US Missile Defense Test Fails 317
KingRobot sends news that a recent test of a US missile defense system has failed. The test of the Groundbased Midcourse Defense interceptor apparently had a problem with the sea-based X-band radar. Both the target missile, launched from the Pacific, and the interceptor, launched from California, performed as expected. "Yesterday's test was intended to quell doubters of the entire missile-defense approach, with the target missile deploying countermeasures. Critics of the GMD programme say that tests thus far, which have not included such spoilers, have been too kind to the intercept tech. The [military] isn't disclosing whether the intercepting kill vehicle had simply failed to reach the 'threat cluster' of warhead(s) and decoys, or whether it had reached the cluster but hit a countermeasure rather than the actual target."
"fails" (Score:3, Insightful)
"Now Commander, that torpedo did NOT self-destruct. You heard it hit the hull, and I was never here."
Sure it failed.
Money (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
Re:Sneaky. (Score:1, Insightful)
No surprise, really (Score:2, Insightful)
There is exactly one instance of missile defense working that I'm aware of, namely combating Iraqi Scud missiles back around 1993.
But the important thing to realize about this version of missile defense (and its predecessor, Star Wars) is that they don't need to work to accomplish their real purpose, which is funneling large sums of taxpayer cash to defense contractors.
Failed test or failed missile? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did the test fail, or the missle? The difference is that a failed test means you don't get any useful information about the device under test, whereas a successful test means that you found out whatever you wanted to know about the device under test.
Example: a test to determine whether a cellphone fails when immersed in water. If you find that your water has been shut off, you have a failed test, because you can't even try immersing the phone in water. If your water works and you immerse the phone and it stops working, the test is successful and your result is that the phone failed. If it still works, then you have a successful test and a phone that didn't fail.
</pedant>
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
Not to mention the side benefit of generating productive tech, instead of just destructive tech. The problem with the moon missions is that the big defense corporations running the US [wikipedia.org] just can't justify such large profits with moon missions. The population (or its politicians) are much less willing to fund if there is no fear factor [wikipedia.org]. Fear does not drive the moon mission development like it does for military expenditure unless you try and use the fear of China doing it first to our exclusion, but even then it's still not the same kind of primeval motivation == less profit.
Re:No surprise, really (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Failed test or failed missile? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Fear is a major factor in military spending. Hell, just look at the shopping spree after 9/11...
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
some of the biggest gains in tech come during war or threat of war. this technology will undoubtably have beneficial technologies used for non military things. GPS was first created for military purposes. now look at it. just because you don't like the idea of being able to survive/defend against a missile attack because it's some how bad form to live when your enemy wants you dead, doesn't mean that there will be no other gains from it. i'm pretty sure that there is moon shot technology used by the military today. some private sector tech gets used for bad things too.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
ICBMs are cool as symbols of military/industrial/scientific might and are, for the moment, the last word in penetrating the borders of a hostile power; but they are tricky to build, extremely expensive, and (even if difficult to intercept) trackable back to their source.
They are pretty much exactly the weapon that you would expect as a culmination of the US/USSR "two nuclear superpowers staring at each other across well defined, and substantially closed, lines" period. In a period of relatively open trade, assorted third parties, and general proliferation, though, it isn't at all clear that you can expect the next warhead to come by ICBM, rather than by Fedex...
Even if it actually worked, a lot of this missile defence stuff reeks of wrinkly old guys shoving money at their contractor buddies in order to finally have the weapons systems that they wanted during the cold war.
Re:Sneaky. (Score:4, Insightful)
You make an interesting point.
However, I'd like to make the irrefutable counter-argument that missiles and rockets are cool while inspecting ships, planes and trucks is boring.
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, if the missile defense system *doesn't work*
To quote Jean-Luc, "Things are only impossible until they are not."
The only real question is whether or not protecting our cities from madmen in Tehran or Pyongyang is a worthwhile investment. I tend to think that it is. Do you really want to live in a world where the United States is held hostage to nuclear blackmail and our only choice if they murder millions of our citizens is to respond in kind?
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
As poorly as these leaders are portrayed through the use of propaganda, please bear in mind that they are the leaders of their nations (regardless of whether you like them or not). They are not fools, and definitely not mad men.
Shrug (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno, isn't it more credible if some tests DO fail?
It's a government contract - of COURSE it's rife with collusion, padding, selective data, etc. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to develop the tech.
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly, do you really think that in a time of peace (and probably even at war) someone in charge of running a country would be foolish enough to authorize a nuclear missile strike against another sovereign country?
Yes, I do. Is there some rule that says nation-states always make rational decisions? History suggests that they don't. Japan went to war with a nation that had twice her population and almost six times her GDP. Germany went to war with virtually the entire world -- she was fighting twenty times her population and nearly five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Any logical observer could have predicted the outcome of those choices. Indeed, many people in the defense establishments of both countries warned what the result would be -- but the leadership pressed ahead anyway. Millions of people on both sides died as a result. The only difference between then and now is that it would take a lot less time to run up the body count with modern technology.
It doesn't strike me as wise foreign policy to trust that our enemies will make a rational decision. Not when millions of people will die if they don't. Having a missile defense gives the President a second option. What would you rather see, the geopolitical fall out from a warhead that was shot down over the Pacific or the geopolitical fall out from the warhead that wiped out Honolulu or San Francisco?
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post is truly ironic.
Yes, I would like to see developments for production sake, but so many production developments came from war/destruction spending.
For example, aren't the rockets that get us into space descended from the ICBM research?
Likewise, automobiles were designed to be productive, weren't they? But without them, we wouldn't have tanks.
It's a two way street. Given the flaw listed here, I can see improvements to GPS as one potential benefit coming out of this system. Maybe it could improve rocket systems as well, something that would help space travel...
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny but that world existed for about 20 years. The US pretty much could have nuked any nation on earth at will from 1945 until around the mid sixties.
The old Soviet Union had no effective to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental US until the early to mid sixties.
The USSR could have hit Europe, Japan, and Alaska but odds are that maybe one or two bombers might hive gotten through to the US and the few ICBMs the USSR had would have been destroyed on the ground. That is one of the reasons that the USSR put missiles in Cuba so they could have a workable threat to the US.
Re:"fails" (Score:1, Insightful)
A complete movie based on that book would run about 6 hours. ... Although I could probably stand Sean Connery speaking English with a Russian accent for that long.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, no.
A couple of things. First, one must consider that "countless" innocent civilians were NOT killed by the two atomic bombs. About 240,000 total was the count (over a period of several months - the immediate casualties of the bombs were closer to 150,000). Note that more were killed in one night of routine bombing of Tokyo than in both atomic bombings combined.
Second, the assertion that "Japan was finished by the time USA dropped the bombs". Remember Okinawa? Two months before the atomic bombings, and the Japanese managed to inflist 50,000 American casualties for one small island? Now, imagine extending that to the invasion of the entirety of Japan...
Third, if Japan were indeed "finished" before we dropped the bombs, why didn't they surrender after the first bomb was dropped? It's not like we dropped them on the same day - plenty of time to get to a radio and cry "uncle" if they were so inclined.
We won't even go into the oddity that both cities (and several others) were spared conventional bombing for years. The AAF wanted, if we actually used the Bomb, to get information on the effects of the Bomb on undamaged cities. So they made a list of military targets (Hiroshima's Naval Base comes to mind) that were put off limits for bombing. I understand that the AAF brass had to do quite the song and dance to justify to their subordinates not bombing those cities for years....
No really, the thing is a joke (Score:3, Insightful)
This system has been failing since at least the late 90's (That's when I first started tracking it in the Marine Corps). The few successes it has had have been predefined configurations where they had a known flight path and pre-set intercept path. The entire thing is staged. And what's worse is that it fails even the majority of these staged intercepts.
People balked when Obama talked about dropping the missile shield in eastern Europe but honestly, these missile defense systems are a joke. They would do squat to improve our security and are costing us billion of dollars as they feed the military complex industry.
Scrap the system IMO, use the money to help offset the deficit, and the good will of the Russians to compel Iran to drop its uranium refineries.
-Rick
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, you guys are so compassionate, ONLY killing 240,000 innocent people.
There are no innocent people in a total war.
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
The only real question is whether or not protecting our cities from madmen in Tehran or Pyongyang is a worthwhile investment. I tend to think that it is. Do you really want to live in a world where the United States is held hostage to nuclear blackmail and our only choice if they murder millions of our citizens is to respond in kind?
The problem that you aren't considering is that a non-functional or unreliable system is worse than no system at all, because it increases the likelihood that an attack will be launched and will be successful. It emboldens our leaders to make rash decisions that will anger potential enemies while assuming that the ABM system will protect our cities. It convinces potential enemies that a strike with large numbers of missiles is necessary to ensure success.
Re:Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Did I say it was a 'self evident thing'? All I said was that Germany was fighting twenty times her population and five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Whatever else you might think of the German war plan, declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor was the height of insanity. It allowed FDR to get a free (in terms of political capital) pass to fully enter the European war and to implment the "Europe first" strategy that condemned the Third Reich to a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Had I been in Hitler's shoes I would have condemned the Pearl Harbor attack and done everything I could to muddle public opinion in the United States. Imagine FDR trying to explain why he was prosecuting an undeclared war in the Atlantic with resources that could have been used against the Japanese. Imagine trying to sell Congress on the notion of sending supplies to Stalin while the Philippines were being overrun and the West Coast was perceived to be in danger of coming under attack.
The other side of the coin is the Japanese stupidity in going to war with the United States. By most accounts we defeated them with just 15% of our war production, the rest went to Europe. That should give you an idea of just how great of a disparity there was between the Japanese and American economies in the 1940s.
You can say that they were banking on a quick victory and a negotiated peace, but it seems to me that you've already lost if you are relying on your enemy to throw in the towel when he has the resources to beat you. It also ignores history -- the United States had proven itself willing to fight a total war against it's own people during the American Civil War (see Sherman's march to the sea and Sherdian's valley campaign), why would the Japanese or Germans make the assumption that we wouldn't be willing to do the same against them?
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
One other thing, sorry to reply twice, but wars are decided by Quartermasters. There's a saying in military circles, "Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." Having the best military technology and tactics in the world means absolutely nothing if you can't supply your troops with fuel, food and bullets.
Here's the deal (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, here's the thing. You can't just wave your hands and say "of course it's a worthwhile investment". Whether it's worthwhile depends on 1) how much it costs (including opportunity costs - in other words, what other good things could be done with the money), 2) how effective the defense system is, 3) how likely the threat is, and 4) the consequences if the threat actually manifests itself. If the consequence is "a major US city is wiped off the face of the earth"... well, that's pretty bad. But if the chances of that happening are 10^-9 over the next hundred years, the cost to defend against it would consume the entire US GDP for a hundred years, and said defense is only 10% effective anyway (to choose an extreme example), then clearly, this would not be a worthwhile investment.
Of course, in the real world the chances of an attack are probably somewhat higher (although realistically, pretty damn small), and GBM is probably more effective and certainly less costly than the extreme case discussed above. But does that mean it's worthwhile? Not necessarily. Although it's essentially a political question, we ought to at least approach it with facts to the extent we can. Discussing the consequences in isolation doesn't really help anyone make an informed decision about what to do.
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Third point (I guess I'm trying to set a record for most replies to a single post), but it's debatable that Germany would have won the war if she had prevailed in the East. For one thing, 'prevailing' on the Eastern Front isn't possible in the conventional sense, unless you can convince Stalin to throw in the towel or fight all the way to Vladivostok.
More to the point though, the Manhattan Project was never aimed at Japan. It was aimed at Germany. The German atomic weapons program was a joke -- they were no where near as far along as we were. Nor did they have the spy network that enabled Stalin to get the bomb years ahead of schedule. Do you think that Germany would have had the political will to continue the war when her cities started being destroyed? Do you think she could have beaten the Allies on the battlefield if they had started using a-bombs as tactical weapons?
Please don't say that German technology would have made the difference either. The British actually beat the Germans to having a workable jet engine. The Allies were ahead of them in terms of radar and electronics technology. We compromised their encryption systems and were decoding their traffic almost as fast as they were. They never came up with a workable proximity fuse for the anti-aircraft role. We had a commanding lead in naval technology. About the only area they had us bested in was rocketry -- but those were terror weapons that had no meaningful impact on the Allied war effort.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse
Key difference: The US had forward operating bases. You can't reach the USSR from North America with 1940s/1950s bomber technology but you can reach it from Turkey, the UK, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Norway, etc, etc.
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Insightful? Really? Are you saying Leaders of nations only make rational decisions? Explain Hitler.. or Stalin, or half the Monarchy in Europe back during the dark ages. Just because your in power doesn't mean it's because your smart. Hell isn't the next leader of North Korea going to be his son? It isn't because the guy is smart enough. A LOT of leaders of countries in the past are both fools and madmen.
Sorry.. but no.. Expecting the other guy to play nice / civilized is nice in a perfect world, but this most definitely is not.