MDAA Alert: “Any Sensor, Any Weapon”

General James E. "Hoss" Cartwright, Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Dear Members and Friends,

At an appropriate setting, the Ronald Reagan Conference Building and International Trade Center in Washington D.C., our nation’s most prominent leaders in the field of missile defense from the government, military and defense industry came together with non-government personnel including engineers, civilians, politicians, appointees and our armed forces for three days this week.

Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn addressed the conference at its opening by endorsing strong bipartisan support on missile defense and increasing the missile defense budget from last year by 700 million to 9.9 billion for 2011. Further, Mr. Lynn announced the growing quantitative and qualitative ballistic missile threat and reinforced the six policies put forward by the President on missile defense.

MDAA Alert: We Are As Good As Your Word

Dear Members and Friends,

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, under the direction of President Obama, put forward the most positive statement of support for Missile Defense by a Democratic President since President Lyndon Johnson, as the Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report was announced and released last month. Click here for the BMDR

“The protection of the United States from the threat of ballistic missile attack is a critical national security priority. The threat to our deployed military forces and to our allies and partners is growing rapidly. This threat has significant implications for our ability to project power abroad, to prevent and deter future conflicts, and to prevail should deterrence fail.”

General Cartwright on missile defense

This past week at the Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James “Hoss” Cartwright addressed the relevance of missile defense. He said the key to missile defense was striking a balance between, “the exquisite and good enough.” He stressed that when the Quadrennial Defense Review, Nuclear Posture Review, Ballistic Missile Defense Review and Space Posture Review are completed, it will give government and military leaders a chance to reassess all the defense programs to make sure we are, “doing the right things.”

Speaking about the procurement process he asked , “are the tools that we’re procuring relevant to the reality of the wars that we’re in and to anybody’s best estimate of the wars that we’re likely to go to?” And questioned if they were, “strategy adaptable? Because if we’ve learned anything over the last eight years of this conflict, it’s that the enemy has a vote in where we’re going to go and where this fight’s going to go.”

He also stressed a theme of balance in trying to integrate the different policy recommendations made by the different reviews and commissions. “These are the kinds of thoughts that we’re trying to understand as we start to look at the synergies between the Ballistic Missile Defense Review and the Nuclear Posture Review”, “How do these things fit together? And it’s not one size fits all.”

He did say progress has been made on developing missile defense technologies and added that the underlying theme of defense systems procurement is adaptation. “We’ve gone the right direction in missile defense. We have proliferated; we have so many choices, the adversaries just plain don’t know where to go.” “We’ve got to do the same with the capabilities we have in space, integrating them across domains, so it doesn’t matter what [the enemy does] to my air, ground or my space,”. “There’s always another answer, and we can adapt faster than you can change.”

I’ll post more quotes from General Cartwright at the confreence as I find them.