Obama should pursue missile defense

By E. THOMAS McCLANAHAN

Barack Obama’s first test came pretty quickly. But we still don’t know how he will respond.

The day after the election, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated Moscow’s threat to place short-range missiles near Poland if the United States builds a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

NATO has endorsed missile defense for Europe. The United States and Poland have agreed that missile interceptors will be placed on Polish soil. The question is whether Obama will back away from that in the face of Russian threats.

The answer, so far, is unclear.

Soon after his election, Obama spoke to Poland President Lech Kaczynski, who said he was told the “missile defense project would continue.” But Obama’s transition team issued a statement saying the president-elect had made no such commitment.

The confusion highlights Obama’s tendency to straddle the missile-defense issue.

In a debate with Sen. John McCain, he said, “I actually believe that we need missile defense, because of Iran and North Korea and the potential for them to obtain or to launch nuclear weapons.” But he also has pledged to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.”

As his transition team put it, Obama supports a missile defense system “when the technology is proved to be workable.”

This is the favored language of missile-defense skeptics or outright opponents. Of course it has to be workable. Who’s in favor of an unworkable system?

The problem is, missile defense is a system of systems, and the way to test it is to develop it. It has to be built before it can be tested. The same thing applied to the Global Positioning System.

As a recent Heritage Foundation paper pointed out, the Defense Department did not require operational testing of the GPS network before buying the first satellite, because it would have been “impossible to field this very valuable defense system on that basis.”

The same applies to missile defense, which has continued to advance since the first few interceptors were put in the ground in Fort Greeley, Alaska, years ago. There are radars in Japan, Greenland and the United Kingdom. There are interceptors on ships. A system for high-altitude theater defense has made tremendous strides.

In February, one of the ship-borne interceptors successfully rammed and destroyed a falling satellite 150 miles above the earth. Since 2001, the Missile Defense Agency says, there have been 37 successful hit-to-kill intercepts out of 47 attempts, a success rate of nearly 80 percent.

Fair odds

Those are pretty fair odds, good enough to make an adversary think twice about launching a missile.

On the issue of the installation in Poland, Dan Goure of the defense-minded Lexington Institute says he thinks Obama will “slow roll” construction of the installation in Poland rather than back away altogether in the face of Russian bullying.

Going back on the project would send a terrible signal and stiff our Polish allies, who want the missile base because it will increase the importance of their country to NATO.

Obama, said Goure, has a big problem. “He may break ground and spend a few million, but not billions and billions to set it up,” Goure said. “He’s got a few options, but not many.”

In any case, how Obama deals with this challenge will be a key indicator of his ability to stand up to the Russians.

With the Iranians proceeding on their missile technology and nuclear programs, it would be better to have a Central European missile defense capability operational sooner rather than later.

Several days after Obama’s election, the Iranians tested a two-stage, solid-fuel rocket capable of reaching southern Europe — another sign that a “slow-roll” on missile defense would make little sense.

X E. Thomas McClanahan is a member of the Kansas City Star editorial board. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.