it’s going to go, so you can get an interceptor there first.

Why didn’t critics realize the central importance of detection software, and how fast it was improving? Well, because they’re not experts in the field. This isn’t a knock against them, or a demand that they “stay in their lane” — if you’re a writer who writes about politics and policy and budget priorities, you pretty much have to have an opinion on defense spending, because it’s a big and important part of the budget. No writer can be an expert on everything (except Brian Potter, but he’s one of a kind). So instead, as a writer, you go looking for domain experts to explain things to you, or at least point you to some good reading material so you can teach yourself the basics.

Missile defense critics were badly served by their go-to experts. The loudest and most prominent of these was Theodore Postol, a professor at MIT. He was a relentless lifelong critic of missile defense, penning numerous op-eds on the topic over the years. And his work was recognized by other scientists — he won awards from the American Physical Society in 1990, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1995, the Federation of American Scientists in 2016, and others, all for his criticisms of missile defense. After the Gulf War in the early 90s, Postol went around claiming that the Patriot missile had performed much more poorly than believed, and had shot down almost no incoming missiles at all.

And Postol had plenty of scientific arguments on his side. For example, in MIT Technology Review in 2002, he briefly explained some of the physics of why incoming missiles are hard to spot:

For one thing, measuring temperature with this infrared equipment is not possible when objects in space are observed close to the earth, because their signals are routinely contaminated by reflected infrared radiation from the planet’s surface; they are further confused by such factors as the amount of cloud cover, time of year and which part of the earth the target is over.

This isn’t wrong; Postol isn’t an ignoramus. But it seems that he didn’t reckon with just how amazingly good software (and hardware detection technology) would get. By the time the Ukraine War came around, the Patriot missiles that Postol had spent so many years assailing had become star performers, shooting down Russian Iskander ballistic missiles and hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. Now, Israel’s even more-advanced Arrow system is shooting down even longer-ranged, faster ballistic missiles (which, by the way, have the same range as China’s DF-21 anti-ship missile). Postol also claimed in 2014 that Israel’s shorter-range Iron Dome system didn’t work, which turned out to be very wrong.

Postol is a smart guy, and there’s no reason to think he’s a liar or beholden to foreign interests. He’s just an expert with strong opinions who happened to be wrong about a lot of stuff. But because he was so loud and strident and activist, journalists looking for an expert on missile defense would often find him and quote him. And op-ed writers looking for background knowledge on missile defense would read his writings and take them to heart. So his mistakes got amplified and became conventional wisdom.

What about other experts? Why didn’t people who understood the advances in sensing and detection software push back and explain to journalists and op-ed writers why missile defense was a better idea than Postol was saying? Well, I’m not sure, but one likely reason is that many of these experts worked for defense contractors or for the national defense establishment. So most of them were probably obligated not to blab to the press about missile defense’s true capabilities. Unlike Russia, which tends to overhype its weapons in order to boost arms exports, the U.S. tries very hard to hide its weapons’ true capabilities — for example, the Patriot wasn’t officially supposed to be able to shoot down the Kinzhal, but it did.

So we have an asymmetry here. The information about how good America’s weapons systems are gets kept behind closed doors, unveiled in secret Congressional briefings and whispered between defense contractors. Meanwhile, everyone who wants to criticize U.S. weapons systems is on the outside, squawking loudly to the press.

In fact, an even more egregious example concerns warplanes. For many years, I believed — and even repeated — the conventional wisdom that the F-35 was an expensive boondoggle with dubious military value. I also saw a number of people claim that the A-10 “Warthog”, a low-flying plane with a big gun for strafing tanks, was a great plane, and that we should be building more of that instead of the fancy, overengineered F-35.

It turns out that many of these criticisms came from a man named Pierre Sprey, who claimed to have worked for the DoD on the development of a number of planes. Although more astute aerospace experts knew that many of his criticisms of the F-35 were uninformed and false, journalists and op-ed writers frequently cited his claims that the plane basically didn’t work.

Well, it turns out that Sprey wasn’t really much of an expert. Internet sleuths discovered that his involvement with the development of planes like the A-10 and F-16 was very minor at best, and he was quietly removed from some of the relevant Wikipedia pages.

Meanwhile, the F-35, despite going way over its initial budget and having some initial performance issues, is now apparently performing extremely well. A bunch of countries are ordering large numbers of F-35s — so many that Lockheed Martin is having trouble manufacturing enough of them to meet the demand.

So the program that we pundits held up as a paradigmatic example of defense contractor waste and ineffectiveness turns out to have been…pretty good after all! Why? In an entertainingly silly but well-argued YouTube video, British defense commentator LazerPig argues that most of the F-35’s good points were simply kept behind closed doors:

As with missile defense, we see the same basic story. A difficult technology is developed by the Pentagon at great expense, behind closed doors, over decades. At first there are big technical hurdles and some initial failures, and some of those problems leak out to the press, which rushes to jump on an example of the waste and fecklessness of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the technology’s successes and true capabilities are hushed up and kept behind closed doors, in order to avoid alerting America’s rivals to our true strength.

Meanwhile, a small handful of loud, highly opinionated experts (or, sometimes, “experts”) outside the defense establishment shout to anyone and everyone that the technology doesn’t work, can’t work, and will never work. This reinforces the basic narrative, and the critics seem to have good technical reasons and credentials, so the pundits declare that the program is yet another boondoggle by America’s failing and overpaid military establishment. Conclusion: We should cut defense spending and divert the money to social programs.

That conclusion is, of course, likely to be influenced by domestic battles over income distribution. Back in the post-WW2 period, defense spending was a bipartisan thing, but since Reagan’s military buildup in the 1980s, it has become Republican-coded. I remember seeing this slogan ad infinitum in my youth:

This quote is attributed to Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I suppose kindergartners don’t learn that U.S. defense spending has fallen as a share of GDP for decades on end, or that public education spending is now considerably higher as a share of GDP.

But in any case, the notion that defense spending needs to be cut, and the money diverted to social programs, has become conventional wisdom in progressive circles. This conventional wisdom seems unrelated to how much we actually spend on defense, or what our national security threats are. It’s simply a fixed belief. And that fixed belief makes it a lot easier to believe that specific items of defense spending — missile defense, or the F-35, etc. — are expensive boondoggles that can and should be cut.

A natural tendency toward short-sightedness about the security environment presents a final obstacle to clear-headed writing about defense spending. In the mid-2000s, it seemed clear to many people that our main military challenge was counterinsurgency — after all, that’s what we were doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 2006 article, Yglesias argued that the only reason we’d want missile defense is if we wanted to attack other countries:

The only situation in which a missile shield, if it worked, would possibly be useful is if we wanted to invade another country and stop it from deterring us with its missiles. This, however, is a pretty terrible idea…Ballistic missile defense is, in short, not just a waste of money, but the tip of a wildly misguided intellectual iceberg — a whole worldview that radically misconceives the nature of America's interests and the contemporary international situation. The conservative movement is committed to an outlook that revolves around impractical solutions to unreal problems, and missile defense is just one more example to add to a pile including the invasion of Iraq, the decision to spurn Iranian peace overtures, and the effort to define the (necessary) struggle against al Qaeda in the broadest and most apocalyptic terms available.

Fast forward two decades, and this outlook looks dangerously naive. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s attacks on Israel, and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan or the Philippines show the importance of ballistic missile defense as a way of blocking attacks by invading states. In 2006, in the middle of the War on Terror, it might have seemed inconceivable that just 18 years later, the world would see multiple authoritarian empires waging aggressive, expansionist wars, and that the U.S. and its allies would be playing a beleaguered defense. But here we are.

If we could pivot our military procurement and research on a dime, this wouldn’t be a problem; we could just direct all our spending and effort to solving the problems of the day, instead of trying to think decades ahead. But modern military technologies like missile defense or the F-35 are so complex, expensive, and difficult that they take decades to develop. The U.S.’ anti ballistic missile program has been in development since the 1950s, and the development of the Arrow program that shot down those Iranian ballistic missiles began in 1986.

We can’t know what kinds of threats we’ll be facing in four decades. But we have a basic idea about the types of threats that might emerge, and “hostile power armed with ballistic missiles” was as plausible of a future threat in 2006 as it was in 1986. Fortune favors the prepared.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of the reasons writing about defense spending is challenging. Defense contractors, the Defense Department, and the military themselves all have their points of view and their interests to protect. Conservatives are just as likely to play politics with this issue as progressives. Foreign interests are at work here too — countries like Russia and Iran constantly push the narrative that they’re peaceful and that U.S. militarism is the main force pushing war upon the world. And there’s a whole generation of Americans — my generation — who watched the Iraq War unfold during our formative years, and who are thus biased toward thinking of wars as something that America chooses instead of something that is forced upon us.

There’s no easy solution here, other than simply being aware of these difficulties and trying very hard to counteract them. We pundits should talk to and listen to a variety of experts, not just the loudest and most confident. While recognizing that we don’t have enough time to become experts in everything, we should still try to understand the underlying technologies as best we can, as well as the details of the defense procurement process. And most importantly, in my opinion, we should keep the interests of the nation foremost in our mind, and remember that if the U.S. goes down, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power will hardly matter.

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