Dear Members and Friends,
When our nation spends close to ten billion dollars a year on missile defense and the President and current Administration announces a clear cut missile defense policy objective to first and foremost defend our homeland from ballistic missiles, we, as a tax paying American public with constitutional rights to be defended, expect to be defended.
Yet we are only spending around ten percent of the total missile defense budget on protection of our homeland and we’re cutting from our homeland defense the most pivotal sensor tool in discriminating capability of the actual re-entry warhead inside a cloud of debris, chaff, potential decoys, counter measures and informing whether or not we actually hit this long-range ballistic weapon heading to our homeland.
A sensor that has cost our tax payers 1.5 billion dollars and is the most powerful X-Band radar ever built in the world; that has been used on intercept tests (10), deployed twice against North Korean long-range missile tests in protection of Hawaii, Alaska, the Western United States, and for the satellite shoot down by an Aegis SM-3 Block 1A interceptor as the critical fire control location of the warhead inside the threat cloud and for kill assessment. Without the fidelity of the very small radar waves that this X-Band radar provides, the nation will have to rely on much larger radar wave lengths that are on our upgraded early warning radars and Aegis ships; these radars certainly cannot discriminate or provide kill assessment to the detail and confidence of the X-Band radar.
Without this critical tool-the Sea Based X-Band (SBX) radar-to gain similar confidence, logical reasoning would suggest exponentially increasing the amount of interceptors required for each incoming long-range ballistic target inside a moving cloud of debris high in space in order to hit more targets, as discrimination becomes a tremendous challenge as does the confidence that the interceptor killed the correct target.
With a limited supply of 30 deployed interceptors, of which a good portion are on hold until they are fixed and some that will always be in maintenance, it is logically the wrong time to mothball a critical X-Band sensor and to rely, instead, on a depleted amount of interceptors that still need to be proved in testing to have solved their issues of confidence of intercept. Adding to this, we have not had a successful long-range intercept test since December of 2008 and are not scheduled to have another intercept test this year.
In the midst of North Korean threats and Iran getting closer every day to attaining a nuclear weapon with ballistic missile delivery capability, the American public must ask the question: Why is our nation’s homeland defense against these threats getting weaker rather than stronger?
Why is the Administration stating a policy of U.S. homeland defense as the number one missile defense priority when it has reduced GBI missiles, reduced intercept tests, reduced sensors, reduced funding and reduced capability?
If we cannot protect and adequately defend our homeland from ballistic missiles, what is the rationale given to the American public for spending their tax dollars on protecting our allies from ballistic missile threats from Iran and North Korea, as it would seem to further motivate them to strike at the U.S. Homeland.
What are we thinking?
