Roll Call thinks U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) is on Trump’s VP shortlist. The New Republic wonders if she might be the next Speaker of the House.
Sit down for this: I’m not a fan of the pol.
Back in mid-2015, I wrote about Stefanik’s shilling for the missile-defense boondoggle. More than eight years later, she’s still working, frenetically, to land an interceptor site at Fort Drum. The Swamp never changes.
Enjoy?
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Creates jobs in my district? Check.
Likely to help the local military installation slip the noose during the next round of Base Realignment and Closure? Yep.
Strengthens my rep as a “defender of the homeland”? Sure thing.
U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik ran for office in 2014 promising to “bring a fresh perspective” to New York’s 21st Congressional District. If the Republican’s rabid campaign to secure a new site for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system is any indication, her constituents should prepare for more of the same.
GMD is another unwanted legacy of George W. Bush’s administration. With irresponsible optimism, the 43rd president signed off on an initial anti-ICBM architecture not long after 9/11. Problems, as many predicted, sprung up from the get-go. Flight-test failures have been far too common, and the schedule for proving proficiency has slipped by years. According to the Government Accountability Office’s most recent examination of U.S. missile-defense efforts, GMD has yet to demonstrate several real-world capabilities, including “intercepting a target representative of an intercontinental ballistic missile; performing a salvo test where two interceptors are utilized against a single target; and performing a long time of flight intercept.”
It gets worse. GMD’s “fleet of currently deployed … interceptors are in need of upgrades and retrofits to address prior test failures.” (The cost to correct one family of boosters has ballooned from $236 million to just under $2 billion.) Nonetheless, it will take the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) years to fully address the problems. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy will be working on a overhauled “kill vehicle,” the “seventh major attempt to fix and improve the current … design.”
Moving ahead on a third site is madness, until the MDA gets its house in order. In GAO’s assessment, the agency must stop “allowing production to get ahead of testing” and “provide a systematic view of its plans and progress for delivering … capabilities to external decision makers.”
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