Missile Defense Investments Pay Dividends for Civilians.

Created in 1984 as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the United States' ballistic missile defense (BMD) program is attempting to develop a complex system of ground-based interceptor missiles, carrying kinetic kill vehicles that would destroy enemy ballistic missiles. Since its inception, the BMD program received about $60 billion, in a continuous flow of about $4 billion annually.

Most of the funding has been allocated to technologies for target surveillance, acquisition, tracking and kill assessment, directed energy weapons and kinetic energy weapons.

To justify these expenditures, the BMD organization has publicized an array of potential benefits that would accrue from its program, in the form of commercial technology spin-offs. (More details are available on the Web site: www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/update.

Among those spin-offs are applications for the automotive industry, computers and space and innovations in medical technologies. For instance, Honeywell's ring laser gyros developed for BMD were used in commercial aircraft such as Boeing's 737s and 777s, with marked improvements in reliability.

If the BMD program proves to be successful, its benefits to national defense will be obvious. In the meantime, it appears that the wrong questions are being asked concerning this program, thus generating biased answers.

All scientific and technological projects that are geared to challenging and complex phenomena are by nature risky, with uncertain results or timelines for success.

There are no guarantees that a chosen technical approach will succeed. In 1909, for instance, Paul Ehrlich discovered the effective use of organic arsenic in the treatment of syphilis--after 605 experimental attempts. He named the compound "Salvarsan (savior of souls) 606."

Arguments that funding the BMD system will lead to a renewed arms race are based on the underlying assumptions that other nations today have the ability to join in such a development. No other country or group of countries has the economic resources to catch up to 15 years of technological development of the U.S. BMD program, or to embark on a continuing effort.

The questions that should be asked are not whether the United States should fund this specific program, but:

* Whether the funds allocated for BMD are science and technology dollars that perhaps should be used for other Pentagon priorities.

* Whether these funds should be reallocated to civilian science programs.

Once we set aside the issues of inherent risks and the threat of a renewed global arms race, we should fund the BMD effort because of the potential benefits from such massive investments in cutting-edge science and technology.

The primary reason for the BMD program is to create a protective shield against enemy missiles. But, even if an effective shield does not materialize, these massive investments in technology will produce outcomes that will be diffused throughout the U.S. economy and society.

Scientific innovations, thus, will be widely diffused and adopted by a myriad of users in economic and social organizations. In this sense, the distinctions between military and civilian technology efforts are impractical and insignificant.

Historically, nations that were able to implement technological outcomes across sectors proved to be more secure. In addition, there are benefits accruing to social and economic activities such as healthcare, manufacturing and information technologies.

As we experience a decline of the public role in funding national science and technology--that gap being filled by industry--investments in a massive interdisciplinary scientific program are a welcome infusion into the overall national strategy for technological advancements.

In 1996, a Congressional Budget Office report estimated the total cost for the BMD program to be about $5 billion a year through the year 2030. However expensive some believe this figure to be, such an annual infusion of science and technology funding merely replaces the reduction in federal funding commitments for science and technology in the 1990s.

Funds spent on the complexities of a ballistic missile defense network will bear fruits that will reverberate throughout the economy. In the final analysis, years hence, the development of a working ballistic missile defensive shield may be considered a "bonus" outcome.

America's world superiority, accrued in the past 50 years, has been due to the confluence of factors such as massive investments by both public and private sectors in science and technology, popular support for those programs, investments in an infrastructure of research institutions and education and an environment supportive of entrepreneurship and innovation.

To be sure, there is much skepticism within the scientific community about the BMD program.

Two tests of the system failed in January and July 2000. Scientists opposing the project cited the complexity of the technologies involved, and the low probability that the system will be feasible at all.

Last May, Professor Theodore Postol, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a letter to then White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. The letter contended "that the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle will be defeated by the simplest of balloon decoys."

Eliezer Geisler is professor of organizational behavior at the Stuart Graduate School of Business, Illinois Institute of Technology.