It scales back the Airborne Laser program, which could provide an airborne capability and serve as the nation’s first line of defense (because it destroys an incoming missile in boost phase). The budget terminates the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program, which can be rapidly deployed by air to land bases abroad to counter unexpected threats. It kills the Multiple Kill Vehicle program, which is intended to attack incoming missiles in midcourse. It also defers funding for design and risk reduction for the space-based sensor constellation, an important part of the warning and detection systems.

Why, at a time of growing threats from unstable regimes that are testing long-range missiles and at or near nuclear status, would we spend less money on missile defense? To answer this question, we recall the early years of the Cold War. Our nation’s response to the strategic nuclear confrontation with the former USSR was deterrence, not defense. Indeed, U.S. policy rejected anti-ballistic-missile defense systems on the theory that the USSR could add enough missiles or warheads to overwhelm and negate any such system. Instead, we relied on the theory of mutually assured destruction (MAD), according to which neither side would ever launch a nuclear strike because both the U.S. and the USSR knew they would not survive the result.

There is good reason to believe America is actually more at risk today than at any time during the Cold War. In 1972 only nine countries possessed ballistic missiles; today that number is more than two dozen. New nuclear actors, such as North Korea and possibly Iran and Syria, may not be deterrable in the classic sense. Mutually assured destruction is useless against an enemy that does not value life.

To deal with these emerging threats, we need a layered missile-defense system of a global, rapidly deployable sea-, land-, air-, and space-based capability to defend against ballistic missiles. This system must be capable of defending through the ascent/boost, midcourse, and terminal phases of flight. It requires robust command-and-control systems and state-of-the-art network and sensor technologies.

We know that America has the technological expertise and financial resources to protect and defend itself. The question is whether America will have the strategic vision and the determination to do everything it can to deploy a layered, robust missile-defense system.

The other question is whether the Obama administration’s hostility to missile defense is an atavistic, reflexive callback to the Reagan years, when Democrats and liberals tended to oppose every initiative in the realm of defense — and none more so than this one. On March 23, 1983, when Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative to “render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete,” he was met with a hail of criticism from the Democratic Left, fearful of provoking the Soviets.

The New York Times mockingly called Reagan’s initiative “a pipe dream, a projection of fantasy into policy.” To the Democrats, missile defense represented everything they distrust about defense policy in general. SDI relied on technology rather than manpower, increased the defense budget, and was and is designed specifically to provide a unilateral advantage to the United States.

History has demonstrated that this reaction a quarter century ago was shortsighted and foolish. The Reagan administration’s insistence on pursuing SDI was the final blow to the sclerotic Soviet regime. And in the years since Reagan unveiled it, missile defense has succeeded numerous times and proven its value, with consistent successes in testing and real-world successes with the Patriot and Arrow systems. And yet it appears that the mockery of “Star Wars” has remained more potent for the people in Obama’s orbit than has the evidence of 25 years of serious work on the only possible deterrent of the 21st century.

Congress should restore the proposed cuts and support test and deployment of needed systems. If it doesn’t, the political argument that Democrats are soft on defense will once again have real teeth. And it will have teeth because what Obama has already done and what he proposes to do have made and will make America unambiguously less safe.