"Bush Orders Antimissile Defense Shield": C/D

"Many kinks," eh? Nice euphemism for "a monstrous cash-cow that has no prayer of ever fucking working!"

The tests that have been run have succeeded 5 of 8 times, although the exact locations and speeds of the missles were programmed into the defense system beforehand. Which means: Even when the system knows exactly where the missle will be, it still missed almost half the time. Why should be spend billions on this (and of course $8 billion really means $20 billion, the way we waste money) again?

The N. Koreans have actually fired a missle over Japan however. I wonder why the Japanese haven't gone bananas over missle defense?

Oh, and defense contracts keep aerospace engineers fed. I can't really complain since most of my friends and I lived well (and our families continue to do so) thanks to things like space stations, BAT missiles, the PAC-3 and a dozen other programs.

I hope we have a minority government forever!

is there a thread about this already??

Rice says Russia is losing credibility
The Associated PressPublished: August 20, 2008

WARSAW, Poland: U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has dismissed comments by Russian officials who said Poland's accepting a U.S. missile defense base exposes the country to attack.

Rice says that such comments "border on the bizarre."

She said the U.S. has a "firm treaty to guarantee" to defend Poland's territory as if it were its own and such threats from Russia are "probably not wise."

Rice told reporters after signing the missile defense agreement in Warsaw on Wednesday that the "Russians are losing their credibility" and that Moscow will pay a price for its actions in Georgia. She declined to elaborate.

yes Russia's apprehension over the US pressuring nearly every Eastern European state on the Russian border to agree to hosting US missile silos can only be seen as 'bizarre'

all the comments upthread OTM, this one bears particular repeating

The tests that have been run have succeeded 5 of 8 times, although the exact locations and speeds of the missles were programmed into the defense system beforehand. Which means: Even when the system knows exactly where the missle will be, it still missed almost half the time. Why should be spend billions on this (and of course $8 billion really means $20 billion, the way we waste money) again?

-- Yanc3y (ystrickler), Wednesday, December 18, 2002 4:19 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Link

factor in the simple fact that with this system, the best case scenario is _atmospheric_ detonation of a nuclear warhead instead of ground detonation. I understand the military concept of contingency plans and wanting to do something about a problem, but in this case we are antagonizing Russia for nothing

plus the fact that all the missile had to do in previous test was pass somewhere near the target in order to be considered a "success". so what you're looking at is 20 billion for something that succeeds (dictionary definition of success here) 0/8 times!

Those odds aren't TOO bad.

the best case scenario is _atmospheric_ detonation of a nuclear warhead instead of ground detonation

lol whut
do you know how this stuff actually works

(I don't want to defend the MDA by any means but that is kind of RONG 2)

subterranean detonation homesick blues

ok you school me. my understanding is that a nuclear warhead in an ICBM actually does have a chance of going off when intercepted.

Depends on who made it, but the same 1/10000th of a second timing tolerances that keep the world safe from warheads being dropped by accident and going off, or having certain parts corrode and going off, or for that matter the same kind of technology that keeps conventional cruise missiles and torpedoes from blowing up in situ/transit aboard ships in high seas - not likely to be compromised by a catastrophic failure of the fuselage's structural integrity. The radioactive material vaporizing and scattering is a concern, which is why modern intercept approaches utilize engine-killers (all the laser wackiness) and kinetic kill vehicles, a good simulation of which can be observed in the first act of Behind Enemy Lines (best movie ever made). The interceptor gets within a set proximity of the target and then releases dozens or hundreds of heavy flechettes, which break up the fuselage. Everything is designed and operated with the idea of keeping the warhead as intact as possible.

Each type of ballistic missile has a different countermeasure, BTW, ICBMs are a small fraction of the problem.

Where is Gorge to back me up/prove me wrong

thanks for the breakdown -- glad to be reassured & I should tone down the paranoia a notch. there is a friend-of-the-family etc. involved in weapons testing for the pentagon who was tracking accidental detonation on intercept issues and said it still warranted concern. then again everything warrants concern when you're testing weapons. I'm sure the Russian checksums are top notch, I think they're just anticipating the 'depends on who made it' clause you mention

Milton and Tom, I've always heard these systems had low kill rates but if that's such common knowledge, why are the Russians so pissed about going ahead with these systems?

just because they're 'anti-missile silos' doesn't obscure the reality of ex-Soviet satelite states letting the US build military installations w/ launchers right over the border from them. it'd be provocative in any situation and would require active diplomatic assuagements & reassurance that the bases were in the international interest to be accepted. instead the Bush admin's stance has been their typical 'what are you going to do about it'.

Poland's timing for signing on last week, of all times, after months of the government doing everything they could to delay it in the face of public protests, is something to worry about

A low kill rate is not necessarily a bad thing if you can put up three or four of your munitions to each one of theirs; + even with a 20% Very Palpable Hit rate you've changed the risk vs reward calculation of a first strike by a huge amount

and once again I am not being all rah-rah Star Wars but just pointing this out - trying to leap forward in aerial guidance and tracking technology to build this stuff is kind of admirable in that the end goal is to obliterate the Mutual Assured Destruction paradigm and put us back in a conventional warfare mode where only millions die, not billions, when world leaders feel the need to wave dick in public. Unfortunately, this also means we've built our own long range strike weapons to be immune to such countermeasures, resulting in our enemies building deeper and deeper bunkers, resulting in us making uglier and uglier bunker-buster munitions.

the end goal is to obliterate the Mutual Assured Destruction paradigm and put us back in a conventional warfare mode where only millions die, not billions

I don't want to get into an argument with Tom - and will most likely fold within minutes - but if that's true then America is presumably going to share its technological achievements of nuclear defense with the other boys in the class?

Really all they're doing is challenging Russia (and everyone else for that matter) to build a better missile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Concepts_for_orbital_warfare

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/17/Apollo_16_Young_salutes_the_flag.jpg/573px-Apollo_16_Young_salutes_the_flag.jpg

I mean I wholeheartedly agree, but there really isn't a lot any nation-state does that ain't dodgy machiavellian shit

Of course not but no-one else does it with quite the timing and panache of the US.

Just watching a guy called Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute on BBC America who says this is nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with Iran.

*cough* bullshit *cough*

I think the timing and panache you sarcastically attribute to the US is perhaps a little bit biased by being an anglophone; otherwise, for example, you'd never know of hacks like O'Hanlon scrambling to come up with muscle-felx nonsense about Poland asking for PAC-3s etc

Everybody's a dickhead in October 1962

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/8/18/2337/96853/939/569608

Ronald Reagan used to raise alarms about the threat of a Sovietized Nicaragua just a day’s drive – a long day’s drive – south of the Rio Grande. And here was NATO, in theory at least, asserting a right to park its tanks within commuting distance of Russia’s second-largest city.

I am disappointed by the lack of shit-I-didn't-already-know in that piece

dude doesn't even talk about us sending hospital ships to South America to piss off Chavez

I didn't know about all the piecemeal expansions.

Why would hospital ships piss off Chavez? He gets all the doctors he needs from Cuba.

It's kind of an underhanded influence thing. Probably nothing would actually piss off Chavez, he's pimp of the decade.

I became acutely aware of the piecemeal expansions when I was sent to Tallinn on the Secret Service's tab.

Come to think of it, what the hell is the interface between NATO and the EU? It's like wearing two sweaters.

Maybe the hospital ships were tit for Chavez's offer of cut-rate oil for poor Americans tat?

http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2008/05-may/e0514a.html

Estonia sent a couple of experts to Georgia, echoing my trip last summer. That shit was a little weird when I read about it.

I think the interface between NATO and the EU is that if you can be in the latter, fuck it, why not be in the former? You get a package of coupons for Northrup Grumman products, I think.

Tom, I wanted to come up with a quippy response but I just found myself completely out of my depth while inevitably agreeing with you. The best I could come up with was "war as a continuation of dick-waving by other means". Which is by no means as acerbic as I would like it to be but does sum up how tired I am of this shit already.

x-post to fucking ages ago (I went to make toast)

Didn't Russia pull a lot of info attack crap on Georgia over the last couple of weeks?

actually dick-waving by other means as a continuation of war is closer to what we're discussing now, and you've got numpteen us military officers writing war college theses on the different attributes of asymmetrical regional conflicts and sphere-of-influence humanitarian actions; like having anti-missile-missile systems in Poland or wherever isn't about the possibility of using them, but of having them. Everything is about testing your hot shit and forcing the neighbors to acknowledge your existence, or pushing a remix of the Marshall Plan whenever you have some spare change.

That could explain a bit of Russia's reason for actually rolling up into Georgia; they got nothing new to test, and not feeling particularly heavy in the pocket, so just write off some tanks you already paid for.

Tracer: Y, but not "Russia." Russian sympathizers. There's a very important difference. like hiring strike breakers vs. calling the national guard.

Fuck EU membership - if Georgia could just get the xs4all guys on their side they'd be set

this is how you know the RIAA and the MPAA don't really have any pull: China's still inhabitable

Really all they're doing is challenging Russia (and everyone else for that matter) to build a better missile.

the easier challenge is to just build more of the missile types you already have. the simplest way around a missile defense system is to simply overwhelm it.

end goal is to obliterate the Mutual Assured Destruction paradigm

Doesn't MAD work though? It makes the chance of two nuclear armed powers fighting huge conventional wars less likely for fear of it "going nuclear"

Just watching a guy called Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute on BBC America who says this is nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with Iran.

That Polish-Iranian border has historically been a major troublespot

Michael O'Hanlon is full of shit about most things, hth.

google glenn greenwald and o'hanlon for starters.