Last week, President Obama made the courageous decision to drop the idea of setting up a European ballistic missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.

This of course, came as some relief to the Russians, who quite rightly saw the deployment of such a system as a threat to their homeland. After all, with such a system in place, what was to stop the US from hurtling a weapon or two into Federation space safe in the knowledge that the missile shield would effectively eliminate any retaliation?

Of course, the US, and its NATO buddies always saw the rationale behind the erection of the shield a bit differently. They claimed that the aim of the thing was to protect the US and its allies against any missile threat from those naughty boys in Iran, who apparently, present a threat to the safety of Europe and the US.

But with the missile shield shelved, more than a few folks in Europe have now expressed their concern about the safety of their countries. But need they worry? I don’t think so, because if his remarks at the White House last week are anything to go by, the President hasn’t forgotten the safety of us here in Europe at all. Not one bit.

It’s just that in place of the shield, the folks in the US now intend to deploy other ‘proven and cost-effective technologies’ to meet the same goals. And not only that, the President says that these will be deployed sooner than the shield and offer greater defences against the threat of missile attack than the shield could ever do!

This change of heart in US policy apparently came about after President Obama ordered a comprehensive assessment of the country’s missile defence program in Europe, and after an extensive process, approved the unanimous recommendations of the US Secretary of Defense and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Surely, it’s good news for everyone. The Russians are happy, and Europe will be safe from the threat of whatever missiles that Iran might care to lob over here in the next few years or so.

But one thing about the whole affair troubles me. And that is the relatively short period of time that it took the President and his new team of advisors to figure that the missile shield was redundant given the increased capability of these other cost effective technologies.

Because, as we all know, a missile system isn’t like an MP3 player that gets disposed and replaced each Christmas. Aside from their enormous cost, military technologies take years to perfect, to test and to put into service.

So why then wasn’t former President Bush given the same advice from his team of advisors three years ago? Surely they also spoke to the folks who built the weapons systems too, didn’t they? And when they did, weren’t they told, as Obama’s team apparently has been, that conventional cheaper systems would perform equally as well as the shield? Or did I miss something here?
This comment was originally published in the Engineeringtalk Newsletter