Since the mid-1980s, hawks have pressured Congress and the executive branch to integrate missile defense and space weapons into U.S. national security strategy and military budgeting. In the late 1990s, during the Clinton administration, hawks in the Republican Congress mandated the creation of numerous commissions designed to demonstrate that the administration was weak on defense issues.
The commissions with the highest profile were those established to assess the need for ballistic missile defense and space weapons. Both commissions were chaired by Donald Rumsfeld and included former high military officers and defense industry officials as members. Other "threat assessment" commissions included the Panel to Assess the Reliability, Safety, and Security of the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, headed by John S. Foster, and the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, headed by William R. Graham.
The House Armed Services Committee established the EMP Commission under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2001. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) led the initiative to establish the new commission, asserting that the Clinton administration was ignoring the threat of an EMP attack. (An EMP attack entails detonating a large nuclear weapon in the atmosphere to generate a pulse that could knock out a region's electronics-based infrastructure-communications, computers, power generation, etc. There has never been such an attack.) According to right-wing leader Paul Weyrich, Bartlett heard about the supposed threat when he and another congressional hawk, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), conferred with Russian Duma counterparts, one of whom said that Russia had the ability to shut down the U.S. power and communications grid for six months with a EMP attack (OpinioNet, January 4, 2005).
On July 22, 2004 the commission released its report to Congress, concluding that a nuclear-generated EMP is "one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in the defeat of our military forces." According to the commission, an EMP attack "has the capability to produce significant damage to critical infrastructures and thus to the very fabric of U.S. society" and would obstruct the ability of "the United States and Western nations to project influence and military power."
Though the commissions headed by Rumsfeld focused almost exclusively on threats from hostile states including China, North Korea, and Iran, Graham's EMP commission stressed that in addition to peer competitors and rogue states, an EMP attack could be launched by a non-state actor. "A determined adversary can achieve an EMP attack capability without having a high level of sophistication," the commission warned.
Not to worry, though, said the commission, since correcting to the "current vulnerability" is "feasible and well within the Nation's means and resources to accomplish." The EMP Commission recommended that the U.S. government spend $20 billion to $200 billion over 20 years to "harden" U.S. critical infrastructure, including that of the power and telecommunications industries. It also recommended that the United States move immediately to ensure that it has "vigorous interdiction and interception effort to thwart delivery."
Despite its alarmist tone, many experts say that EMP is nothing to worry about. "If terrorists did manage to build a nuclear weapon, it is highly improbable that they could produce an efficient EMP-producing nuclear weapon, according to nuclear physicist Richard Garwin, who also published one of the first theoretical papers on EMP," reported the Project on Government Oversight ("Checking the Pulse of EMP," November 22, 2005).
Some neoconservatives have also touted the EMP "threat." The Center for Security Policy's Frank Gaffney told Bill Gertz of the right-wing Washington Times: "This is the single most serious national-security challenge and certainly the least known" (Washington Times, November 22, 2005). War Footing, a book edited by Gaffney, cites the EMP threat as a danger to the United States.
Of the nine members of the EMP Commission, most had close ties with the high-tech defense industry, including Graham, Foster, Robert J. Hermann, Henry M. Kluepfel, retired Gen. Richard Lawson, Gordon Soper, and Joan Woodard.
Graham, who served on the two Rumsfeld-led commissions, also served as an adviser to the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, the Space Relationship, and the 21st Century, which in October 2006 recommended a stronger U.S. commitment to a missile defense system "capable of constant defense against a wide range of threats in all phases of flight-boost, midcourse, and terminal." According to the group, "A truly global capability cannot be achieved without a missile defense architecture incorporating interdiction capabilities in space as one of its key operational elements." Among other government positions, Graham was chairman of the Strategic Defense Organization, which was renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization under President Bill Clinton (and later the Missile Defense Agency).
Foster's industry ties include his role as director or consultant to such corporations as GKN Aerospace Transparency Systems, Technology Strategies and Alliances, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky Aircraft, Ninesigma, Defense Group, and TRW. In 1999, he was called by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to head the Foster Panel. A former Department of Defense official, Foster has over the past four decades been instrumental in pushing for new nuclear weapons development and testing.
Hermann is senior partner of Global Technology Partners and a former senior vice president of United Technologies Corporation. Kluepfel is corporate vice president in the Enterprise Security Solutions Group of the high-tech contractor SAIC. Lawson is chairman of the Energy, Environment, and Security Group Ltd. Gordon Soper is a vice president with Defense Group Inc. Joan Woodard is deputy director of Sandia National Laboratories. The two other commissioners-Earl Gjelde and Lowell Wood-have no apparent ties to the defense industry but are, respectively, chief officer of the Summit Energy Group and a Hoover Institution fellow who is a member of the Technical Advisory Group of the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence.
Nick Schwellenbach, an investigator at the Project on Government Oversight, wrote: "The EMP Commission is a case study in the revolving door between industry, pro-industry nonprofits, and the Pentagon" (AlterNet, September 21, 2005). In an investigative report on the EMP Commission, Schwellenbach asks, "Given their conflicts of interest and the controversial assumptions behind their report, questions about their credibility arise: Is the EMP Commission's scenario realistic or is it scare-mongering to rally support for missile defense?"
The EMP Commission has also run into criticism in its citation of an Iranian article that supposedly shows Tehran thinks EMP weapons could help it defeat the United States. As Schwellenbach reported in a piece aptly titled "EMPty Threat?": "Just one small problem-the article never mentions EMP, or for that matter nuclear weapons. Titled 'Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars,' the author offers a brief overview of contemporary Western thinking on information warfare, focusing on such issues as internet hacking, computer viruses, and disrupting communications. The article does indeed envision American soldiers unable to find food or fire a single shot-but this is not due to an EMP attack, but rather the result of enemy infiltration of information networks. As it turns out, the EMP Commission didn't need to look all the way to Iran to quote this material. The Iranian author credits the information to the Washington Post" (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2005).
