Defense is Moral and Achievable
We weren’t really worried about being hit by debris from an American satellite launched in 2006 and falling back to earth this month – though concerns both about hazardous fuel landing in a populated area and the potential compromise of spy technology if it landed in the territory of an adversary might have been realistic.
We weren’t really worried about being hit by debris from an American satellite launched in 2006 and falling back to earth this month – though concerns both about hazardous fuel landing in a populated area and the potential compromise of spy technology if it landed in the territory of an adversary might have been realistic.
The interesting thing is what the government did with the problem – or challenge or opportunity if you are an optimist – and how few Americans appear to understand just how extraordinary it was. We quote Rikki Ellison, President of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, on the process:
A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) was fired… off the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) using information fed by the ship’s on board Aegis radar tracking and discrimination sensor to guide the missile close to the falling satellite where the missile engaged its heat seeking sensor thereby enabling a direct perpendicular hit on the 5,000 lb satellite with a kinetic energy impact of 22,000 mph… The majority of the small pieces of the satellite will burn up in the atmosphere upon reentry whereby the bigger pieces will fall harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean in the first 48 hours, and the remaining pieces will re-enter the atmosphere over the next month.
The Sea Based X band radar was deployed in the area to support independently the discrimination and tracking of the destroyed Satellite. Other U.S. military sensors and satellites were deployed in the area and were also used for evaluation of the intercept. The Aegis Destroyer USS Decatur (DDG-73) accompanied the Lake Erie in this mission as a redundant back up with a capable SM-3 missile of its own as well as a duplicate Aegis sensor and radar.
Are we the only ones awed by the technological capability demonstrated Wednesday?
JINSA has backed the development of ballistic missile defenses from the beginning and pushed for the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty to permit development and deployment of systems that would one day protect us from missiles launched from enemy territory. Sea-based defense, in particular, is important because as this event shows, the ability to put the defender missiles where you want them as the threat changes gives the United States powerful options.
So it wasn’t a missile from enemy territory. So it was a failed American satellite. So what?
Deterrence is the art of making one’s adversaries conclude that the price of attacking is unacceptably high. An American bullet-to-bullet hit on a missile-equivalent 150 miles above the Pacific Ocean certainly caught the attention of the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Russians and the Chinese.
Almost 25 years to the day from President Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech in 1983 (and hamstrung until 2001 by the ABM Treaty), America’s missile defense community has done what the “experts” said couldn’t be done, and we are markedly safer for their skill and dedication to the proposition that defense is both moral and achievable.