The last two years have been marked by the rapid development of nuclear weapons by rogue nations like Iran and North Korea.  However, the Obama administration has spent this time dismantling our once-promising national missile defense programs with systematic budget cuts, the cancellation of the Eastern European missile shield, and New START, a misguided treaty with Russia that couples reductions in offensive nuclear weapons with restrictions on missile defenses.

Previous missile defense plans included sites on the U.S. West Coast to protect our homeland from threats in Asia and the Pacific theater while the system in Eastern Europe was meant to protect our allies in Europe and the East Coast from any Iranian attacks.  Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) Systems are already being constructed in Alaska and California to defend our West Coast, but President Obama’s cancelation of the Polish and Czech sites in 2009 leaves us with less viable, more costly mobile land-based and sea-based missile defenses to defend our deployed forces and allies in Europe.  According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office, it will take an additional two years to develop and deploy mobile defenses with comparable capabilities to the programs that have been scrapped, and these mobile alternatives are not meant to address the threat of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile until 2020.  Our enemies are still our enemies.  We need an integrated, layered national missile defense to deter these threats, and we need it now.  During the 112th Congress, I will continue to support a robust missile defense system to protect our homeland and our interests abroad to be deployed as soon as possible.