Is It Time to Embrace Missile Defense?

Hunter DeRensis

Security, Americas

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood discusses the 2019 Missile Defense Review.

The 2019 U.S. Missile Defense Review is the first review released by the Department of Defense on the subject since 2010. On Tuesday, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood presented the highlights of the review at a Hudson Institute hosted event. “The specter of great-power conflict has reemerged,” said Rood. This echoes the changes in the national defense strategy by the Trump administration, which has placed more focus on threats emanating from competing powers like China and Russia than on terrorism. The 2019 review is also more comprehensive than its predecessor, focusing not just on ballistic missiles, but also hypersonic and cruise missiles.

This expansion in coverage, however, could be hiding an ulterior motive. “To be a little frank, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to be conflating all categories of missile defense together . . . I think there’s something to be said for theater missile defense and short-range missile defense, and those have proven themselves to a much greater degree than ballistic-missile defense has, but by putting them all together it kind of becomes difficult to criticize one without looking like you’re criticizing the other,” said Professor Michael Hunzeker of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. “I don’t think it’s an accident that the decision was made to kind of lump these together in a single category,” he told the National Interest.

During the presentation, Rood listed the multiple purposes that ballistic-missile defense serves. These included acting as deterrence, assuring allies that you can defend them, preserving U.S. freedom of action, stabilization, allowing the United States to negotiate diplomatically from a position of strength, acting as a hedge against unforeseen developments, and defending the homeland.