Iran shows no indication of being anything but determined to go nuclear:
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is lying when he says the Islamic Republic has never had any intention of building an atomic weapon. Defecting Iranian nuclear engineers told U.S. officials in the late 1980s that the mullahs’ program, then hidden, was designed exclusively for such arms. Everything Western intelligence services have tracked since then matches those early revelations.
So we are preparing a Plan B of defeating Iranian nuclear missiles (despite presidential assurances believed by few that Iran will not be allowed to go nuclear):
The Missile Defense Agency is working with Lockheed Martin to build a land-based Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense site in Romania as part of a broader strategy to widen the ballistic-missile defense protective envelope over Europe and other areas by drawing upon historically ship-based Aegis radar technology, Pentagon officials said.
An Aegis Ashore deck house, complete with Standard Missile-3, or SM-3, intercept capability, is slated to be operational in Romania by 2015, Rick Lehner, MDA spokesman told Military.com in an interview. The effort is part of the Pentagon’s European Phased Adaptive Approach missile defense plan which calls for land-based BMD intercept capability to be operational at locations in Romania by 2015 and Poland by 2018, he added.
Remember that this is the first stage of the Obama plan that replaces the Bush plan of putting missiles into eastern Europe capable of both defending Europe and defending America against missiles flying our way from Iran across Europe (which Iran does not yet have, I hasten to add).
Other than being authored by President Bush, I'm uncertain of why President Obama did not want that plan.
While the Obama plan can be put in place sooner, since it is initially based on proven shorter range missiles the Navy uses, this system can never defend America.
And given its limited range, I'm not sure if it can really defend much of Europe (remember we have allocated 4 Aegis destroyers to be based in Spain for the European missile defense mission). It is either intended just to defend the corner of Europe seen to be within range of shorter range Iranian missiles that will arrive before longer ranged missiles can threaten deeper into Europe (and Turkey must feel out of the protective umbrella if they are buying Chinese anti-missile systems); or it has the altitude to reach missiles flying over the missile site on the way to targets deeper inland. I'll guess it is the former since this is just phase one of four for the plan, although it is just that--my guess.
But it cannot protect America against future ICBMs.
This is where the problem comes in. While the Obama plan was sold on using proven, more rapidly deployable weapons as opposed to the Bush plan that is still in development (although it is deployed in Alaska and California already), the phased plan is supposed to expand the Europe-based system to eventually protect America by using technology still being developed!
Whether we can develop this new system and deploy it faster than we could have deployed the Bush plan missiles is an open question, for me. Getting to the last phase will be a challenge--or maybe even getting to phase 2, especially given budget problems that will hammer our military's plans even more.
Actually, while Russia's worries that the system could interfere with their ability to nuke Europe or America are nonsense, complaints here that the system is worthless because it won't be able to handle a volley of missiles that will overhwhelm it is a bit misplaced. A thin system like this makes the most sense as a shield to stop leakers during a major strike campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear missiles.
In that scenario, Iran won't be able to fire a volley. They'll either lose all of them in their silos or face the need to fire them as they are readied--in ones and twos--before being destroyed. Europe-based missiles (ashore or on ships) would be the last line of defense rather than the first and only line.
