Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Strategic defense is going to have to, once and for all, become a top national priority

Brian Kennedy, president of the American Strategy Group, says that while it has been entirely appropriate for the US to focus on asymmetrical threats and poisonous jihadist ideology, the country remains a sitting duck with regard to a nuclear danger from nation-state rivals and enemies:

Americans will be shocked to learn that should a madman in Russia, China, Iran or elsewhere seek the nuclear destruction of the United States there is little an American president can do today except launch a retaliatory nuclear strike guaranteeing the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction. There can be little satisfaction, however, in the mass slaughter of Russian, Chinese or Iranian subjects while American citizens would have suffered their own nuclear attack. The morality of MAD was always questionable. In a world where Iranian mullahs preach hatred of the United States and Israel while they continue their nuclear ambitions, it is absurd.
President Trump has pledged to build a national missile defense. Its strategic necessity is greater, if less well-understood, than the wall he will be building on our southern border. When completed, Trump will have done what no president, including Ronald Reagan, has done: ensure that the American people are not vulnerable to the strategic designs of a foreign power. Our freedom and our constitutional order cannot be guaranteed so long as a single command by a Russian or Chinese president or an Iranian mullah could mean the end of American civilization. It would be fair for President Trump to ask his generals how we have arrived in this position.
We know that the end of the Cold War brought a regrettable lack of seriousness to our strategic thinking. Although advanced forms of missile defense were within our technological ability, the reorganization of the Soviet Union removed all urgency. Successive U.S. administrations starting with George H.W. Bush treated missile defense as desirable but not a priority. After an explicit nuclear threat by the PRC in 1995, billions were spent on a limited, land-based system in Alaska that can stop a handful of North Korean missiles. Its main purpose, it would appear, was to give the illusion that we were defended.
Equally vexing, our paralysis continued despite the fact that U.S. intelligence knew the Russians had developed a primitive but effective missile defense of their own during the Cold War and that the Chinese were developing their own missile defenses to complement their growing nuclear arsenal.
Although one could register this failure to build missile defenses as mere incompetence, September 11 should have sharpened our strategic outlook. The world of Islamic terrorism had put the United States in its cross hairs. The 9/11 hijackers had been aided and abetted by Iranian intelligence, itself an act of war. With certainty, we knew that Iran was also building a nuclear capacity to match their advanced ballistic missiles. In this enterprise, the Iranians had the assistance of Russia, North Korea, and, by extension, Communist China. As we were constructing a homeland security super state, it would not have been crazy to include the building of a national missile defense using land, sea and space-based interceptors on the off chance that a future attack on America would be with nuclear missiles.
Underscoring this is the fact that the Iranians have practiced the launching of ballistic missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea. In such testing the Iranians simulated an Electro Magnetic Pulse attack that could, with the right nuclear warhead, destroy the electric infrastructure of the U.S. and, at its most severe, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans. The Iranian test on January 29th was of the same kind. The use of an EMP weapon is at the heart of Iranian strategic nuclear doctrine. It does not require thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles. It requires one highly advanced or several less advanced missiles. This latest test was, moreover, a message to President Trump that the Iranians are perfecting the means, and being aided by the world’s superpowers, to kill every last American man, woman and child. Subtle they are not.

Bracing words, but words we cannot fail to heed.


15 comments:

  1. Oh, so we're not vulnerable to nuclear attack from the above-state actors?

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  2. Nothing new, same threats, different day. Trump and his military and industrial cabinet are what they are and this is indeed what Ike called it. Trump is doing 180s on a lot of established strategies and even laws evolving out of the past. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We're all on the same bus, but a real Bozo is driving it now. Maybe right off the cliff.

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  3. How about if we stick with the actual conditions that Kennedy makes plain? We do not - I repeat, do not - presently have any response available to us besides retaliation should any of our adversaries or enemies lob a nuclear-tipped missile at us.

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  4. Disarmament, not proliferation. See Einstein's letter to FDR. See Ike, See JFK and all Presidents, including your revered Ronnie. Just google them + proliferation for starters.

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  5. You are not responding to what I said about sticking to the actual present situation. The world-weary "it-was-ever-thus" affectation indicates a fundamental unseriousness ab out national security.

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  6. Let me ask you this: Do you have some sort of problem with developing and deploying a strategic defense system adequate for preventing a ballistically delivered nuclear attack?

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  7. “We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.”
    Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, 1985

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  8. Sure, preventive measures are great, but starting another nuclear arms race is another thing entirely. You don't think the rest of the world will freak with a Republican freak itching to make America great again like we have to put up with here now for the next 47 months? Disarmament is the only way. If you need quotes from all the other Presidents since and including Truman, please advise. I thought the Reagan one would suffice. I suppose you'll say times change and these times are totally different.

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  9. I must admit I misread the article as it addresses nuclear defenses, aka Reagan's star wars defense system, but I thought I read that Trump wants to proliferate too, and you know what that means, other countries will too. http://time.com/4437089/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-nukes/

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  10. We have to have the decidedly largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Ii is the only way we can have an advantageous negotiating position with reasonable actors, and hopefully deter those who aren't.

    "Disarmament is the only way" is about the stupidest statement I've come across in some time. We disarm, North Korea doesn't. How do you think that's going to work out?

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  11. We have to have the decidedly largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Ii is the only way we can have an advantageous negotiating position with reasonable actors, and hopefully deter those who aren't.

    "Disarmament is the only way" is about the stupidest statement I've come across in some time. We disarm, North Korea doesn't. How do you think that's going to work out?

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  12. Again, simply Google disarmament (or proliferation, if you prefer, you don't even have to add the word nuclear) and any prexy since FDR and you will find stupid. In your own twisted hawkish mind only.

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  13. For the five billionth time, you refuse to answer my specific question.

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