From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 23:31:37 MDT
war stories
Build It and It Will Work
The Bush administration's missile defense fantasy.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 1:48 PM PT
The Bush administration seems to be no longer even pretending that its
missile defense system will work. More than that, it no longer seems to
care. The administration still displays extraordinary support for the
program. Its military budget, now before Congress, authorizes $9.1 billion
for missile defense next year, with plans for hefty increases each year for
long after. The first stages of a system—10 anti-missile interceptors and
their launch gear—are scheduled to be deployed in Alaska and California by
October 2004.
But look at the Bush's new National Security Presidential Directive,
"National Policy on Ballistic Missile Defense," an unclassified version of
which was released by the White House on May 20. Buried within the
five-page statement—the usual litany of prospective threats and strategic
rationales—are these two sentences:
The United States will not have a final, fixed missile defense
architecture. Rather, we will deploy an initial set of capabilities that
will evolve to meet the changing threat and to take advantage of
technological developments.
"Architecture," in this context, means pretty much what it means in its
colloquial sense: a detailed blueprint with measurements, an underlying
design, a notion of how a structure's materials fit together, all rooted in
basic principles of physics and engineering.
For the administration to start deploying a missile defense system before
devising an architecture is no different from a construction firm starting
to hammer nails, put up joists, and lay out a roof before knowing the style
or size of a house.
Another sign of unreality is the news—revealed this week by Sen. Carl Levin
of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee—that the Pentagon has, without explanation, canceled nine of the
20 missile defense tests it had planned to conduct between now and 2009.
One of the canceled tests—which was to have taken place between April and
June 2004 (that is, before deployment begins the following October)—might
have marked a major step toward realism-in-testing. For the first time, an
interceptor was to have been fired at a missile along the same flight path
as that of a missile launched from North Korea. Incidentally, it's not as
if the program's test record has been so smashing that its managers can
afford to relax their standards—five hits out of eight tries, none of them
involving multiple targets, decoys, or realistic trajectories.
A May 19 article on Bloomberg.com—one of the very few pieces about the
canceled tests (alas, the piece is no longer online except to the service's
subscribers)—quoted Maj. Gen. Peter Franklin, the Pentagon missile defense
agency's deputy director, as justifying the cancellations. "To focus just
on the interceptor test alone," he said, "does not take into consideration
everything else that has been built up to get to the point where we
are—numerous ground tests, simulations, and war games."
Franklin surely knows better. Any American officer who has advanced to the
rank of general must have learned, at some point in his career, that ground
tests, simulators, and war games are unreliable predictors of what will
happen in a flight test of real hardware.
Sen. Levin, who is oddly the only Democrat who has made a serious go at
challenging Bush's rush to deploy this thing, put the matter in better
perspective: "The decision to field an as-yet-unproven system has been
accompanied by a decision to eliminate or delay the very testing that must
be conducted to show whether the system is effective."
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2083470/
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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