Israel Matzav

Report: US exposed to missile attack by Iran

A study by top scientists and military experts working for the National Research Council has concluded that the manner in which the United States' missile defenses are structured makes the US vulnerable to a missile attack by Iran.

In a report, the panel suggested that President Obama shift course by expanding a system he inherited from President George W. Bush and by setting aside the final part of an antimissile strategy he unveiled in 2009. In so doing, the panel said, the president could set up the nation’s defenses to better defeat the kinds of long-range missiles that Iran may be developing.

It is the first time that the research council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has weighed in on the nation’s overall plans for defeating missile attacks.

Chartered by Congress to give scientific and technical advice to the government, the council is considered to be the nation’s preeminent group of scientists. The 16-person panel consists of scientists, engineers and weapons experts from universities, research groups and national laboratories, including one in Livermore, Calif., that deals with nuclear arms.

Philip E. Coyle III, a former national security official in the Obama White House and a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon, said the panel’s report exposed a system that should be rebuilt from top to bottom, adding that the antimissile complex was geared toward “producing and fielding hardware” rather than actually devising ways to deflect enemy attacks.

The Pentagon wrote off the report as pedestrian.

...

The assessment is a major blow to Mr. Obama’s strategy of playing down the long-range defenses he inherited from Mr. Bush and focusing instead on defenses in Europe against shorter-range Iranian missiles. He articulated the shift in September 2009, calling the envisioned system “stronger, smarter and swifter.”

But the report, released Tuesday, faulted the results. It said the domestic defenses in place could probably handle crude missiles fired from North Korea, but nothing more sophisticated. It called the current generation of antimissile arms “fragile” and full of “shortcomings that limit their effectiveness against even modestly improved threats.”

You know, if the US would go in and take out Iran's nuclear program, no one would have to worry about Iran anymore.

Just sayin'

Labels: anti-missile systems, Barack Hussein Obama, Iran

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:16 PM