By Martin Sieff
Washington (UPI)
Jan 3, 2007
SpaceWar
2007 was a year when major industrial nations divided into tortoises and hares in their policies towards ballistic missile defense.
The United States led the hares, with a banner year in progress on its many BMD programs. With much less publicity but solid achievement, Russia quietly moved at the very least into second place. The first battery of S-400 anti-ballistic missile interceptors, Moscow's state-of-the-art weapon, was deployed operationally around Moscow over the summer. Russia also sold Iran its formidable Tor-M1 system, which some analysts have claimed is up to 80 percent effective against sub-sonic U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Israel stepped up its already formidable anti-ballistic missile program, directed primarily against potential threats from Iran and Syria. A new hard-charging defense minister, Ehud Barak, moved rapidly to clean up the administrative chaos he inherited from his clownish and much-criticized predecessor Amir Peretz.
Israel's highly successful existing Arrow-3 ABM interceptor chalked up more impressive test interceptions against target missiles targeted to behave like Iranian Shehad-3 intermediate range ballistic missiles. In addition to the Arrow-3s and the U.S.-built Patriot PAC-3s that have been purchased in addition to defend Tel Aviv and the Jewish state's densely populated coastal strip, Barak also pushed ahead boldly on the visionary new "Iron Dome" project to create new effective defenses against very-short-range ballistic missile threats.
These range from the amateurish but still potentially lethal very-short-range Qassam rockets being lobbed into the Sderot development town from neighboring Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, to the much more formidable threat of the 9,000 to 11,000 massed Russian-manufactured multiple launch rocket systems, or Katyushas, assembled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Party of God, in southern Lebanon.
Asia was filled with "hare" nations racing fast to develop their own ballistic missile defenses against very concrete local and regional threats. Japan led the way. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe boldly expanded the scale of the impressive programs he inherited from his hard-driving predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.
Abe proved no Koizumi in terms of domestic credibility, however, and he was toppled after only a year to be replaced by 71-year-old Yasuo Fukuda, the very epitome of the famous cautious "gray men" of the Liberal Democratic Party establishment. But even Fukuda made no move to cut back or slow down the fast-developing programs launched by Koizumi and accelerated by Abe.
In Japan, as in the United States, rapid BMD development and deployment has reached consensus status in domestic politics. Before the end of the year, a Japanese destroyer equipped with U.S.-made Standard Missile-3s and the Aegis radar system shot down an intermediate range ballistic missile target in flight. It was a dramatic achievement for the Japanese program.
That was the case in equally democratic India, where the centrist Congress-UPA-led coalition government that took power in 2004 continued to green light the rapid development of the nation's indigenously made anti-ballistic missile system. On Dec. 2, an AAD01 anti-ballistic missile interceptor hit a simulated electronic ballistic missile at a height of 15,000 feet over the Bay of Bengal.
The test resulted in an endo-atmospheric, or inside-the-atmosphere, interception against an electronic target. Indian scientists said the procedure had confirmed the interceptor's capability to change direction, or maneuver, at high speeds within the atmosphere, or under endo-atmospheric conditions.
Indian news reports described the AAD as a single-stage solid-fuel missile guided by an inertial navigation system, a high-speed computer and an electro-mechanical activator. The report said the interceptor reached an altitude of 18 miles and traveled nearly 80 miles in all during its flight.
China was perhaps the most unexpected member of the hare category. Back in January 2007, Beijing astonished the world by carrying out and then publicly proclaiming a successful test interception and destruction of one of its own Earth-orbiting satellites. That achievement meant China now had the operational capability to destroy key U.S. assets in space including surveillance satellites essential for early warning in ballistic missile defense.
But for every "hare" nation pushing ahead boldly with its BMD programs, 2007 also saw its share of "tortoises" that fell out of the race or were determined never to join it. Slow or complacent on BMDThe dramatic progress posted by nations such as the United States, Russia, Israel, Japan, India and even Iran in ballistic missile defense was balanced by the complacency for loss of political will on the issue in many other countries. For every "hare" nation on BMD in 2007, there was also a "tortoise."
Britain threatened to become even more of a "tortoise" nation and France remained one. Both countries pushed ahead with their versions of PAAMS, the Principal Anti-Air Missile System, a ballistic missile defense program to defend Western European nations against intermediate range ballistic missiles.
But Nicolas Sarkozy won election as president of France, and so far he has shown no interest in trying to transform or prod the extremely cautious policymaking consensus he inherited from Jacques Chirac. Unlike Junichiro Koizumi during his five years as prime minister of Japan, Sarkozy showed no signs of transforming his country from a tortoise into a hare on BMD.
In Britain, the cautious policies on BMD of Prime Minister Tony Blair looked like becoming even more cautious under his successor, Gordon Brown. Both in temperament and in key top governmental choices, Brown appears far more problematical about his nation's traditional special relationship with the United States than Blair did.
Brown's choice as foreign secretary, David Miliband, achieved notoriety a year before by objecting to allowing the U.S. Air Force to use British air bases to refuel when it was flying needed military supplies to Israel during its July 2006 mini-war against Hezbollah. By the end of 2007, Brown had not taken any steps to cut any of Britain's relatively small-scale and cautious BMD programs, but it appeared increasingly likely he would take no steps to boost them either.
Conservative, pro-American governments that had been dedicated to developing BMD fell in Poland and Australia during 2007.
The change of government in Warsaw loomed as especially epochal. The Bush administration was already running into trouble with the Democrat-controlled 110th Congress on getting sufficient and rapid funding to allow Boeing to start constructing its proposed base in Poland to hold 10 anti-ballistic missile interceptors to guard against an eventual threat to the United States that could be posed by nuclear-armed Iranian intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Given the extremist language of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his threats against the United States and to wipe Israel off the map, and given Iran's established close technical ties with North Korea, which is still striving to complete its own workable Taepodong-3 ICBMs, such a threat seems extremely feasible in the foreseeable future.
The pro-American Polish government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski certainly thought so. But his successor as prime minister, Donald Tusk, and new Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich see things differently. On Nov. 19, Klich was reported in an interview published in the Warsaw newspaper Dziennik to be skeptical about the need for the base. Given Tusk's priority of repairing strained ties with Russia, which has furiously opposed the U.S. BMD base plan for Poland, the year ended with the prospects of seeing that base built declining by the day.
The change in government in Australia was less central to U.S. strategy, given Australia's "point of the way" location. But the new government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that took power on Dec. 3 lost no time in reviewing plans to buy expensive new combat aircraft from the United States. Also, Rudd certainly did not share the enthusiasm for BMD of the previous government led by veteran Prime Minister John Howard. Australia's contribution to the U.S.-led Western BMD program was relatively small in scale but important in quality.
Australia has been developing its Jindalee high-frequency, over-the-horizon radar -- a system more advanced than anything comparable in the world. The close partnership Howard cultivated with President Bush allowed the United States to use that technology. It remains to be seen if that level of cooperation will be sustained under Rudd.
During Howard's last year in office, the scale of U.S.-Australian cooperation on BMD dramatically increased. On March 31, 2007, it was announced that Australia would buy three Aegis radar tracking systems for its warships, and on May 23 Australian Foreign Secretary Alexander Downer pledged to significantly boost his country's investment in BMD.
There was a widespread expectation that if it won re-election, the Howard government would push ahead with plans equip two or three warships not just with Aegis radars but also with U.S.-made Standard Missile 4s to defend the nation's population, largely concentrated in the major cities of the southeast. But that plan too now looks increasingly problematic. Having looked increasingly like a hare on BMD, Australia ended the year suddenly transformed into a tortoise.
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