Missile Defense

[Sam_Stone]

@MEBuckner

Yeah, but it’s one thing to argue that we shouldn’t even do basic R&D on missile defense/fusion power/whatever. I know some people do argue that with respect to missile defense–that it’s inherently impossible or destabilizing or whatever and we shouldn’t even try–but that position is not what many of us who are critical of this stuff are arguing.

That’s good, because what’s actually destabilizing is to allow your enemies to build weapons that you have absolutely no defense against. Now foreign policy becomes a non-stop game of brinksmanship.

The current administration seems to be almost taking the position that “Hey, we don’t need to build more fission plants, or figure out how to make coal cleaner, or invest in windpower–we’ll just build fusion plants!”

It does? I haven’t heard this administration say much about fusion at all. It seems to me that the position of this administration is that the future will consist of a variety of energy sources including oil, coal, nuclear fission, ethanol (Bush is a big proponent of cellulosic ethanol, while Congress prefers to throw money at their big agri-business sponsors and back idiotic corn-based ethanol, while slapping tariffs and quotas on imported sugar and sugar-based ethanol), wind, and solar. Bush actually has a reasonably good notion of what the future energy infrastructure will look like, aside from the fact that he thinks these fixes will come quickly.

If the Pentagon wants to mess around with launching things at Kwajalein and seeing if they can figure out how to shoot them down, I don’t necessarily have a problem with that. But pretending this stuff is anything like ready to deploy against actual threats from Iran or North Korea is kind of crazy.

Not at all. As I said in the last message, a completely ineffective weapons system can have value if you can convince your enemies that it’s working, or even partially working. But some of it definitely is ready to deploy. Israel’s Arrow missile is deployed, and it has been highly effective in tests against SCUD-type missiles. The U.S. has conducted multiple operational tests which have been successful, including a shoot-down of a missile with a ‘production’ interceptor - and it even included three decoy ballons the missile had to discriminate against.

No one is claiming the system is 100% effective, or even that it will ever be. The deployments that have currently happened are small, of limited effectiveness, but even so they help to complicate the planning of the enemy and force them into more expensive R&D. It was really a response to North Korea’s test of a missile capable of hitting Alaska, and it sent the message that they better not think about nuclear blackmail, because the U.S. was prepared to answer.

So… everyone understands that the system is still in its early infancy, that operational deployment is limited and will be for a time, but clearly the system CAN be built, and CAN be effective. It’s not going to replace the rest of the military - it’s just one more weapons system in the mix.