TOWARD DEFENSE SYNCHRONICITY IN JERUSALEM
As part of their ongoing collaboration on missile defense, Israel and the United States have carried out a military simulation testing joint defenses against the growing strategic threat from Iran. Defense News reports in its January 12th issue that the weeklong war games were held in mid-December at the Joint Active Defense Battle Lab facility in Israel, and involved the use of the Arrow, PAC-2, THAAD and PAC-3 missile defense systems. The goal of the computerized maneuvers, according to one Israeli defense official, was to “hone readiness in the event that the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy—together with their advanced systems—may need to come here and work with us to defend against the Iranian threat.”
MISSILE DEFENSES IN EUROPE UNDER SCRUTINY...
President Barack Obama could soon launch a review of U.S. plans to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Europe, a top U.S. official has indicated. “I would not at all be surprised for a new administration to want to review: Where do we stand in this program now? What's the level of technological development? What are the costs?" the Agence France Presse (January 20) reports the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying. This does not mean, however, that the Obama administration has any plans to abandon missile defense altogether at this time. "There's nothing there at this point that would cause you to say that there's a political disagreement or a walking away from missile defense," the official said.
That is not the message that the Kremlin appears to have received, however. "We have noticed that President-elect Obama is willing to take a break on the issue of missile defense... and to evaluate its effectiveness and cost efficiency," RIA-Novosti (January 16) reports Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as telling a news conference in Moscow. Kremlin officials, moreover, are hopeful that the new president’s qualified stance in support of missile defense could translate into diplomatic gains between Washington and Moscow. "We hope that while studying the [missile defense] project, he will pay attention to the breakthrough proposals made by Russia in 2007 on the collective Russian-American-European network for monitoring the global risks of missile proliferation and joint measures to tackle these risks," Lavrov has said.
...AS THE NEW SPACE RACE HEATS UP
Even before formally assuming office, President Barack Obama had set his sights on a new theater of competition with China: space. Bloomberg news reported on January 2nd that the president-elect’s transition team at the time had drawn up plans to expand collaboration between the Pentagon and NASA as a response to Beijing’s increasingly evident space ambitions. The focus, analysts say, is on maintaining American space dominance. “If China puts a man on the moon, that in itself isn’t necessarily a threat to the U.S.,” Dean Cheng, a senior Asia analyst with CNA Corp., has explained. “But it would suggest that China had reached a level of proficiency in space comparable to that of the United States” – a development that is of concern to U.S. defense planners because of its potential military applications.
HARD TIMES FOR ENGLAND’S NUCLEAR DETERRENT
The British government’s plans to reinvigorate an independent nuclear deterrent through a $40 billion investment in the Trident submarine missile system have raised hackles among some retired military officials. The Agence France Presse reports that three prominent British military leaders – Field Marshal Lord Bramhall, a former head of England’s armed forces, and retired generals Lord David Ramsbotham and Sir Hugh Beach – have come out publicly in opposition to the British government’s plan, still under consideration despite considerable parliamentary opposition. “Nuclear weapons have shown themselves to be completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently, or are likely to, face – particularly international terrorism,” the three retired military officials wrote in a recent op-ed published in the Times of London. Today, the authors argue, “Political clout derives much more from economic strength.”