Nice of the media, then, to play up the administration spin while it could.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Another area of Administration spin came with the Sobering Thought of activating the National Ballistic Missile Defense (NBMD), of questionable reliability. Now, the NBMD systems on the West Coast (Alaska and California) are midcourse intercept, that can engage a missile only in a trajectory that's bringing it, from high altitude, onto North America.

The North Korean test site is on the coast, just like the US sites at Cape Canaveral, Wallops Island, and Vandenberg AFB. It's nice to have ocean if something goes BOOM-SPLOOSH a few seconds after launch. Yes, there are some inland centers, mostly when there are massive areas of unpopulated land, such as in Russia, Australia, or the US White Sands Missile Range.

The significance of a coastal launch site is that international waters start three miles out. While I haven't yet seen the exact list of ships, US and Japanese Burke-class destroyers were offshore. Later model Burke-class ships, with the AEGIS battle management system, can carry the SM-3 missile, which is intended for Theater BMD (TBMD), along with the Army Advanced Patriot PAC-3 and the Air Force's experimental Airborne Battle Laser. All of these systems could engage a North Korean missile in the immediate area, the Navy and Air Force systems in boost and the Army and Navy systems in terminal attack (i.e., coming down).

SM-3 happened to pass another scheduled test last week, in much more realistic conditions than NBMD has been tested. Again, I don't know if US ships were actually carrying it, but, while admittedly that is rocket science, the capability is real.

Japan builds Burke-class destroyers under license, and is now in a TBMD partnership with the US. Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (i.e., Navy) Burkes are scheduled to get SM-3 this fall. There's also been a recent agreement to supply the Japanese with PAC-3.

So what was the hoopla of activating a questionable system that might actually never get the missile on its radar (geography and all that), while there were more reliable systems already near Korea?

We wouldn't want to be drawing attention to the NBMD system, a very expensive solution that may be in search of a problem?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*