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November 25, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Missile Milestone Sea change in missile defense.

ovember 21, 2002 is likely to be remembered by the national-security community not only as the day the U.S. Navy successfully intercepted a ballistic-missile target in its "ascent" phase. That date in history may also be recalled as the beginning of a fundamental — and enormously consequential — sea change in the way the Bush administration thinks about, and performs, missile defense.

The test involved the third-straight intercept by a SM-3 missile launched from a cruiser, the U.S.S. Lake Erie, equipped with the Aegis-fleet air-defense system. As in the previous two events, the Navy shot down an Aries rocket simulating a Scud-class short-to-medium-range missile. Such weapons were used by Saddam Hussein in 1991 to attack U.S. and allied targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; one of these caused the largest single loss of American lives in Operation Desert Storm. There is reason to be concerned that Saddam still has a small number of such missiles, perhaps equipped with chemical or biological weapons, and may use them in the event hostilities with Iraq resume.

Another frightening possibility was noted recently by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. At a Washington symposium on October 24, Donald Rumsfeld's influential second-in-command asked rhetorically:

What is to stop [rogue states] from launching shorter-range ballistic missiles that they already possess today from cargo ships near our shores, perhaps using non-state terrorist surrogates to attack without fingerprints. It's not a far-fetched threat. The United States test launched a captured German V-2 rocket from the deck of a ship in 1947. And recently we have observed indications of an outlaw state attempting to do the same thing with a short-range ballistic missile from a ship.

Were this capacity realized by such a state, it might be able to attack the U.S. without having to invest the significant time and resources necessary for developing a long-range-missile capability. Until now, there has been nothing in place that we could use to prevent such an attack.

That intolerable situation began to change last week. Two previous Aegis/SM-3 tests demonstrated the Navy's ability to use now-available sea-based defense technologies to shoot down enemy missiles later in their flight. The intercept above the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, however, proves that such technologies can also be used to destroy ballistic missiles as they are rising.

The ability to perform such a feat means that, if necessary, it will be possible to try to intercept an attacking missile at several points along its trajectory. This "layered" defense greatly increases the probability of protecting large areas against missile strikes. What is more, the inherent mobility of the Navy's Aegis cruisers and destroyers — of which there are now more than 60 in the fleet — offers the possibility of affording antimissile defenses not only to the territory of the United States but to our allies and American forces overseas, as well.

In fact, the Pentagon is reportedly going to deploy an Aegis ship to the waters off Israel in the near future. Apparently, the idea will be to exercise its radar with Israel's indigenous missile-defense capabilities — adding additional test data to a similar U.S. experiment conducted last month while potentially considerably augmenting Israel's antimissile protection.

If the ship had SM-3s aboard, it might be able actually to help shoot down any ballistic missiles launched at Israel. Such a deployment could, moreover, prove a valuable model for American cooperation with other allies, especially those in Europe and Japan who have either Aegis ships of their own or ones whose systems can be operated in a collaborative fashion.

Best of all, thanks to the enormous investment the U.S. Navy and its counterparts have made in the ships, sensors, communication gear, and other infrastructure needed for sea-based missile defenses, the costs of putting such a capability in place are a fraction of those associated with other alternatives. There will surely continue to be a need over time for at least some of those alternatives — particularly space-based antimissile sensors and weapons. But the immediate commencement of deployment of limited missile defenses at sea offers a way to buy the nation time to begin to address the current threat, while evolving, improving, and augmenting the systems first deployed on an emergency basis.

In recent months, the Bush administration has rightly shown growing confidence in the Navy's ability to make a real contribution from the sea to the security of our homeland and other priority areas targeted for ballistic-missile attack. The successful November 21 test was a giant leap forward in this mission.

— Frank J. Gaffney Jr., a Reagan Defense Department veteran, is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy