The Huntsville Times February 26, 2009
Sessions: Don't cut missile system
By Shelby G. Spires
Rumored cuts in the missile defense budget prompted Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Mobile, to ask the Pentagon Wednesday to protect a ground-based missile defense system.
Sessions sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about recent reports that the Pentagon is considering cutting $2 billion from the Missile Defense Agency's $10 billion budget. Sessions believes the cuts would come from the decade-old ground-based missile defense program, which is being developed and managed in Huntsville, and slow its evolution to a better defense system, he wrote Gates.
"We are so close to completing the system that it would be unwise and very cost ineffective to slow down the production," Sessions told The Times during a phone interview Wednesday. "It would be unwise to signal to our adversaries who could use offensive missiles that we plan to back away from this capability."
The Pentagon has two missile fields in Alaska and California along with several advanced radars scattered across the globe that support the ground-based system. It is intended to protect continents from incoming nuclear-tipped missiles.
Also, Sessions addressed suggestions by other members of Congress that money be shifted from the ground-based system to medium-range missile defense programs such as Patriot, Navy Aegis cruisers and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. These systems are geared to protecting troops and military bases.
Sessions vowed to work with missile defense boosters in Congress and fight any cuts "to the best of our abilities."
But funding cuts to missile defense may be inevitable as the Obama White House writes a federal budget that faces stiff deficits and an economic slowdown, said John Pike, a missile defense expert who runs the Pentagon watchdog Web site GlobalSecurity.org.
Pike said the Missile Defense Agency budget "has been bloated over the past decade and you could cut out $1 billion or even $2 billion because nobody knows where that money goes. There's $1 billion that's classified every year that has never been accounted for.
"There is room to cut. That budget had more than doubled over the past decade, but the American people haven't gotten twice the capability."
Sessions said the Missile Defense Agency needs more money to provide for enhanced capability "and the ability to take on multiple threats and missiles that have decoys on them. This program was always intended to grow."
© Copyright 2009, The Huntsville Times
