Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chairman, my straightforward amendment would prohibit the misguided use of taxpayer dollars to attempt to develop a space- based missile defense intercept layer.

As the Chair knows, the Senate-passed version of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 tasks the Missile Defense Agency with developing such a concept.

Mr. Chairman, we have been here before. The idea of a space-based intercept layer has gone in and out of fashion for the last 30 years, ever since President Reagan called for defending the United States against a massive first strike by developing a Strategic Defense Initiative system, commonly known as Star Wars.

But every time technologically competent outside experts have looked at this space-based concept, they deem it unworkable, impossibly expensive, vulnerable to simple countermeasures, easy for an opponent to destroy, easy to overwhelm with a small number of enemy missiles, or all of the above.

In fact, the former Director of the Missile Defense Agency, Admiral Syring said in 2016, that he had:

Serious concerns about the technical feasibility of interceptors in space, and its long-term affordability.

In order to reach an incoming ballistic missile during the first few minutes of flight, a large number of interceptors must be stationed in low-altitude orbit where they will be very easy for an enemy to destroy.

A report conducted by the American Physical Society in 2003 concluded that in order to ensure full coverage, a fleet of 1,000 or more orbiting satellites would be required to intercept just a single missile.

To put that in perspective, the United States today currently has slightly more than 800 satellites in Earth's orbit, and that includes commercial, scientific, and military satellites.

The National Academy of Sciences estimated that even an austere and limited network of 650 satellites would cost $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the cost of a ground-based system.

Setting aside the massive cost, a space-based missile defense system has inherent vulnerabilities that greatly limit its effectiveness. Even with thousands of interceptors deployed, only a few would be within range to target an incoming missile, and those could easily be overwhelmed by the launch of several missiles from one location.

And because interceptors must be stationed in low-altitude orbit, they could easily be detected, tracked, and destroyed. It is these limitations that led Admiral Syring to conclude that:

Essential space-based interceptor technologies have been worked on only sporadically over the years and, consequently, are not feasible to procure, to deploy, or operate in the near or midterm.

There is no doubt that a ballistic missile defense, if technologically feasible and economically justifiable, would be an important priority for our national security. So would be the Star Trek warp drive, or the transporter, if they were not technological fantasies.

But as a scientist, and, in fact, the only Ph.D. physicist in the U.S. Congress, I think that we have to listen to the experts and do our homework before investing hundreds of billions of dollars attempting to develop an unworkable system.

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chairman, I spent most of my career as an energy particle physicist and accelerator designer, designing and building complex technical systems. Nothing is less productive as a use of taxpayer money than designing and building a system, attempting to build a system that you know from the outset cannot and will not work.

If there was suddenly a magic new technology, then we can revisit this decision. But the fundamental physics and the fundamental numerology of the attack versus defense balance in this has not changed in the last 30 years as we have examined this issue.

So I think that just because it would be nice if we could magically drop a launch missile back on the enemy's head, if we do not have plausible technology that could accomplish that, doing paper designs of systems that will not work is a blatant waste of taxpayer money.

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have remaining?

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chair, I think this all comes down to technical feasibility. Whenever you are thinking of how to spend taxpayer money, you must make a judgment call as to what things are just way out there and are not going to happen in our lifetimes, and things which have a realistic chance of working on the time scale that we are planning for.

And when all of the experts that you convene to look at this unanimously say that this system makes no sense, then it makes no sense to spend taxpayer money until we get the breakthroughs that might some day make it possible.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Indiana for yielding.

As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I would like to take a moment to highlight the risks of underfunding both nuclear nonproliferation and detection.

When discussing the dangers of nuclear weapons, we often overfocus our attention on missiles and missile defense. Unfortunately, proliferation challenges are changing significantly, and there are, unfortunately, many ways to deliver a nuclear weapon, for example, the smuggling of nuclear radiological materials into the United States through our maritime ports or borders or through the use of commercial and recreational vehicles to deliver waterborne nuclear devices.

We must focus our resources on developing and deploying technologies that will lead to a substantial improvement in our ability to detect, verify, and monitor fissile material and devices. And we must continue to strengthen our workforce at our national laboratories by continuing to recruit the best and the brightest technical experts.

I note that much of this expertise is the same as will be required to ensure complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons programs and their nuclear weapons.

We can have the most expensive missile defense system in the world, but unless we address these unconventional threats as well, it is simply a false sense of security.

So it is my hope that, by raising these concerns and rebalancing our spending, we will continue to develop new and innovative ideas to detect and monitor the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and materials and, ultimately, make the world a safer place.

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