I predict that one of the casualties of the 2004 election cycle will be missile defense, no matter which candidate wins.

 

If Kerry wins, he'll just nix it completely. That much is fairly obvious.

 

If Bush wins, I think he'll have to cave on the issue, because of two factors:

 

1) The deficit. Democrats are going to keep hammering away about this, even though it's equally their fault, and they're going to start winning the perception game on this, because Republican control of both houses *and* the White House for 8 years has, in political terms, *more* than double the impact of a single term. You start hearing phrases like "legacy" and "the Bush years", and characterizations of that nature. That positions Democrats to become the "defict recuers" in 2008, and you know Hillary's going to love to grab that banner and run with it, because there is no down side.

 

2) The tech sucks, and it's not getting any better. And even here the politics come into play, with Democrats (and a lot of Republicans) continuing to point out that spending the same amount of money on PORT security will have a far greater impact on overall security than pie-in-the-sky missile defense.

 

I've been pondering this position for a while, but this article at UPI nudged me into going ahead and writing something up on it.

 

http://about.upi.com/products/perspectives/UPI-20041030-024405-1244R

 

They get to the issue about halfway down the page. An interesting quote:

 

Dick Cheney is a good predictor: As a member of Congress and Defense Secretary, he consistently opposed efforts to move actual deployment of missile defense onto the agenda. He's a research-it-to-death guy, as are most members of the uniformed military, and the military-congresional complex, and the defense contractors themselves.

 

Republicans looking ahead will balance the prospect of having missile defense in 2009, or whenever the slothful Bush Pentagon would deploy it, against the prospect that any terror attack over the coming several years would lead to a GOP debacle in 2006 or 2008. Missile defense, RIP.

 

 

Some background reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Missile_Defense

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-ballistic_missile

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/news/1098868722252580.xml

http://www4.army.mil/news/article.php?story=6496

I predict that one of the casualties of the 2004 election cycle will be missile defense, no matter which candidate wins.

I believe that SDI (star wars) should be scaled back, but should not stopped. The scaling back to take place only if the money is required for weapons and surveillance systems etc, that are required for effective warfare against terrorist's and guerilla warfare.