“be willing to trade the end of this Clinton-era Space market debacle for rapid development and deployment of orbital BMD systems

You present a false choice. The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike. ITAR is utterly irrelevant to that policy debate.”

Windy, the false choice is not between BMD and ITAR. It is between the concept of “arms control” as a whole, and BMD, since “arms control *does*not*work*, unless enforced. That enforcement is what happened when Ghaddafi turned over his nuclear & ballistic missile program to us after Iraq was invaded. He was terrified he would be next.

Competently done multi-layered BMD is a *far* gentler means of enforced “arms control” than is invading another country, not to mention cheaper. It is more appropriately called “shaping the battlefield”, by discouraging the development of the small SRBM, IRBM, and ICBM ballistic missile arsenals that most probable assailants of industrial society around the world could afford.

ITAR *is* “arms control”, through a hope and a wish that keeping our sellers from a market will keep others from advancing their own technology. It will make their technology advance more expensive, to be sure, but no more. When the resulting expense is still inside their expenditure limits, it must ultimately be harmful to us, while not stopping the assailants of industrial society from gaining the advantages of ballistic missiles.

ITAR is thus nothing more than a means to keep less “progressive” politicians from making a stand for BMD that could cost them politically, while still looking like they are “doing something”,…no matter how ineffective it ultimately is.

“he US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike.”

goofy RGO

“The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike.”

What a throwback you are. The world is too small now for the big countries to duel it out with nuclear war, and why would China try to nuke it’s largest trading partner?

Just like the SLS doesn’t address any known payload needs, BMD doesn’t address the most likely methods of nuclear weapon delivery – airplanes and ships. Why build a rocket when a cargo container costs so much less?

You present a false choice. The US should be aggressively pursuing Strategic BMD with the goal of denying Russia and China a first strike. ITAR is utterly irrelevant to that policy debate.

One point in particular about the inclusion in ITAR of all space-related hardware and software is what that inclusion is a very poor substitute for.

It is useful, at all, only because the US refused to spend the money between 1993 and now to build the sort of Ballistic Missile Defense that would make the technology of the vast majority of the satellites and spacecraft blocked from sale by ITAR useless to our, and our allies, potential assailants. It is the combination of dropping ITAR inclusion for most spaceflight technology *and* the provision of a substantive equivalent of the Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) that makes both policy and strategic sense for the US. Not 1 percent of our spaceflight technology will make Iran or China, much less North Korea, more dangerous to us once we fully accept the need for those BMD systems that ITAR inclusion of spacecraft technology has tried to substitute for.

Windy’s objections would be far more obviously flaky than they are today with such systems in assured development and deployment. So, are the advocates of cleansing the Space markets of ITAR intervention willing to back the BMD systems that category XV ITAR is such a poor substitute for?

And Windy,…would *you* be willing to trade the end of this Clinton-era Space market debacle for rapid development and deployment of orbital BMD systems that do not encourage others to take markets away from the US??