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.
Indeed.
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.
Wrong. First it is recommending Brilliant Pebbles...which was killed by Clinton for purely ideological axe-grinding reasons. It also envisions about 22 NMD-dedicated ships with a FIXED SM-3 FlightIIa (drastically increasing range and closing velocity)...and uprating the other 80+ Aegis ships so they could supplement in a pinch...all could do the job. Their range would be a start, and later on TBMD or the KEI Kinetic Energy Interceptor would be added to the very same ships with more than twice their range. Deployed in conjunction with a reasonable screen of PAC-3s and THAAD city defenses...that we should already have deployed to deal with the high and low air threats such as cruise missile threats, we can have some confidence against essentailly all sporadic "anonymous" attacks.
And the thicker the BP screen is made, the more robust it will be against the ICBM threat from our "friends and trade partners"
The best way to protect ourselves from this threat is to destroy those nations that are a threat
In principle, (the best defense is a good offense) Agreed. But that isn't happening...or ever going to happen. Plus, these threats are near-term, not just long...and they are not being adquately recognized as such by the decision makers that are obstructing. Our RINO-In-Chief is too squeamish and "compassionate."
..instead of trying to make trade partners with them and inviting them to send ships off of our shores.
I'm with you on that..keeping a reasonable perimeter and forcing US-only transipments to protect ourselves. But again, that isn't going to happen...unfortunately. W thinks that such an aggressive approach is a retreat, and cowardice. And he is totally wedded to dressing up Thomas Barnett's trade "entanglement" theology as a "strategy".
Agreed.
I think to an extent we are already seeing that, however. We are seeing W RINO/RAT-policies in action. He is procrastinating...interfering with Rumsfeld's own desires to deploy... to an extreme extent. I am frankly surprised he has not resigned in protest yet.
An early Aegis defense could have been fully tested and deployed in ONE YEAR from when he took office...and the 22 NMD-dedicated ships put on order. Instead, he has had it all on the back-burner. Saying "no" to TBMD, KEI, and SM-3 FlightIIa, or the 22 NMD-Aegis ships...or Rumsfeld's staff reviving Brilliant Pebbles [they recognized that BP would be a far cheaper...and more robust... alternative to GBI].
W's naval ship procurements rate is precisely one-half of what the traitor Bill Clinton had. W came in with a Navy of 344 ships. It has been forcibly reduced...in war time...to 281 ships. At the current build rate, the Navy will collapse to only 180 ships. He is openly having think tanks justify a 9-carrier fleet. He is allowing to be retired without any alternative replacement all the S-3 Viking ASW planes and the F-14 air-superiority fighters (the F-18 cannot and does not replace the F-14). China will surpass our Navy by 2015. He has retired many ships with most of their service life unused, and his bean-counters have openly started talking about retiring older Aegis ships.
Remember the old saw, that "Only Nixon could go to China." Likewise today...what else CAN we think of him? Only W can destroy our Navy and Air Forces the way the Xlintons WANTED to.