Peter Brookes on New Missile Shield Plan
Last week, Vice President Joe Biden visited Poland and the Czech Republic, the first such visit to the region by a high-level official since the President Barack Obama dropped plans to deploy missile defense shields to those countries. The Heritage Foundation‘s Peter Brookes commented on the new missile defense shield plan proposed by the administration.
“In pulling the plug on the Bush missile-defense plan in Eastern Europe last month,” Brookes writes in the New York Post, “the White House came up with a new architecture based on a new evaluation of existing intelligence on the Iranian ballistic-missile threat…The Pentagon now insists Iran is moving faster on its short- and medium-range ballistic-missile programs than on its long-range ICBM effort, against which the Czech and Polish sites were aimed. (Of course, many experts think progress in one missile program supports another.)”
The new plan may protect Europe, but what about the Iranian threat to the U.S. and Israel? Land-based SM-3 missiles, designed to protect us and our ally, are in development. The target date for completion is 2020, but Iran could have an intercontinental ballistic missile by 2015.
“[T]he Obama administration thinks that if the Iranian ICBM comes online before the land-based SM-3s are developed and in place, the West Coast, Bush-era missile-defense sites give us some breathing room…Not really.”
Brookes notes that the “West Coast” system was created to protect us from North Korea, not Iran. Sites that would protect us from Iran (in Alaska and California) may not be adequate, especially since the administration reduced interceptors at those sites.
“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.”
Other problems with the new plan are cost, efficiency, and concerns that Russia will once again “negotiate” with the U.S. to curb development of another weapon.
“It’s…a good time to remind ourselves that the purpose of defense is to be technologically ahead of the threat, not behind it — which is where we’ll be if we’re not careful,” Brookes writes.
Read the full article at the New York Post.
Tags: Barack Obama, Czech Republic, ICBM, Iran, Joe Biden, North Korea, Peter Brookes, Poland, Russia, SM-3