I'm thoroughly skeptical of BMD systems to begin with, particularly the current Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system.

The technology for decoys is simply too easy, it's basically the same as the shiny metalized children's balloons you can get at party city, and striking a reentry vehicle when closing speeds are in excess of a mile per second seems to me to involve awfully long odds.

I call it "faith based missile defense," and one of the earliest goals of the Bush administration was to ensure that it be deployed into service come hell or high water, on the theory that once it was there, it would be politically costly to remove it.

OK, I get that part, Saint Reagan called for it, so it must be done, and since it must be done, you have to drag our European allies into this too.

So here's the con: Those scary Persians are going to lob an IRBM at Europe, so we have to put an Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system into Poland, so as to protect everyone.

Poland?  Why put it in Poland?

Thing is, Poland is a pretty crappy place to put a BMD system to protect our NATO allies, and this installation, along with the associated radar at Brdy in the Czech Republic,^* and it's gotten the Russians absolutely batsh$# insane.

If you figure out the trajectory of a Ballistic missile,^† and the tools to the this can be found in a number of places on the web, the location does not make sense.

It does not protect Turkey, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, or southern France.

I've had discussions with people who have suggested that it would protect the eastern seaboard, and it would, if you launched the missiles from downtown Tehran, but just like our ballistic missiles are not located on Washington DC or Crystal City, it's unlikely that they would put their installation there.

They would want to locate it as far away from a potential aircraft carrier, NATO airbases in Turkey, and the US base at Diego Garcia.

This would put a missile base in the North East corner of the country about 500 miles east of Tehran, in the general vicinity of Masshad, the 2nd largest city in Iran.

Suddenly that interceptor in Poland does not do such a good job protecting the east coast.

For an attack on the West Coast, it's path is too far from either Poland, or the base at Fort Greely, and the installation at Vandenberg seems iffy for covering San Francisco and points north.

Now, the folks the Missile defense agency claim that the installation in Poland is unable to intercept Russian ICBMs (bottom picture), but unsurprisingly the Russians do not believe them.

The Russians did offer a site at Qabala, which they rent from Azerbaijan, if the US dropped the Polish installation, but the response of the United States at the time was a diplomatic raspberry.

In any case, it's clear that Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia would be prime locations for such a site, though there are serious political issues there, but sites in Turkey, Romania, or Bulgaria would provide better coverage of Europe, and might have a shot at intercepting something headed forChicagoland, which none of the current installations do.

There is the additional issue that pissing off the Russians has real consequences for our security, as evidenced by their outbidding the United States about access to the airbase in Kyrgyzstan.

So, it seems to be a really bad idea, and SecDef Robert Gates is already making noises about there has been no final decision on the Euro missile shield.

So, why were Bush and His Evil Minions^™ so intent on putting that GMD installation in Poland?

All it really seems to be capable of doing is pissing off the Russians.

Well, Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is the one most likely to be correct, and the simplest answer is that the goal of this whole was to piss off the Russians; they decided that it would be a good thing to poke the bear with a stick.

Why would this be so?  It doesn't make sense from the perspective of the real security needs of the United States.

The answer is as venal as it is stupid: Someone (Dick Cheney?) decided that it would be to the political advantage of the Republican to have a hostile power, armed with thousands of nuclear warheads capable of striking the US.

The big scary Russians would make the voters run to the Republicans.

Additionally, it would give Condi Rice something to do once she left the State Department, since her gig as the Worst Sovietologist Ever^™, where she made a career of painting them as 10 feet tall and irredeemably hostile, had basically ended when the Berlin Wall came down.

Basically, they were trying to recreate the Cold War for personal and political gain.

^*In fact, the radar, which can surveil all the airspace in European Russia, may be more of a sticking point than the missile base in Poland.
^†I used Google Maps. Go there, then click "my maps", and then click on "browse the directory", and click on the distance measurement tool, and it will compute great circle^‡ distances, which is what modern aircraft, and ballistic missiles, do .
^‡It's the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. The straight line on a Mercator projection is actually longer. It's what you would get if you used a globe, and a tight string between two points on that globe.

Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.