Missile Defense

In case anyone missed the news, the latest test staged by the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency concluded in an embarrassing failure on Dec. 15. The target rocket launched on schedule from Alaska, but the interceptor rocket never left its pad in the Marshall Islands for their planned rendezvous in space. The cause, according to the Missile Defense Agency, was "an unknown anomaly," which in plain English means that the Pentagon, after spending roughly $100 billion over the past two decades on this system, has no idea why it still doesn’t work.

According to newspaper reports, the test had been postponed several times due to "bad weather," so apparently we must hope that our enemies choose a nice sunny day to attack. In fact, the interceptor hadn’t been tested for two years, because the previous test in December 2002 was also a disastrous failure. On that occasion, the "kill vehicle" didn’t separate from the booster rocket, missed the target by hundreds of miles and finally incinerated in the earth’s atmosphere.

There are many sound scientific and technical reasons why this particular version of missile defense may never function as advertised, no matter how many staged experiments are performed. Previous tests have been carefully rigged by placing a homing beacon on the target, by launching the target repeatedly along the same course, and by programming complete information about the timing and trajectory of the target to the interceptor. The enemy not only has to attack on a sunny day, but they had better tell us exactly when and how, too.

Even if the Pentagon’s engineers can someday launch an interceptor rocket that meets an incoming target, the enemy missile is likely to deploy simple countermeasures that can divert the "kill vehicle." Missile defense isn’t nearly ready for realistic testing, and won’t be for years, if ever.

>> Source [New York Observer Opinions article]