Poland and the Czech Republic are being offered roles in the Obama administration's new plan to defend Europe against Iran's development and deployment of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, senior administration officials told Congress on Thursday.
Obama's decision two weeks ago to halt the Bush administration's plan to put 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic was based on a new intelligence assessment in May that said Iran has slowed its development of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could strike the United States. Instead, the report said, Iran is focused on rapid production of a shorter-range missile that could be used to attack Israel and other countries in the region where U.S. forces are stationed.
On Thursday, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, Ellen O. Tauscher, told the House Armed Services Committee that the new plan, which is to use ship-based Aegis radars and their related Standard missile interceptors, would be "a very robust system that deals with the current threat now and protects NATO allies first." Tauscher said the multiple Iranian missile launches earlier this week "visibly demonstrate the nature of this threat."
She added, "We have offered the Poles a future piece of the SM-3 [Standard missile-3] deployment" and "we're working on a number of different things" for the Czechs. Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O'Reilly, director of the Defense Missile Agency, who also appeared at the session, said one possibility was putting command and control facilities in the Czech Republic.
When several Republicans on the panel questioned whether the U.S. homeland remained vulnerable to the possibility that intelligence was wrong and Iran could develop an ICBM capable of hitting the United States before the new 2015 to 2020 estimate, Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that to counter such a threat from Iran, the United States' "primary capability still resides" in missile defense interceptors in Alaska and California.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/01/AR2009100104217.html
