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Old 08-09-2017, 02:09 PM
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Arrow New MDA director: US prepared to defend against North Korean nuclear ICBM threat

New MDA director: US prepared to defend against North Korean nuclear ICBM threat
4-hours ago - Space and Missile Defense - Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News.
RE: http://www.defensenews.com/smr/space...r-icbm-threat/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The new Missile Defense Agency Director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, said he is confident the United States is prepared and equipped to defend the homeland against a North Korean nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile threat.

When asked directly during a presentation at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, Greaves said, “Yes, we believe that the currently deployed ballistic missile defense system can meet today’s threat.”

But, he added, the Missile Defense Agency is addressing the evolving threat or a more complex threat that could include several ICBMs or countermeasures or decoys by “diligently” pursuing capability to “mitigate” those threats.

Greaves said he wouldn’t say he was confident without a wealth of data backing it up. “We have done analysis, we have built the systems, we have done the modeling and simulation, and, oh, by the way, we have done the testing and we’ve done the testing in a rigorous manner, we’ve done it in a comprehensive manner. We’ve got the data to show it.”

The director told Defense News following his presentation that the MDA is following a timeline to develop and add capability to ensure the U.S. stays ahead of threats as they grow and evolve.

“That is what we have been working on for the past five or six years, that is what we are working on today, and that is what we will have in place,” he said.

North Korea has ramped up its missile testing exponentially since Kim Jong Un assumed power in the country. And as his testing increases in frequency and capability, the specter of war is looming over the Korean Peninsula.

Late last month, North Korea tested an ICBM which analysts say displayed, for the first time, capability to exceed 10,000 km in range, a distance that could reach San Diego but also New York.

Since that test, analysts have also reported that North Korea has successfully developed a nuclear warhead that can fit in a missile.

And North Korea’s rhetoric is also growing more bellicose, particularly Wednesday when the country threatened to nuke Guam.

One piece of data that is sparking increased confidence in the ability to defend against an ICBM attack was a monumental intercept test in May of the U.S.’s critical homeland defense system designed to defend against ICBMs from North Korea and Iran.

[Missile takedown: Historic ICBM intercept test sends strong message to North Korea]

The test marks the first time the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system has gone up against an ICBM-class target, although some previous tests have featured intermediate-range ballistic missile targets that have approached ICBM speeds.

[Politics, both home and abroad, drive South Korea THAAD deployment]

And MDA has also seen successful tests – the most recent happening last month – of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System. A THAAD battery has been deployed to Guam since 2013 and another THAAD battery is being deployed to South Korea.

Personal Note: Better to be safe than sorry. I've got faith in our Armed Forces to make the right decisions when needed. Boats
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O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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Old 08-09-2017, 02:31 PM
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Fact-checking Trump's tweet on the US nuclear arsenal
By: Joe Gould   5 hours ago Defense News
RE: https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon...lear-arsenal/?
utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MilSpace&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Military%20Space%20Report

WASHINGTON — Amid nuclear tensions with North Korea, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted a fiery boast on Wednesday: His first order as president was to “renovate and modernize” the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and now it is “far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”

But is that accurate?

The tweet, perhaps meant to back down North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or rally Trump’s political base, was met with a quick backlash from arms control and national security experts on Twitter, who refuted the claims as “nonsense” or “a total lie.” This, amid boiling criticism that Trump’s vow to meet North Korean threats with “fire and fury” was not helping to deescalate the possibility of nuclear war with Pyongyang.

To be clear, efforts to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal were long underway before Trump took office and are years from completion. Its nuclear arsenal has actually shrunk over the last seven months to meet the conditions of New START, the strategic arms reduction treaty, noted defense budget analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This is patently absurd,” Stephen Schwartz, former editor of the Nonproliferation Review, said in a tweet responding to Trump. “Literally nothing has happened in the last 201 days to increase the overall power of the US nuclear arsenal.”

The senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Alexandra Bell, called Trump’s claims “a total lie” in her own tweet. “Modernization plans for nuclear arsenal were well underway before [Trump] came into office & his own budget isn’t passed yet,” she said in another.

“The recklessness of his nuclear flaunting aside this is nonsense,” Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said in a tweet. “[President Barack] Obama set in motion massive upgrade plans, which [are] still being implemented.”

Reif, in an email, noted that the U.S. arsenal is no more powerful than it was when Trump took office and the president’s first budget request largely continues Obama’s approach. The budget won’t take effect until Oct. 1 at the earliest and may be delayed given the appropriations deadlock in Congress.

The Trump administration’s nuclear policy is still in its nascent stage, expected to grow out of the Pentagon’s ongoing Nuclear Posture Review. Trump ordered the review as part of a Jan. 27 memorandum to “rebuild” the U.S. military, but it did not begin until April and is not expected to finish before September.

In the balance is whether Trump will continue or expand Obama’s nuclear modernization plans and spend as much as $1 trillion over 30 years to replace America’s aging fleets of bombers, submarines and long-range ballistic missiles. Russia and China are in the midst of their own major nuclear modernization efforts.

For the record, Trump’s first official order, signed Jan. 20, minutes after he took the oath of office, was aimed at overhauling Obama’s signature health care law.

In December, Trump made a series of statements that contained his first and clearest support up until that point for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” he said in a tweet.

A day later, Trump said in a TV interview: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

Trump had just met with a number of the military’s top policy and procurement officials, including Vice Adm. James Syring, head of the Missile Defense Agency, and Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, deputy Air Force chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration.

A month after taking office, Trump derided New START in an interview with Reuters as “a one-sided deal,” saying that “if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”

Signed in 2010 by Obama and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the treaty calls for the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers to be reduced by half.

Trump’s statements upset nonproliferation advocates and roiled the delicate political consensus in Washington on nuclear arms. Generally speaking, Obama traded support for nuclear modernization for the support from defense hawks for the treaty.

Nuclear modernization was a hot topic in Washington long before Trump was elected. The arsenal is estimated to cost at least $400 billion through 2026, and modernizing it faces a so-called bow wave of spending that adds up to $1 trillion over 30 years, by some accounts.

Defense Department officials have repeatedly made the case to Congress that 40-year-old Minuteman III missiles and Ohio-class nuclear missile submarines need to be replaced, while a new nuclear-capable bomber must be built to retire the venerable B-52.

The nonproliferation community, and some Democratic lawmakers, are pushing back against modernization plans over the cost, and they say a new nuclear cruise missile, the Long-Range Standoff weapon, could fuel a new arms race.

On Tuesday, Trump remarked to reporters that Pyongyang is not to make any more threats against the United States or it will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

North Korea published a statement Wednesday saying it was reviewing plans to strike around the U.S. territory of Guam, in the Pacific, including Anderson Air Force Base. It accused the U.S. of provocative flights and tests in the Pacific.

Aaron Mehta and Valerie Insinna in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
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Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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