"Missile Defense Costs $10 Billion a Year. What do we get for that?"

[swag]

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00163

Expert Philip Coyle notes that successes have been only under artificial circumstances and that in the two most recent tests interceptors didn’t even get off the ground; he urges Congress and the press to question the system.

Under the administration of President George W. Bush, the Department of Defense has been spending about $10 billion per year on missile defense. The President's goal is to be able to shoot down enemy missiles of all types - short range, medium range, and intercontinental ballistic missiles - with interceptors launched from land, from sea, from aircraft and from space. It's called a layered defense. The idea is that if one layer misses the next one won't. Pentagon briefings picture the United States covered by a series of overlapping glass domes, and we are meant to imagine that enemy missiles will bounce off those domes like hail off a windshield.

In a recent report the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that missile defense spending could double by 2013 to about $19 billion per year. The CBO also proposes an evolutionary approach that would reduce missile defense spending to only $3 billion per year by focusing on research and development, rather than continuing to deploy unproven hardware.

In my judgment, both the Congress and the press need to foster a more vigorous national debate on such a problematic, expensive and potentially destabilizing system.

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[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Scrap that and put all the money into universal healthcare and free

public education cradle-to-grave.

[savemefromdumbya]

2. It doesn't work anyway

[phantom power]

3. "Focus on R+D"

Wow, what a concept -- try to make something that works before deploying it...