Americans' Wacky Faith In Missile Defense

Americans have a very touching faith in technical solutions to difficult problems, and so they naturally resist when you tell them that missile defense is an insoluble problem. They just figure you aren't being a positive thinker. Still, missile defense IS an insoluble problem!

Defensive capabilities that are more expensive to implement than offensive capabilities are naturally prone to failure when you need them most. Offensive missiles are cheap to make. If you have 20 expensive defensive missiles that readily defend against 20 cheap offensive missiles, all an attacker has to do is obtain 20 more cheap offensive missiles. Or 100. Or 1000.

Checkmate!

Freeman Dyson, among others, pointed this out back in the 80's, and it's just as true today as it was then.

Politicians can use the existence of a missile defense system for all kinds of mischief. For example, if Barack Obama wanted to turn a blind eye to the Iranian nuclear program, the existence of a missile system would give him a fig leaf to justify doing so - even if that's a very bad idea!

Missile systems are like pieces of the True Cross: artifacts that promise a shield but do nothing.

Here is an interesting article:

US missile defense plans are based on "technical myths" and interceptors have mostly failed to knock out incoming warheads in military tests, a new study argues.

Two American scientists reviewed 10 tests of the SM-3 "kill vehicle," designed to take out ballistic missiles, and concluded that the interceptor succeeded in directly hitting mock warheads in only one or two cases.

"This means that, in real combat, the warhead would have not been destroyed but would have continued toward the target and detonated in eight or nine of the 10 SM-3 experimental tests," wrote George Lewis of Cornell University and Theodore Postol of MIT in the latest issue of "Arms Control Today."

The Pentagon had described the tests between 2002 to 2009 as successful.

The US administration's claims about the missile defense system are "nothing more than a fiction" and "the policy strategy that follows from these technical myths could well lead to a foreign policy disaster," wrote the scientists in an article titled "A Flawed and Dangerous US Missile Defense Plan."

But the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on Tuesday rejected the findings of the study, calling them "flawed, inaccurate and misleading."

US officials and the academics disagreed over the importance of the interceptors striking the body of a rocket or its dummy warhead.

The SM-3 tests "showed that the interceptor's kill vehicle impacted the target body or warhead within inches of the expected impact point that was calculated to maximize damage against a variety of warhead types," the MDA said in a statement.

MDA spokesman Richard Lehner said some of the earlier tests did not use mock warheads at all because the goal was merely to hit the target missile.

One of the authors of the study, Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a long-time skeptic of US missile defense who previously helped expose the failure of most Patriot anti-missile weaponry in the 1991 Gulf War.

Much is riding on US missile defenses based on land and at sea, with President Barack Obama arguing the system will help counter the threat posed by Iran's missiles and will allow for scaling back the American nuclear arsenal.