BMD advocate hails Obama's commitment to missile defense

WASHINGTON, April 20 (UPI) -- A recent e-mail message from one of America's most prominent champions of ballistic missile defense highlights the radical way the debate has changed in recent years for traditional supporters and critics of the program alike.

Riki Ellison is founder and chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. On April 9, Ellison sent out a report to his base praising U.S. President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates for remaining committed to the principle of BMD.

Ellison began by noting that he was writing right after Obama had publicly endorsed the principle of ballistic missile defense in a keynote speech in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. He was also writing after North Korea had unsuccessfully attempted to launch a communications satellite into orbit on top of a Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile. The attempt failed, but the missile did fly for 2,000 miles -- still far from ICBM capability but twice as far as any previous North Korean missile had managed.

Most notably, Ellison was writing just after Gates had unveiled his series of proposed cuts for the fiscal year 2010 budget to get Pentagon spending under control. These included major hits for the development of Boeing's Airborne Laser and Lockheed Martin's Kinetic Energy Interceptor.

Nevertheless, Ellison focused on the BMD cup being half full rather than half empty.

Obama and Gates "have made a strategic decision to support and field a missile-defense capability," he wrote. "This administration has acknowledged the threat of ballistic missiles from Iran and North Korea in the near term and have defied the critics of missile defense by deploying what we have now, and the fundamental policy question of whether we should do missile defense or not do missile defense has been answered. "

Ellison then made a point we have repeatedly documented in our analyses of patterns of funding for BMD by the previous Democrat-controlled 110th Congress in 2007 and 2008.

"Missile defense looks to be an embedded core element of the defense of the United States and will be part of the underlying fabric of American defense capabilities. This administration has clearly ratified the idea that ballistic missiles are a real threat to the United States, its allies and the armed forces," he wrote.

Ellison was also correct in pointing out, as we have noted in previous analyses, that ballistic missile defense against intermediate-range ballistic missiles is now a relatively mature and reliable technology and that there is an effective bipartisan consensus in Congress to retain funding for it.

"The preliminary budget shows clear determination to field the near-term capabilities in face of the threat and keep and deploy what we have developed," he wrote. "Those near-term systems include Aegis, THAAD and the long-range ground-based interceptors. It is a fundamental change from those that say they support missile defense but don't want to deploy it until it is perfect. Secretary Gates added an additional $900 million in new money for some of the current deployed systems."

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Part 2: The BMD debate switches focus