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"Shortchanging Missile Defense"
Wall Street Journal
Within days of President Obama releasing his fiscal 2016 defense budget this month, Pakistan tested a nuclear-capable Ra’ad short-range missile, Russia announced plans to test a new RS-26 intercontinental ballistic missile, Iran launched a satellite into space and North Korea blasted five antiship missiles into the Sea of Japan. Each volley underscored the bad news that Mr. Obama’s budget again shortchanges U.S. missile defenses.
Of $4 trillion for the federal government overall and $612 billion for defense, Mr. Obama wants $8.1 billion for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. That’s up from $7.5 billion last year—the first real-dollar increase since 2011—but the overall trend remains downward. Funding is set to drop again after fiscal 2016, leaving missile defense slashed 25% in real dollars over the Obama Presidency. …
Mr. Obama partially changed course in 2013, expanding defenses in Asia and committing to install the 14 additional West Coast interceptors he had scrapped in 2009. Yet he simultaneously cancelled the final phase of the program he had promised for Europe, which would have placed high-speed interceptors in Poland capable of targeting intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Administration began reviewing possible sites for new antimissile systems on the U.S. East Coast, but only after years of Congressional pressure.
“I don’t support a missile defense system,” Mr. Obama said in 2001, when he was old enough to know better but not yet a prominent politician. Many Democrats have held that view since dismissing Ronald Reagan ’s Strategic Defense Initiative. But engineers have proved they can hit a bullet with a bullet: 65 of 81 U.S. antimissile tests have succeeded since 2001, while Israel’s Iron Dome has excelled (aided by U.S. funding).
So Democrats today rarely denounce missile defense outright. Instead they treat it as a bargaining chip with adversaries such as Vladimir Putin . Mr. Putin complained in 2010 that antimissile systems “undermine our nuclear capabilities.” In other words, they hamper Russia’s ability to play the bully with its nukes and missiles. That’s a reason for Washington to invest more in missile defense, yet Team Obama has repeatedly sought to appease Mr. Putin’s objections.
The Administration abandoned the Polish and Czech sites amid its “reset” with the Kremlin and talks over the New Start arms-control treaty. The new U.S. approach was “less threatening” to Russia, a senior Administration official told the Washington Post at the time. Four years later the U.S. again weakened its European antimissile posture because, as another senior official told author David Rothkopf, “it had become an impediment to every area of important cooperation” with Russia, “including both Iran and Syria.”…
All of this is an opportunity for the new Republican Congress, which could force progress on building an East Coast interceptor site, developing defenses against boost-phase missiles, and deepening cooperation with NATO, Japan, South Korea and Australia. As the forces of disorder spread, missile defense becomes more urgent.
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