Kyl Flip Flops on Sea-Based Missile Defense

In 1999, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) said:

While the best defense is obviously an integrated land, sea, and space combination, I think it is becoming more and more clear that sea-based defenses offer the best near-term solution to meeting our nation’s theater and national missile defense needs.

In September 2009, Kyl responded to the Obama administration’s decision to make sea-based defenses the near-term solution to meeting our nation’s missile defense needs by saying:

The decision announced today by the administration is dangerous and short-sighted. Not only does this decision leave America vulnerable to the growing Iranian long-range missile threat, it also turns back the clock to the days of the Cold War…[insert betraying allies/appeasing Russia rhetoric here]

Hmmm, this does not compute. If Kyl supported a sea-based system in 1999, why did he denounce it in 2009?

Wait, I know. The threat must have changed. If Iran’s missile capabilities evolved significantly over the last decade, then Kyl’s 1999 threat baseline is no longer applicable today and he is justified in believing a sea-based system to be inadequate, right?

What was Kyl’s proffered threat baseline in 1999? He said:

…the bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission issued its unanimous report predicting that a rogue nation could acquire the capability to strike the United States with a ballistic missile in as little as five years and that we might have little or no warning before such a threat emerged.

Uh oh. The Rumsfeld Commission’s alarmist “five years” assessment came nowhere close to panning out on Iran. The general consensus in the intelligence community today is that without substantial foreign assistance, Iran is still not likely to possess a ballistic missile topped with a nuclear weapon capable of threatening all of Europe and/or the United States for ten to fifteen years. Moreover, with Iran blasting off missiles every three days or so, the suggestion that the United States would be caught off guard by an Iranian ICBM seems incredibly unlikely.

Ten years after Kyl’s and Rumsfeld’s hyped-up 1999 estimate, Iran is still at least 10 years away from having a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the United States. Though off in his threat assessment by at least 15 years, Kyl wants us to believe that Obama is misguided for seeking to deploy a more capable sea-based system than the ground-based system preferred by Kyl?

The pitfalls of threat inflation and missile defense theology - on full display.