No Missle Defense & Radar in Czech Republic?

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plasmahawk

Member
ITAR TASS, Lenta.Ru and a Czech news site, are carrying articles about a call from Obama to Czech PM about canceling the Radar deployment for the EU Based Missile Defense System.

Tass Link
Lenta.ru: Link

"Prague - The Czech people have marked the victory of today's decision by the U.S. administration to abandon plans for the creation of radar missile defense shield in Brdy CSSD chairman Jiří Paroubek and Jan Májíček Movement No to Bases!. On the contrary, ODS chairman Mirek Topolánek, who was last year at the time of the signing of two major radar contract to lead the government, said that changing attitudes Washington is losing interest by the U.S. Central area. " more here Google Translate


Obama said the refusal to place U.S. missile defense radar in the Czech Republic

PRAGUE, September 17. Itar-Tass Shamshin. President Barack Obama said Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer on his country's decline to place U.S. missile defense radar station in the country. The head of the White House to-night telephone conversation with the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, according to local media.
Representatives of the Czech government confirmed the fact that journalists telephone conversation between Barack Obama and Ian Fisher. Details to be announced today, after receiving an official document to Prague from Washington. Its acquisition is expected in the next few hours.

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Interesting Lenta is also carrying an article about an S-500 Announcement from the Russian Military, about its imminent completion. Which is odd, because not enough of the S400s have been rolled out yet. ( link to the S-500 Story) - Although no juicy information about the system is listed, just general *will* *should* *might* *some time later*

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Feanor

Feanor

Super Moderator
Staff member
It's more then politics. It's also a matter of budget and cost-efficiency. There is also considerable expectation that Russia will now stop selling missile technology to Iran. There are also proposals for a joint BMD system with Russia floating around, which (if realized) would give the US access to the Russian early-warning network. I agree that there are a lot of politics behind the decision, but it's not purely political.
 
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PhysicsMan

Member
Feanor said:
It's more then politics. It's also a matter of budget and cost-efficiency. There is also considerable expectation that Russia will now stop selling missile technology to Iran. There are also proposals for a joint BMD system with Russia floating around, which (if realized) would give the US access to the Russian early-warning network. I agree that there are a lot of politics behind the decision, but it's not purely political.
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Well, what you just summarized is about politics. They came up with the idea of the shield in part (or quite possibly entirely) as a bargaining chip in dealings with Russia, so that they have some leverage with them on Iran issues and now they're exploring what they can get for terminating it.
And, more generally, by definition, if an idea such as this "shield" has no military merit then it's a political decision. And it really does have no military merit, not against ballistic missile attacks. In that respect, Obama is right to be focusing more on the medium and short range threats from Iran...
 
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turin

New Member
And, more generally, by definition, if an idea such as this "shield" has no military merit then it's a political decision.
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The most significant technical aspect is that they switch from a rather unproven design - the GBI - to one, that at least passed its tests much more successfully. While the AEGIS-shield in its current design does not match the (very theoretical) capabilities of the GBI, its at least already operational (I remember the amusing press statement about the GBI being "operational" some time ago).

Now as for military and political merit...that really is a very blurry line, especially with strategic arms aspects, I guess. Certainly this card was played well, because with GBIs questionable track record one might argue that the Russians shot themselves in the foot big time when their press work made this thing look like the nail on the coffin that was Russian deterrence capabilties. Now they seemingly trade their tech-proliferation to Iran (which, on a side note, is substantial) for the termination of a white elephant. The US might have gotten some bad rep with the Polish and the Czechs (funny how they are complaining now, considering how sceptical they were over the whole deployment just a few years ago), but in the end I just cannot see how Obama sacrificed anything substantial there.

So now the USN "just" has to come up with enough ships to do all the rest of their normal work. Which can be good or bad, depending on how shipbuilding and upgrading get along in the future.

As for this S-500 that was mentioned in the first post...its certainly far from being rolled out. As far as I read the statements, they just coined the name, really - and not much more.
 
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PhysicsMan

Member
turin said:
Certainly this card was played well, because with GBIs questionable track record one might argue that the Russians shot themselves in the foot big time when their press work made this thing look like the nail on the coffin that was Russian deterrence capabilties. Now they seemingly trade their tech-proliferation to Iran (which, on a side note, is substantial) for the termination of a white elephant. The US might have gotten some bad rep with the Polish and the Czechs (funny how they are complaining now, considering how sceptical they were over the whole deployment just a few years ago), but in the end I just cannot see how Obama sacrificed anything substantial there.
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I agree. There's just one note. From the Soviet times (and probably even imperial times) Russian leadership is used to always be thinking in strategic terms, even if not called for. I don't know if they called this one right but besides the direct military consideration of additional American assets near their borders they were thinking about Poland and Chech. The sphere of influence thing is important to them and any time they can weaken western presence in Eastern Europe they will do it. Same thing as the Georgian war - there's hardly any importance in South Ossetia to Russia, it was all about d..ck flexing with the West in their backyard.
 
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turin

New Member
Yeah, I agree with your points about Russian backyard-thinking. But whatever the outcome of this whole thing is, Poland and Czech are still the most anti-russian places in Eastern Europe (except the Baltic states perhaps) and temporarily weakening the US posture there will not lead to any improvement of Russian influence in the same place. If anything, this will prompt those countries to improve their bilateral relations and those to the European Union, which are strong already and not really affected by the Missile Defence-discussions (the talks between Russia and Germany for an offshore oil pipeline made up for that though).

The thing is, historically, Czech and Poland never where in a exclusively Russian backyard, except for the rather brief Soviet post-war era. Russia always had to respect a compromise, with Germany (and Austria) for the most part, but more recently with the West as a whole and the Czech and Polish themselves consider themselves rather more western than eastern european. I understand and - to a certain degree - respect the Russian fear for their "safety zone" in the west. But from a historical POV their perceived sphere of influence including those two countries per se is not adequate (which of course is the reason why Poland was split up so many times before they temporarily turned into a nation-state, when Russias influence was diminished after their revolution in 1917).
 
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