Missile Defense - Ultimately Unprotected

The Weekly Standard blog has some insight into the NIE that the Obama administration is using to justify delaying (until the 2020's) a long-range missile defense system based in Europe to protect from Iranian ICBM's.

You may recall, the administration has chosen not to deploy long-range interceptors in Poland with their radars in the Czech Republic. The NIE does push out the time when the Iranians are expected to have a long-range ICBM capability from 2015 to 2020, but, the Standard correctly points out that the administration's land-based SM3 capability is not planned until after 2020, thus, we will go defenseless for some period from 2020 (when the current NIE predicts the threat develops) until some time after 2020 when the land-based SM3 variant becomes operational in Europe.

So, while we have a better technical decision against the current threat, we have actually probably made ourselves more vulnerable against the future threat.

To those who say things like "The reversal of the National Missile Defense strategy today exposes the blundering strategy of the previous adminstration," I say, dig a little deeper.

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