BMD'S SHIFTING FOCUS
The Obama administration's planned overhaul of U.S. missile defense systems will make the United States more vulnerable to ballistic missile attack in the future, a new study by a leading defense think tank has warned. "The net effect" of the Obama administration's decision to cut some $1.4 billion from the Pentagon's requested budget for missile defense activities "is to shift the focus from national missile defense (NMD) systems, designed to protect the United States from strategic ballistic missile attack, to theater missile defense (TMD) systems, intended to protect forward-deployed US forces against shorter-range ballistic missiles," the report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments notes. "Some of the advantages of this approach are that it is more affordable in both the near term and long term, and it invests money in systems that are proven effective." But, the study points out, "this approach does not put the nation on a path to providing the same level of national missile defense protection in the future."
A MAKEOVER FOR GBI?
Months after the Obama administration made clear its aversion to the deployment of ground-based missile defenses in Europe by virtually zeroing out the budget for the "third site" planned by its predecessor, U.S. industry is responding. The Jerusalem Post reports in its August 20th issue that a leading U.S. defense contractor has proposed an alternative missile defense deployment in Europe. "If a fixed site is going to be just too hard to get implemented politically or otherwise, we didn't want people to think that the only way you needed to use a GBI was in a fixed silo," Boeing vice president Greg Hyslop has said. Under Boeing's alternative plan, the early warning radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic originally envisioned by the Bush administration would be substituted with a mobile interceptor missile transported by C-17 cargo planes and deployed during times of crisis. Administration officials are said to be currently considering the proposal, which Pentagon planners have termed a "significant undertaking."
ARMS CONTROL VERSUS THE RRW
A struggle is underway within the Obama administration over a Bush-era plan to field modern nuclear warheads, the Global Security Newswire (August 18) reports. Vice President Joseph Biden is said to have shot down plans by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to reinstate the "Reliable Replacement Warhead" program - a effort initiated under the Bush administration to design and construct new nuclear warheads that would make the existing U.S. strategic arsenal more secure and dependable. The reason for tabling the plan appears to have everything to do with politics; according to the news service, "lawmakers have charged that warhead replacement could damage U.S. counterproliferation objectives by making it appear that Washington was backtracking on its commitment under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to reduce and ultimately eliminate its own large arsenal." Instead, the Obama administration appears to be leaning toward maintaining a more modest plan, already operational, to reuse existing warheads via the "Stockpile Stewardship" program run by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
THE MATURING IRANIAN BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT
Within the next three to four years, Iran could be able to target most of Europe with its ballistic missiles, a leading Israeli defense analyst has said. Reuters (August 21) cites Uzi Rubin, the founder of Israel's Arrow ballistic missile defense program, as saying that an all-out push on the part of the Islamic Republic could bring the preponderance of the European continent under Iranian ballistic missile reach by early next decade. “If they push it — put all the budget, put all the engineers — three or four years” is how long it would take for the Iranian regime to field a 3,900 kilometer-range ballistic missile, Rubin told the audience at the U.S. Army's annual missile defense conference in Huntsville, Alabama. The assessment tracks with recent forecasting by Air Force's own National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which warned in a recent report that Iran "could develop and test an ICBM capable of reaching the United States by 2015.”
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