Iran is continuing work on a long-range ballistic missile that could be flight-tested by next year despite the latest Pentagon report to Congress on Tehran’s military that omitted earlier references to the looming ICBM threat.
“The 2014 Iran Military Power report confirms that Iran could have an ICBM capability by 2015,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
“We have known this since well before the Obama administration,” Rogers said. “This unchanging fact is one of the reasons I have been and continue to be concerned about the administration’s efforts to dismantle our missile defenses.”
Rogers said that suggestions that somehow the danger of Iran’s developing long-range missile capabilities has diminished, or that the Pentagon report has altered U.S. intelligence assessments “is untrue.”
Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence analyst, told Insidedefense.com that the omission represented a significant shift in assessments of the Iranian missile program.
Thielmann, now with the liberal Arms Control Association, said the language change means the U.S. intelligence community is “losing confidence” in its earlier prediction that the Iranians could test an ICBM by 2015. He accused advocates of missile defense of using the estimate to “pump up the Iranian threat.”
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/iran-still-on-track-for-2015-icbm-flight-test/
No comments:
Post a Comment