A deputy defense secretary tells Congress that the administration is indeed considering giving Moscow sensitive Aegis ballistic missile defense data. We’ve gone from “trust but verify” to “appease and surrender.”
Brad Roberts testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee Tuesday that the Obama administration was actively considering giving Moscow classified missile defense data to allay Russian concerns about the capabilities and intent of our proposed ballistic missile defense system based in Europe to guard against missiles launched from Iran.
Roberts testified that the administration believes “cooperation could be well-served by some limited sharing of classified information of a certain kind if the proper rules were in place to do that.” The Bush administration also sought cooperation on missile defense, he noted.
The only thing President George W. Bush wanted to share with the Russians was a heads-up on our plans to deploy long-range, ground-based interceptors, such as those deployed in California and Alaska, in Poland as well as missile defense radar in the Czech Republic.
He certainly wasn’t offering them data such as the burnout velocity of Raytheon Co.’s Standard Missile-3 interceptors, the centerpiece of our Aegis ballistic missile defense system.
I suppose this is because Moscow has been so supportive regarding Syria, or because their elections are so clean, or because they feel that our unilateral disarmament of nuclear missiles isn’t enough, or because we didn’t back down about the missile defense shield promised our Eastern European allies, but those are just guesses. Given the brouhaha over Leon Panetta’s strange views on US sovereignty, this is nothing to worry about.
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