The military has never been able to make a missle hit something that didn’t have already a tracking device on it. 30 years of research and the technology is useless against a Russian ICBM. Star Wars is still only a movie, and generation-long boondoggles aren’t always cooked up by Democrats.

[Editor --- the military has never been able to make a missile hit something that didn't already have a tracking device on it? You're kidding right? And you base this info on what? Your real world experience or expertise in missile defense technology? I guess you think the 70% success rate the Patriot Missile System demonstrated against SCUD missiles during the Gulf War never happened...and that technology is nearly 20 years old.

Truth be told, Pat, you don't have the slightest clue what current US missile defense systems are capable of.]

Left by Pat on February 21st, 2008 at 11:00 am

http://www.commondreams.org/views/051100-101.htm
We examined three countermeasures in detail, each of which would defeat the planned US defense.

A country that decided to deliver biological weapons by ballistic missile could divide the lethal agent into 100 or more small bombs, known as ”bomblets,” as a way of dispersing the agent over the target. This would also overwhelm the defense, which couldn’t shoot at so many warheads.

The Rumsfeld panel, a high-level commission convened by Congress in 1998 to assess the ballistic missile threat to the United States, noted that potential attackers could build such bomblets. We show this in detail.

An attacker launching missiles with nuclear weapons would have other options. It could disguise the warhead by enclosing it in an aluminum-coated Mylar balloon and releasing it with a large number of empty balloons. None of the missile defense sensors could tell which balloon held the warhead, and again the defense could not shoot at all of them.

Alternately, we showed that the warhead could be enclosed in a thin shroud cooled with liquid nitrogen - a common laboratory material - so it would be invisible to the heat-seeking interceptors the defense will use.

These are only three of many possible countermeasures. And none of these ideas is new; most are as old as ballistic missiles themselves.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=10098
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced Dec. 11 it was not able to complete a test involving the planned intercept of a long-range ballistic missile target over the central Pacific Ocean when the exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) interceptor and the booster rocket failed to separate, preventing the EKV from engaging the target warhead in space.

Left by Yoda on February 21st, 2008 at 12:37 pm

Despite the naysayers, I am impressed when a missile can knock a bullet out traveling at 17,000mph with a BB.

Left by no2liberals on February 21st, 2008 at 1:08 pm

Robbie - You’re right – I stand corrected, as I misspoke. When I said the military has never shot down anything without a tracking device, I meant to say that they have never successfully shot down any missiles perceived to be a threat to the continental US. 60s-era Scud missiles won’t be landing in NYC or Sacramento anytime soon. While the Patriot program is the one shining success generated from the billions wasted on this cold-war pipe-dream, it’s intended targets are in a completely different league than those possessed by the nuclear-armed countries of the world, the defense of which has been the stated goal of this program since day one.

Truth is, Robbie, this has been a Republican boondoggle that has never produced the results as promised. Massive efforts have gone into covering up failures of the program. The Patriot missile system was not what people were envisioning when St Ronnie touted the “Star Wars” system in the early 80s, because we knew that short-range ballistic missiles posed no serious threat to the US mainland.

I have little info on this shoot-down that occurred today, but the fact remains that the military knew exactly where this satellite was in space so shooting it down was no groundbreaking feat (the Chinese just did this last year.) It does, however, smell an awful lot like the same old propaganda Bush has used in the past to try and bamboozle the public into pouring billions more into this pie-in-the-sky:

http://archive.salon.com/news/col/cona/2001/07/31/test/index.html

[July 31, 2001 | The Pentagon and the Bush administration are determined to sell the American people a national missile defense system that will probably increase tensions with allies and adversaries and will surely cost more than $100 billion. Their latest marketing exercise took place on the evening of July 14, when a "kill vehicle" launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific smashed into a rocket sent up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Precisely according to plan, the target was instantly vaporized on impact -- and along with it, or so the Pentagon's uniformed salesmen hoped, the perennial concern that missile defense won't work. With the cooperation of major news organizations and conservative pundits, that test provided an enormous propaganda boost to the Bush proposal, which conveniently enough had been brought up to Capitol Hill by Defense Department officials just two days earlier.

There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it. In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was rigged.

This rather significant aspect of the July 14 mission remained hidden in the fine print until a few days ago, when the Pentagon confirmed the role of the GPS device to a reporter for Defense Week magazine. But of course most Americans still don't know why the test functioned so smoothly, because the Defense Week scoop was either buried or ignored by the mainstream media, which had so obediently celebrated the technological breakthrough two weeks earlier.

And as Kadish later acknowledged, each of the previous three tests -- two of which failed anyway -- had also involved the use of a guidance beacon. (To longtime observers of the missile-defense effort, this latest news recalled the notorious "Star Wars" scandal, when investigators discovered that a target had been secretly heated to ensure that it would be picked up by the interceptor's infrared sensor.)
[…]
With billions in contracts at stake and bellicose ideologues in power, the salesmen for national missile defense must conceal the many defects in their dangerous product. And the press corps, reverting to the bad habits of the Cold War, has done little so far to penetrate the Pentagon’s propaganda.
So when the next “successful” missile-defense test is announced with fanfare and fireworks, don’t necessarily believe what you hear. You are the buyers targeted by this massive sales effort — and you should most certainly beware ]

Left by Pat on February 21st, 2008 at 3:47 pm

Henh…the LSM dubbed it “Star Wars” and the Soviets called it an evil empire breaker.

Left by no2liberals on February 21st, 2008 at 7:05 pm