This could get ugly

residenttroll wrote: Obama said in September 2008 he believes the United States needs a missile defense system in part because of the nuclear threat North Korea poses. Then in 2010, Obama begins the decommissioning of our missile defense system.

The United States is overhauling Bush-era plans for a missile defense shield in Europe, based partly on the latest analysis of Iran's offensive capabilities, President Obama said Thursday.

"This new approach provides a better missile defense capability for our forces in Europe, for our European allies and eventually for our homeland than the program I recommended almost three years ago," said Gates, who was defense chief in the last two years of the Bush administration and stayed on when Obama took office.

"The system that President George W. Bush proposed ... would have deployed interceptor missiles that had yet to be tested under real-world conditions to defend against long-range missiles that Iran had yet to develop," said the council's senior vice president, James Lindsay.

"Meanwhile, the interceptors would have been useless against the short- and medium-range missiles that Iran is rapidly developing," he said in a written statement.