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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (37390)	9/25/2009 3:40:37 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Your personal assessment.... A meaningless point. Your statements are also largely your own personal assessments. Statements that aren't the personal assessment of the poster are someone else's personal assessment. However many missile defense technical experts are saying that moving --- even more rapidly then Bush --- to actual deployment of TESTED and effective missile defense systems (the Aegis technology) positioned directly to negate Iran's offensive capabilities, gives us immediately a greater defensive ability. Irrelevant to the specific point. If SM3/Aegis is more effective right now, that doesn't change the fact the canceling deployment in Eastern Europe makes future deployment in Eastern Europe more difficult. And even moving beyond the specific point to the larger question, once again even if X is better than Y, that doesn't mean that X is better than X+Y (X=SM3/Aegis, Y=current land based systems), let alone X+Z (Z=improved land based systems) that will be more difficult to deploy in Eastern Europe, and perhaps even in some other places, because of this cancellation. And again the testing issue is irrelevant to deploying the radar. And, layering-on land-based ABMs when they become proven and available will just strengthen our capabilities on down the road. There not much less proven than the SM3, and in any case layering them on is now harder, after we pushed the Eastern European countries to accept them, causing the government to expend political capital to get the deployment accepted, and then backed out of the deployment (not only of the imperfectly tested missiles, but also of the radar). Beyond the political issues, there is the lesser point that if we built the infrastructure for missile deployment now, it would be easier to deploy upgraded missiles later since we wouldn't be starting from scratch.