The Hill:
The Trump administration and the Congress responded to North Korea’s ballistic missile tests by increasing the original missile defense budget for fiscal year 2018 by an additional $368 million. This action is welcome, but much of America’s planned missile defense spending is allocated to costly interceptor systems located overseas, which are designed to intercept missiles at the beginning or end of their flight.
There has been recent growth in missile defense sites overseas. Romania is a new host to a missile interceptor site, and Poland will host a site in 2018. Aside from a significant financial commitment from the U.S., a lot of diplomatic effort is required to negotiate the deployment of missile defense systems, and the supporting troops and contractors, to foreign soil.
The systems deployed overseas are designed to intercept missiles either prior to or after the midcourse phase of their flight. Destruction of a missile early in its flight should be a good thing, but destruction of a missile carrying a nuclear warhead at a low altitude greatly increases the chance that the population and infrastructure of the defender or a friendly neighbor will be damaged by missile debris or radioactive material from the warhead.
