White House to Scrap Bush’s Approach to Missile Shield
17/9/2009Rumors of a U.S. back down on BMD in Europe appeared in the press on Sept. 16.
The New York Times reports on Sept. 17 that
The Obama team relied heavily on research by a Stanford University physicist, Dean Wilkering, who presented the government with research this year arguing that Poland and the Czech Republic were not the most effective places to station a missile defense system against the most likely Iranian threat. Instead, he said, more optimal places to station missiles and radar systems would be in Turkey or the Balkans.
“If you move the system down closer to the Middle East,” it would “make more sense for the defense of Europe, Mr. Wilkering said in an interview.
Mr. Wilkering said the new administration did not want to simply abandon missile defense but orient it for a different threat than the Bush team saw. “The Obama administration is more interested in missile defense as a valuable instrument, a valuable aspect of our military posture than I would have thought,” he said. Beyond moving the system from Eastern Europe, the Obama team concluded that the advantage of using the smaller SM-3 interceptors is that they have been proven effective and can be deployed sooner than the ground-based interceptors that the Bush team was still developing.
In any case, the matter should be followed closely, since the political/strategic implications are wide. For instance, the U.S. may be trying to trade-off the BMD in Eastern Europe with Russia’s diplomatic support on the Iranian nuclear question. Moreover, Poland risks to be forced to review its overall strategy of military modernization, that was predicated upon a strong partnership with Washington.
Things appear to be in flux, but once again the BMD project shows its tremendous complexity both at the technical and the diplomatic-strategic level.
