April 24, 2008 :: Analysis
Air Force Lt. Gen. General Obering said on Wednesday that the U.S. should be comfortable in welcoming a global missile defense race. Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency, has told Senate appropriators that in the absence of such defenses, a race for offensive missiles has already exploding all over the world due to easy access to certain kinds of offensive systems.
According to Obering, the kind of layered defense the U.S. is pursuing through the Bush Administration and allies would likely deter enemies and potential enemies from building arsenals of offensive missiles.
In a hearing on the MDA’s 2009 budget request, Obering confidently told appropriators that if Washington, its NATO allies and countries like Russia could come together to develop and field missile shields around the world, hostile regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang will certainly “think twice about [fielding] offensive missiles,” as history has shown that these sorts of defensive systems are “hard to defeat.”
Obering’s report comes as Pentagon and administration officials are in talks with European allies and Warsaw attempting to come to agreement over a proposal to install roughly one dozen missile interceptors in Poland. Additionally, the U.S. has already reached a preliminary agreement with the Czech Republic to put an advanced radar suite there.
Negotiations with Polish officials halted earlier in the year when a new government took over in Warsaw and made clear that its desire for greater American military and security support before agreeing to host interceptors. More recently, U.S. officials have been optimistic about the prospects of linking a deal with Poland.
Obering told the Senate appropriators that he is hopeful that an accord can be reached “by the end of the year,” which would allow the MDA to begin the competition for the European shield work. The agency hopes to select a contractor soon enough to start work in Europe by the end of next year.
Meanwhile, Obering has reported that the Airborne Laser (ABL) effort, geared towards installing a laser weapon on board a Boeing 747 jet, is scheduled for a missile shoot-down test in mid-2009. Following this test, Obering said, agency officials will apply lessons provided by the test, during a “transition period” during which the agency will “try to figure out how to make the third and fourth planes as affordable as possible.”
With the ABL program progressing, Army Lt. Gen Kevin Campbell, chief of the Army Space and Missile Defense and Army Strategic Forces commands argues that the ground force is in talks with Air Force officials about the latter’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) program. These two bodies are working to integrate certain AHW technologies with the Air Force’s Prompt Global Strike program aimed at fielding a next-generation weapon capable of striking fleeting targets around the glove faster than today’s munitions. Additionally, MDA is working on doubling the size of its forthcoming SM-3 missile fleet over the next five years.
The Pentagon’s recently completed Joint Capability Mix II Study was meant to study the cocktail of missile defense weapons and sensors to handle threats that may occur in the 2015 time frame. The examination concluded that more SM-3 missiles would be needed. General Campbell has said that MDA plans to scatter the doubled SM-3 fleet across the “out years” of the future years defense strategy.
(Article)
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