Great leadership, great vision and great credit goes to President Barack Obama for his administration’s achievement today in placing a tested, proven and extremely effective missile defense system on European soil to protect Europe and its citizens from Iranian ballistic missiles. President Obama put forward this specific vision in his 2009 European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) policy. The second phase of the now three-phased EPAA policy to deploy a land based Aegis Ashore site with AN/SPY-1, Baseline 9 and SM-3 Block IB capability in Romania by the end of 2015 has been declared technically ready in Bucharest, Romania. This is a tremendous achievement by any standard in today’s complex world. The Missile Defense Agency surmounted extreme challenges of engineering, development, manning, construction, timelines, cost and testing of a brand new platform that is now declared technically capable in Deveselu, Romania to defend southern Europe and its population from Iran’s ballistic missiles.
The 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review (BMDR) Report outlined the role the Obama Administration envisioned for missile defense in the future security environment. Nearly six years later, some of the major contours of the missile defense architecture envisioned by this document are emerging in response to a threat environment remarkably similar to the one described by the BMDR.
However, we would be remiss not to bring up the President Obama’s cancellation in 2013 of the fourth phase of the EPAA in Europe that was due in 2020. That policy replaced George W. Bush’s initiative of a third site in Poland designed both in policy and technically of defending the United States of America from Europe in intercepting Iranian intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. The United States has invested heavily in the upper tier missile defense protection of Europe from Iran. The responsibility for the protection of the United States from Iran now lays with the next President of the United States.
