July 8, 2016
Growing Ballistic Missile Threats Cannot Be Ignored
By Steven P. Bucci
China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—all are U.S. adversaries, and all are making remarkable and continual advances in long-range ballistic missile capabilities. Maintaining and modernizing our upper-tier missile defense system has never been more vital in order for the U.S. to be able to win on the future war landscape.
Repeated cuts to the U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) budget over the last eight years have already put us behind where we should be. Moreover, the entire BMD enterprise has been retarded by leaders who reject a modern view of how technology should be developed and deployed.
Clearly BMD technology is not yet perfect. The “old school” method, embraced by the Obama Administration, is to test a new technology in “the lab” until it performs perfectly; only then do you deploy it. The modern view is that, since we need protection now, we should deploy BMD now to gain the protection it can provide (which, while not perfect, it is pretty darned good); then, use those real world deployments to fuel the technological improvements.
http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/07/08/growing_ballistic_missile_threats_cannot_be_ignored__109537.htmlREAD MORE
