You have heard of the ‘Department of Homeland Defense’? Though you may think that it is nothing but yet another imperfect system that we should scrap, it is in fact the agency designated to guard against those sneaky-terrorist WMD attacks. You want to talk about problems with ‘decoys’ and whatnot? Makes NMD look like shooting big fish in a small barrel.
The Missile Defense Agency is tasked with protecting us from another sort of threat, and the foundation for that defense is being laid.
Out of curiousity, for the naysayers:
In terms of overall reliability, how ‘available’ must the system be before you would deploy it? (Including things like system failures with the booster or kill veihcle, radar issues, etc.) 50% of the time? More? Less?
How accurate must warhead/decoy discrimination be before you would deploy the system?
Asssuming conditions #1 and #2 were met, how much funding do you feel is justified on NMD?
I do not know enough about this system to argue whether or not it can plausibly work, but I do know software testing after doing it for over 10 years.
People often bring up the fact that transponder was used in those above tests, and treat that as if this shows the test to be invalid. This is almost certainly not correct. All it means is that the part of the system that the transponder replaced was simply was not part of the test. They were testing other parts of software. In the last company i worked for, we called this “component testing”. Only certain components of the stsem are being tested, individually, to see that they do their job. Later on, one does “system testing”, where all the pieces are put together and tested. Obviously, different companies may have different names for these phases (or may not even break up the testing into those different phases).
Also, depending on what part of development they were in, hitting only 2 of 6 targets might be a pretty good. The purpose of testing is to find out what isn’t working, and fix it. Not working at the beginning of the development cycle is pretty much a given.
It is very possible they are way behind schedule, and it is certainly possible the system as designed or of any design may not ever work reliably. But citing these early tests does not support that conclusion, because ALL software of certain complexity is tested like that (or at least should be), and it would be miraculous to have perfect results from the beginning.
Hey Brutus, can we first dip into that NMD fund and buy our troops some fucking body armor and the Hummer armor they’ve needed since they stepped foot in Iraq? You know, spend that money for something actually useful?
As far as NMD what happens if they shoot two missles?
Well look, when I talk about climate change, I avoid cites to groups like UCS or Sierra Club that have a point-of-view because there is lots of good information out there from organizations like IPCC and NAS that are designed to be impartial and objective (although that hasn’t stopped their objectivity from being challenged).
Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the case with national missile defense. There was a study by the American Physical Society (APS) back when Reagan first proposed it that was quite pessimistic on it…anticipating many of the difficulties that have been encountered in the 20 years since. And, APS recently did a study of new boost stage defense proposals that was also quite pessimistic in its conclusions.
However, in terms of analyzing the current system being deployed, one has to look at stuff from organizations having an agenda…including the missile defense agency themselves and I did link to an article where the head of that agency testified before Congress.
That said, I think the comparison of UCS to PETA is way off the mark. Despite having a point-of-view, UCS has built its reputation on presenting the science honestly and accurately and I don’t think I have ever seen any real critiques to the contrary in this area. About the best I remember hearing from the defense department in response to their “Countermeasures” report a few years ago was questioning about whether a potential enemy (who had presumably mastered ICBM technology) could handle mylar balloon technology. And, by the way, I should say that I know somewhat the two senior scientists, David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund, in this part of UCS’s work because they were physics grad students at Cornell a few years ahead of me who then went on to do postdoctoral work in arms control / global security issues after getting their PhDs. Gronlund recently was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, a quite prestigious honor which gives you some idea of how her work is viewed within the physics community.
I’ll also mention by way of disclosure that in 2001 and 2002, I went down to D.C. as part of a group of scientists, under the auspices of UCS, who talked with our Senators and Reps (well, okay, almost always just their aides) about missile defense and other arms control issues. Some of my fellow scientists/engineers there were people who had actually worked on missile defense (I think one worked for Boeing?) so they knew from whence they were speaking on the subject.
Interesting questions and ones that I’ll admit that I don’t have a ready answer to. This is exactly the sort of debate that ought to be taking place in Congress and elsewhere. But, I don’t think one has to know exactly where the “cutoff” should be in order to decide that the current system is so untested and inadequate as to be useless…or worse yet, more dangerous than no system at all (for the reasons I have mentioned in other posts).
Brutus:I just find it odd that people believe that ‘MAD’ is going to work with an Islamist regime or with that ivory tower of rational thought, Kim Jong Il.
It might not. On the other hand, many people used to believe that the Soviets were too fanatical and irrational to be influenced by “Mutual Assured Destruction” deterrence doctrines, too. Consider this summary of an article by Richard Pipes in Commentary back in 1977 (you can see the original article if you’re a Commentaryarchives subscriber):
And yet, those “cunning” Soviet Marxist “peasants”, who were so conditioned to “use force” and considered “conflict to be normal”, turned out to be fairly accessible to reason on the issue of mutual assured destruction. Self-preservation is a pretty strong impulse, even among ideologues and megalomaniacs.
Of course, that’s not to say that MAD is a guaranteed successful strategy against every conceivable opponent, nor that it makes judicious research on missile defense unnecessary. But it’s certainly a hell of a lot better strategy than placing our confidence in inadequate, theoretically flawed, untested, highly expensive anti-missile systems because we’ve kidded ourselves that MAD can’t work on loonies.
In a surreal display of election year politicking, the general in charge says the setback will not affect plans to begin operating the system in the next month or two.
Meanwhile, the absence of proper datafuels rampant speculation over how well the system will work:
Look, fuck MAD, this ain’t the cold war world anymore, that’s a relic of the past, let it go. Brutus we’re not even mentioning MAD, because I think you’re right, it won’t work in our current threat environment. What will work, is squeezing every drop of efficiency out of every possible penny we can, and employing a little bit of risk management. That NMD bullshit is pretty much the most expensive solution to the least likely threat we’re facing.
So to recap, we’re against it because we feel there are alternatives that will protect us better
When a Pentagon person under extreme pressure to being putting the best public face on things says that he will not be able to provide a confident assessment of the system’s viability ahead of the planned deployment, I think we can all figure out what that means! (And, I would really love to learn what assumptions go into the claim that the system may be capable of hitting its target even 20% of the time. I believe that previous scenarios under which there seemed to be some reasonable possibility of an intercept, based on the testing thus far, involved North Korea being so kind as to tell us when they were going to launch their missile, where they were aiming for, and what their warhead and any potential decoy would look like [provided that they were kind enough to make them look sufficiently different for us to be able to easily distinguish them] amongst other things. And, this of course, assumes that there are no glitches with running the system with a booster having twice the speed as before.)
WE:we’re not even mentioning MAD, because I think you’re right, it won’t work in our current threat environment.
I partly disagree. It’s true that mutual deterrence is probably not effective against a nebulous, denationalized terror group trying to smuggle a nuke across our borders. In such a case, there’s really no localized enemy for us to nuke back, so the threat of retaliation is pretty futile.
However, in the case of a threat from a nation-state, where the aggressor is a geographically definite entity that can be hit in return—such as us vs. N. Korea, Israel vs. Iran, India vs. Pakistan, etc.—MAD is as relevant as it ever was.
*What will work, is squeezing every drop of efficiency out of every possible penny we can, and employing a little bit of risk management. *
I agree that this is indeed a much more important consideration than the efficacy of deterrence, and it’s the chief reason why we should be upset about rushing to “deploy” ineffective overpriced NMD systems.
Well my friend, you hold a much brighter vision of these guys then I do. As stated earlier, MAD works on the premise that both sides don’t want to get blown the hell up, or at least possess a modicum of sanity. With “ill” Kim is the house, that motherfucker is straight up crazy. Pakistan will be a problem 20 years from now, keeping up with that good 'ol US tradition of helping out nuts, then having them turn on us a few decades later. Sadly to say, I’d consider Iran the sanest on your list, and that ain’t good. I really ain’t feeling MAD with these characters.
Bosda:I once suggested, thinking of MAD at the time, that you could threaten to strike at Mecca if the US were hit with a terrorist nuke.
I was subsequently condemned by all & sundry on the SDMB as an evil person.
Without condemning you as an evil person, I would definitely condemn that proposal as an Extremely Bad Idea. The whole point of deterrence is that counter-aggression is guaranteed against the entity responsible for the initial aggression. Mecca != Muslim terrorists. Islam != Muslim terrorists. (Think how Catholics would feel if it were suggested that we should nuke the Vatican if, say, an IRA terrorist claiming to be defending Catholicism hit us with a dirty bomb.)
Mutual deterrence doesn’t just mean that each party threatens to do something that the other party won’t like. It involves a reciprocal threat that keeps hostilities balanced and holds attackers directly responsible for their aggression.
WE:I really ain’t feeling MAD with these characters.
You may be right (though I hope you’re not), and I definitely agree that our current policies with regard to Iran and Pakistan are short-sighted in many ways. (Oddly, the NK policy is the one I’ve been feeling least hopeless about, at least once Bush stopped calling its leader a “pygmy” and we settled back down to the actual six-way talks again.) I’m just pointing out that many reputable and well-informed people used to feel just as dubious about the Soviets, and I’m glad we nonetheless gave MAD a chance in that case.
Bosda:if that’s [Mecca/Muslim holy sites] all they [Islamist terrorists] value, we ain’t got a lot of target choices.
Exactly, which is why the whole concept of “targeting” a retaliatory nuclear strike is an Extremely Bad Idea in the case of nebulous, denationalized terrorist groups.
State-to-state retaliation is an equitable type of threat. If NK bombs us, NK as a national entity is responsible for that act, so it is in some sense “fair” for us to bomb NK back. International law recognizes the essential justice of threatening that type of retaliation.
But if a few Islamist loonies bomb us, Muslims as a whole and their sacred sites in particular are not responsible for that act. Nuking Mecca is not a just response in that case, nor is it fair to threaten such a response beforehand.
The worldwide anger, outrage, and condemnation that would be provoked by such a threat would outweigh any possible deterrent effect it might have on the original Islamist loonies thinking about bombing us. What good does it do to scare off a few potential terrorists by a counter-threat that’s so outrageously, massively unjust that it inflames many more people into terrorism against us?
We Americans have got to get way, way over this idea that it doesn’t so much matter whom we hit as long as we hit somebody. We have got to grit our teeth and just accept the fact that non-localized, non-nation-state terrorist groups are intrinsically un-nukeable, and we have to fight them in other ways.
And yup, those other ways might at some point include some kind of missile shield defense, if we can come up with one that has a reasonable chance of working.
Right now? We fire off our one interceptor and hope, and we definitely (well, within the capabilities of the missile) take a hit from the other. But by the end of October or there abouts, we will have 5+ interceptors in place, so the odds improve somewhat.
This has to be every weaponmakers wet dream. It’s profitable, the chances of it ever seeing action are extremely slim, and it’s a state secret whether the damn thing even works. Wish I could get a contract like that. But, on the bright side: We now know where the hole is they’re pouring our tax money down.