American panel says US vulnerable to Iran missile strikes

A panel of top US scientists and military experts have discounted the country’s defenses against missile attacks, including Iranian ones, as deficient and vulnerable to long-range strikes.

The congressionally mandated National Research Council, which offers the US government scientific and technical advice, suggests in a report that President Barack Obama should set aside the final part of his Europe-based anti-missile strategy, unveiled in 2009, and “set up the nation’s defenses to better defeat the kinds of long-range missiles that Iran may be developing,” the New York Times reports Tuesday.

The report appears to further point to growing recognition and fears of American government authorities of Iran’s rapidly advancing aeronautics and missile technology, while continuing to portray the Islamic Republic as a security threat.

Top Iranian officials, however, have maintained that the nation’s technological and military advances are strictly for defensive objectives, developed around persistent threats made by a US-led coalition of Western governments, in addition to the Israeli regime.

According to the Times report, former Obama administration’s national security official Philip E. Coyle said the panel’s report “exposed a system that should be rebuilt from top to bottom, adding that the antimissile complex was geared toward producing and fielding hardware rather than actually devising ways to deflect enemy attacks.”

The Pentagon, however, has dismissed the report as “pedestrian,” describing the panel’s warnings about the missile system’s limitations as “an old story.”

In 2009, the Obama administration shifted the focus of the preceding George W. Bush administration’s anti-missile system from protecting the continental US to what it claimed as “defending Europe and the Middle East from short- and medium-range Iranian missiles,” the report adds.

Experts and authorities from Russia and elsewhere, however, totally rejected Obama administration’s claim about Iranian missiles and insisted that the Europe-based missile system was primarily designed as a measure against Russia.

Furthermore, Iranian observers and officials widely suggested that the US-sponsored NATO missile radar system, based in Turkey, was mainly an intelligence measure geared towards protecting the Israeli regime.

Meanwhile on Tuesday, some US experts faulted the new plan. A prominent anti-missile critic and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Theodore A. Postol described the calculations behind the newly-proposed radars by the panel as “completely wrong and unrealistic.”

“They’re claiming they can do things that are not physically possible,” he said.