Posted on 04/18/2017 7:48:07 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
As Pentagon looks for strategies to pressure into denuclearization, officials worry that intercepting missiles could escalate tensions and risk war.
The US military is considering shooting down North Korean missile tests as a show of strength to Pyongyang, two sources briefed on the planning told the Guardian.
As tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles threaten confrontation in north-east Asia, the Pentagon is looking for ways short of war to pressure North Korea into denuclearization, particularly if Pyongyang goes forward with anticipated sixth nuclear test.
The option, which defense secretary James Mattis has briefed to Congress, has yet to mature into a decision by the military to intercept a tested missile.
One US official said the prospective shoot-down strategy would be aimed at occurring after a nuclear test, with the objective being to signal Pyongyang that the US can impose military consequences for a transgression Donald Trump has said is unacceptable.
But experts and former officials said shooting down a North Korean missile during a test risks an escalation that Washington may not be able to control, one that risks war on the Korean peninsula and potentially devastating consequences to allies South Korea and Japan.
“I would see such an action as escalatory, but I couldn’t guess how Kim Jong-un would interpret it,” said Abraham Denmark, the senior Pentagon policy official for Asia in Barack Obama’s administration.
“But I would be concerned he would feel the need to react strongly, as he would not want to appear weak.”
Both sources said the military was not looking to use the high-profile missile-defense system the US is providing to South Korea, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad). Thaad’s 200km range and sophisticated radar have unnerved China, whose president, Xi Jinping, has been coaxed by Trump into pressuring North Korea.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
“What if he really believes he would win?”
He still loses everything, including his life.
It’s the US that has nothing to lose in this. He must be stopped before he has the ability to hit the US.
That’s a purely binary, and existential national security issue. Us or them, and they lose.
While we should be concerned about the impact to Japan and South Korea, and do all we can to mitigate that impact, we cannot let those concerns stop us from protecting the United States.
Acctually, they should be shot in dead
Well it’s China’s leash on Kim...they let him go as far as ‘they’ want.....but I’m not giving Fat Boy the credit....it’s the old die horses thats pulling Kim’s strings in order to sustain their very comfortable lifestyle. He’s just Window Dressing to keep the people in line who need a figurehead to worship.
need a dot release of Stuxnet.
This assumes the missile ever gets high enough to need shooting down.
President Trump apparently thought it was heading there last week.
It was not.
Yes
We cant tel what is on his missles..Shoot them down as self defense.
RE: Can we know whether it is armed or not?
Yes
___________________
OK, good. How?
...These operations consisted mainly of air and naval probes near Soviet borders. The activity was virtually invisible except to a small circle of White House and Pentagon officials--and, of course, to the Kremlin. "'It was very sensitive,' recalls former undersecretary of defense Fred Ikle. 'Nothing was written down about it, so there would be no paper trail.'"Emphasis added.
The purpose of this program was not so much to signal US intentions to the Soviets as to keep them guessing what might come next. The program also probed for gaps and vulnerabilities in the USSR's early warning intelligence system:
"Sometimes we would send bombers over the North Pole and their radars would click on," recalls Gen. Jack Chain, [a] former Strategic Air Command commander. "Other times fighter-bombers would probe their Asian or European periphery." During peak times, the operation would include several maneuvers in a week. They would come at irregular intervals to make the effect all the more unsettling. Then, as quickly as the unannounced flights began, they would stop, only to begin again a few weeks later.
According to published accounts, the US Navy played a key role in the PSYOP program after President Reagan authorized it in March 1981 to operate and exercise near maritime approaches to the USSR, in places where US warships had never gone before...In the August-September 1981 exercise, an armada of 83 US, British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships led by the carrier Eisenhower managed to transit the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap undetected, using a variety of carefully crafted and previously rehearsed concealment and deception measures. A combination of passive measures (maintaining radio silence and operating under emissions control conditions) and active measures (radar-jamming and transmission of false radar signals) turned the allied force into something resembling a stealth fleet, which even managed to elude a Soviet low-orbit, active-radar satellite launched to locate it. As the warships came within operating areas of Soviet long-range reconnaissance planes, the Soviets were initially able to identify but not track them. Meanwhile, Navy fighters conducted an unprecedented simulated attack on the Soviet planes as they refueled in-flight, flying at low levels to avoid detection by Soviet shore-based radar sites.
I won't go any further.
If this wasn't an authorized leak, the sources should be hunted down.
From now on don't let a single NK missile fly. Knock every last one of them out of the sky. Rob North Korea of all in flight research data and target their launch facilities.
No brainer: shot every missile test fired outside of NKorea down, every time.
Spencer Ackerman, one of the Guardian writers, is No. 1 on “JournoList: 151 names Confirmed (with News Organizations), posted on Thursday, July 29, 2010, 2:25:42 PM by Buckeye Texan.
No. 1. Spencer Ackerman - Wired, FireDogLake
“Wired”, if this is the same publication, is a computer/information oriented publication
There are 151 names on this “list” that I picked up somewhere. The writers range from liberal/leftist to hardcore Marxists, including “Eric Alterman - The Nation, Media Matters for America” and the now-defunct Maoist weekly “The Guardian” (US weekly).
Dean Baker - The American Prospect
David Corn - Mother Jones, hardcore Marxist from “The Nation” magazine
Ari Berman- The Nation
Joel Bleifuss - In These Times
Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic (Coates hates white Americans who aren’t Marxists or BLM supporters)
Joe Conasion - The New York Observer - this puppy has written a lot of sick shit in the past, a real hater he be
Todd Gitlin - Columbia Un), an old SDS organizer and one of their intellectual thinkers.
Michael Kazin - Georgetown Un, another ex SDS leader,thinke
John Judis - The New Republic. The American Prospect, formerly with “In These Times”, a publication of the Marxist Institute for Policy Studies
Ezra Klein - Wash. Post, Newsweek - he gives a new meaning to “snarky”, “arrogant” little shit
Paul Krugman = NY Times, Marxist economist
Katha Pollit - The Nation, veteran Marxist feminist
Ben Smith - POLITICO, now with another even further left news group
Jeffrey Toobin - CNN, the New Yorker, a real legend in his own mind
Matthew Yglesias -Center for American Progress, Podesta and Soros operation
Thought I’d give you a taste of the New Left writers/journalists who pollute the American reading scene
“What if he really believes he would win?”
Yep, I doubt Fat Boy has himself surrounded by anything less than Fanboys telling him what he wants to hear. Realists probably don’t live long in his inner circle.
Thank you. That was my first thought as well. Course, could just be more of them ‘anonymous’ sources the MSM find in thin air all the time.
Upon what do you judge it to be a waste? Missile goes up, missile gets shot down, launch site gets detected and subsequently blown up.
You judge that to be a waste?
Oh, forgot #3: Our military gets good practice at shooting down Fat Boy’s missiles.
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