Oct 202009
Oh, freakin’ hurray.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/15/inside-the-ring-2059116/#
President Obama recently shifted authority for approving sales to China of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department — a move critics say will loosen export controls and potentially benefit Chinese missile development.
The president issued a little-noticed “presidential determination” Sept. 29 that delegated authority for determining whether missile and space exports should be approved for China to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.
7 Responses to “Obama loosens missile technology controls to China”
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To be fair, export controls on space technology do need to be loosened. I was at the Space 2008 conference in San Diego, and I swear that whenever ITAR was mentioned, every person in the room would groan.
ITAR can get crazy it’s true, but loosening up missile technology to China wouldn’t be at the top of my list of things to fix with it.
This will go swimmingly, I’m sure.
sferrin – that’s true; I had missed the exclusive nature of the deal on my first run-around.
On the other hand, would you feel better if Obama had opened the floor up for every nation, instead of just China?
Brianna: I’d have rather he left well enough alone. ITAR exists for a reason.
Not that I agree with the decision itself, specifically the “exclusive” nature but I DO agree ITAR needs changing, badly.
The major problem is ITAR is rather focused on preventing technology and goods that can be used to build more effective missiles, yet at the heart of it the real difference between a space launch vehicle and an ICBM comes down to the trajectory and payload.
Currently too many things ‘fall’ under ITAR rather arbitrarily and the enforcement, allowance, and restriction coming from the White House often seems to simply reflect who managed to get in the last word rather than actual consideration of the possible use of a technology.
IIRC, (which with my “memory-like-a-steel-sieve” abilities… Well… :o) somewhere around 2004/5 there was a mild ‘up-roar’ through the advanced kit electronics hobbyist and manufacturing crowd over the sale to China of several dozen advanced Field-Programmable-Array (FPA) designs in the hopes of getting them to manufacture them for the US market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_analog_array
At “issues” was a (then) recent decision by the White House to no longer allow foreign sales of some standard PC chip and board sets because, (as quoted by one source) “Someone in the White House recalled that during the Cold War the Russians had used Japanese Video Game components for the electronics of combat aircraft” and they didn’t want a repeat of that.
From what I’ve learned it sounds to me like the FPA technology is MUCH more dangerous, yet much harder to control, than what amounted to obsolete chips and mother boards.
ITAR is a double edged sword both trying to ‘protect’ the world from spreading advanced missile technology around, yet its restrictions also slow the development of private space efforts and its larger effect seems to be, like gun-control legislation, geared less with actually stopping or slowing down missile technology transfer but towards focusing on and busting-balls of those who actually attempt to do thing legally!
The whole ITAR system needs an over haul and badly! Decision and enforcement SHOULD probably be placed within another agency, (commerce is ‘good’ and they can call in other agencies such as the FBI, Homeland Security, etc for enforcement) just to get a better perspective on the technology in question.
Randy
You’d have thought that Obama would’ve learned from Hillary about the mess Billy Boy got into over missile technology to China. But no…