Lt. Gen. Robert Gard: Euro-BMD bad for U.S.

The Center’s Senior Military Fellow, Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, recently wrote a tremendous op-ed in which he calls the Bush administration’s decision to build a national missile defense complex in Europe “premature, misguided, wasteful of billions of dollars and damaging to U.S. relationships with our European allies and Russia.”

Gard begins...

National missile defense, now called the Ground-Based Midcourse Missile Defense System, or GMD, is being developed to protect the United States against a limited attack from warheads launched on long-range ballistic missiles by so-called rogue states. The intent is to destroy incoming weapons during their flight in space, called the "midcourse" phase of their trajectory.

Yet GMD is still in its developmental phase, by no means ready for deployment. It has not demonstrated the capability under realistic conditions to destroy a target in space, and operational testing of the system is not yet even scheduled. Knowledgeable defense scientists believe the system will never be able to defeat countermeasures that any nation capable of fielding complex intercontinental ballistic missiles will be able to employ with ease.

Click here to read the complete article in which Gard runs down a litany of problems associated with the Bush administration’s initiative to expand missile defense to Europe.