The UK Telegraph is reporting that Barack Obama is considering abandoning laser-based airborne anti-missile defense. Writes the Telegraph today: 'US laser warplane under threat from Barack Obama
The future of a US warplane that fires lasers at the enemy is under threat from Barack Obama's administration. ...
One of first the first decisions of US defence that the President-elect will face in office will be whether or not to continue funding for the futuristic Airborne Laser weapons programme.
The system aims to send an invisible, ultra-powerful laser beam from aircraft hundreds of miles from their targets, and could one day alter the nature of aerial warfare.
Primarily designed to strike enemy missile silos, the US Missile Defence Agency has called the ABL the answer to "rogue states" or terror groups equipped with intercontinental ballistic missiles."
Nobody knows if this is just a trial balloon, or if the new administration is truly considering making its first truly gigantic military/foreign policy blunder. Certainly liberal 'experts' are always putting down missile defense efforts --- they have been doing it for decades. This is obviously foolish and dangerous just at the time when we are approaching a genuinely effective anti-missile defense, for the first time in the sixty-year history of the Nuclear Age of Anxiety. There has never been a working defense before. Now a lot of liberals are hoping to 'stop the world, I want to get off!!'
Trouble is that the real world doesn't care. The Democrats can follow their loudly proclaimed fantasies and abandon missile defense. But the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Israelis and even the Europeans are smarter than that. They may applaud the Obama Administration's unilateral surrender theatrics, but secretly they're all going:
SUCKER!!!
So my guess is that this is a trial balloon. If it's not, it will obviously increase, not decrease, the dangers as the United States becomes the first nation in history to disarm itself in the face of mullahs with nukes.
So it will be a very good test of sanity. We'll find out very soon.