Obama's missile plan clears hurdle

Despite Republican denunciations of President Obama's decision to revamp plans for missile defenses in Europe, the Senate last week quietly offered its formal acceptance of his shift to the near-term deployment of a sea-based system to protect the continent from the looming threat of Iranian short- and mid-range missiles.

By unanimous consent, the Senate adopted an amendment to the fiscal 2010 Military Construction Appropriations bill allowing the Pentagon to use $68.5 million in unspent fiscal 2009 missile defense funds to build a Hawaii test facility for the Navy's Aegis Weapons System, which is central to the president's plans.

Senate Armed Services Chairman Committee Carl Levin, D-Mich., said in an interview that the UC "shows endorsement by many of us and acceptance ... by a lot of people who previously raised problems" with Obama's approach to missile defense.

The amendment, sponsored by Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, and ranking member Thad Cochran, R-Miss., came at the behest of Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, who heads the Missile Defense Agency. But a spokesman for Cochran said the senator's co-sponsorship role "should not be considered an endorsement" of Obama's plan.

O'Reilly sought a reallocation of funds in an Oct. 7 letter to Inouye in which he called construction of an Aegis test facility "our top priority."

Making the funds available for the test facility, O'Reilly added, is "essential if we are to implement the president's new phased adaptive approach in time to counter the growing ballistic missile threat."

Under Obama's plan, the United States would deploy existing missile defense systems -- Aegis, SM-3 interceptors and sensors -- to Europe and the eastern Mediterranean over the next two years. By 2015, the military plans to deploy a more capable version of the land- and sea-based SM-3s and more advanced sensors to expand the defended area.

Around 2018, the Obama administration expects more advances will allow protection of all of Europe from the threat of Iranian missiles. And, by 2020, the military hopes to field a more advanced SM-3 capable of defending the United States from a potential long-range missile attack from Iran.

The plan replaced one developed by former President George W. Bush's administration that called for building a radar site in the Czech Republic and launchers for long-range missile interceptors in Poland. The Bush plan set off heated internal debates in both Eastern European countries and became a flash point in U.S. relations with Russia.

Senate debate on the Inouye-Cochran amendment drew none of the partisan furor that greeted Obama's Sept. 16 announcement he was scrapping Bush's ground-based missile defense plan for a sea-based approach -- a change Republicans denounced as misguided, dangerous and an act of "appeasement" to Russia and Iran.

Indeed, the biggest concern over the amendment came from Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain, R-Ariz., who pressed for an authorization before the money could be spent. "You cannot just appropriate money for major systems - or anything, in my view - without authorizing," McCain explained.

So he and Levin have introduced a stand-alone authorizing bill for the test facility funding.

"The committee will expedite consideration of this bill provided that we can get the normal assurances that the project is supported by the secretary of Defense and that the proposed construction costs and timelines are accurate and up to the standards we would normally expect in a similar MilCon project request," Levin said in a Nov. 17 colloquy with Inouye before passage of the amendment.