PRESS ROUNDTABLE
with
Lt. General Henry Obering III
Director, Missile Defense Agency

Friday, March 7, 2008
from 8:45 - 9:30 a.m.
Westin Grand Hotel
Berlin, Germany

TRANSCRIPT OF STATEMENT
General Obering: "Thank you very much.  I'm glad to be here in Berlin and I am very pleased to be able to talk to you this morning.  I'll just cover a few points and then get right to your questions because I know that's why you're here.  We've come a long way in the United States with respect to our missile defense efforts and our activities.  We have fielded a capability that we have activated in the past and we continue to improve and to mature the system.  We have had great success in our test programs with our long range, our medium range and short range defense systems, and in fact we have now not had a major system failure in our testing in over three years.  We had ten successful tests last year, in 2007, in ten attempts and we are now 34 of 42 attempts since 2001.  We are very much engaged in extending coverage into the European theater to protect not only our deployed forces, of which we have a significant number in the area, but also our allies and our friends.  You, of course, are aware that we made proposals to extend this coverage by placing interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic as the primary focal point for that coverage and we have been in negotiations with both of those nations for the past several months and they are proceeding very, very well.  We have also been in discussions with NATO in terms of how we would integrate the U.S. proposals within the NATO architecture. We actually conducted a demonstration in January in which we took U.S. data -- that would include things like mission planning, track data -- that type of thing -- and we hosted that on a NATO command and control system prototype that's under development for their NATO theater missile defense program and we took NATO data and hosted it on the U.S. command and control system for missile defense.  The next step there is in June just to do a two way exchange of that information simultaneously and then proceed from there.  We have also been in discussions with our Russian friends in determining how we can engage with Russia in a collaborate effort as we proceed and also trying to ensure that they understand that this extension of protection is certainly not aimed at any Russian threat, but is certainly more aimed in terms of what we see evolving in the Middle East and especially in Iran.  But we have continued those discussions and we will continue to do so.  So, with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have."