Innovation and the BMDS

C.I.R. Press Editorial

WASHINGTON, D.C. – One of the biggest issues that people bring up is that the Ballistic Missile Defense System is a waste of money because it doesn’t work. I have two reactions to that assessment. Thank God we have not yet had to prove it via battle-test. Second, it does work. People fail to realize this is a system including land, air, and sea assets. Have there been failures in the testing of some assets, yes. I will not try to hide that. Cars were failures, the Titanic sank, many things have failed does that mean we end any and all usage? I liken it to airbags. Airbags are expensive things, you pay for them to be in your car… and likely will never ever use them. But in the rare event you need them, they are there for you. Think of the BMDS as the nations airbags. Just one component of the over all safety features in the car that you pray you never have to use. As well as insurance… my driving and added training makes me confident that I don’t need insurance. Law requires it, but even if it wasn’t required I will still spend the money knowing I will never use it.

Over the times of civilization there had come times when great leaps in technology were thought to be ahead of their time. Maybe others just give up but we are America, we should not be giving up… sometimes we do. For example look at the following photographs.

The “flying wing” B-35 was a dream in an genius’s head that was developed and went from prop power to jet power in the B-49. As time went on people said it can’t be used, or that it was a generation before its time. His love was gone and Northrop left the aviation industry. Only to later in his life find out about the newest and possibly most technologically advanced aircraft in the world… the B-2 Spirit was the spitting image of his work. What took computers today he had essentially done with pen, paper, and brains so many years ago.

So for those against the missile defense systems why wait? Why put off something that is inevitable? Doing so only leaves open another way of attack from country or terrorists elements. I personally think we need to spend the money on defense before other things. Why in God’s green earth did we allow federal money to be used to repair the stadium in New Orleans? Any one that wants to talk about the wasting of money I would really like an explanation as to why federal money to a stadium is more important than say… BMDS?

So let us look at the requested amounts and how much they are granted:

So let’s see who really was for and against BMDS. Mid to late 90’s the President asked for less money, but by ’96 Congress started to provide more money than even the Democratic President requested. Then in ’02 the President pushed for more money and congress delivered. Sometimes giving a little more or little less. But with the threat obvious those with the safety of the nation looked to the future and wanted to prevent any horrific attack a nuclear armed missile would unleash.

It was nearly 30 years between the end of the YB-49 and the recall and start of the B-2 Spirit. Missile defense has been in the making since before the YB-49, around the time of the first V-2 rockets terrorizing England. Closer to our time it was in 1976 that the Safeguard system was closed and for some time we had no defense. As so many on the left say today “President Bush needs to listen to the generals” that is exactly what President Reagan did in 1983 when he received a unanimous recommendation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to implement the SDI program.

In 1993-94 there was a huge drop in funding for missile defense under President Clinton. He split the systems up, taking some of them off the defense acquisition table. Funny how that was timed in the years surrounding our good friends at the New York Times placing an article on their front page that said the HOE (Homing Overlay Experiment, one version of a possible new system) was not actually a success. This was a test done in June of 1984 yet the article appeared on the front page in 1993. But the test was proven not to have been rigged by the Pentagon and General Accounting Office (GAO) when they refuted the article.

Then there are the complaints from the left that President Bush is just leaving problems for the next President. Well it was on September 1, 2000 that President Clinton announced he was too worried about violating the ABM Treaty so he would not be deploying the system to Alaska. That is right, he was overly concerned about everything BUT the safety of America, and in that speech left this problem to the next President.

Thankfully President Bush saw the need for the system and if it required a change in policy to protect the US, then that is what needed to be done. So on December 13, 2001 he announced that the US would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. He also realized that over the years we would develop weapons systems and in the effort to make them perfect spent so much time testing them that they were obsolete when they reached the battlefield. So he changed some regulations allowing the typical ORD to be avoided and for new systems to be put online as quickly and as safely possible.

“The deployment of missile defenses is an essential element of our broader efforts to transform our defense and deterrence policies and capabilities to meet the new threats we face. Defending the American people against these new threats is my highest priority as Commander-in-Chief.”
— President George W. Bush, December 17, 2002

With Iran trying to acquire nuclear weapons and missile technology, North Korea trying to develop nuclear technology and improve upon their ICBMs… and announcing they will have to launch missiles at the US if sanctions are imposed. How can anyone not see the threat and want to safeguard against it? The missile threat has been around far longer than our terrorist threat. We must guard against both and not open ourselves to a missile attack because we divert all resources into other threats. That is a recipe for disaster, and with nukes… one hell of a disaster.

-md

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