Riki
Ellison, Founder and Chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance
(MDAA), www.missiledefenseadvocacy.org, has commented on the U.S.
placing a missile defense system in Turkey. Ellison is one of the top
foremost lay experts in the field of missile defense in the world. His
comments include the following:
United States missile defense
assets will be placed in Turkey that will help protect Europe, the U.S.
and Turkish territory from Iranian ballistic missile threats. Turkey, a
country which borders Iran and is a participating member of NATO, is
going to play a vital role in missile defense to contain Iran's
continued proliferation of ballistic missiles and future nuclear
capability.
These assets, namely the AN/TPY-2 Forward-Based X-Band
radars that would be coupled with Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
(THAAD) batteries that can handle missile salvo raids, will provide
early sensing and the future capability to remotely launch and engage
with sea- and land-based interceptor missiles.
The AN/TPY-2 radars
deployed in Turkey will provide early tracking information on long
range missiles headed towards the U.S., securely linked into the fire
control of the 30 Ground-Based Interceptors (GBI) in Alaska and
California defending the U.S. A similar architecture is deployed today
against North Korea with the AN/TPY-2 radar deployed in Shariki, Japan.
In
the future these AN/TPY-2 sensors will have dual capability to perform
U.S. sensor duties and the fire control of a THAAD battery, which will
offer both endo- and exo-atmospheric protection of Turkey from multiple
Iranian ballistic missiles. These AN/TPY-2 sensors will link into the
Aegis Ashore scheduled deployments in Romania and Poland to expand their
defended areas.
These same deployments are projected to have a
forward-based capability to shoot down intercontinental ballistic
missiles (ICBMs) and medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) heading
towards the United States and Europe ten to fifteen years from now.
Ideally,
two AN/TPY-2 radars would be deployed in Turkey to provide
triangulation and cover the full range of missile paths from Iran to the
U.S. and Europe. This system would be complemented with THAAD and
Patriot Batteries as well as linkage into U.S. Aegis Missile Defense
Ships and Aegis Ashore platforms to provide a multi-layered robust
defense. If this is done correctly it would provide a regional ballistic
missile defense system that could be applied to any area in the world
from the Persian Gulf to South Korea and Japan.
In the impending
vote by NATO for territorial missile defense, Turkey will play a
critical part of the after effects of a positive vote by NATO.