Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 14, 1993 TAG: 9305140098
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Secretary of Defense Les Aspin Thursday announced the end of the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program that for nearly a decade had chased the dream of shielding the United States from a massive missile attack by the Soviet Union.
Aspin said that because the threat of such an attack had ended, the program will focus instead on creating an antimissile system to defend U.S. forces in the field and a system to defend the continental United States from limited missile attack, particularly from a nuclear-armed "terrorist state."
In a bid to separate the program's controversy-laden past from its future, Aspin said the SDI office would be renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. That was the cumbersome title it had before then-President Ronald Reagan created the "Star Wars" program in 1983 to pursue the sweeping goal of rendering all enemy missiles "impotent and obsolete."
"We are here to observe . . . the end of the Star Wars era," Aspin said in his surprise, 30-minute eulogy to the SDI program at the regular noon briefing for Pentagon reporters. "These changes represent a shift away from a crash program for deployment of space-based weapons designed to meet a threat that has receded to the vanishing point."
Aspin's announcement formalized a shift that has been under way for some time. Reagan's vision of an impregnable antimissile shield for the United States already was sharply scaled back by the Bush administration.
The Clinton administration's requested budget for such work in fiscal 1994 will remain unchanged at $3.8 billion, the same amount allotted during the final year of the Bush administration, Aspin said. But tougher times may lie ahead: The program is one of the main subjects of a bitter intramural fight at the Pentagon known as Aspin's "bottom-up review" of defense spending.
Aspin also stripped the program of what had been its unique, preferential status within the Defense Department. Instead of reporting to the office of the defense secretary, the program's director now will report to an undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, two rungs down the Pentagon's bureaucratic ladder.
Aspin said this shift reflects his plan to move out of the research stage and begin developing and acquiring systems for defending U.S. forces against shorter-range battlefield missiles.
by CNB