PRO-Overview-2019
THAAD launcher during firing. The system in which Lockheed Martin supplies missiles and Raytheon AN / TPY-2 radars have proven successful
system with some export potential. The end of the INF/INF treaty could help sell THAAD to other countries.
On January 17, 2019, the US Department of Defense published the Missile Defense Review. This open document describes the US administration's course of anti-politicism adopted by the administration of President Donald Trump. The review, although general, is interesting in that it allows us to evaluate the results of the development of American ballistic anti-missile systems from the point of view of two decades. And it also confirms—rather unintentionally—the true intentions and selectivity of Washington in its approach to compliance with Cold War disarmament treaties.
Missile Defense Review 2019 (MDR) is also interesting for many other, smaller reasons. If only because it is the first document of this rank, signed by the current new Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan, who replaced James Mattis in January. However, most of the MDR had to be created under the direction of its predecessor. Conversely, confusion over the resignation or firing of James Mattis, as the current owner of the White House likely interprets, likely delayed the publication of the MDR. In some places, statements about planned activities (tests, production, etc.) in 2018 are noticeable, which, although overdue, in the MDR do not contain any information about the implementation of these plans, or even indications of whether there were any - or attempts generally met the deadlines. It's like MDR is a compilation of material over a long period of time.
We will not focus on the political issues already mentioned at the beginning of the article. Although the MDR is full of them. In fact, it is more of a rationale for US arms policy than a report on the development of the system. Therefore, we recall the most interesting arguments used by the authors of MDR.
Defense is also an attack
The Pentagon says the announced MDR is based on National Defense Strategy (NDS) assumptions from 2017 and 2018 and is in line with last year's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) recommendations. This is basically true. The 2018 NDP even uses some infographics about four countries that Washington considers its adversaries.
MDR 2019 was created: […] to counter the growing missile threat from rogue and revisionist powers to us, our allies and partners, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles. The vocabulary and grammar of this phrase - as if from the speeches of Comrade Wieslaw or George W. Bush - are so charming that we did not refuse to quote ourselves. In any case, the entire MDR is written in this language. Of course, the "red states" are the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and the "revisionist powers" are the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.
But let's leave aside the language of political propaganda, as MDR 2019 has much more compelling claims. We laid out explicit language at the outset as to who the US missile defense program is aimed at—Russia and China. Russian politicians (and probably Chinese politicians) are finally satisfied that some US government document confirms their years of accusations about the reasons for the US unilateral withdrawal from the 1972 ABM treaty. Why is Washington consistently denied so far.
Another interesting aspect of the MDR is that it clearly states that the current U.S. anti-missile (or, more broadly, anti-missile) doctrine consists of three components. First, it is the use of strictly defensive systems, which must detect and destroy enemy missiles in flight before they reach their targets. The second is the so-called passive defense, which will allow you to deal with the consequences of hitting those enemy missiles that reach the United States (we will skip this topic, we are just talking about civil defense, which is the responsibility of FEMA - Federal Emergency Management Agency). The third component of the doctrine is to strike at the strategic arsenal of these adversaries "in the midst of a conflict." This topic is also not very developed in the WDM, but it is assumed that we are talking about pre-emptive conventional strikes with an existing arsenal or new weapons. In the latter case, we are talking about the so-called PGS (Prompt Global Strike, WiT 6/2018). We emphasize that the word "leader" is our interpretation, and the MDR does not formulate it this way. Just as it does not imply that this is a preemptive nuclear strike. Moreover, the authors of the MDR directly accuse Russia of such plans - a preemptive nuclear strike. Washington's attribution of its own military concepts to Russia has been going on for a long time, but we will analyze this projection another time. We only note that the opinion that it is possible to eliminate a significant part of the strategic thermonuclear weapons of Russia or China (for example, underground launchers of ballistic missiles) only with conventional weapons is very optimistic.
