Effective Missile Defense

The Christian Science Monitor has a report on Israel's "Iron Dome" rocket defense system that credits it with contributing to a cease-fire with Hamas.

A key factor supporting the cease-fire was a new weapons system that allows Israel to protect its citizens and thereby lessen public pressure for swift retaliatory strikes on Gaza.

Though not fool-proof, the "Iron Dome" missile-defense system shot down about 20 militant rockets in recent days before they landed in Israel cities. That provided a window for mediators from Egypt and the United Nations to step in and calm the situation.

Iron Dome achieved a 93% success rate even though it has only deployed two of the fifteen batteries planned for defense against the Gaza terrorist attacks. For once the U.S. is getting its money's worth from some foreign aid, since Israel is essentially field-testing missile defense technology applicable to U.S. systems under actual hostile conditions.

Experts say the technology of Israel’s anti-missile interceptors – which also includes the Arrow II missile for Iranian ballistic rockets – is based on the same concepts as the US-conceived Star Wars missile defense program.

The other benefit, as the article emphasizes, is that effective defense against rockets lessens the need for immediate Israeli retaliation. This is important, since alone among states, Israel is expected to absorb rocket attacks against its cities without taking any serious retaliatory measures. When it takes even minimal measures against Gaza, its actions are called "excessive force" by Israel-haters and their useful idiots worldwide, and it comes under tremendous pressure to refrain from doing things necessary to protect its citizens. Even though it should have the right to use whatever force necessary to eliminate the terrorist threat from Gaza, Israel's unique position makes this rocket defense system even more significant than otherwise -- at least until Gaza terrorists find a new preferred method for targeting Israeli civilians.

US Funds Israeli Missile Defense

I often criticize President Obama on foreign policy, so it's worth pointing out when does something right. Israel is in the process of building a multi-layer missile defense system. One key component is called "Iron Dome."

The Iron Dome missile defense system aced a test run in January, and event that convinced senior defense officials that the defense system was on its way to becoming operational and that it will be able to effectively protect against short-range missiles, such as Katyushas and Qassams, which often hit Israeli towns.

Like most missile defense systems, it's expensive, and the question of funding was holding it up.

The budgetary difficulty that has been delaying Israel's armament with the anti-missile defense system Iron Dome has apparently been resolved. The Pentagon has issued a message to Israel's Defense Ministry that U.S. President Barack Obama has approved the transfer of special assistance totaling $205 million (just under NIS 800 million) for the purchase of more than ten Iron Dome batteries.

For those who balk at handing even more money to Israel, here's why I believe this action is in the U.S. interest.

As I've argued before, I believe that U.S. interests are best served by keeping a lid on the overall Arab/Israeli situation, and by a policy of deterrence toward Iran and its likely eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons. An effective Israeli missile defense system will do several things. First, it will lessen the chance that Israel will need to take offensive action to defend itself. Rockets which are intercepted before they strike are much more tolerable than ones which hit Israeli towns and kill civilians. It may even make Palestinian rocket attacks even more counterproductive than they are already. Why make the effort to launch such attacks if there is little likelihood that they'll hit any targets?

An Israel with an effective missile defense system is also an Israel that might be more willing to consider a deterrent policy with regard to Iran. Iron Dome doesn't counter long range missile threats, but it's a component of an layered system, which would at least partially reduce the threat from Iran's ally/proxy Hezbollah. With the U.S. tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the situation as fragile as it is in both places, the last thing we need is a major war caused by a preemptive Israeli offensive. Such a war would radically alter the dynamics of the situation, and cost far more than the $205 million we are shelling out to Israel. If improving Israeli defenses makes offensive action less likely, and I believe it does, than the money is well-spent. Finally, we have our own needs regarding missile defense. Funding what appears to be a successful Israeli project could benefit our own efforts through technology transfer. It is also likely that Israeli defenses will be tested for real, as they intercept rockets from Gaza. The data from a working missile defense system should be invaluable to missile defense research in general.

Successful Missile Defense Test

This time in Israel. Israel has been developing one of the most comprehensive missile defense systems in the world, a multi-layer arrangement designed to counter different types of missile threats. One of the major components, Iron Dome, recently passed successful tests against "Qassam rockets, Grad rockets, and mortar shells." 

According to the article in the Christian Science Monitor, the system can distinguish between threats worth countering, and those which can be safely ignored.

One of the advantages of the Iron Dome system is that it can distinguish worthwhile targets - missiles headed for a populated area – from those destined to land in an open field, for example, and not worth trying to knock out of the sky. In wartime, such a tool could be crucial.

So rather than overloading the system by trying to intercept everything, it can focus only on significant threats, giving those a greater probability of interception.

Israeli advances in missile defense are good news for the U.S. The Iron Dome System is scheduled for activation this year. The Israelis already face a real, ongoing missile threat. Their tests and actual operation data should be invaluable to our own missile defense projects.

Israeli Missile Defense

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post today about Israeli missile defenses. Those defenses take on  greater importance with the spineless, appeasement-oriented Obama administration in charge, and the recent International Atomic Energy Association revelation that Iran may already have the capability of building nuclear weapons. According the the Post, Israel is

steadily assembling one of the world's most advanced missile defense systems, a multilayered collection of weapons meant to guard against everything from the shorter-range Grads that have been used to strike Israeli towns such as [Ashkelon] to intercontinental rockets.

The article speculates that the existence of these Israeli defenses lowers the chances that the country will launch a preemptive strike against Iran. One system, Arrow, is already operational, and a second, Iron Dome, is scheduled for deployment next year.

Israel is caught in a real strategic dilemma. Ideally, given its size, its best defense against nuclear attack is preemption. But Iran's nuclear program is too advanced, and too decentralized to be eliminated by the type of surgical strike Israel favors. Any attack would bring massive and possibly unforeseen repercussions. Israel's relationship with the U.S. is the worst it has been in a long time, and no one there in their right mind is counting on support from Obama. And the U.S. clearly opposes an attack. Launching a preemptive strike, with all the dangers and drawbacks, only to achieve a delay in Iran's nuclear program, is not a favorable risk vs. reward calculation. The only preemptive attack that makes sense is a first strike with nuclear weapons, which could utterly destroy Iran's nuclear program and also cripple its ability to respond. But even for a country facing a possible existential threat, it would incredibly difficult to make such a decision.

It's not hard to see why a layered missile defense combined with deterrence appears to be Israel's default method of dealing with the Iranian threat. It's one thing for Iran to plan a first strike, attempting to decapitate Israel's nuclear arsenal and destroy the country, calculating that they can survive whatever retaliation the shattered country can muster. But if they can't be sure their own strike will even penetrate a missile defense system, even leaders motivated by religious lunacy might think twice.

A nuclear Iran is a dangerous threat to the U.S., but a deadly one to Israel. If I were an Israeli I'd be in favor of as many layers of missile defense possible, building more nuclear weapons, and deploying them to large numbers of survivable delivery platforms.

Obama Scrapping Missile Defense Plans

President Obama can never do something right without following it with an ill-advised action. Just the other day, I was congratulating the president for the successful operation in Somalia. But today, reports indicate that Obama will abandon our missile defense plans in Eastern Europe.

The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

This action is yet another example of Obama's inexperience and naivete in foreign policy matters, one of the many reasons that someone with his minimal qualifications should never have been elected president.

The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran's long-range missile program hasn't progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

So that means we are going to wait until it actually is a serious threat before deploying defensive measures. That's some brilliant national security thinking -- about what I'd expect from a Democrat.  But let's pretend that the administration's lame explanations for abandoning hard won plans for missile defense in the region are actually accurate, instead of just fables covering its obvious preference for empty talk and wishful thinking over concrete security measures. Instead of scrapping deployment unilaterally, why not at least use it as a bargaining chip to extract some serious concessions from the Russians? Instead, Obama is just going to project his usual weakness, hand Putin a victory on a silver platter, alienate our friends in Eastern Europe, and demonstrate yet again that we can't be trusted to follow through on security arrangements.

New Reports on Missile Defense

The GAO and other organizations have recently released reports on ballistic missile defense (BMD) progress. The full GAO report can be found here, and the others here. USA Today has a misleading article up about them called, "Reports question U.S. shield of Europe." The first paragraph reads:

After 24 years and more than $100 billion spent to develop a U.S. missile defense, an American-operated system proposed for Europe would cost billions more to deploy and still may fail, a series of independent reports concludes.

Sounds bad, doesn't it? If you read through the article you'll see some pro and con views on BMD, but one of the cons is from the Union of Concern Scientists, which opposes missile defense on ideological grounds, and would almost certainly oppose deploying a system even if it was proven 100% effective. So their objections can be easily dismissed. The last word is given to a damning quote from physicist Richard Garwin:  

because it can be so easily defeated by decoys, the "system is not worth deploying, because it will be useless."

When otherwise smart people make such stupid comments, you have to question their motives. How about we work on improving it so that it can't be easily defeated by decoys?

Some of the main criticisms of missile defense are intellectually dishonest or just plain unreasonable. Pretty much everyone agrees that BMD requires some of the most complex military systems every devised. The idea that we are going to be able to develop, purely through testing, anything like a fully effective system is just crazy.  Military systems don't work that way. Prototypes have to be built, changes have to made. Sometimes after you build them they don't work right at all. Many of the critics are not interested in building effective BMD. They just want to block it entirely.

We will never have effective BMD until we deploy a full system and start extensively testing and modifying it based on actual conditions. Yes it will be extremely expensive. And yes, there is a chance that it may never achieve the results we want from it. It may have to be rebuilt, and almost certainly will have to be massively re-engineered, modified, and constantly updated. But if we don't deploy an actual complete system, we will never have effective BMD. At some point limited testing has to translate into actual deployment. We should reject the idea that we can't deploy until it is ready for action -- because it never will be. It will always need further testing.

Where the critics are correct is that we need to carefully monitor the Pentagon and associated contractors, push for more realistic testing, and expose overly optimistic propaganda that makes grandiose claims based on limited, controlled testing. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that any newly deployed system is going to be truly effective. Instead we should regard these new systems as first-generation prototypes that are very unlikely to work as advertised. 

Obama's "secret" proposal to Russia

The New York Times reports that

President Obama sent a secret letter to Russia’s president last month suggesting that he would back off deploying a new missile defense system in Eastern Europe if Moscow would help stop Iran from developing long-range weapons

It's hard to know exactly what to think about this situation. Was this just a type of trial balloon? What exactly does the Obama administration think the Russians can do about Iran? Who leaked the letter and why?

Taking this story at face value, I don't think using our missile defense system as a bargaining chip is a good idea, especially since it doesn't appear that Russia can actually deliver anything of equal value in exchange. As I have written before, unless a drastic change occurs within Iran, it is not going to give up its nuclear ambitions. Let's stop pretending that diplomacy is going to magically alter its committed national aspirations and start facing reality. Iran will eventually have nuclear weapons, and it already has various delivery systems. Our only option other than war -- which is simply not a realistic possibility -- is deterrence. Missile defense will be a particularly useful part of that deterrent effort. It's one thing to calculate a nuclear strike based on the threat of retaliation, but a defense system adds the possibility that your strike will also be ineffective -- i.e. you could face the consequences of launching an attack without even hitting a target.

I have no problem with the U.S. making deals with Russia, if necessary to improve our strategic position, or our position with regard to Iran in particular. But I do object to any attempt to sacrifice our missile defense. We should have had missile defense systems working and deployed years ago. That gaping hole in our defenses has been there far too long, and we shouldn't delay deployment based on something as minor as  some sort of nebulous "help" from Russia, regarding something they have no more control over than we do.

33 Minutes

The Heritage Foundation is producing a documentary promoting missile defense. The trailer can be viewed here. I've been strongly in favor of developing missile defense systems for a long time, and wrote about the issue back in November.

Missile Defense

There' a good article in the Wall Street Journal by Brian T. Kennedy of the Claremont Institute.  It details the catastrophic consequences of EMP,  from an attack by even a single nuclear weapon. Kennedy makes a strong case for missile defense.  As he points out, our current capability consists of:

only a rudimentary system designed to stop a handful of North Korean missiles launched at our West Coast. Barack Obama will become commander in chief of a country essentially undefended against Russian, Chinese, Iranian or ship-launched terrorist missiles.

This has been something I've thought was crazy for decades, since I first became aware of the strategic situation during the Cold War. There has long been only one threat, against which we had no defense, with the potential to completely destroy the United States: nuclear ballistic missiles. During the Cold War we deliberately chose to leave ourselves defenseless, as part of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine. Because of the calculus of MAD, we wasted 30 plus years when we could have been developing and testing countermeasures.  Now, even with MAD & the Cold War behind us, we still have plenty of people -- mostly on the left of course -- who think missile defense is a waste of money, or somehow provocative.  Given Obama's attitude toward missile defense, it's likely the limited progress we've made will be halted under the new administration, and we will continue to remain virtually defenseless to nuclear ballistic missiles. We were very lucky to get through the Cold War without a nuclear clash, and we'll have to trust to luck for the next four to eight years as well.