By Jen DiMascio
In a Capitol Hill speech yesterday, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), a strong advocate of missile defense, blasted past statements by presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on the topic.
Kyl, who has endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president, said the likely winner of the election–not McCain–has made statements about gutting funding for the nation’s missile defense system.
“This leading Democrat has gone from statements such as, ‘I don’t agree with a missile defense system,’ to promising that he would save billions in wasteful defense spending by cutting missile defense system research by as much as $10 billion,” Kyl said during an event sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council. “This is the defense posture of the person who is likely to become the next president of the United States. And he’s proposing to cut $10 billion out of a budget that wasn’t even $10 billion this year.”
After the speech, Kyl told reporters he received the information about presidential candidate and Obama’s position on missile defense from Chicago newspaper articles written in 2001 and 2004.
Obama’s office did not respond to a request for comment by press time. However, a survey circulated by the Iowa branch of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities–a group seeking to shift spending from defense to other areas of the federal budget–did lay out a position from his campaign.
Obama said in the survey that he has supported shifting funds from “the unproven missile defense system” to proven technologies and that missile defense needs to be “developed in a way that is pragmatic, cost-effective, and will work.”
Obama’s response to the survey, indicated he does not support weapons in space. Rather, he proposed a code of conduct for nations that travel in space. “One key element of that code must include a prohibition against harmful interference against satellites. Meanwhile, I have opposed unnecessary spending on military space programs, including opposing funding for the President’s request for a space test bed, the first step toward weaponizing space,” Obama wrote in response to the survey last year.
That puts Obama squarely at odds with Kyl, who last year tried unsuccessfully to restore $10 million to the budget for the space test bed.
Last year’s budget cycle was the first since Democrats regained control of Congress. The defense bills cut $500 million for space systems, $450 million from missile defense and $100 million from Space Tracking and Surveillance System, Kyl said. “It’s proof that elections have consequences,” he added.
Looking ahead to the possibility of a Democratic president and Congress, he urged missile defense supporters to fight for a number of positions. Those include: completing radar and missile components in Europe, ensuring Aegis destroyers and cruisers are integrated into the missile defense sensor network and are equipped with interceptors over the next three to four years, starting the space test bed study and begin debating a space-based layer to the missile defense system.