North Korea: Threat or Blackmailer?

[CRedskinsRule]

Originally Posted by Alvin Walton

Why would their ability to defend themselves against incoming missles be alarming?
I would believe that most of their ships already have some kind of CWIS capablity anyways.

In China's shoes:

Guam is a launching base for US aircraft, and naval vessels. If they felt we were an aggressive opponent, they could see defending those assets as a threat to their ability to defend themselves. Just as in football, a good defense enables an offense to be more aggressive.

My main point is you are looking at it from a skewed view that pre-supposes the US to be a gentle giant, but much of the world looks at us as a heavy handed military power, and any additional military hardware or expertise is going to be considered at some level as a threat.

Outside of the Chinese theater, look at the anti missile batteries we had proposed in eastern europe to protect against iranian threats. The russians didn't accept those, and put a lot of pressure on the us to change their locations. Why? What was their rationale? Because us having that ability to stop incoming threats enabled us to launch a strike in such a way that their first wave defense wouldn't then carry out an effective retaliation.

China clearly has wargame scenarios, as we do, where their first goal would be to reduce our effectiveness in the Pacific theater, which would, I imagine, taking out our Guam base. A missile defense system there forces them to account for that and target it more heavily.