Mark Dubowitz, Chief Eecutive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,  writing in The Wall Street Journal, had some thoughts regarding strict enforcement of the Iran nuclear weapons agreement and some thoughts on an alternative path for dealing with Iran and its nuclear weapons.  I’m focusing on the latter.

First, Mr Trump must address the Iranian threat the way Ronald Reagan treated the Soviet one. … The Trump NSC needs a similar plan, one that uses both covert and overt economic, financial, political, diplomatic, cyber, and military power to subvert and roll back the Iranian threat.

Second, the Trump administration, with an assist from Congress, needs to reinvigorate the sanctions regime aimed at Iran’s support for terrorism, ballistic-missile development, human-rights abuses, war crimes, and destabilizing activities in the Middle East.

The Trump administration also needs to put Iran on notice that the US will use force to counter Iranian aggression. Sanctions without the credible threat of military action will always be insufficient to change the regime’s calculus.

With regard to that last, “notice” by itself is just talk.  President Donald Trump will need to act, as well—having the Navy sink Iran’s fast boats that charge in provocatively and too close or other Iranian naval shipping that fire live weapons from too close will be necessary to give force to the rhetoric as well as to the sanctions.

My questions are these.  Do the Republicans in Congress have the stomach for this?  Do the Democrats in Congress have the integrity?

President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, US officials said, changing the Obama administration’s policy of limiting the spy agency’s paramilitary role and reopening a turf war between the agency and the Pentagon.

This is an odd way to show distrust of the CIA.  Maybe Trump’s war against the CIA is more NLMSM fake news.

Arthur Herman, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute wrote of an interesting idea over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal.  The title of his article explains the idea: There’s a Way to Stop a North Korean Missile Attack.

He wrote about a means of implementing a boost-phase missile defense system.  The advantages of intercepting a ballistic missile during its boost phase—the phase immediately after missile launch—are several

• the missile’s first stage, its booster, is the hottest of them all, and so the easiest to detect
• the missile is moving at its slowest speed, especially compared to the missile warhead’s reentry speed, which is enormous
• the booster is very large, especially compared to the warheads and decoys that are the missile’s payload, and so again very easy to detect
• the boost phase is the least cluttered detection environment—those warheads and decoys, and any associated electronic countermeasures, have not yet been deployed, so there’s less need to sort the defense system’s target out of the clutter
• the boost phase occurs at the earliest stage of the missile’s flight (of course), and so there’s both far more reaction time and increased opportunity to reservice the missile or to go after deployed warheads in the event of a boost phase miss.
• debris from a successful intercept would fall closer to the launch facility as opposed to a terminal phase intercept, which debris would fall closer to the missile’s intended target, and with potentially catastrophic result if the terminal intercept occurs late (and at commensurately lower altitude) in the phase

Herman then pointed out that we have the technology.

A BPI [boost phase intercept] would be launched not from a ground- or sea-based system like THAAD or Aegis, but from an unmanned aerial vehicle waiting at 55,000 feet and equipped with infrared sensors that will detect missile launches from 350 miles outside North Korean airspace. Even a submarine-based missile could be detected minutes after launch, something neither THAAD nor Aegis can do currently.

The aerial vehicle would be equipped with a conventional antimissile missile of 225 kilograms, more than enough firepower to bring down even a large intercontinental ballistic missile.

And

There are already American-built unmanned aerial vehicles capable of carrying up to four interceptor missiles of this size, while conventional aircraft have successfully done BPI tests using missiles of this type. Putting those vehicles on a rotating patrol off the North Korean coastline would mean continuous surveillance and detection.

As implied above, Herman suggested deploying such a system to defend against a nuclear attack by northern Korea.  It occurs to me, though, that we should expand the deployment.  We should operate such a BPI system out of Alaska, Greenland, and eastern Europe, to defend against a Russian attack.  We should operate such a system out of Vietnam (a potential ally, and useful at least until we can recover the Philippines as a reliable ally) and enough additional locations in Japan to handle the People’s Republic of China, as well.  We should operate such a system out of southern Europe and Israel for the benefit of Iran.  And we should operate such a system along each of our coasts to handle someone’s submarine launches.