Dear Members and Friends,

The President released his budget for 2006 earlier this week and among the many items listed was the funding for missile defense under the Department of Defense’s portion of the budget.

Missile defense has been allocated $7.8 billion which amounts to less than 2% of the defense budget of $418.3 billion, and with the addition of the supplementary defense bill of $80 billion, missile defense is at 1.5% of the defense budget. Though the budget is $1 billion less than last year, it is certainly affordable and money well spent, as the American public has stated overwhelmingly and repeatedly throughout our country over the past two years. Click here for polling results. Let us not forget that a one billion dollar cut from missile defense funding is a sacrifice for our country and its urgent needs.

My initial analysis of the 2006 missile allocation of funds finds that it is focused on real capabilities in the near and mid-term deployment and mobility over its longer term objectives of future systems. The Department of Defense’s decision to defer almost a billion dollars in the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a futuristic advanced program, and the growing concern of the numerical threat from North Korea along with the proliferation of medium and short-range missiles makes that conclusion clearly.

With this week’s nuclear announcement from the North Korean government and their intention to build more, it is without a doubt that our government and its budget, needs to make sure that we have enough ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California to dissuade and if necessary, defeat this threat. The ominous fact is that our country today still remains unprotected as the limited missile defense system deployed has not become fully operational, and that we do not have enough deployed interceptors to deter and intercept a complete North Korean attack. We encourage our congress to make sure that there is enough funds in the budget and that those funds are allocated in the correct way to protect our lives, our communities, and our country.