RE: http://www.military.com/opinio...15202,193956,00.html

quote:

Indeed, from all outward indications, Team Obama did just about nothing but bloviate to defend US territory and interests from the missile that, by almost all accounts, has the potential to reach the western United States.

These missiles have neither the range or ability to reach the western US. Nor do they carry any payload of signifigance. To overreact to someone like Kim Jong Il only serves to give the spoiled little tyrant what he wants: attention.

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The Pentagon even declined to put the Pacific missile-defense system (based at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.) on operational alert -- precautions the Bush administration took during North Korea's 2006 Taepo Dong test.

Did Bush's solution (considering the maturity of the BDM system at the time) really serve any other purpose than to give the crazies at the Heritage Foundation a feel-good moment? Nope.

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But the April shot saw the Taepo Dong fly further than ever before -- some 2,500 miles. That relative success apparently surprised and embarrassed the White House enough that it's taking a drastically different approach this time by deploying just about all of the bells and whistles in our (still limited) missile-defense arsenal.

The conservatives are very good at making mountains out of molehills. There isn't much reason for concern yet, as the N. Koreans missiles seem to have a bad habit of falling apart, and haven't sufficient range to hit Hawaii anyway. But since we have some goodies, and the conservative bloviatocracy is wetting their Depends[tm], deploying the assets we do have makes for a reasonable training excercise, and gives some comfort to the locals. But the unfortunate aspect of all this is that our reacting to this N. Korean tantrum gives all the more reason for KJI to continue with his antics.

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It's the right thing to do, but what changed? Pretty clearly, the Obama crew got mugged by reality.

Sort of - they got mugged by political considerations.

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Their charm offensive toward North Korea isn't working. Pyongyang has been as belligerent as ever, lobbing more threats, epithets and missiles in our direction than at any time in recent history.

There hasn't been any "charm offensive" to N. Korea. I don't suppose that there is any lamenting on the part of the so-called "Heritage Foundation" (an ironic name for the organization that espouses policies that seem determined to ensure there is no American Heritage to salvage) and their support of the policies that encouraged N. Korean to restart their nuclear and missile programs is there?

Clearly wishful thinking on my part...

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Deploying missile defense in the face of continuing Korean hectoring also helps the administration counter the perceptions (domestic and international) that it's weak on national security. Indeed, this allows the Pentagon to act militarily, but in a way that's relatively unlikely to provoke escalation by the other side.

That perception has been widely circulated by the very people that supported the policies that according to multiple years worth of NIE's (2006, 2007) vastly damaged not only the national security of the United States, but those of our allies as well. The terms that describe the perception that is promoted by people like Mr. Brooks include: mendacity, hubris, and hypocracy.

And it all boils down to simply being unable to act like adults and accept responsibility for your actions - especially when blame-storming is so much easier.

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It's certainly more subtle than stationing a carrier strike group off the Korean coast.

We have considerable assets in the region, and anyone who thinks we don't have assets lurking off the coasts of N. Korea is a fool.

MAD is the best safeguard against a nuclear attack. In this case, it's more like "AD", even if NK had the capability to hit the US, it would be destroyed within minutes of an attack.

Exactly, Foxred, people forget that we went eyeball-to-eyeball with the Russkies on the premise of MAD. Shills like Brooks conveniently leave out those factoids. Of course the biggest one---that Bush deployed a working Missile Defense system, actually it rarely works and only if we put a transponder on the target missile so we can increase the chances of interception---even then it misses, ha!!

Lies, and more lies:

"The good news is the Bush administration kept its promise to develop and deploy missile defense to protect us against an expanding nuke and missile threat (only in the neocon's fantasy land, of corporate welfare) Otherwise, we'd now be completely vulnerable to North Korean missiles." (We still are completely vulnerable ya shill)

OK, so what do we do? Standby until it does hit us? Can anyone forecast when that will happen? Will we have time to develop a defense system if ours is so inaccurate or should we just go on with inoperable weapons systems?

The Satanic Bible says it best, "Hit the other before he has a chance to hit you." Unfortunately, we are still adhering to the Christian dogma of "Turn the other cheek."

Yanqui,

Uhhhh, that would a resounding heck yes! Amongst professional military circles, it's called Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD, not a novel concept, it's been around over 60 years, and your point is exactly??? Buy a system that doesn't work so you can say you have a system? Utterly ludicrous. I'm not going to string the pearls of wisdom for you, but in effect that is what we presently have, an inoperable system that is only functional if all the elements are known, especially where and when the missile is coming and even then it doesn't always hit it, nor can it handle spoofs, got that? G'day!



PS: Are ya ever gonna answer your mail and tell us all exactly how is it that DoD is inundated by Muslims? Ya know what they say about those who can't defend their hate speech...

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