By William M. Arkin (THE WASHINGTON POST, 07/07/06):
What's intelligence for, anyway?
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says he was notified of the North Korean missile testing Tuesday within a minute of the first launch. President Bush says he Rumsfeld called him "right after launch."
The notification came from the well-worn, Cold War-era, early-warning system. Seconds after the rocket engines ignited on their launch pads, infrared cameras aboard Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites detected the heat and transmitted an alert back to U.S. command centers in Colorado Springs, Colo., where the type of missile determined and the trajectory was calculated.
Activity at the launch sites had primed those U.S. infrared satellites for more than a month, intelligence sources say. Spy satellites and U-2s detected movement, NSA intercepted signals; North Korea even reportedly issued a standard public "notice to mariners" announcing a forthcoming military exercise and missile test.
So if U.S. intelligence detected preparations for the launch of the Taepodong intercontinental missile, and it also observed shorter range Rodong and Scud missiles being readied for launch, the natural question is: Did we do enough to expose North Korea's plans to avert launches, thereby undermining its element of surprise and its reason to launch in the first place to create a crisis?
Two weeks ago, someone in the administration -- I'd suggest U.N. Ambassador John Bolton -- leaked a story to The New York Times about North Korea's missile test preparations. The leak unleashed the public side of a diplomatic flurry: Countries urged North Korea and condemned the potential launch, threats were made, defenses prepared.
But if, as U.S. intelligence sources now say, the U.S. has been expecting these launches for more than a month, and was even unsurprised by the multiple missile launches, then why didn't the government do more than leak a snippet of information. Why not announce from the podium precisely what the U.S. knows to maximum advantage in diplomacy?
"We saw this coming," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said yesterday. Hadley says U.S. intelligence watched the North initially roll about 10 missiles up to their launching pads. (Three or more missiles may still be ready for launch, and NBC News reported last night that a second Taepodong-2 intercontinental missile is in the final stages of assembly.)
Hadley is defending the administration, making the argument that the U.S. did everything is could diplomatically, but he misses the point.
U.S. intelligence knew that North Korea was preparing as many as 10 missiles for launch and it didn't publicly say anything? Because some doctrine of protecting sources and methods doesn't even provide the possibility of actually making maximum public use of what we know?
Similarly House Armed Services Committee chair Duncan Hunter (R-CA) promotes his cherished missile defense, saying on CNN yesterday that "at some point, if diplomacy doesn't work, it's all physics."
"If you have a missile in the air, and it's coming toward one of your cities, the only way to stop it at that point is not with words, but with interceptors," he said.
"Each and every launch was detected, monitored and interceptors were operational during the missile launches that took place," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says. Missile-defense geeks will argue about what interceptors were operational and detractors will argue that the technology just isn't there yet.
Is that it, that our national security reality is all physics?
The conspiracy buffs will argue that the Bush administration was more interested in testing and promoting missile defense than it was in avoiding conflict.
It's no conspiracy: We are just so wed to the machinery of response and retaliation and so in love with (and dependent upon) our gizmos and technology -- what we actually have under our own control -- we can not even conceive of or seek a different path.
A more reasonable and systemic explanation is that the old ways of "response" and retaliation still rule and that we didn't even think of making use of the details of U.S. intelligence to put even greater pressure on the North and China to avoid the crisis altogether. It seems to me though that if the United States is going to have preemption as national security strategy when it comes to weapons of mass destruction, maybe we should change our mindset when it comes to what intelligence is for.
Given how these confrontations unfold, I still believe the Bush administration has accorded itself pretty well in responding. And I'm not suggesting for a moment that a public revelation of North Korea's plans would have necessarily made a difference in Kim Jong Il's calculations. But there is -- there could have been -- another option.