The US has successfully conducted another flight test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, intercepting a medium-range ballistic missile over the Pacific near Hawaii.
Senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center Rick Fisher said on Wednesday that the timing of the test “cannot be ignored.”
It was significant, he said, that the test was conducted after North Korea’s third nuclear test, its reported imminent test of a new ballistic missile and China’s “aggressiveness” in the East China Sea.
“A robust American missile defense capability is directly relevant to the security of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea in that it deters both North Korea and China by creating doubt about the success of their missiles,” Fisher said.
However, Fisher stressed that a purely missile defense strategy for Taiwan — or the US — was being made untenable by China’s and North Korea’s growing missile arsenals.
“It is simply too expensive for the defender to deter the numbers of missiles China and North Korea can produce,” he said.
It would be far more efficient, he said, to build offensive missiles that could hold Chinese and North Korean assets at risk “much as they are doing to the democracies in Asia.”
Fisher said that Washington had “quietly” changed its previous caution about allied Asian offensive missile capabilities.
He said it now needed to help “rationalize” new allied offensive missile capabilities if non-nuclear deterrence was to survive in Asia into the next decade.
The latest BMD test was carried out by US Navy sailors aboard the USS Lake Erie using a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block 1A guided missile.
A target ballistic missile was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.
An in-orbit tracking system detected and tracked the target and the second-generation Aegis BMD weapon was launched five minutes later.
“The SM-3 maneuvered to a point in space and released its kinetic warhead,” a statement from the US Department of Defense said.
“The kinetic warhead acquired the target re-entry vehicle, diverted into its path, and, using only the force of a direct impact, engaged and destroyed the target,” the statement said.
“Initial indications are that all components performed as designed,” the Department of Defense said.
The Department of Defense said that the test was a demonstration of the ability of space-based “assets” to provide mid-course fire control quality data to an Aegis BMD ship “extending the battlespace, providing the ability for longer-range intercepts and defense of larger areas.”
It was the 24th successful intercept in 30 flight test attempts for the Aegis BMD program since flight testing began in 2002.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS