Still Opposed to Missile Defense?

[Mandelstam]

I have been silently following this thread for the last few days.

I am just curious, Sam. By your own definition, aren’t you a “biased” source? That is, why should any of us who are skeptical about SDI, or who dislike military overspending listen to anything that you say? By your own account, you’ve been following this issue for years just as though you were the acting head of, um, the Union for Concerned Canadian Software Developers ;). You seem to assume that your years of dedication to the matter add up to an objective stance; whereas others (Coyle, UCS) with similar dedication, but a different viewpoint, are biased.
According to this view we should, perhaps, all just log off now and watch television, or, maybe read people’s posts solely for the pleasure of their rhetorical styles. For, by your definition, anyone who has a strong commitment to an issue is biased–unless it happens to be your side of the matter, in which case the individual is “objective.”

This leads me to wonder why you even bother to post. If the world is full of biased people who can never provide any reliable assessment of new information (your opponents), and objective people who already know what they need to know and read all the rights sources (you) why should we even bother to debate?

Just thinking aloud here.

[jshore]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
In case you didn’t know, the UCS is an left-wing lobby group that has opposed every strategic weapons system in my memory. They are not an objective, impartial source. They are also routinely spectacularly wrong. That’s what happens when you let lawyers use your credentials to add weight to what are in essence partisan positions.

Sam,

Yes, UCS has a point-of-view…i.e, it is an activist group. (They are not, by the way, a lobby group at least by the definitions of the IRS.) But, that stuff about the scientists serving as credential boosters for some lawyers is total BS that just displays your ignorance of the organization.

UCS has gotten the respect that they enjoy today by bringing sound scientific analysis to various environmental and defense issues. And, unlike with the Administration and defense department where you have politicians, generals, and press secretaries communicating to the outside world, the UCS reports that I linked to were written directly by PHD scientists (whose credentials I can vouch for personally).

By the way, Sam, we haven’t even gotten into the issue of whether the Administration could have gotten most of what it wanted in terms of testing (even some of the stupid things it wants) by reaching an agreement with the Russians rather than by backing out of the treaty. Here are a few links that discuss the Russian negotiating position and the Russian assessment of when their scientists thought the U.S. would have to run afoul of the treaty (from around the time last November when the U.S. pulled out:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/nov2001/nf2001119_6269.htm
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/2abm.htm

[jshore]

*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
…This is basic engineering, understood by everyone except reporters for the <i>New York Times</i>.

Sam, this is such a cheap shot / straw man. You know that the reason the reporters think it is important is because these tests are oversold (even by people on this very message board…not to name any names) as showing more than they do. Also, the details of the tests are sometimes hard to ascertain and, not surprisingly, as more facts come out it becomes clear that the test was more unrealistic than previously believed.

You guys want to have your cake and eat it to. You want to be able to conduct “Mickey Mouse” tests (again, not claiming that what they are doing is not difficult but simply that it is way less difficult than what they would have to do in the real world) and yet credit for being close to having a credible system. Sorry but we aren’t going to let you get away with this!

[jshore]

*Originally posted by jshore *
Yes, UCS has a point-of-view…i.e, it is an activist group.

The a-word that I was actually looking for here is “advocacy group” in that they do advocate for certain general policy positions on the basis of scientific knowledge.

[jshore]

By the way, here is a tidbit that I missed in the news from last month…Apparently, Rumsfeld has exempted the missile defense agency from normal oversight and accountability, in a move that even the Joint Chief “expressed reservations” over. Here is some info on this: http://www.tompaine.com/op_ads/opad.cfm/ID/5241

Of course, it is from a web site that has a point-of-view and one different from Sam’s so he may completely discoount it. (You can get the original Feb. 16 article in The Washington Post at their website but you have to pay for it now, which I did.)

Here’s a quote from an interview (at the above posted link) with Lizabeth Gronlund at UCS explaining what this means:

Well most military programs are required to be tested before the U.S. formally decides to buy them. There is a provision in U.S. law, called “fly before you buy” which is something Congress set up about 20 years ago to make sure they didn’t waste money on systems that didn’t work and hadn’t been properly tested. One of the things that Rumsfeld has done is to exempt the Missile Defense Agency from that requirement.

And the way that process works is the military has to define a sort of a minimal acceptable level of performance for a weapons system. If it can’t meet that minimum level, then the U.S. won’t buy it. And in effect what Rumsfeld has done now is set the minimum very, very low, if not zero. He said we’re going to eliminate all of those requirements at this point in the program, and we’re going to try as hard as we can to build something, and whatever it is we succeed in building, we will deploy.

The deeper one wades into this morass, the smellier it gets!