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Whatever the Obama administration’s new missile defense plan may be, it seems the Czech Republic may still have a part to play.

Although the president dropped plans to install missile defense shields in Poland and the Czech Republic, Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, met with foreign leaders to discuss the matter. “This is … the opportunity for the Czech Republic to play a very significant role…We are talking to the government about a number of good opportunities.” (Source)

Obama’s new system purportedly involves developing shorter-range missile interceptors. “This is obviously a very big issue for us because of our deep relationships with the Czech Republic, and our hope that we can find a significant role for the Czech Republic,” Tauscher said.

Brian T. Kennedy, president of the Claremont Institute and member of the Independent Working Group on Missile Defense, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal about missile defense in Japan.

Kennedy cites what he sees as Japan’s lack of concern about strong missile defense. He quotes politician Tsuyoshi Yamaguchi, who said missile defense was “almost totally useless…Only one or two out of 100 are ever effective.”

“Unfortunately,” writes Kennedy, “both the new Japanese and the U.S. administrations appear to share an ideological predisposition against missile defense.”

Kennedy briefly summarizes President Barack Obama’s views on missile defense. The administration has cut funding to missile defense and dropped plans to deploy missile shields to Poland and the Czech Republic. Obama envisions a world of no nuclear weapons, whereas our enemies are more realistic. Kennedy notes that Japan sits between China and the U.S., and China intends to continue building its ballistic missile program. Does it make sense for Japan to move in the opposite direction?

“Today China possesses an arsenal of medium-, intermediate- and intercontinental ballistic missiles that could inflict destruction on the Japanese homeland,” Kennedy writes. “In addition, China possesses nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and is developing advanced stealth bombers to deliver them. Next year the Pentagon expects that Beijing’s JIN-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine fleet to be operational. The missiles on these submarines could strike at Japan from a significant distance anywhere in the international waters of East Asia. Beijing also seeks space-based capabilities.”

At the present rate, China may one day overpower the entire continent, including Russia. Will the U.S. be able to protect Japan, considering that our president is lukewarm on missile defense? While both the U.S. and Japan cut spending, countries like China, North Korea, and Iran are putting resources into defense technology.

“[T]he Japanese must continue to build robust defenses. Otherwise it will not be possible to build a strategic relationship between the two over the longer term in which Japan is not merely the junior partner but a supplicant to Beijing.”

Read the full article here.

(Image source)

 
Rep. Trent Franks of Arizona wrote an op-ed for Military Space and Missile Forum magazine about FY10 missile defense spending. He says President Barack Obama’s new missile plan includes protection against shorter-range missiles. Although countries have more short- and medium-range missiles than long-range, there are missiles capable of reaching the U.S.

Franks reminds us that Iran and North Korea are bound and determined to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) capable of reaching our shores.

“And yet paradoxically, while all of these events are taking place, our Ground-Based Midcourse Defense element, the one and only system we have in place to defend the homeland of the United States from ICBMs, sustained a 35 percent cut over last year’s appropriated amount. In addition, the administration halted the number of interceptors being emplaced at 30, rather than the full 44, as had been planned.”

While the administration has shifted resources to shorter-range missiles, it fails to consider the lethality of long-range missiles. “It would take only one nuclear armed ICBM to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans.”

To read the full text of Franks’s op-ed, download it here. (PDF)

 
Last year, Russia threatened to deploy Iskander missiles near Poland in response to our country’s plans to deploy missile defense shields to the region. The purpose of those plans was to protect Poland and the Czech Republic from missile attacks from North Korea. Russia claimed the shields would compromise its national security.

In September President Barack Obama dropped those plans.

Yesterday, Russia participated in “war games,” simulated attacks on Poland. (Source) Russia fired nuclear missiles, while troops landed on “Poland’s” coast. Held in September, the purported defense simulation looked offensive in nature to witnesses.

“The Russian air force practised using weapons from its nuclear arsenal, while in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which neighbours Poland, Red Army forces stormed a ‘Polish’ beach and attacked a gas pipeline.”

During the exercise, Russian troops also simulated suppressing an uprising of minorities in Belarus. In light of Poland’s and the Czech Republic’s concerns that Russia is dictating their foreign policy, with the Obama administration’s apparent blessing, the simulation is even more ominous. What does it portend for Central Europe?

The Telegraph quotes a Polish man calling himself Ted, who said “Russia has laid bare its real intentions with respect to Poland. Every Pole most now get of the off the fence and be counted as a patriot or a traitor.”

Strong words. No doubt Poland thought it had negotiated some sort of protection with the U.S. when the country agreed to host missile shields. Now, a fearless and bold Russia is playing war games simulating “defensive” measures against Poland.

We won’t hold our breath waiting for Barack Obama to respond in a way that would displease Russia.

 
Last week, President Barack Obama announced the nomination of missile defense critic Philip Coyle to become the administration’s Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Source)

A former assistant secretary of defense and director of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon, Coyle will advise the president on various scientific and national security issues. He called Bush-era testing on ballistic missiles “shoddy” and “thin” and disparaged the former president’s plan to deploy missile defense shields to Poland and the Czech Republic.

“In my view, Iran is not so suicidal as to attack Europe or the United States with missiles,” Coyle said. “But if you believe that Iran is bound and determined to attack Europe or America, no matter what, then I think you also have to assume that Iran would do whatever it takes to overwhelm our missile defenses, including using decoys to fool the defenses, launching stealthy warheads, and launching many missiles, not just one or two.”

Given these statements, Coyle obviously doesn’t believe Iran might have an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) by 2015. The U.S. is developing land-based SM-3 missiles to counteract this threat, but the target date for completion is 2020, five years after Iran’s possible ICBM capabilities.

Despite these projections, Coyle believes our country’s spending on missile defense isn’t justified.

As a vocal critic of Bush’s missile defense and supporter of Obama’s way of thinking, Coyle likely will breeze through the vetting process and take his place among the president’s team of appeasement-minded advisors.

Read more at the Foundry blog.

 
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.

 
It’s Vice President Joe Biden’s turn to visit Europe and assure allies we didn’t abandoned them when we dropped plans to deploy missile shields, which would have helped defend the region from Iranian attacks.

Supporters of strong and comprehensive missile defense saw the move as an attempt to placate Russia, notoriously hard to please. President Barack Obama’s decision ostensibly was based on new intelligence showing Iran’s shorter-range rockets to be a greater threat than its long-range rockets.

Biden’s three-day trip is the first such visit to the Poland-Czech Republic region by a high-level official since the plans were dropped. Tony Blinken, Biden’s national security advisor, said Biden will discuss America’s “strong commitment to missile defense and to a better system, a more effective system, than the one we had originally proposed.”

The vice president will attempt to assure the two countries that the new missile defense system is better than the previous one. Will he also try to convince them the U.S. is not trying to appease the former Soviet Union? Although the administration denies the accusation, it looks like appeasement. Russia considered the shields a threat, and now the shields won’t happen. The U.S. wanted Russia to issue tougher sanctions against Iran, and Russia so far has refused. The U.S. has received nothing in the appeasement deal, and we appear weak.

We doubt Biden will say anything to change that perception.

(Source: ABC News)

 
Last week we blogged about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Russia, a country she claimed was being “extremely cooperative.” She echoed the president’s intent to “reset” relations with Russia and agreed to stop criticizing the former Soviet Union about its human rights abuses.

Russia has refused to issue tougher sanctions against Iran. In fact, the country’s leaders didn’t even want to discuss the matter. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process. Threats of new sanctions and pressure against Iran under current circumstances are counterproductive.”

What, if anything, has the U.S. gained in talks between the two countries or from the compromise we made on missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic? Columnist Charles Krauthammer asks these and other questions (Source):

“[W]hat’s come from Obama’s single most dramatic foreign policy stroke — the sudden abrogation of missile defense arrangements with Poland and the Czech Republic that Russia had virulently opposed? For the East Europeans it was a crushing blow, a gratuitous restoration of Russian influence over a region that thought it had regained independence under American protection.”

Krauthammer notes that despite how the talks were reported in the media, President Dmitry Medvedev didn’t budge on Iran sanctions. According to Lavrov, threats of pressure on Iran are of no use. At which point would it be productive to threaten tougher sanctions? The U.S. is retreating on missile defense, as Russia calls the shots, and Iran and North Korea defiantly continue their missile development.

Rather than dealing with Iran without Russia’s help, the Obama administration appears indecisive and desperate at the expense of resetting relations with a country that has all but refused to compromise.

“The Russian leadership, hardly believing its luck,” Krauthammer writes, “needs no interpreter to understand that when the Obama team clownishly rushes in bearing gifts and ‘reset’ buttons, there is nothing ulterior, diabolical, clever or even serious behind it. It is amateurishness, wrapped in naivet, inside credulity. In short, the very stuff of Nobels.”

 
Reuters reports that Poland may be in the running to receive missile interceptors under President Barack Obama’s new missile defense plan.

Poland and the Czech Republic were surprised (to put it mildly) when the president dropped plans to deploy missile interceptors and radar to the region. He purportedly intends to focus on systems that will defend against Iran’s shorter-range missiles rather than long-range.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Alexander Vershbow told reporters at a briefing to Polish officials that the U.S. will deploy sea-based and SM-3 interceptors to Poland that would target short-range missiles.

Vershbow said the new plan will be “more flexible” than President George Bush’s plan and will allay Russia’s concerns about long-range missile interceptors.

No doubt Poland and the Czech Republic feel betrayed by the U.S. and resentful toward Russia’s dominance. Poland tried to assert itself, and the U.S. reneged. But Poland may get something even better. Polish Undersecretary of State for Defence Stanislaw Komorowski said his country would bring a U.S. battery of Patriot missiles.

Agreed to in August 2008, the battery would be based permanently in Poland in 2012. We suspect Russia will object to this agreement as well.

>>  We blogged earlier this week that the Ukraine may be part of our country’s new missile defense shield plans. According to RIA Novosti, Ukraine’s president said the U.S. has yet to ask his country to host shields.

Such facilities in the Ukraine would be part of an early warning radar system, although it already has two missile radar systems. When Barack Obama dropped plans to deploy missile defense shields to Central Europe, Russia was pleased. But the former Soviet Union apparently reflected on the decision and realized it may not like the new plans, either. Russia’s Sergei Lavrov said, “We would like to receive full clarification.”

Russia and the U.S. seem to have different ideas about which countries pose the greatest nuclear threat. Russia doesn’t believe Iran’s missiles can reach Europe, and the U.S. doesn’t want to downplay Iran’s capabilities. Whether Hillary Clinton accomplished anything significant in Russia remains to be seen.

>>  In recent talks with Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer at Forum 2000, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak expressed concern about Iran.

“Iran is a threat to the entire world and not just Israel,” he said. “The international community needs to unite together against this threat and recruit countries like Russia, China and India. Israel believes that everything needs to be done to stop Iran from becoming nuclear.” (Source)

>>  North Korea seeks bilateral talks with the U.S. and remain uninterested in six-party talks. The country invited U.S. special envoy Stephen Bosworth to meet with leaders to discuss the matter, but there’s been no official acceptance.

North Korea walked out on discussions in April. The State Department’s Phillip Crowley said, “We continue our close consultations with the other partners in the Six-Party process, but our position remains the same: North Korea has to eventually come back to the Six-Party process and recommit towards denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” (Source)