With some hostile powers around the world licking their chops at the possibility of a weak and incompetent successor to Trump taking office, it’s always good to have options if the **** hits the fan.
An option is now on the table.
Those of us old enough (or, in this writer’s case barely old enough) to remember the Cold War and Reagan Administration will also remember the prominent role that Reagan’s (in)famous Star Wars Defense Program held in the public imagination at a time when the only other option for defense was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction).
This strategy required one key assumption: that the OTHER side valued the lives of their own citizens as highly as governments in the West valued ours.
In today’s environment, with some reckless rogue actors and a small cabal of expansionist Communist Chinese dictators that aren’t above ‘disappearing’ their own citizens, we have no such guarantees that losses are a meaningful deterrent to our potential adversaries.
We need something more effective than the goodwill or self-preservation instincts of our enemies.
The U.S. military shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile from a warship on the Pacific Ocean, a test that demonstrated for the first time that the United States can intercept ICBMs from its ships at sea.
The Missile Defense Agency announced the success of the test Tuesday, saying the USS John Finn had struck and destroyed a “threat representative” ICBM using a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor in the ocean northeast of Hawaii. The ICBM was outside Earth’s atmosphere when it was shot down.
The test, which took place Monday, comes as the United States steps up its missile defense capabilities in response to North Korea’s advancing arsenal. Last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rolled out a massive new road-mobile ICBM during a parade in Pyongyang, a larger version of the nuclear-capable North Korean missiles that can already reach the United States. –NationalPost
