Forum Post: Chicago Summit: NATO To Announce Activation Of European Missile Shield

On the day Rasmussen addressed the issue, the Obama administration's National Security Council senior director for European affairs, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, gave a presentation titled "Revitalizing NATO: From Lisbon to Chicago" at the the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washhington, D.C. in which she confirmed the NATO chief's assertion by stating, "At Chicago, it is our intent to declare an interim capability for NATO missile defense based on the ability to employ U.S. assets under NATO command..."

Sherwood-Randall, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia during the middle 1990s and a veteran of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, highlighted the fact that "the best example of the President's commitment to NATO's capabilities of the future is our work on missile defense."

She verified that the first phase of the missile system endorsed by NATO at its last summit in Portugal in November 2010 had been achieved with the deployment of an Aegis class warship, the USS Monterey guided missile cruiser, equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptors in the Mediterranean Sea and the deployment of an American X-band radar system in Turkey, adding that "now additional work is underway on the next phase." Read the rest here