This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 4th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What would it mean for the U.S. to beef up its missile defense systems?

It's a popular idea, but one that alters the

terms of future agreements to reduce nuclear stockpiles. Cato's Eric Gomez discusses

the president's request for missile defense funding and what that means

for negotiations among nuclear-armed global powers.

The White House is asking Congress to give missile defense efforts about 20 billion dollars in 2021.

And the big long-term thing that the request is indicating is that the United States is going to try and erase existing

distinctions between what's known as regional systems and homeland systems.

And the spark notes of what that means is that regional systems typically defend relatively smaller areas or maneuver units from shorter range attack, homeland systems defend the entire

homeland. And before this is a pretty clear dividing line between these two roles, but the missile defense agency wants to try and

add certain things that used to only be for regional into the homeland defense picture.

First of all, I did not realize that Spark Notes had replaced Cliff's notes as a piece of vernacular. But why does that make a difference? The idea that we should be that they're muddling this line between

regional defense and US defense?

In a blog post I wrote about this I outline a bit of why this is important and that the United States has traditionally relied on nuclear deterrence to protect the homeland. And we've always said that missile defense is meant

to protect against small countries like North Korea or Iran,

so-called rogue states that don't really have very sophisticated arsenals and that we weren't trying to use missile defense to build up an insurance policy against a Russian or a Chinese attack.

They have always, the Chinese and the Russians

have always had a hard time believing us

because we keep on expanding the size

and the ambitions of our missile defense system. And if we do this if we effectively erase this distinction and allow things

...