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Heritage Foundation Joins The Sweepstakes: Hardly Any Money To Enter -- Missile Defense Is The Prize

According to a Heritage report released today, the U.S. could deploy an effective sea- based missile defense based on Aegis ships in less than four years and costing less than $8 billion -- faster and cheaper than the NMD Administration's plan.

Council for a Livable World, a Washington, D.C.-based pro-arms control organization, criticized the Heritage study for promoting missile defense like the sweepstakes companies promote get-rich schemes.

John Isaacs, the Council's president, charged: "Missile defense hawks are so desperate to promote their instant defense schemes that they have begun to resemble Publisher's Clearinghouse and other companies up before Congressional committees."

Even the Pentagon's head ballistic defense missile man, General Lester Lyles, recently dumped cold water on the right-wings schemes.

In a February 24, 1999 statement, Lyles told a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee:

"I am concerned that some groups outside the Department of Defense have advocated this architecture as a ‘quick, cheap and easy' approach to NMD.

My experience - and the findings of the report confirm this - that such an approach is much more complicated. Moreover, over twenty years of defense acquisition experience tells me that when someone advertises a system as ‘quick, cheap or easy,' it seldom is."

Lyles also disputed the Heritage Foundation's low-ball cost estimate: "A stand-alone sea-based NMD architecture that could protect all 50 states is estimated to cost $16 billion to $19 billion . . . Some advocates outside the Department assert that this capability can be fielded for as little as $2 to $4 billion because it builds on the existing AEGIS infrastructure."

"This is but one more scheme to throw more tax dollars at unproven and untested missile defense systems. The U.S. has spent $120 billion thus far on missile defense,"said Isaacs.

Isaacs concluded: "The fine print on the latest Heritage Foundation scheme should read, ‘The chances of success are one in a million.'"