Why Do Democrats Hate Missile Defense?
A rather minor story about a new phase in the country’s missile defense program got me asking the question in the title of this post.
Reuters reports that the Pentagon is moving to a new phase in development—the airborne laser, after several real-world tests proved successful from stationary positions on the ground.
The so-called Airborne Laser has been developed at a cost so far of about $3.5 billion with the aim of destroying, at the speed of light, all classes of ballistic missiles shortly after their launch. If successful in flight testing and deployed, it would become part of an emerging U.S. anti-missile shield that also includes land- and sea-based interceptor missiles.
“You’ve demonstrated capability on the ground,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said at a ceremony at which the aircraft was rolled out of a Wichita, Kansas, hangar where it has been undergoing modifications.
“Not since that time nearly twenty-two hundred years ago, when Archimedes reflected the sun’s rays to set the Roman fleet on fire off Syracuse, has the world seen a weapon that puts fresh meaning into the phrase ‘in real time’.”
“Let’s do it now in flight,” Obering told employees of Boeing, the prime contractor, and chief subcontractors Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. at the event.
There is nothing particularly astonishing about this, its simply the next step, but one that portends to realize a 20 odd year dream with no shortage of naysayers. Why are the all Democrats?
Front Page Magazine has the transcript of a fascinating exchange between Thomas Karako, a doctoral candidate at the Claremont Institute, Austin Bay, a retired Army Reserve Colonel, PhD, journalist, author and uber-blogger, Ilan Berman, a security expert of impressive credentials and finally Jed Babbin, occasional talk show host substitute and former deputy-Secretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Austin Bay:I suspect the hardest elements of the Left had invested a lot of time, energy, and youth in portraying Reagan as a mad, nuclear armed cowboy. (Recall the 1983 so-called Euro-Missile Crisis? If you don’t read about it here.) The anti-Reaganites derided SDI as “Star Wars.” Agreed, the “Astrodome” SDI (one capable of stopping, say, two hundred Soviet ICBMs) was sci-fi –or a very long sci-reach, decades away—but the hard core opposed the idea of even deploying a limited defensive system to counter an accidental launch. That hard core created political friction, especially when anti-missile missile test failures were treated to big “we told you so” headlines in the New York Times. ....
Jed Babbin: First, the issue to be addressed at the outset is not to pin the tail on the donkeys who have prevented a robust missile defense since President Reagan announced the initiative twenty years ago. If we want to play those games, the principal blame goes to Sen. Carl Levin and no credit whatever goes to the Clinton administration, who did absolutely nothing other than slow-roll missile defense. To say anything else is risible.
There may well have been genuinely good objections to missile defense, but its a matter of some mystery that history keeps proving Democrats dead wrong on security issues. No matter, Democrats just go ahead and revise history to make themselves right.
That’s Rep. Ellen Tauscher’s line on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning– liberal Democrats have always supported missile defense. Hogwash. The LibDems have spent over two decades demonizing those of us who do support missile defense. The NoKo bomb has changed the LibDem tune. That’s good, but please, let’s not try and change history — the history of hysterical opposition to strategic missile defense.
Yet another reason to pause in the act of voting for a Democrat—we simply can’t afford another interregnum in the development and deployment of a missile defense.