No Counter to Oreshnik for Another 15 Years, General McMaster Says

Commenting on the new Russian Oreshnik missile system, former U.S. National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Herbert McMaster (ret.) clearly stated, “Our probabilistic models of protection against missile attacks show that the American THAAD and Aegis systems cannot be used to counter the Oreshnik and are unlikely to achieve the necessary reliability over the next 15 years,” according to a Jan. 11 article in Russia’s Argumenty i Fakty. A British Defense Ministry research center report cited by the article also concluded that the West has no defense against the Oreshnik. President Putin earlier said that he felt there would be no effective defense for at least a decade. Gen. Jack Keane, a former U.S. Army vice chief of staff and now a security expert at the Institute for the Study of War, has remarked that the Oreshnik missile “changed the rules of the game.” These comments raise the question about the implications of the new missile system: Do the technologies of the Oreshnik represent new physical principles?