Depends on opportunity cost, Joe. I'd be hardening ports with the money first and spending enough to keep R & D moving forward.

A.L.

Missile Defense is the Maginot Line of the American right.

I think that I agree with AL here. The greater danger isn't a missile launch but a warhead snuck into port. There are only a handful of countries that pose a missile threat to the US. North Korea, Russia, China, that is about it. Unless we feel that North Korea is going to launch missiles at us soon, beefing up our border security is more important.

Sorry, Joe. Our missile defense system could be "foiled" pretty easily.

Andrew L.- The Maginot Line worked. It was the rest of the French strategy and tactics that failed. Nobody ever said there was a strategic silver bullet, and just as the French failed to defend Luxemburg north properly, we might fail to defend ports and other entrepots properly. AL has a point which is very valid, unfortunately putting more money into Homeland Defense is like watering your lawn. Its hard to see immediately what you are getting. At least with BMD we are getting the semblance of prototypical component tests.

So watch out for your historical analogs, as they might just prove something other than what you intend.

praktike- By what? Some decoy plan which presumes a MIRV capacity which only Russia has an operational capacity for right now? The current system isn't being designed for defending against a Russian first strike. If you have other countermeasures in mind, cite them.

While I agree with praktike that the defense system is unlikely to work (tests to date haven't been very encouraging, now have they? or should I say, absence of tests?), the sadder truth is that even though the Maginot Line worked in the small, it failed utterly in the large. The Germans rolled France up like a pancake. Tom and I agree on this but we draw opposite conclusions.

The missile defense system, besides giving us the entirely false sense of security of the Maginot Line, will unquestionably divert financial and human resources that could be spent better elsewhere. The whole thing looks like a gravy train for the defense contractors involved and another bogus "symbol" of our power. These bluffs worked pretty well against the Democratic Party circa 2000-02, but North Korea doesn't seem to play that game.

I'm with AL on this one. And I think that theater defenses should take priority. It's much better to launch a cruise missile from a cargo ship 200 miles from our coast and then scuttle it over the deep ocean to destroy any evidence than it is to launch an ICBM from your own territory and then wait for Pyongyang or Tehran to evaporate in retaliation. And, as has been stated before, just detonating from inside a container ship is the easiest of all. I'm not opposed to continued research, but it strikes me that most of the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Does anybody know anything about boost-phase interceptors? I'm no expert on the subject, but that seems to be a much better idea than the current NMD plan.

Ack, I hit post instead of preview. I meant to add that the links to the articles on boost-phase and sea-based defenses don't seem to be working. Anybody have live links to those reports, or info elsewhere?

Current test results, along with an expected spin on the results and goals, are at:

http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/

The problem with boost phase interception is that the interceptor either needs to be space based or located in the neighborhood of the launch. The former is still being worked out, though the BRILLIANT PEBBLES concept of the early 90's was shown to be feasible given a working target acquisition system. ABL (linked at the above site) is a medium term option which also is prototypically working.

Other sites to look at are
http://www.heritage.org/Research/MissileDefense/index.cfm
and
http://www.fas.org/ssp/bmd/index.html

Both of these sites are pretty fair in their factual presentations, but their conclusions differ. The Heritage site has a link for test summary prior to 2002. Since then, testing has largely been successful as well.

Andrew L.- The Maginot Line was intended to be a strategic barrier south of Luxembourg enabling an economy of force in that area. It gave no "false sense of security", as the diplomatic record of 1939-40 shows with the French government actively trying to get the Belgians to allow for forward deployment of French troops into Belgium. Where the French failed is in how they handled the German Army on the whole, as you pointed out, and that failure occurred entirely apart from the Maginot Line.

To apply that situation as an analog to the current BMD (praktike brings up theatre and cruise missile defenses which are similar and have to be done in parallel as what is theatre for the US is strategic for Japan/India/Taiwan) is erroneous as:

a. in 1940 the Allies were confronted by one threat: the Wehrmacht/Luftwaffe combined arms team. That team could go through the Maginot, through the Ardennes, or through central Belgium in a new Schleiffen Plan. They feinted in central Belgium and blew through the Ardennes and Meuse defenses. But the threat was a unitary threat.

b. as might be noted in this thread, with AL's comments, we now see a multiplicity of threats. BMD is just an answer to one of these. Better port security through investment in the Coast Guard would be another answer to another threat. The total threat is a spectrum and not unitary as in 1940 in France.

Therefore the France 1940 analog is skewed to the current situation as anybody who watched the WTC crumble could see. For that matter, 12 CVN task forces didn't prevent 9/11 either, but then they are dealing with other threats, aren't they?

We face many different threats. We can argue about priorities and allocations, but complete ignorance of a credible threat, IMO, is not an option.

Tom, it's pretty clear those tests were canned.

One thing that has been addressed here yet is to what extent missile defense can lead to a destructive arms race with the Chinese. I don't think anyone can make a credible case that it's in our interest to encourage the Chinese to build up their arsenals.

On the other hand, I have heard of several successfull tests (sorry, no links). One system was able to shoot down artillery shells. As far as "experts" saying it "can't be done, that's impossible!", history is full of the same people who said things like "the automobile will never replace the horse drawn buggy, rockets can't fly through space because there is nothing to push against out there, and Orville, that foolish contraption will never fly!!"

I think it was Heinlein who said: "If you want to get rich, find something that all experts declare is impossible, then do it."

If China wants to sink billions into ballistic missles, I say go ahead. That's money they can't spend on R&D into really cutting edge technology, which is what they really need to do to become as/more powerful than the US.

Critics of missile defense systems like to claim that the tests are "canned" or faked. This is a misrepresentation. Throughout a weapons system program, different tests are run that test different aspects of the program as it progresses. A test that fails because a subsystem isn't ready yet for test is a waste of resources. To make the test useful, the test may be constructed so that parts of the system not being actively tested at that time don't have to be working.

I find Andrew's misuse of the analogy to the Maginot Line quite amusing but more importantly it is illustrative of how many critics of missile defense fail to understand the purpose of military defenses. They judge them on all or nothing criteria that are irrational. In the case of missile defense, a system that an opponent thinks has enough of a chance of working to make them rethink an attack is a success.

Another aspect of the BMD testing to date is that it is solely at the system component level. In order to simulate the other components that aren't being tested, you have to simulate them (aka "can the test"). Is this dishonest? Hardly. It is simply part and parcel of systems development in a very complex system. What is dishonest are news stories about an interceptor warhead test which failed, but without mention that it was the booster that failed and nothing to do with the warhead item being tested. Other such misrepresentations have been perpetrated upon the mass media's public. To a very large extent, the criticisms of the Coyle report at the FAS site I mentioned above have been remedied at MDA. What remains is the political question that Armed Liberal brought up: how does it all rack and stack with other US priorities.

Finally, in regards to test results, Slate's Kaplan never fails to note DoD stupidity but only rarely writes up anything that does work right. A man with an axe to grind indeed. A light weight follow on to Scott Shuger.

More balanced critiques of the MDA testing program are this CDI review of the 2003 results which notes clearly that the fixes to Kaplan's miss phenomena were difficult to fix, but were apparently fixed, and the new GAO findings on the MDA program.

praktike-- If missile defense encourages the Chinese to build up their arsenal in an attempt to defeat it, I would assume that they're building up their arsenal regardless. At the least, spending more money on MIRVs and such would presumably be diverted from other things, such as building up a navy to capture Taiwan.

Yes, the Chinese (for example, or anyone who pays enough money) will be able to catch up and defeat a defense. There's still something to be said for increasing the cost necessary for other states to play the game. If the PRC can still defeat our defenses, but a host of other countries now find it cost ineffective to do so, then that's still strategically important.

That's a separate issue from feasability and cost, of course. It's probably worth some research, though the right amount is of course hard to say.

The principle PRC thrust is MRBMs pointed at Taiwan and a secondary priority as deterrants to Russia and India. This makes THAAD a critical US priority, which it is addressing by both supporting the PAC3 upgrade program, the joint MDA/Israeli ARROW, and the USN missile defense work. The PRC ICBM force remains nearly vestigial, and would be directly countered by the upcoming deployment in 2004-5 until they get a working MIRV system. That will be a big event, and almost certainly buried in the national press coverage.

John, but isn't it actually more expensive for us to develop better and more sophisticated missile defense systems than it is for our opponents to develop countermeasures? And I don't think we're going to bury the Chinese economically anytime soon.