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Shooting Down the HypeThe satellite takedown doesn't prove anything about our missile-defense capability.

By Fred KaplanUpdated Friday, Feb. 22, 2008, at 4:56 PM ET

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Michelle Tsai explained why it cost $60 million to shoot down the spy satellite. In May 2006, Fred Kaplan dismissed the plan to put missile interceptors in Europe. In December 2004, Kaplan asked, "Must we spend another $80 billion before we admit missile defense doesn't work?" In September of that year, he wondered, "When will Bush stop throwing billions at a failing project?"

This is not to be trivialized. However, we have to assume that we're facing a thinking enemy. It is probably true that some prospective foes—say, North Koreans, Iranians, or Chinese—were very impressed by the satellite shoot-down. They may well have inferred, more than Gen. Cartwright said is justified, that the United States could really soon possess a working anti-missile weapon.

But what will they do in response? Will they see they can't win and fold their cards, shut down their programs to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? Or will they redouble their efforts—and, in case of war, resolve to fire more missiles than they'd planned to fire—in order to evade or saturate the U.S. defenses? Another way to pose the problem: What would we do, faced with a similar obstacle? The question answers itself.

Another course a thinking enemy might follow is simply not to play our game. For instance, rather than develop ballistic missiles, they might build cruise missiles—which fly through the atmosphere rather than arc into outer space. They are also cheaper and easier to build. And our very expensive ballistic-missile-defense system—on which we've been spending more than $10 billion a year for as long as George W. Bush has been president—has no way of shooting them down.

All this raises a more basic question: Who is this enemy? Officials who justify the missile-defense program warn of "rogue states," like North Korea and Iran, which have active programs to build missiles and, possibly, nuclear weapons. Or they cite the dangers of a terrorist organization, like al-Qaida, somehow acquiring a pocketful of nukes. Against these kinds of foes, a U.S. ballistic-missile-defense system—whether or not it's effective—will tend to push them toward other ways to attack us.

The smart way to play an arms race is to develop weapons that force the enemy to spend more money to counter them. A ballistic-missile-defense system pushes the enemy toward alternatives that cost less.

The other enemy that officials ponder—though they don't mention it very often—is China. They don't mention China very often because it doesn't really pose a threat right now. But if the Chinese did start to flex their muscles and build a truly expansive military force—a force that could project power beyond the Taiwan Strait—they could easily evade and saturate a defensive system. One lesson that everyone—even, eventually, Richard Nixon—learned during the heyday of the Soviet-American arms race was that offense easily beats defense. (This is why both sides signed the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty in 1972. It had nothing to do with the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction"; it stemmed from the realization of strategic futility.)

There are two threats that do exist and that a missile-defense system might be able to handle: a North Korean missile attack against Japan and a Chinese attack against Taiwan. And yet—as John Pike of the invaluable GlobalSecurity.org calculates—the U.S. missile-defense program is not geared toward either of these threats. There are not enough interceptors, nor are they deployed in the right places, to deal with either scenario. Members of Congress might want to ask why not.

There is another oft-cited scenario: a single nuclear-tipped missile launched either by accident or by a lunatic. A missile-defense system might be able to shoot down that missile—if the interceptors are in the right place and if the system is on high alert. How much do we want to spend for such a contingency? This is another question that Congress should debate, if it decides to start debating military strategy or defense budgets ever again.