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ID:
131339
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
One of the central debates in contemporary international relations scholarship concerns the issue of whether balancing has occurred in response to US-based unipolarity, and if it has, how this should be characterised. Existing research has seen analysts argue that major power responses to unipolarity can be placed in one of either three categories: an absence of balancing, soft balancing, and hard balancing. This article contributes to the scholarly literature by providing a case study of hard internal Russian balancing against the US's development and deployment of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems during the Bush Administration (2001-08). Russian hard balancing against the US has involved: (1) fielding new strategic nuclear and conventional weapons equipped with BMD countermeasures, and, relatedly, (2) making changes in military doctrine. As a result, security dilemma dynamics are increasingly in evidence in US relations with Russia.
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| 2 |
ID:
130347
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The recently unveiled budget for the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) focuses on restoring confidence in the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system while keeping other aspects of the Obama administration's ballistic missile defense plans moving forward. The administration's missile defense budget request for fiscal year 2015 came in at $8.5 billion, including $7.5 billion for the MDA, representing a stable funding level compared to previous years despite cuts in other parts of the defense budget. Congress appropriated $7.6 billion for the MDA for fiscal year 2014.
In the March 4 press conference announcing the budget, MDA Director Vice Adm. James Syring said that the MDA will invest approximately $100 million to "initiate the redesign" of the Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI) kill vehicle, the part of the interceptor designed to seek out and destroy an incoming missile with a kinetic impact. A separate line item of around $26 million is devoted to "common kill vehicle technology," which will be used to "breed the technologies and improvements" for the GBI kill vehicle and potentially other interceptors such as the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), Syring said. The GMD system has not had a successful intercept test since 2008, and the two currently deployed versions of the GBI kill vehicle, the CE-I and CE-II, have failed to intercept targets in the three tests since then. Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said in recent remarks that the GBI system suffered from "bad engineering" due to an accelerated deployment schedule.
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