Gee, Shodan, if SDI was all, like, feasible and stuff: where is it? Been more than twenty years now. What’s up with that?
Thanks, tomndebb, I thought you had lost the argument too.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, under the Clinton Administration, SDI was rolled into the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. It was the desire of Congress and the military that efforts in this area continue, and they did.
These twenty years of research have produced several fielded weapons systems already, particularly in the area of theater ballistic missile defense.
Well, yes, the Patriot system was fielded in Gulf War I, and later determined to be an abject failure. And then there’s been more recent testing of theatre defense systems where the inteceptors have generally failed to hit incoming test missiles with every possible advantage.
I would hardly hold these systems out as evidence that any of the promises of SDI have come to fruition.
The Patriot system was a pre-SDI system, developed through the 1970s and fielded in 1984. Now, several recent upgrades to that missile in fact depend on advancements first made possible in the SDI organization, but as fielded in the Gulf War, the missile in no way argued for or against “Star Wars” and isn’t particularly germane to this discussion, except to note that research to improve theater missile defense was shown to be needed by the 1980s era Patriot.
That is an inaccurate depiction of these systems, and in any case demonstrates an unawareness of at least several of them that demonstrably work well and are fielded, including the PAC-3 Patriot upgrade, the Israeli Arrow missile developed jointly with the United States, and the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, among others.
Well, that’s because you chose a couple of examples that don’t really fit the bill, didn’t you? Why don’t you look at some others and reevaluate?
Long-term, SDI produced a few direct programs, a lot of non-starters, and some interesting side projects, especially in the area of X-ray lasers. Par for the course with large scale project like this, hmm?
“Theater ballistic missile defense” is not strategic missile defense (the “S” in SDI), and with the exception of the still-incomplete, limited, and only marginally tested Ground-based Mid-course Defense system, the only system that could truly be considered a strategic ballistic missile defense system is the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, which has had a limited number of successful operational intercepts.
For theater-level systems, the MIM-104C ‘Patriot Advanced Capability 2’ system fielded in the First Gulf War had a miserable record for intercepts (low to none) despite the baseless numbers initially touted by advocates. The ‘Patriot Advanced Capability 3’ system (essentially an entirely new system almost completely unrelated to previous Patriots) is operationally fielded while still under development but has only seen limited battlefield use; Terminal (formerly “Theater”) High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) is edging on being a decade overdue and so far beyond original budget estimates that the numbers are just fantasy at this point. The Navy had the Standard Missile 2 which is of limited utility for point defense against incoming supercruise and ballistic missiles, having originally been designed to defend against aircraft and subsonic cruise missile.
In summary, it’s very hard to point to any system which demonstrates better capability than was available since before Reagan even came into office. Certainly none of these demonstrate anything resembling or potentially offering the capability to provide an impregnable, invulnerable shield that will end forever the specter of nuclear war of which Reagan spoke so fondly. Certainly we do not have, nor will we have in the foreseeable future, lasers which zap boost-phase ICBMs half-way around the globe, or any system which can credibly cope with a strategic missile attack. Even if we did, the end result would not be to put paid to the spectre of nuclear attack, but simply alter the means to deliver said weapon.
The irony is that some of the people so strongly trying to lionize Reagan are responding to specific claims and detailed argument with little more than dismissive and ad hominin accusations of denial and fabrication. I disagree with Sam Stone and think that he has some of his facts wrong, but at least he actually brings something substantive to the debate.
Stranger
Goes both ways, doesn’t it?
We could debate SDI all day, but it would be a mistake to imply that nothing came of it, as elucidator did. Clearly those efforts led to something. They may lead to yet more things down the road.
Whether it was worth it is of course debatable, but let’s not just dismiss the whole thing. That wouldn’t be honest.
Well, sure, they promised us a nuclear powered Lamborghini. But look here! We got a go-cart powered by a lawnmower engine! Hey, its got wheels! It goes! Can’t dismiss that as a failure, might even get better “down the road”. Fifty years…sixty, tops!..and we’ll be ready to add brakes!
There was missile defense before SDI. I’ve never been against research defense. SDI was unrealistic in its claims and goal. Certainly good things came of research conducted in its name – but it’s wrong to say that things wouldn’t have happened without SDI. I worked in a program that changed its stripes so it could get SDI money – it had been going on beforehand, and this just added a new wrinklle to the funding game. Certainly there was more money poured into such defense (and other, not-directly-related lines) by SDI, but it’s not at all clear to me that we got any sort of bargain out of all of that spending.
Well, your experiences with the type in Canada have no more bearing on the discussion than if someone were to describe meeting them in Burundi. Doctrinaire Marxists in the US would’ve had more effect on US politics in the 70s and 80s than ones in Canada, who we roundly ignored the same way we ignored all other Canadians (with the exception of Shannon Tweed), but they were darned few and far between by the time I entered college in 1972. In fact, I never met one, despite traveling in leftist circles. A suggestion that Soviet apologists were common in the US has not been true since the 30s, if ever.
Well, the question is obviously whether RWR deserves credit for that in the sense FDR deserves credit for the defeat of Hitler – which he does, though obviously he had a little help.
FDR, I meant, not RWR.
Good thing. I thought you were dengirating the fact that Reagan’s WWII training films brought down Hitler single-handedly.
This was the true product of SDI. The various programs that might have been the subject were all worthy of consideration. Eventually humans will be out fighting each other in space and we may as well be prepared. The problem was the idiotic notion that we could actually create an impervious shield to all ICBMs that was hyped in such a way that we actually killed valid military researtch in order to fund pie-in-the-sky dreams of Buck Rogers (or, as noted, here, renamed legitimate studies to pretend to be Star Wars related just to keep from losing funds), and then to pretend that the huge waste we incurred on the silly peripheral stuff actually had an effect on Soviet policy.
I am aware that you have silly notions about the discuassions in this thread. That’s OK. We need the humor.
Oh. OK. A cite, some pie, and a 1920’s Style Death Ray walk into a bar…