Free Republic

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech that horrified the liberal establishment of the time: his call for a Strategic Defense Initiative. Ronald Reagan was not your typical politician. The only president born and raised in Illinois (yes, Lincoln, Grant, and Obama moved to Illinois as adults, but only Ronald Reagan grew up there), he came to politics with a heartland sensibility: do what makes sense, do what’s right; don’t worry about what the elites from the Ivy League or Foggy Bottom insist upon. Reagan came to party activism late in life, running for public office for...

<p>The Pentagon is canceling the planned fourth phase of an anti-missile system that had been scheduled for deployment in Poland in 2022. The SM3 IIb missile was significant for two reasons: It was the only interceptor planned for the Europe-based system that could have defended the United States against an attack from Iran; and it was the component of the system most decried by Russia, which claimed that it could be used against its intercontinental missiles.</p>

Missile Defense: The administration beefs up our Alaskan-based interceptors it once downgraded in response to North Korea's threat, while ending the final phase of the Europe-based defense against Iran it once supported. We welcome the Obama administration's decision to place an additional 14 ground-based interceptors (GBI) at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., by 2017, as well as a second TPY-2 phased-array X-band long-range missile defense radar system in Japan following North Korea's deployment of a new road-mobile missile. We are reminded that if President Obama hadn't scuttled President Bush's plans, these added interceptors would already be...

War: A decaying regime with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles threatens war. It would be dangerous to dismiss this as mere bluster from a leader who consults ex-NBA stars with a fondness for wedding dresses. North Korea's army has formally declared invalid the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953, an article in Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party, reported Monday. Threats from North Korea have customarily been treated with a high degree of skepticism. This is not 1950 with a revolutionary China ready and willing to come to its aid. Its conventional...

Missile Defense: As Pyongyang threatens a nuclear strike, the administration says our missile defenses can handle anything they can throw against us or our allies. If so it's not because of anything the president did. 'I can tell you that the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Thursday after North Korea's raging runt, Kim Jong-un, said Pyongyang was scrapping the 1953 armistice deal that ended the Korean War. He threatened a "preemptive" nuclear strike against the U.S. Carney added that "our recent success in returning...

Our National Security Illusion Built On Cover-ups and Americans forget too easily. The fact that the American people are being lied to concerning the motivation of the Islamic jihadists who attacked the U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi and killed four Americans, the reason for the U.S. unpreparedness for the attack, and the governmental incompetence in responding to the attack is beyond question. However, this incompetence and mendacity is not the only incompetence and mendacity that the regime of President Obama is covering up. On November 9, 2010, a Los Angeles CBS news crew in a helicopter videotaped a flying object...

Using lasers for tracking objects through the sky has been possible for years, but there's never been anything like Lockheed's new laser defense system successfully tested last week. It's not that using high-powered lasers to drop incoming missiles is anything new, and was achieved by Boeing with a nine-year Air Force project that was canceled in 2011. That monster laser was packed into a 747 and designed to head off ballistic missiles fired at the U.S. from very far away. Raytheon then tested their laser defense on a drone for the Navy in 2010, but now Lockheed's distilled the process...

Israel strengthened its military deterrence during the recent clash with Hamas by demonstrating that its Iron Dome missile defense intercepted Israel-bound rockets from Gaza 84 percent of the time. Most media accounts of Iron Dome in action marveled at its precision performance in preventing most of the rockets from reaching their targets in southern Israel - although a few did get through its new defensive net. Iron Dome was widely credited with keeping Israeli casualties to a bare minimum. But that's not exactly the view of the Washington Post in its Sunday, Dec. 9, edition. In a front-page article that...

A new Israeli air shield against rockets more powerful than those intercepted by Iron Dome in the Gaza conflict passed its first field test last week after being rushed through development, officials said on Sunday. They said that David's Sling, billed as Israel's answer to the longer-range missiles of Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas and Syria, shot down a target rocket in a secret November 20 desert trial that coincided with fierce shelling exchanges between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Worried about deteriorating security on the fronts with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and the international showdown over the disputed nuclear...

Security: As Hamas launches rockets toward Israeli population centers, Tel Aviv's investment in missile defense passes its acid test, destroying the vast majority. The U.S., meanwhile, is moving in just the opposite direction. On Sunday, Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system successfully shot down two Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets aimed at the heart of Tel-Aviv by Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades. It was just one of many such interceptions by what is now the world's only battle-tested missile defense system. The "Fajr" (Dawn) series are mobile-launched, unguided, solid-fuel artillery rockets developed by Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war with...

A social worker friend of mine used to talk about the ways dysfunctional families adapt and adjust to the craziness of an abnormal family member. Typically, they are so used to making allowances for the neediest family member, that they stop noticing his or her deficiencies. Only a visiting social worker, dropping in unannounced on a home visit, is able to recognize that the fact that Moishe'le is sitting naked under the dinner table eating the scraps his siblings hand him from above the table is crazy. Israel and the world have become one such a dysfunctional family, with the...

Security: As Hamas launches rockets toward Israeli population centers, Tel Aviv's investment in missile defense passes its acid test, destroying the vast majority. The U.S., meanwhile, is moving in just the opposite direction. On Sunday, Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system successfully shot down two Iranian-made Fajr-5 rockets aimed at the heart of Tel-Aviv by Hamas' armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades. It was just one of many such interceptions by what is now the world's only battle-tested missile defense system. The "Fajr" (Dawn) series are mobile-launched, unguided, solid-fuel artillery rockets developed by Iran during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war with...

The latest Gaza war is only a few days old, but already one conclusion can be drawn: missile defense works. This is only the latest vindication for the vision of Ronald Reagan who is emerging as a consensus pick for one of the all-time great U.S. presidents. For it was Ronald Reagan who made missile defense a major priority for the U.S. and our allies. His 1983 speech on the subject was widely derided as “Star Wars” because he envisioned that some missile would be intercepted in space. For years critics claimed that it was impossible to intercept missiles in...

Fifty years ago, I was a young Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer on the heels of celebrating with our development team the deployment of Telstar, the first telecommunications satellite — and also a grad student at New York University. I vividly remember the evening of October 22, 1962, watching a student-union black-and-white TV broadcast of President John F. Kennedy’s address to the nation.  The president announced that the Soviet Union was deploying nuclear weapons in Cuba, only 90 miles from our Florida coast — and the actions that the United States was taking in response. (For the unedited broadcast, see...

........Of all the waste by the Federal government and with all the other Federal agencies that could be moved to privatization, Obama selects our space program. This detracts from the progress of our missile technology that is shared with our military, it inhibits our national defense, and it damages our national identity.Space X is Obama's choice for supplanting NASA. It appears Obama has picked another loser. Move over Solyndra.Let's begin with the performance to date of the ersatz space program called Space X....."Thus far, NASA has awarded at least $2.1 billion in SAA money to private space companies,including a total...

In case you haven’t seen the video, watch it. Drink it in. Obama campaign Deputy Communications Director Stephanie Cutter, in a craven and flailing attempt to salvage the White House’s ebbing credibility surrounding their response to the 9/11/12 attacks in Libya, said that it was her estimation that the attacks were only an issue because Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan made it one. In effect, Cutter said that this attack, one of the most comprehensive and successful Al Qaeda attacks on American assets since September 11, 20001 in which an American ambassador overseas was killed for the first time since...

Obama "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility" Medvedev "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir"

This week, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski accused the Obama Administration of betrayal, saying, “Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a [missile defense] shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change of president.… We paid a high political price. We do not want to make the same mistake again. We must have a missile system as an element of our defences.” In 2009, President Obama cancelled the deal the U.S. had with Poland and the Czech Republic to build an interceptor site and radar that would provide protection of the U.S....

(Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin oversaw the start of construction of one of Russia's newest generation submarines on Monday and vowed to boost nuclear naval forces to safeguard the country's position as a leading sea power. Warning that its navy would protect top energy producer Russia's interests in the oil-rich Arctic, Putin led the ceremony to begin building the submarine Prince Vladimir, named after the ruler who founded a precursor state to modern Russia. The vessel is the fourth Borei class submarine, designed to carry one of the country's newest and most powerful intercontinental nuclear missiles, the Bulava, or Mace....

<p>"And I confess the progress didn't come quickly, and it did not come easily," President Obama said about his time as a community organizer in Chicago. "Sometimes it didn't come at all. There were times where I thought about giving up and moving on. But what kept me going day in and day out was the same thing that has sustained the Urban League all these years. The same thing that sustains all of you. And that is the belief that in America, change is always possible. That our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible."</p>