no matter what the political system is like. so what does the adversary's leadership really think? that's the question that you are going to ask if you're the military planner on the other side. so when i see general -- we worked in the pentagon. i was the scientific adviser to the chief of operations. i'm highly sensitized to who says what. so when i see general james cartwright in front of the senate saying that if he -- he was actually asked by -- i forget the senator now. it was actually asked by a member of the committee, if there was a crisis between the united states and north korea, what advice would he give the president of the united states about with regard to the ground

base missile defense system. and he said, oh, i would tell the president that he could have complete confidence in the system. you could see the eyebrows raised in the senate among senators. now, this guy is the second most senior member of our military. i worry -- i worked on nuclear war plants and i really worked on them. i was at the ground zero level. i really had a lot of access when i was in the pentagon and i was helping to integrate training one into the force when it was just coming in there. so i know what goes on in these plants. and it should make your hair stand on end. what these statements of a military leader of that level does is it potentially creates the possibility of a misunderstanding by leadership. when i was in the pentagon i

looked at the moscow abm system. a worthless system. a worthless system. i give a lecture on the moscow ibm system in my courses. i sat and watched that system and said, why are they doing this? what do they believe? what might they do in a crisis or a continue frafrontation tha inadvertently get them in a nuclear war that is not true. the fact that this system doesn't have capability doesn't stop them from speculating about the potential for accidents that could leads to nuclear war. let me just end here because i can see harold is getting out the club. i'm sure my other colleagues here will have their own clubs to use against me. thanks.

>> thank you, ted. thank you very much. i want to thank all three speakers, of course. michael? i had promised and i will keep that promise that we'll take some time just to let the three speakers clarify what the other speaker may have said or may have not said. i think we'll deep same order as we had. michael, would you like to just comment on what dean and ted have said? >> yes, let me be brief because we want comments from the floor. i'll just say a couple of things. first of all, dean has been an adviser to the defense department on these issues, current, you know, recently and currently, so he's very knowledgeable about the strength and limitations of these systems. he's also done, i think, with walt slocum, a national academy

study. >> may explain his position, just to be clear. >> let me just comment on two points that ted raised. one is was there any technical input to the ball liistic defen review, or he said there were no technical input. these are some of the technical groups that poured over the details of our systems. remember, we're talking about systems that are in the process of evolving over a decade. there's always lots of uncertainty here, in terms of what we're going to find out about our own systems and what we might find out about the threat. technical groups represented in the review included -- and you have to make your own judgment about their capability of voracity, from the missile defense agency itself, from the navy, from the air forks from the office of science technology

policy, from the white house, the joint staff to the chairman of the joints chief of staff, from several of the national laboratories and others. there were reviews or at least interactions with technical experts in britain, france, and other countries in the nato alliance and other allies. these concepts and plans were briefed to the most senior russians who had many technical experts present. so the notion that the -- that the ballistic missile defense review report was completely unrelated to any technical input is factually not correct. >> no, you didn't address that question. the fact that you're appealing

to different organizations playing a role, i've been in the pentagon, i've watched these charades put on. you go and you talk to a bunch of different people. you select what you want to say and you say it. now, if you have some facts -- are you willing to say, for example, that the current missile defense system is defending the united states right now? do you believe that? >> that is a different point. >> no, no. you can't get into it. talk about appeal to -- >> i'm responding to a couple of the points you made. if you would like to respond to that, you're welcome to. >> respond to the factual points made. >> i'm responding to the way i want to respond. >> fine. >> that's the first point. it's fak chctually incorrect. second point, was the motivation of the administration solely to a peace t-- appease the

republicans? nothing could be further from the truth. when it was denounced from, members of the armed services committee, as a sellout to the russians. that we were appeasing the russians by withdrawing the interceptor from poland. that also was not true. we were developing the systems and plans, as i described, which would over a ten-year period make an increasingly difficult for potential adversaries to use ballistic missiles against targets in europe, in any sort of cost-free calculation, it would be increasingly difficult for them. are we aware that they used decoys? of course we were aware. this is kindergarten level understanding.

we've done a lot of work on decoys. a lot of work. more work than is publicly available. we've done a lot of work on how to defeat decoys. do we have all the answers? no. will we have all the answers in 2020? i don't know. probably not. will we increase the doubt that potential adversaries could be effective in their attacks and, therefore, give them pause, cause them to not attack? in other words, enhance deterrence? i think yes. do we have the credibility to use these systems 100%? do we have the intent to use them 100%? if deterrence is about credibility, credibility is about will and capability, we will have substantially more capability tomorrow than we will today and we will have 100% intent to use it. i can assure you that the

iranian government is fully aware of this and if you think they are more encouraged and more likely to use these systems because of the weaknesses in the systems, that is a misreading of the situation. now, just very briefly on the national missile defense. i didn't talk about that in my talk. others raised it briefly. just on the table we have two systems, modest systems, one in ft. really, alaska, one in van denburg air force base, a couple with other radars around the world, intending to defend continental united states, not against a full-scale attack from russia but against limited attacks from other adversaries. this is a policy that the u.s. has sustained, obama sustained the bush policy. he's chosen not to augment the

capability, that also has been attacked by republican senators. so we have a system in place, again, just to demonstrate the willingness to defend the united states against limited attacks and we have this growth of regional network systems that are intended to make it more difficult for them to attack regional targets. final point, conceptionally missile defense involves three layers of attack. sometimes called a layer defense. slightly artificially, trajectory of the attacking missiles is into boost phase, course, and terminal phase. dercht elements of the defense are focused on each phase of the trajectory of the attacking missile. so there's boost phase intercept, which is tough. there's recourse intercept, and there's terminal intercept.

and as these technologies mature and as the networks and net -- sense of networks mature, we have expectations that the ability to degrade the attacking missile in either boost phase, mid course, orterminal phase will grow so the likelihood of penetration will be reduced. you know we say in policy, policy is about prediction. you establish a policy because you expect that if you do it, it's most likely that the following will result. sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong. but i think it's not helpful, it's not constructive, although it's often done, to impugn the motives, purely for grounds other than the technical capability. and dr. carter, whom we all know very well, who was under secretary of defense at the time

of the missile defense report, not assistant secretary, and is now deputy secretary, who is a noted technology and policy expert, rhodes scholar, oxford, long-time harvard faculty member -- >> former close friend of mine. >> -- ultimately will now be one of the key figures in the defense department as deputy secretary to oversee and evaluate the progress of the missile defense program. so i think we have the best capability we could have looking at this. this is a free and fair society and we're delighted to get the criticisms when they're on a particular point, i think the administration will -- by the way, i should -- finally, members of the congress and congressional committee staffs have some excellent technical experts and they've looked at these systems, too.

so it's a work in progress but i certainly personally believe that the motivations are sound. they're in defense of this country, and that the capability that's been put into it is also quite high and we're continuing to work with the problem. and i think it's a valuable investment. it's about $8 billion a year. >> michael, thank you. dean, we'll just keep the same order. and please feel free to comment on michael. >> okay. very briefly. the thing i like about ted's analysis is he raises one of the most challenging issues for missile defense, and that's mid core discrimination. can you tell decoys and the rest from real warheads. that is the akill -- achille's

heel. while they say the problem has not been involved, we can't do it pr fethly but we can do a reasonable job. >> i did not say -- they said we do not have the capability. >> let him finish. >> no, no, no one entinterrupte you. you spoke for 25 minutes and no one interrupted you. let mem speak and then you say what you want. >> then the facts out to be correct. >> you can correct them after he stops. >> i'm going to correct some of the facts. >> guess what, ted, i'm going to give you a chance to talk, too. >> okay. >> okay. your die tribe is not necessarily facts. >> any time you want to talk technically with me, please feel free to do so. heard a statement to you other than appeals to authority. >> okay. >> i think dean was talking. >> let me try to get out some of these points if counter measure debate is a tough one. and i've wrestled with various ways to explain it.

in my view, counter measures decoys are not easy to build. credible ones. that is, ones that can fool the kinds of radars and infrared sensors we have today. but it is true that if i define a certain missile defense architecture i can always come up with a counter measure to defeat it. i can also, once given a counter measure, i can always define a missile defense system to counter it. both those statements are true. so missile defense systems don't work perfectly. the counter measure is about a b binary issue. there are a lot of different counter measures. some are easy, trivial. some are tough to defeat. there's a problemistic calculation, maybe you get 20% of them, 80% of them, et cetera. but at difficult problem worked

very ted mentioned a couple. tumbling targets, i don't believe that's a showstopper. ted mentioned that if you cut the missile into pieces, that radar and infrared sensors cannot tell the difference between those chunks of missile body and warheads. that is absolutely technically not true. you can -- not easily, but you can tell the difference between the two. defense science board reports. it's a very good report. i recommend you all if you would like to get the technical details. it's called the science technology, issues of early missile defense. download it from the web. ted said the report says none of the radars work. there's no place in the report that says that. in fact, it says quite the opposite. >> it says the radars don't have adequate range.

is that what it says? >> it doesn't say that, either. >> well, you're wrong. >> it says that -- >> ted, i want you to comment but all in turn. >> if you increase the radar by a factor of three, then in the most stressing case, the radar is adequate. the defense science board report nowhere says that you cannot discriminate decoys from warheads. that statement is never found in any of these pages. the one place that it says is that the department of defense has not demonstrated that you can do kills a cessment. that is to say, once a kill vehicle hits something out there and you get the splatter of chunks of stuff coming out of it, the i know that the nuclear warhead has been destroyed? and that is a challenging problem as well. it's a very different problem than the decoy discrimination problem. that's the one statement they say that has not been demonstrated. they do not say say the

discrimination problem is impossible or can't work. nor does it say that adversaries are already testing decoys that could defeat the defense. there's a wonderful chart in there that shows foreign, foreign decoy release times after the boost phase. foreign decoys. that's british, french, russian, chinese, and anybody else. it does not say north korean. it does not say iranian. one of the open questions is the adversaries for the system are iran, not russia, not china, maybe the french. i don't know. but we don't know, at least there's no information in the open domain about what iran and north korea can do. and so i would submit that their ability to develop decoys that can defeat this system is problematic at best.

finally, it's true, the russians worry about phase three, rather than give you the arguments i have a paper coming out in "survival" a journal that's coming out that go into this whole question about how much the threat the system is to russia. phase three does not threaten the russia whatsoever, from europe. if you think of phase three as the polish deployment, no threat whatsoever. if you put the ships off the coast of the united states, then it could do something but that's not what the russians have complained about yet. >> that's not true. we wrote a paper, published it under the federation of american scientists. we looked extensively at the potential that united states could draw these ships back off the coast and defend the country. at least in principle. i want to be clear that in practice, i don't think the system is going to work at all. it's just another way to pump money out of your pockets through a defense ministry.

but the four kilometer, 4 1/2 kilometer could easily defend the united states in theory. to argue that an adversary has the capability but won't use it because they just won't choose to, the phase that they approach is supposed to be adaptive by putting it on ships so they can move it all over the place. i think that's in the ballistic missile defense review. so why we would not in a crisis choose to do that would defend on the crisis because it's certainly a possibility, at least in principle, and to argue that i'm only going to look at this particular military threat but not the other. both of which are within the reach of the technical capacity of the system is simply to mislead the public. if you tell people from europe, you also tell them you would

have to -- you would have to pull this threat back and use it off the coast of the united states but you don't believe this would be the case, that's what i would call a comprehensive argument. if you tell them that it is only could be done, it can't be done from europe, you don't tell them it can be pulled back, then you're misleading them, in my judgment. >> remember, it's a land based site. >> well, that's -- i'm just saying -- all right. now, since the gmv system is currently defending the u.s., according to the study that you're defending, iraq has weapons of mass destruction so we need to go to war against them. that was vetted all over the place. wasn't it? so you're supposed to believe that because air force and navy and contractors who get paid to tell the department of defense what it wants to hear and get used by the department of

defense to make misleading statements to the public, this is okay, this is -- this is what you should accept as authority. what you should do is go and look at the analysis that's published, right? the warhead, a three-meter long warhead that i can show you the data for if you take the trouble to bore you with it, we don't need to, has radar cross section blow .01 of a square meter at x band. i've rated it, push established it. dean has seen it. i don't know why it's .1 meters when he's talking about an x band radar of range. it diminishes the range. it will not acquire the target at long range and it means if there's any chance of discriminating you will not have what's called the signal to noise to do it. and let me explain very simple

notion that you all will understand quickly. if you can only dimly see an object because the threshold of what i can see, see it, i still may not be able to identify it relative the other objects that look somewhat similar. only if it's in bright light where i can really see all the details i might be able to actually identify one object relative to another. and incidentally, i've got to know what i'm looking for. when somebody tells me, a decoy problem, simple question. if somebody puts a warhead inside a balloon because we're in space and they throw out another bunch of balloons with it, and every balloon is designed to look different, my forethought, some are painted different colors, some are made different size, i want to know, how are you doing to tell it

apart? that's a technical question. i'll stop there. >> i want to thank you all. this has not been an easy topic to discuss. i am pleased to tell you that it's all going to become clear with a single question from processor of fis sicks who led the american physical society review, ballistic missile defense. hang on for just a few seconds and roger will put us straight. >> i'm not sure that's going to be true, but i'll try. so i can stipulate that this is a complex, hard problem. so i think about it, i think about it for a very long term. i thought about it in three dimensions. people have addressed two of those here. one is the political dimension. can we increase security by pursuing missile defense and, i don't know, i would hope that

conversations among the nations we're having corporations with will inform that question about whether it's going to increase global security. second, technical questions, and i would hope that r&d on systems like this would inform that part of the dimension. we saw that in the boost phase, chemical laser area, for example, where if things didn't pan out, that i think the program has been stopped or slow or -- r&d is an answer to the technical. the third dimension which is maybe the one you haven't talked about and maybe we could refocus a little on that is prioritization. i mean, we're looking at cuts in the dod budgets. there are lots of other things we can do for global security. costs obviously comes into this. no one talks about cost. how do you think about prioritizing this versus other things we can do. and maybe we could get an answer

on that. >> excellent question. i'll keep to the same order if it's okay with you, michael? >> it's hard. every constituency is claiming that their area has to be the top priority. certainly has to be an area that has to be set aside from cuts. i think that at the moment -- and it's been a while and it's going to increase, iran and north korea, the principle nation state threats to the united states, to u.s. security, to our allies security, as nuclear weapon states and as ballistic missile producers and deployers. and we have to do everything we can militarily, politically, economically, to meet those

threats. and if there are deals that can cut, arms control, other means of retrant, we're all for that. we have to have substantial military assets put against these threats. and that's what we're doing. so i don't think that missile defense against north korea and iran will be cut. certain elements might be cut. there's a phasing issue. dean pointed out there's some three-block 2b funding has been cut for down the road. but i think that, you know, this is a priority area. >> dean, did you want to address roger's third dimension? >> yes, i wish there was an answer to that question because it's the $64,000 question, not just in defense area fwhu health care and all public policy arenas. in fact, it's a great subject for the school to work on. how do you allocate resources from competing demands? i know of no good rational clear

way to do it. in my mind the liability of missile defense is the issue is not so much the technical issues, it's rather, the -- what's the term of art? the opportunity costs. i spend $10 billion a year on missile defense. would that be better spe eter s augmenting special forces, augmenting the navy for operations in the pacific since we've pivoted to the pacific? what about land forces, what about air force, what about space, what about cyber? that's all dod stuff. what about our economy? if our economy goes down the tanks, all the guns in the world aren't going to shore our country up. so you've got guns and butter trade offs. i wish i knew a better way to make those allocations, but i don't. it's a classic problem. the way the decision gets made on the hill and in the pentagon, i think it's just, you know, they hold a finger up and there

are debate, competing interests, and a decision gets made. may not be optimal. >> ted, would you like to address roger's question? >> yeah. first of all, i think if the country feels it needs a missile defense, it has to do it in a realistic way. none of this hand waving, appeals to all the air force and this and that. we all know how the system functions. any of white house have been in the pentagon as i've been in it know you can get any answer you want there. and the as far as the question of -- of discrimination is concerned, i think there's a simple way to at least think of it from a point of view as a physicist chi would argue is the easiest way to characterize the problem and then engineering detail which are important. you have to ask, are there physical observables associated with different objects that i can exploit that will allow me to tell the difference between