Preparing for larger conflicts.

According to Agence France-Press, the U.S. military is readying to face expanded and more dangerous threats, especially from Communist China. According to the report, "China's secretive transformation of its military power leaves the United States preparing for the worst eventualities, including over Taiwan, a Pentagon official said." The official, Richard Lawless, undersecretary for Asia-Pacific affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee that the United States was interested in dialogue with China about its military expansion, but that such dialogue did not appear to be imminent. "I think if we had a true dialogue of depth.... we might be able to constrain and put some of those issues of [Chinese] intent to bed," Lawless said. "Not being able to, we must plan and prepare for the worst."

Lawless' comments echoed concerns highlighted in the 2007 Defense Department annual report to Congress on the Military Power of the People's Republic of China. "The outside world has limited knowledge of the motivations, decision-making, and key capabilities supporting China's military modernization," the Defense Department report noted, while also pointing out that "China's actions in certain areas increasingly appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies."

Meanwhile, in Eurasia, Russia has raised the specter of nuclear war. Reacting to the U.S. proposal to place anti-missile installations in Eastern Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned: "If the U.S. nuclear potential extends across the European territory and threatens Russia, we will be obliged to take countermeasures." More ominously, he continued, "Of course, we'll have to select new targets in Europe."

In Washington, the official line is that the proposed anti-missile system is intended to counter missile threats from rogue states like Iran, but nearly everyone discounts that explanation. More than likely, the real reason for putting the system in Eastern Europe is, in fact, to counter new Russian ballistic-missile capabilities, a new generation of nuclear missile that features a multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle system that sends individual warheads from a single ICBM toward multiple targets. Such systems are very difficult to intercept and Russian military leaders touted the new missile as unstoppable.

To mount a defense against such a missile system, anti-missile weaponry would need to be situated relatively close to the launch site in order to target the ICBM in its boost phase.