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The Gipper's Win
Investor's Business Daily
SDI: A destroyed satellite attests to the prowess of U.S. technology and our ability to defend ourselves. Democrats said it wouldn't work. Adversaries say it's provocative. Somewhere Ronald Reagan must be smiling. Rarely is military technology put to so public a test with so much riding on its success or failure. With the whole world watching, a modified Standard Missile-3 was launched Wednesday night from a Navy cruiser in the North Pacific, its target a spy satellite in a decaying orbit headed to Earth full of hazardous hydrazine fuel.
SM-3 lifts off from USS Lake Erie.
Deputy National Security Adviser James Jeffrey discounted any comparison with an anti-satellite test conducted by the Chinese last year. "This is all about trying to reduce the danger to human beings," Jeffrey said. Some say the U.S. was just using the situation to test its missile defense. We say, "So what?" This also is about reducing the danger to America.
This wasn't officially a missile defense test, though critics have tried to paint it as such — notably the hypocritical Chinese, who've conducted their own tests of anti-satellite missiles, and the ever-anxious Russians. The SM-3 was designed to intercept ballistic missiles, but the sensor and software modifications to hit a falling satellite are different from those needed to hit an incoming warhead.
Nonetheless, failure would have been met with relief in Beijing and Moscow, where the rapidly re-arming Russians and Chinese are turning out new ballistic missiles like sausages. Rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran would have celebrated. In the Democratic caucus, failure would've been met with unbridled joy, proof that the long-derided "Star Wars" was unworkable. Attempts to cut funding would be given new life.
But it worked. Once again the bullet hit another bullet. And the technology has progressed to the point where we can hit a particular spot on the bullet: The target wasn't just the satellite, but its fuel tank full of hydrazine. Bull's-eye! The fuel and satellite were vaporized in space rather than disintegrating over a city. Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an expert on military space technologies, said the satellite and the kinetic kill vehicle collided at a combined speed of 22,000 miles per hour 133 miles above the Earth.
A video clip showed the spectacular impact. "We have a fireball," notes a smiling Cartwright, "and given that there's no fuel (on the tip of the SM-3), that would indicate a hydrazine fire." Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, recently said the operational tests before Wednesday were unconvincing. Over on the House side, seven Democrats, in a letter sent to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, complained of "tests that have been highly scripted."
This was a real-life, pants-on-fire emergency with potential loss of life. Neither the satellite's trajectory nor the potential impact point was known. Launch conditions, such as wave height, had to be taken as is. Levin should be grateful that, thanks to President Reagan's dream of a national missile defense, a thousand pounds of hydrazine aren't raining on some neighborhood in Detroit.
We feel confident, as the military undoubtedly does, that we could have taken out an Iranian Shahab or a North Korean Topodong if we had to. Someone should tell Barack Obama that it'll take more than "aggressive personal diplomacy" to defend America. He talks very well. We still prefer the big stick. Thank you, Ronald Reagan.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 25 February 2008