Today’s New York Post has an opinion piece by Peter Brookes dealing with the changes America has made in the missile shield promised to Poland and the Czech Republic. Vice-President Biden visited those two countries last week to explain the program the White House is planning to put in place there.
The new plan for a missile defense shield is based on a new evaluation of existing intelligence on the Iranian ballistic-missile threat. The Pentagon currently says that short and medium range missiles from Iran are more of a threat than any long range missiles. The decision to use US Navy ships to defend Europe from Iranian missiles is a good idea if the threat is from short and medium range missiles; however, the system promised by the Bush Administration would also have been an early warning system to protect the US.
The article points out the future dangers to the US in terms of our own missile shield:
“The Alaska and California sites could take out an Iranian ICBM targeted at much of the United States, but there are serious questions about coverage — including New York and Washington — because of the missiles’ trajectory and range.
Worse yet, President Obama decided to reduce the number of West Coast interceptors from 40 to 30, which would limit the capability to take out incoming ICBMs, because several interceptors would be fired at each missile to ensure a kill.
That means there’s a gap in our defenses against an Iranian ICBM strike until the land-based SM-3s are operational, which, by the way, will almost certainly face funding and engineering-development challenges.
In the end, the Biden proposal not only lags the Bush plan’s deployment time frame, it’s possibly more expensive and probably only equally as capable. Plus, the Russians (and Chinese) may try to get us to stand down on the new, “juiced” land-based SM-3, arguing that they’re a counterspace weapon in the arms-control talks many think the Obama administration is interested in opening on the weaponization of space.”
We currently live in a very complex world. I am not sure our present administration is equipped to deal with the complexities of that world.