America Needs Space-Based Interceptors.

• Author: Cruz, Ted
• Position: Viewpoint

Three years ago, a usually obscure Chinese naval periodical, Naval & Merchant Ships, caught international attention when it published an article illustrating how a volley of 20 nuclear-armed Chinese ballistic missiles could be launched at cities across the United States to kill 50 million Americans.

One of the diagrams was a map of Manhattan overlaid with circles inside circles, narrowing down to a point in Central Park where an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) would be aimed to destroy the whole island.

Some parts of the article were speculative. At the time, the Chinese Communist regime had not yet confirmed the existence of its next-generation Dongfeng-41 (DF-41), which can carry 10 nuclear warheads, travel at 25 times the speed of sound, and hit almost anywhere in America.

Two days before President Trump's first state visit to China in 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered a flight test of the DF-41.

There is nothing our military planners have that can stop this new threat. Our existing missile defense systems, based on the ground and at sea, can intercept a missile if they have the time to track how it's flying and pluck it out of the air. They can't stop the DF-41.

Nor can they stop Russia's new RS-28 Sarmat, which was unveiled last year by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Putin bragged that America's missile defenses were technologically useless against the missile, and Russia's state-controlled media bragged it can wipe out a landmass the size of Texas.

What we need is a space-based interceptor (SBI] system that can look down on a missile in the "boost phase," as it's being launched, and knock it out of the sky. ICBMs are most vulnerable during that phase: they're moving at their slowest, their heat signatures are most pronounced, and their countermeasures against interception are rudimentary. Once they get into space, all those vulnerabilities disappear. The missile can maneuver, its heat signature drops off, and it can deploy decoys and other countermeasures.

Two years ago, I fought for and won a provision to remove statutory limitations on our missile defense. That was an important first step. Last year, I authored and passed a bipartisan amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act...