9 - Early deployment?

Summary

Previous chapters have shown why SDI was consolidated and how it acquired momentum. This chapter will examine one aspect of the shaping of SDI, namely, the issue of early deployment. This was a bid to change the programme by reordering and accelerating short-term projects.

Some of Reagan's keenest admirers believed that his vision had been captured by the bureaucracy. A disenchanted Angelo Codevilla, formerly aide to Senator Malcolm Wallop of the ‘laser lobby’, charged the SDI Office with stifling the growth of strategic defence by raising performance requirements and restricting the programme to research:

no part of it has the task, or even the opportunity, to design and develop any weapons system or any part thereof. Such things would require integration of work in all five program elements … Severally and jointly, the parts do not necessarily have any connection with the reality of weaponry … SDI is in effect a decision to postpone until the 1990s any serious consideration of what, if anything, the United States shall do to prevent Soviet missiles, once launched, from landing in the US.

In late 1986, important SDI factions started to urge deployment of SDI, with an early Initial Operating Capability (IOC) for a partial defence, to be followed by a fuller system. In the short term and for practical purposes SDI would become a defence of some ‘point’ sites, rather than being what Reagan envisaged, a comprehensive protection for the nation.