Dear Members and Friends,
In response to a ballistic missile agreement that was announced this weekend between the Republic of Korea and the United States that allows South Korea to build and deploy tactical ballistic missiles that can reach all parts of North Korea, North Korea has threatened the United States of America today with their strategic rocket forces capability to strike the U.S. homeland, Japan, Guam, and South Korea.
North Korea claimed in a statement released by the Official Korean Central News Agency that they “do not hide” that their armed forces, “including the strategic rocket forces, are keeping within the scope of strike not only the bases of the puppet forces and the U.S. imperialist aggression forces’ bases in the inviolable land of Korea but also Japan, Guam and the U.S. mainland,”
It is with assurance that the U.S. has deployed missile defense functional and operating units on land in Korea, Japan, and the U.S. homeland as well as on U.S. Aegis Navy BMD Ships in the waters off of Korea and Japan that have the capability to defeat and destroy North Korea’s current strategic missile forces if they were to be launched. In addition, both the Republic of Korea and Japan have similar deployed land based missile defense systems as well as Japan’s Navy with its “Kongo” Aegis sea based missile defense capability to defeat ballistic missiles from North Korea. This past April, North Korea put forward a long range ballistic missile test that brought together an integrated cooperative missile defense capability and effort from Korea, Japan, and the United States using all of their systems that provided unification and a higher degree of integration so that all three militaries could track and defeat a North Korea ballistic missile threat.
North Korea has physically demonstrated that it can deliver satellite payloads in orbit through their possession of the basic scientific capability to deliver small payloads over any place on Earth. North Korea’s current engineering of demonstrating and delivering much heavier payloads on long range ballistic rockets has a history of recent failures culminating with their last test this past April. With North Korea’s relentless pursuit of power and long range ballistic missiles in this region coupled with their nuclear weapons and their future technical ability to place them as a payload on ballistic missiles, the United States, Japan, and Korea have to be absolutely deliberate in demonstrating assured reliability with tremendous confidence in their missile defense systems. This is a vital national security issue to all three countries involved. It is at the core essence of their respective government’s existence to the defense and protection of their people.
The cornerstone of protecting the U.S. Homeland from long range ballistic missiles is our nation’s Ground Based Missile Defense System. This system, with forward based sensors in Japan, Alaska, California, and interceptors in California, and Alaska all connected to an overall fire control system in Colorado Springs that integrates the sensors to include U.S. Navy Aegis BMD Ships forward as well as space sensors, and other land/sea based sensors for a complete command and control integration center. The fundamental cornerstone of protecting Korea, Japan, Guam, and the region from North Korean threats is to ensure that the U.S. homeland can never be threatened by nuclear ballistic missiles from North Korea.
Our country is not where it should be in its reliability of our missile defense systems as our last fully operational Ground Based Missile Defense system intercept test was close to two years ago and it did not achieve intercept. Our homeland defense requires more testing, more funding, more support, and more attention. This entire system with so many parts has to be reliable, tested, and continually proven. Testing of the entire ground based missile defense system and its component parts on all the units within it have to be increased as well reducing test risk aversion of failure in delaying and/or funding tests. Demonstrated reliability of our Missile Defense systems is critical and failures will happen along the way until this system becomes 100 percent reliable.
This mission is far too important not to get it 100 percent right, our American People demand it, for when North Korea has their full capability intact to strike the United States with a long range ballistic missile carrying a nuclear weapon there can be absolutely no failure and no doubt in defeating that missile.
