Deployment of a multi-layered missile defense, including space-based systems, should be an urgent U.S. priority, argues Ambassador Henry F. Cooper and Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff, in the August 28 edition of The Wall Street Journal. Dr. Pfaltzgraff is president of the Institute of Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA) and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at Tufts University. Ambassador Cooper was the former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative and chief U.S. negotiator to the Geneva Space and Defense Talks, and is currently chairman of High Frontier, a missile defense advocacy group. Both participated in the Independent Working Group, which recently released the report Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the 21st Century.The authors write: “We should make it virtually impossible for any adversary—rogue states, non-state actors and larger strategic competitors—to influence U.S. decisions, or the course of regional conflicts, by threatening to launch missiles with nuclear weapons against the U.S., its deployed forces or its allies.”
The U.S. needs a “continuously ready, global, multilayered system to provide multiple shots at attacking missiles and their warheads in all their phases of flight.” Such defenses would make a missile attack against the U.S. an expensive endeavor, and therefore less attractive for enemies to buy the technologies to overcome them.“The ABM Treaty era showed that it is the absence of defenses, rather than their presence, that encourages the development of offensive technologies.” To accomplish this, the U.S. should complete the ground-based sites in Alaska and California but build no additional ground-based sites. Limited resources would be better spent deploying more effective sea- and space-based missile defense components.
The U.S. has already invested $80 billion in over 80 Aegis-equipped warships armed with Standard Missile-3 interceptors, which provide an effective defense against cruise missiles. An additional investment of $100 million per ship, they write, would enable these flexible platforms to shoot down ballistic missiles, and thus provide an effective near-term defense capability. For a long-term global defense, the U.S. should invest in space-based systems that can intercept ballistic missiles in all phases of flight. T
he technology already exists in the form of Brilliant Pebbles, a space-based system developed during the Reagan and first Bush administrations but never completed. Brilliant Pebbles consists of a constellation of lightweight satellites that would release watermelon-sized interceptors into the path of the oncoming missiles and destroy them by impact. Cooper and Pfaltzgraff point out that all key technologies for Brilliant Pebbles were proven by the mid-1990s, and that the more advanced technology of today would provide such a system with even greater capabilities.
FYI Ping
Great idea. Now go convince Congress to pay for it.
Just after the posted article was published...
US Missile Defense System Intercepts Rocket in Test
September 2, 2006 | DAVID S. CLOUD
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1694629/posts
Main consequence of this is the disqualification of the author of the article from further comment on anything.
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While the article points out a valid threat from short range offshore missiles, it does not promote a valid defense. Unless you are willing to put 10,000 ships off our shores with short range missile defense systems thereby making our navy impossibly large, there is no way to protect from this threat.
The best way to protect ourselves from this threat is to destroy those nations that are a threat instead of trying to make trade partners with them and inviting them to send ships off of our shores.
Get a Dummycrat in office for the next president, and look forward to much smaller tax base.