Yahoo Finance by Mark Fritz September 18, 2017
There is serious disagreement among defense experts about whether the United States has the tech to knock a North Korean missile out of the sky before it brings hellfire down on a friendly target.
The head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, told a symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, last month he’s pretty confident anti-missile technology can take out the latest North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile, the trajectory of which takes it out of the atmosphere before it comes down and explodes.
“We believe that the currently deployed ballistic missile defense system can meet today’s threat,” he said, according to the nonprofit Defense Tech think tank.
Other Experts Call U.S. Claims Baloney
Greaves has trumpeted a July test in which an anti-missile rocket launched from Alaska took out a decoy ICBM near Hawaii.
The agency said it was the 14th successful intercept in 14 attempts for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense weapon system, a mobile launcher capable of intercepting ballistic missiles inside or outside the atmosphere during their final phase of flight.
The THAAD is manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT). It carries no warhead, instead relying on the kinetic energy of impact to destroy the incoming missile. A kinetic energy hit won’t set off a nuke warhead.
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Joe Cirincione, an analyst with the authoritative Defense One trade journal, was adamant in a column Sunday in saying that the Pentagon was overstating its capabilities. Last week, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, the second to soar over Japan in less than a month.
“The number one reason we don’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles is that we cannot,” he wrote. “Officials like to reassure their publics about our defense to these missiles. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told his nation after last week’s test, ‘We didn’t intercept it because no damage to Japanese territory was expected.”’
The True Test May Be Beyond Comprehension
Cirincione’s basic argument? The North Korean missiles fly too high. He said the apogee of the flight path over Japan last Friday was 475 miles. “None of the theater ballistic missile defense weapons in existence can reach that high,” he wrote.
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