ix. rumsfeld wins
How did we get here? here being a weapons-procurement policy that is governed by special budget procedures, allowing money to be moved from one program to another without outside oversight? That is exempt from traditional "fly before you buy" rules? That tolerates huge overruns -- $478-million, or six percent of the total budget in fiscal 2006? That works in carefully controlled "capability-based" tests but malfunctions under "knowledge-based" conditions like rain?

To understand what happened, it is necessary to dial back the clock to 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majority took over Congress. To make the case that America faced new threats in the post-Cold War world -- and thus needed to maintain a big defense budget -- Congress ordered America's intelligence agencies to assess the new dangers. The resulting National Intelligence Estimate was issued in 1995.

The problem began when the NIE arrived. The report concluded that there weren't any immediate threats: "The Intelligence Community judges that in the next fifteen years, no country other than the major declared nuclear powers will develop a ballistic missile that could threaten the contiguous forty-eight states or Canada."

Republicans immediately attacked this report. "Extraordinarily sloppy work," declared Sen. John Kyl of Arizona. Missile boosters mandated that a congressional commission be assembled to study this obviously flawed assessment. To ensure they got the answer they wanted, they stacked the commission with Republicans and put Robert Gates, a former CIA director, in charge. Yet Gates and his team concluded that not only was the NIE correct but that things were even less dire than stated.

Enraged, Congress mandated yet another commission. This time, the chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Working alongside Paul Wolfowitz, the future secretary of defense finally came up with the result that Republicans were looking for. The Rumsfeld Commission established a new standard of threat, asserting that any country with Scud technology would be able to easily convert to ICBM capability. Most important, they determined that the earlier intelligence efforts were flawed because they looked only at "likely" threats instead of "possible" threats -- such as North Korea and Iran and Venezuela.

This was a key conceptual shift, the difference between relying upon known facts to empirically project a likely scenario and relying upon the human imagination to conjure every possible danger. If the shift seems familiar, that's because it is the same one that occurred throughout the government after September 11th. All threats, big and small, were now on the table, and all were taken seriously. In foreign policy, this worldview became known as the War on Terror. In the realm of national defense, this idea became the missile defense shield. The vocabulary used to make the case for missile defense served, in essence, as an intellectual dry run for the arguments made about the threat level of Iraq in 2003.

After Bush's inauguration, when Rumsfeld was placed in charge of the Pentagon, he immediately began directing big budget increases toward missile defense. One day, in the Senate, some Democrats started to complain that too much money was being spent on missile defense and not enough to combat the kinds of nontraditional attacks preferred by terrorists. Joe Biden threatened to cut the missile defense budget unless Rumsfeld shifted some money toward preparing for terrorist attacks. Rumsfeld threw a fit and threatened to have President Bush veto any such bill. The day this angry standoff took place was September 10th, 2001.

Since then, the budget for missile defense has ballooned beyond all expectations. Democrats hope to shave the funding here and there, mostly in an attempt to drive the program away from premature deployment and back toward testing. But the shield itself -- its backyard grill, its permanence as a part of America's national security -- is no longer a matter for debate. Rumsfeld won: We have poured concrete and placed interceptors in the ground.

Rumsfeld also won the wider debate -- the one over how the shield would be built. With no Oppenheimer-like rocket scientist to crack the whip on contractors and accelerate testing toward something that might work sooner rather than later, the entire system is being developed by layers of midlevel managers on a slow-train schedule that has no completion date. It is being developed not just to defend us against knowable threats but against any imaginable threat. And that defense will be provided not by a system that actually works but by one that, at least in theory, is capable of working.

The old worldview of deterrence relied upon the isometric force of human nature: Both sides were safe if both were equally in danger. We have overthrown that strategy for one that depends entirely upon American superiority. But not a superiority based on diplomatic cunning, past generosity or speaking softly; rather, a "bring 'em on" superiority whose success in the clutch depends on many moving parts -- multiple Pentagon bureaucracies coordinating scores of private contractors, who in turn must come together seamlessly to boot up layers of untested technologies, all of which must work perfectly the first time.

On board the SBX, I stand on the heli­pad. I can do this because, two years after its completion, this helipad has still not been cleared for routine landings of military helicopters. So the crew has adapted it to other purposes. At the edges of the helipad are positioned a couple of bright-yellow Adirondack chairs. Scattered about are cigarette butts. For now, the helipad of our missile defense shield is a billion-dollar smoking lounge.

From here I can peer along the starboard side of the vessel, where the crew has bolted a basketball hoop on a wide deck down below. The crew comes out here sometimes and plays a half-court game in the space between the hoop and the starboard-side railing. It's a pretty challenging game, the engineer tells me, because every once in a while the players are jolted back into realizing where they are. During one game, thanks to an errant pass, the ball sailed unexpectedly over the side. The game stopped and everyone ran to the railing, skyscraper height above the surface of the sea.

"That basketball," the engineer says, "it fell and it fell and it fell, and it fell some more, and it kept on falling, and it fell a little bit more, and it finally hit the water. It's a long way down."

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