The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don’t exist. Sometimes, the Defense Department cooperates with Hollywood and provides advice; other times, it takes a pass, especially if the subject raises touchy issues. The Navy, for example, naturally didn’t want to help with Crimson Tide, deciding that the 1995 movie about a mutiny on a nuclear-missile submarine perhaps wasn’t in the best interest of the naval service.
Now the Pentagon is annoyed with the director Kathryn Bigelow’s new movie, A House of Dynamite, a sweaty thriller about civilian and military leaders trying to cope with a surprise missile launch against the United States. It’s not too much of a spoiler to note that in the early part of the movie, America launches GBIs, or ground-based interceptors, from Alaska—a system that really exists at Fort Greeley, near Fairbanks—to shoot down the mystery missile. Those interceptors miss. Twice.
This depiction of a failed interception, along with some discussion in the movie about the overall chances of America’s GBIs shooting down enemy weapons, has the very real Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, concerned. According to a mid-October internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, MDA felt the need to send around talking points so that the agency leadership “has situational awareness and is not ‘surprised’ by the topic, which may come up in conversations or meetings.”
[Tom Nichols: Kathryn Bigelow’s warning to America]
MDA is particularly concerned that the characters in A House of Dynamite accept that U.S. interceptors have only a roughly 61 percent chance of shooting down an enemy missile—a problem described by the film’s deputy national security adviser of “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” This prompts the movie’s secretary of defense to shout with frustration: “So it’s a fucking coin toss? This is what we get for $50 billion?”
Having worked on (and taught) these issues during my career, I thought 61 percent was too generous, but MDA is having none of it. The film’s 50–50 estimation, according to MDA, is based on dated tests and older prototypes. Today’s interceptors, the agency says, “have displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.”
Read that again: 100 percent.
Experts, including me, obviously have some questions about a claim like this one, but you don’t need to be an expert to know that there’s no such thing as a 100 percent success rate for anything. No weapons system functions at 100 percent by any measure, whether it’s a kid’s slingshot or an intercontinental ballistic missile. Military planners build redundancy into their plans and systems because they specifically reject the foolish assumption that anything is 100 percent functional. The world’s an imperfect place; machines fail and the humans who run them make mistakes all the time. As retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, an adviser to the film, said to the ABC reporter Martha Raddatz this weekend: “I don’t know of a single technological system that is perfect with 100 percent accuracy. And remember, in this case, Martha, we’re talking about literally a bullet needing to hit a bullet.”
I asked Joe Cirincione, a well-known arms-control analyst and author, whether there is any interpretation of MDA’s claim that makes sense. The only way the agency can claim that the interceptors have displayed a 100 percent accuracy rate, he wrote to me, “is by carefully selecting the data range.”
Specifically, the words more than a decade seem to be doing a lot of work in the MDA memo. Cirincione noted a recent analysis by scientists at the American Physical Society showing that the Pentagon used the results of only its most recent four tests, conducted since June 2014. “Those four hit their targets,” he wrote, but if the Pentagon “had gone back 15 years, they would have had to include the three failed tests in 2010 and 2013. That would have given a success rate of 57 percent, which is about what the film uses and is, in fact, the approximate success rate over all 20 tests, going back to 1999.”
Nevertheless, the Pentagon has a point, doesn’t it? Four tests, four hits, right?
Well, no. Only two of the tests were against test targets representing ICBMs; the other two were against intermediate-range launches, which are somewhat easier targets. So, in more than a decade, the system has had two tests against a threat like the one in the movie, and those two tests succeeded under very controlled and artificial conditions. Cirincione and others call these “strapped down chicken tests”—highly scripted events where the target’s location and time of launch is already known as part of the exercise.
[Anne Applebaum: The Pentagon’s preferred propaganda model]
Why would MDA make such a risible claim? For one thing, inflated numbers are nothing new in the missile-defense world. More than two decades ago, the Pentagon official Edward Aldridge asserted that an earlier version of the interceptors would be 90 percent accurate against a North Korean missile launch.
But more to the point, MDA is probably anticipating funding from the Trump administration for the president’s “Golden Dome,” an idea that no one seems able to define beyond a Lockheed Martin executive’s description of a “defense of our nation against all aerial and missile threats.” Donald Trump, as I wrote last summer, appears to think of Golden Dome as a nuclear-missile shield over the entire United States that would function like Israel’s Iron Dome system. But Iron Dome is a much more limited system, over a much smaller country, against much slower targets. A leak-proof shield against ICBMs is impossible, just as it was when Ronald Reagan first announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. (I worked on SDI-related projects in the late ’80s; even back then, the goal was to complicate Soviet nuclear first-strike planning, not to seal America under a bubble.)
Trump is not someone who deals well with nuance, and MDA may be guessing that “100 percent” is the kind of talking point he’d like. (Trump long ago claimed that U.S. missile defenses are 97 percent effective, so MDA is upping the ante.) The president is also someone who watches a lot of television, and MDA is probably right to worry what could happen if someone turned a White House television to Netflix while A House of Dynamite was playing. Claiming 100 percent accuracy would be a hard sell even to a sympathetic public—which is probably why the MDA memo was for internal use only—but it’s a very smart way to pitch something to someone like Donald Trump.
The military was not involved with A House of Dynamite, because Bigelow didn’t ask for their help: “I felt that we needed to be more independent,” she recently told CBS. Instead, she sought out former senior military officers and other wonks as technical advisers. (I was invited to the set and asked for some of my input on the film while it was in production, but I was not formally a consultant to the production.) And just as well, because even the most fanciful screenwriter is not going to write a scenario with a system that’s 100 percent accurate. A House of Dynamite is fiction, but at least it’s not science fiction.
