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If someone says, “Trust the science!” these days, it’s usually an effort to short-circuit debate over weighty policy issues. “Trust the science” has been deployed in the past five years to prevent debate over COVID school closures and mask mandates, over electric-car subsidies, and over sex changes for boys and girls. For my entire time in Washington, though, “trust the science” has been used to oppose a missile defense system for the United States. For my first 20 years as a journalist, I was told that a missile defense system simply cannot work and that anyone who disagreed was a...

Those of us of a certain age will remember a time, some 40 years ago now, when President Ronald Reagan advocated the Strategic Defense Initiative, Project High Frontier, and various other related programs, all built around the basic concept that we should have defenses against incoming missile attacks. Throughout all of human history, military preparedness has involved both offensive and defensive elements. An army might have swords and longbows for offense, while being equipped with shields for defense. Cannons and cannonballs made up the offense, fortresses and moats provided a defense. Thus it has been for thousands of years, but...

In recent days it has been reported in the Chosun Ilbo (one of South Korea’s most widely read daily newspapers) that if North Korea launches an ICBM into the “Pacific region,” the United States will “immediately” intercept it. This report was quickly responded to by Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, who warned of a “swift and overwhelming” military response to any action taken by the United States. It is unclear if the reporting in the Chosun Ilbo was a misquote or even a mistranslation. Such a comment has never been made in the past by a senior American official. The...

The U.S., South Korea and Japan are rehearsing their ballistic missile defense this summer following a record number of demonstrations by North Korea this year of its missile capability. The three nations will hold missile detection and tracking drills sometime during or after this year’s Rim of the Pacific, the world’s largest maritime military exercise, South Korean Defense Ministry deputy spokesman Moon Hong Sik said during a press briefing Tuesday. Moon did not specify the dates for the missile drill, but South Korean news agencies reported Wednesday it would be held in August. The biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise,...

"US president shelves scheme in Poland and Czech Republic, citing new intelligence on threat from Iran....Barack Obama has abandoned the controversial Pentagon plan to build a missile defence system in Europe that had long soured relations with Russia....Obama said the new approach would offer 'stronger, swifter and smarter' defence for the US and its allies."

A four-year FBI investigation into the transfer of classified weapons technology to China and other countries from NASA’s Ames Research Center is being stonewalled by government officials, sources tell FoxNews.com. Documents obtained by FoxNews.com, which summarize these and other allegations and were given to congressional sources last week by a whistle-blower, described how a “secret grand jury” was to be convened in February 2011 to hear testimony from informants in the case, including a senior NASA engineer. But federal prosecutor Gary Fry was removed from the case, which was then transferred from one office in the Northern District of California...

The United States is setting up its own version of the 'Iron Dome' on the Pacific Ocean island of Guam as it begins testing the missile-defense system on the heels of China flexing its military might. Soldiers from Fort Bliss, Texas flew to the US territory weeks ago to help set up the Iron Dome, according to a spokesman for the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command. The system arrived on Guam last week. ....

A Navy warship and the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency on Saturday failed twice in a key test to shoot down a medium-range ballistic missile, raising questions about America’s readiness to intercept potential enemy attacks. The Defense Department did not reveal a specific location, but it’s believed the test took place somewhere off the coast of Hawaii. The announcement of the test’s failure comes just one day after the Biden administration requested a fiscal 2022 budget of $8.9 billion for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), down from its 2021 figure of $9.1 billion. In the past, the U.S. military has conducted...

Hawaii can rest a bit easier this Christmas, thanks to another successful Missile Defense Agency anti-ballistic missile test. On Nov. 16, an SM-3 Block IIA (SM3) missile fired by a U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, the USS John Finn, destroyed an "ICBM-representative target" as it plunged toward Hawaii. The SM3 is a kinetic interceptor, hit to kill. Its November kill was exo-atmospheric -- in near space. The target missile had physical characteristics similar to North Korea's advanced ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). Launched from a site in the western Pacific, its flight trajectory mimicked a Nork shot at the Hawaiian Islands. Anyone...

This month, an intercontinental ballistic missile was fired in the general direction of the Hawaiian islands. During its descent a few minutes later, still outside the earth’s atmosphere, it was struck by another missile that destroyed it. With that detonation, the world’s tenuous nuclear balance suddenly threatened to come out of kilter. The danger of atom bombs being used again was already increasing. Now it’s grown once more. The ICBM flying over the Pacific was an American dummy designed to test a new kind of interceptor technology. As it flew, satellites spotted it and alerted an Air Force base in...

The U.S. military is developing Navy destroyers to take out hypersonic missiles and a ship off the coast of Hawaii has successfully tested the potential innovation, according to Warren Maven editor Kris Osborn on Fox News. An “engage on remote” intercept of an ICBM test Nov. 16 was successful from ship-fired SM-3 IIAs, Osborn reported. “In this developmental test, the destroyer used engage-on-remote capabilities through the Command and Control Battle Management Communications network as part of a defense of Hawaii scenario,” a Missile Defense Agency statement read, per the report. “After receiving tracking data from the C2BMC system, the destroyer...

Homeland missile defense faces an uncertain future. The U.S. deploys 44 ground-based interceptors to Alaska and California and a global sensor network to defend the homeland from a limited attack. But as these systems age and the foreign missile threat grows, the U.S. needs to commit to ensuring an adequate missile defense for the future. A strong missile defense offers many benefits. Most importantly, it can save hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American lives, from a limited nuclear attack.It also serves as a deterrent. By lowering the probability that an attack will succeed, it forces states like North...

Turkey's leaders have called Israel the "West's spoiled child," and the "bully" of the eastern Mediterranean. When a Tel Aviv soccer team showed up in Istanbul recently for a match, the welcome was less than warm. In September, Turkey kicked out the Israeli ambassador, suspended military and trade deals and threatened legal and naval action to challenge Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip. As roars of approval went up around the Arab world, few noticed another announcement quietly slipped in by Ankara: Turkey had signed off on a plan to host an American X-band radar system as part of a...

More than 120 surface-to-air guided missiles have been supplied by Russia to Turkey along with a regiment set of S-400 air defense missile systems, a military diplomatic source told TASS on Monday.

ROME (AP) — Italian police arrested six people Thursday in raids on a group of suspected radical leftists who were allegedly planning a terror attack, authorities said.

Nobody watching President Barack Obama talking to President Dmitry Medvedev to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and addressing a university audience could have failed to notice that Moscow was not a pre-Presidential election Berlin audience. The first was courteous, the second displayed no emotion and the third was cool. No chemistry there; added to which his visit was overshadowed by Michael Jackson's funeral. The main achievement was a missile deal that favoured Moscow, which did not go down well with his political opponents at home and has yet to receive the Senate's fiat. But there was also agreement reached to allow...

Rudy Giuliani: The witness I relied upon if you paid any attention to what I did last week is someone named Victor Shokin. That’s the affidavit I put out plus two others… Those three all say that Joe Biden pressured the president to fire Shokin because Shokin had just come upon a laundered $3 million transaction to Hunter Biden. And he was told by the Serbian government that the United States government would not allow to give that information out. That’s the reason they say they were fired… That’s a lot stronger proof than any silly whistleblower nonsense about something...

Putin offers to sell Saudi Arabia its missile defense systems in the wake of the attack on its oil facilities. “We are ready to help Saudi Arabia so that she can protect her territory,” he says. “She can do so in the same way that Iran has already done in buying the S-300 Russian missile system and the same way that Turkey has already done in buying the S-400 Russian missile system,” Putin adds at a press conference in Ankara, alongside the Turkish and Iranian leaders. The US has blamed Iran for the attack on the Saudi oil facilities.

The former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on Wednesday criticized the Trump administration’s recent escalation of tensions with Iran – saying she “can’t imagine a more dangerous situation than the one we’re in now.” Speaking at Dartmouth College, Clinton said the Trump administration’s recent sanctions against Iran and the deployment of an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf have only served to further erode relations between Washington and Tehran that started when the United States withdrew from the controversial, Obama-era nuclear deal. “Now we have an administration that doesn’t believe in agreements,” Clinton said. “The Iranians have...

[Dossier] Democrats intentionally used disinformation from Russia to attack Trump, campaign aidesBy Rowan Scarborough The Washington Times July 11, 2017 While the mainstream news media hunts for evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, the public record shows that Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump and attack his administration.The disinformation came in the form of a Russian-fed dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. It contains a series of unverified criminal charges against Mr. Trump’s campaign aides, such as coordinating Moscow’s hacking of Democratic Party computers.Some Democrats have widely circulated the discredited information....