Posted on 08/21/2008 10:18:31 AM PDT by Schnucki
A deal on missile defences angers Russia even though they may not work
THE east Europeans have little reason to fear a strike from Iran. So why are they eagerly signing up to America’s system to intercept Iranian missiles? Because they are scared of Russia. Within days of Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Poland had agreed to host ten American interceptors. Ukraine offered to link up its early-warning radars and contribute to surveillance in space. The Czech Republic had already agreed to host the missile-tracking radar.
“We have crossed the Rubicon,” said the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, as the deal was done. Russia said any country involved in America’s missile defences made itself a legitimate target for nuclear attack. Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, who went to Poland to sign the deal this week, retorted that such threatening language “isn’t tolerable”.
Missile defences cannot fend off Russia’s huge arsenal, but countries hosting them place themselves under America’s umbrella, in effect becoming part of the defence of its homeland. American officials said the war in Georgia could have made further delay seem like surrender to Russia. But Mr Tusk offered another view: after Russia’s invasion, America at last accepted Polish demands for help in modernising its armed forces, and for the deployment of an American Patriot anti-aircraft (and anti-missile) battery in Poland.
Iran strengthened America’s case by boasting (apparently falsely) this week that it had tested a missile capable of launching satellites. Previously Iran claimed its missiles could reach targets as far away as Ukraine and the Balkans. But if it ever put objects into orbit, that would allow it to fire warheads a lot farther. The Kremlin still plays down the Iranian threat, and says America’s real objective is to neutralise Russia’s nuclear forces. America has invited the Russians to join in, to no avail.
Missile defences do not just pose a geopolitical risk that could worsen the West’s poor relations with Russia. They are also a technological gamble. The system is not fully proven. The two-stage interceptors that will be deployed in Europe have not been built yet, and the geometry of using ground interceptors against a future Iranian threat has still to be tested.
The Pentagon’s independent office to evaluate new equipment said last October that it was far from being able to certify “a high probability of [the system] working in an operationally effective manner once deployed”. It said intercepts of Iranian weapons were “very distinct” from past tests against simulated North Korean missiles over the Pacific, since shorter distances require a quicker response. The European system must also be able to deal with two kinds of missiles, intercontinental-range missiles fired at America and intermediate-range weapons fired at Europe, with different trajectories and speeds.
General Trey Obering, director of the Missile Defence Agency (MDA), calls Pentagon evaluators “very pessimistic”. He says the two-stage interceptor is a simplified version of the three-stage version used above the Pacific. The principles of missile defence differ little regardless of range. Yet critics insist that America is wasting a fortune for an impossible technological fix. It has spent more than $110 billion on missile defences since Ronald Reagan launched his “star wars” Strategic Defence Initiative 25 years ago, evoking an impossibly ambitious “shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain”. The new system is less ambitious, designed to fend off only a small number of missiles—but it will still cost as much as $10 billion a year.
The MDA is developing some 16 overlapping systems, designed to hit missiles in different phases of flight on the philosophy of “shoot early, shoot often”. The European system will try to intercept missiles in mid-course in space, where warheads separate. In several tests, the MDA has shown that it can “hit a bullet with a bullet” or even, in the words of General Obering, “hit a spot on a bullet”. In February an American ship shot down a spy satellite that had spun out of control.
But can the system be fooled by counter-measures? The lack of atmosphere in space means that missiles travel predictably, but it also means that decoys such as balloons move identically. How to identify a decoy dressed up as a warhead, or a warhead wrapped in a decoy? Critics such as Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say this problem is insurmountable, however powerful the radars and other sensors. “It is like trying to find a bomb hidden in a pile of suitcases only by looking at them, without being able to shake them and without sniffer dogs,” he argues.
Not so, says Keith Englander, chief scientist at the MDA. Even in space there are “residual” effects that help to identify warheads. He says the system can already distinguish between warheads and balloons. It cannot yet handle more complex counter-measures, he admits, but these are harder to deploy than critics imagine.
Yet some criticisms have hit the mark. The MDA wants to develop new ways of watching a missile’s flight “from birth to death” to try to identify a warhead. And if it cannot spot the real target, it is developing interceptors with multiple “kill vehicles” to destroy decoys too. Besides, the critics have a big weakness: if missile defences were just expensive junk, why would the Russians protest so loudly?
It's proven to work and work effectively to protect our Country.
President Bush needs to call Congress back to session to vote to DRILL NOW so we can look back and know we did the right thing for the future of our Country.
Doesn’t matter how many missiles Poland has, our administration no matter what party will never let Poland use them. We didn’t even use NORAD on 9-11 even after the first plane.
It's proven to work and work effectively to protect our Country.
President Bush needs to call Congress back to session to vote to DRILL NOW so we can look back and know we did the right thing for the future of our Country.
That is true. We prepare for things we have no intention of doing. We build systems we do not intend to use. The problem is that our enemies know this now, and while they were scared of us for awhile after Hiroshima, they know we’ll simply go out, do a limited action that changes little, and then go home again once the threat to us is over.
Is this a bad thing? Yes and no. We haven’t had a nuclear attack or major world war since that time. We’ve fought a few limited engagements here and there, and nothing has ever touched our soil. However, the cloud has been gathering, and the collusion between radical Islam and the hard left may be the thing that makes it impossible for us to continue this way.
Peace will never break out, regardless of the chants of the left, simply because that same left is an all-devouring monster that will always be lusting after us. And we have to keep it back.
Frankly, at this point, if we strike now, I think we’d have a chance of knocking them back. But we won’t, and they know it.
Lets hope Obama doesn’t get in and betray all these nations.
He’s already said he will gut military defense budgets.
Note that this total fraud used to insist that missile defense "couldn't hit a bullet with a bullet." Now that we have demonstrated that it can, he's gone to a fallback position.
Bear repellent..
On the topic of “behind America’s shield” -
I totally despise these (mostly European) countries that look down their noses at us for not being “enlightened” (socialist) enough, and for spending more on guns than butter,
when the mere fact that America DOES spend more on guns than butter allows them to not have to!
A good leftist would answer this with “well, they don’t have to because they don’t go around threatening people all the time.”
- totally ignoring the fact that some dictator or jihadi movement would just completely walk all over them and enslave them if we weren’t protecting them.
I don’t know about the SF stuff, but Pan Am 800 was definitely a terrorist attack, and the flight to the DR may also have been a bomb.
However, the Spanish plane was probably just the result of poor maintenance. It had been flown on the route from Barcelona to Madrid a few days earlier and had the same overheating problem in the left engine that was eventually the thing that brought it down. People are too willing to write off things to a failure of the indicators rather than to ask what the indicators may be showing.
In the case of the Spanish plane, from what I have read, they said the monitor was simply recording overheating because of a bad connection between the outside air monitor and the engine monitoring instrument. Obviously, this was not the case, and there was a problem. This plane, which had made an earlier take-off attempt about an hour before the crash that was aborted by the pilot when he saw that the engine was overheating, should never have been allowed to fly.
What about the people who said there was an explosion? And, what could break a plane in half and engulf it in flames other than an explosion?
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