NYT Editorial: The Faith-Based Missile Shield

[Dudley_DUright]

The Bush administration's exorbitantly wasteful missile defense system is about to be formally activated, just in time for its immediate bull's-eye: Election Day. Despite widespread technological doubts, President Bush promised in 2000 to have a missile shield in place this November. So, even though the $130 billion spent so far has yet to produce anything like a battle-ready system, the Pentagon plans to pronounce it active this month at a half dozen new missile silos on the West Coast.

This wisp of the old Star Wars fever dream is bedeviled by missing components and unproven premises. The Pentagon has suspended normal accountability standards in favor of what military proponents euphemistically term "evolutionary acquisition." This means spend and build now, and attempt credible tests when and if all the parts finally arrive. Even a Pentagon analysis called it a "case study" against rushing forward on faith.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/opinion/10sun2.html

[papau]

1. $130 billion, here, and $130 billion there, and soon you can't pay Soc Sec

because of that deficit!

[Hekate]

2. All they've produced so far is spectacular contrails ...

... or whatever they're called on a missile. But you can't hit a bullet with a bullet, as someone pointed out, not even if you're using really big "bullets."

It's one incredible waste of money and resources, all for Ronald Reagan's Buck Rogers fantasy.

We were supposed to get a "peace dividend" when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR fell apart. However thanks to Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld-Halliburton it's all evaporated into a new arms race -- and without the USSR as an adversary equal to the US, our Mayberry Machiavellians, our Masters of War, simply invented some new and virulent adversaries and called them the Axis of Evil.

Hekate