Here’s an interesting Briefing Room back-and-forth on Iran’s successful Sajjil-2 missile test (emphasis mine).
This is largely political spin, damage control aimed at shifting attention from the fact that the President’s decision to unilaterally cut missile defense from Europe was answered with Iran testing out their new missile staging technologies and revealing the existence of a second uranium enrichment facility. Not a good week for the Obama administration. So we’re now told that this is “smarter” missile defense, a purely military decision recommended by senior military leadership. Yet only a little over a year ago, Lt General Henry Obering –Director of the Missile Defense Agency– said the following before the Foreign Affairs subcommittee:
That’s not the testimony of someone who felt we needed “smarter” missile defense, but rather a military professional who had already developed a working solution to Iran’s rapidly advancing ballistic missile technology. The fact of the matter is, the SECDEF and Joint Chiefs were fully on board with the practical European missile defense plan laid out by Obering until the Obama administration injected politics into their military analysis. It’s likely that the plan submitted by the Chiefs last week was one compiled only after the White House told them “no” on European BMD, resulting in a less-robust stop-gap that cobbled together politically neutral missile defense technologies and was then clumsily labeled “smarter.” Today, Iran validated Obering’s concerns of 2008 by demonstrating that they’ve mastered staging and solid-fuel rocket technology. Killing the European ground based mid-course inceptor in Europe, a technology that has already been proven against precisely the type of rocket that Iran tested today, was exactly the opposite of what military missile defense experts had been saying for years. Smarter indeed.
