The media and the nation are busy debating vitally important issues like Mary Cheney’s sexuality and John Kerry’s Vietnam tours (and occasionally there’s a bit about a war we’re fighting somewhere in the Middle East . . . despite winning it a year and a half ago). What slight advantage Bush has in some polls seems to derive largely from a sense that he is better suited to handle the country’s defenses. I have yet to come across much evidence supporting this view. From where I’m sitting, it appears that the current administration has managed to royally screw up nearly every military pie into which they have stuck their fingers. Case in point: the (profoundly unfunny) joke known as National Missile Defense.

Remember Star Wars? Not the movie, but Reagan’s sci-fi fantasy that would keep us forever safe from the Soviets and the Chinese and the Romulans if we just spent enough money on it? Sure you do. Of course, it never worked and most scientists who didn’t stand to draw a paycheck from the project laughed at the idea that it ever even could. It gained currency under Reagan, but the idea of long-range missile defense actually goes back about 40 years and $75 billion dollars (estimated conservatively) ago. Even amortized over 40 years, that’s a hefty chunk of change, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Bush proposes to spend $10 billion in 2005 and as much as $100 billion by 2010 on a wide variety of missile defense projects. Given the history of the program, you can safely expect those cost estimates to be vastly less than the actual bill.

That figure includes the $25 billion for the interceptor missile systems recently installed and set to be expanded in Alaska. Now you may be thinking, “Recently installed? But I thought they hadn’t ever worked.” And you’d be thinking correctly. They haven’t been tested in anything remotely approaching real-world conditions and even the thoroughly gamed tests they did undergo went poorly. Get this: the type of interceptor missile being used has never been flight tested and of the eight times they did other interception tests, under highly controlled, starkly unrealistic circumstances, the missiles failed to hit their target three times. This includes the last time such a test was performed — in 2002. After that failure, the government simply stopped performing such tests and went straight ahead with deployment instead, keeping with their entire faith-based approach to governance. You can almost hear the conversation:

“These tests aren’t working.”
“Well then, don’t be a sap. Stop testing them.”

How could this happen? Here are some clues:

• Engineering challenges have been underestimated. Although the basic technology exists for most of the systems being developed, the engineering required to shift them from the laboratory to reliable defenses on the battlefield will, in some cases, take years longer than optimistic assessments from the Missile Defense Agency and its contractors. For example, an effort to equip a jumbo jet with a missile-killing laser is years behind schedule despite a doubling of its budget to an estimated $5.1 billion.
• Testing programs are unrealistic. Testing has been scripted and, in some cases, too reliant on simulations and computer modeling instead of actual flight tests. The eight missile-intercept tests conducted so far have not come close to real-life conditions.
• There is little independent oversight. A 2002 decision to exempt missile-defense programs from traditional Pentagon oversight and requirements means that virtually no one without a stake in a project’s success has any authority over it. As a result, systems with marginal capabilities are being rushed through development.
• The process is politicized. Politics and partisan ideology have thwarted efforts in recent years to make the programs more accountable and testing more meaningful. Modest attempts by missile-defense moderates in Congress to beef up testing finally won approval this month.

The entire article is worth reading, though prepare to be miffed. The third and fourth items in the list up there are the big ones. Missile defense has turned into a cash cow for a small group of thinktank jockeys and military contractors who know full well that the entire system is essentially vaporware but have nobody to answer to about it. The “modest attempts” in item four that won approval carry no penalties for not complying with them. Care to guess what that means?

Just last week the American Physical Society put out a press release stating that the system isn’t useful at all against solid-propellant missiles, which are the very sort we’d be expecting to see by the most optimistic timeline of having an operational system.

The APS Study Group looked at boost-phase defense systems utilizing land-, sea-, or air-based interceptors, space-based interceptors, or the Airborne Laser.

The effectiveness of interceptor rockets would be limited by the short time window for intercept, which requires interceptors to be based within 400 to 1,000 kilometers of the possible boost-phase flight paths of attacking missiles. In some cases this is closer than political geography allows. Even interceptors that were very large and fast and that pushed the state of the art would in most cases be unable to intercept solid-propellant ICBMs before they released their warheads.

A system of space-based interceptors, also constrained by the short time window for intercept, would require a fleet of a thousand or more orbiting satellites just to intercept a single missile. Deploying such a fleet would require a five- to tenfold increase in the United States’ annual space-launch capabilities.

The Airborne Laser currently in development has the potential to intercept liquid-propellant ICBMs, but its range would be limited and it would therefore be vulnerable to counterattack. The Airborne Laser would not be able to disable solid-propellant ICBMs at ranges useful for defending the United States.

“Few of the components exist for deploying an effective boost-phase defense against liquid-propellant ICBMs and some essential components would take at least 10 years to develop,” said Study Group co-chair Daniel Kleppner. “According to U.S. intelligence estimates, North Korea and Iran could develop or acquire solid-propellant ICBMs within the next 10 to 15 years. Consequently, a boost-phase defense effective only against liquid-propellant ICBMs would risk being obsolete when deployed.”

Although a successful intercept would prevent munitions from reaching their target, live nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads could strike populated areas short of the target in the United States or in other countries, shows the study. This “shortfall problem” is inherent in any boost-phase defense and difficult to avoid.

Great. Not only does the hideously expensive system not work, it will be obsolete in a decade or so anyhow. At which point, the military-industrial complex will have an entirely new, shiny system to sell you. The issue isn’t whether this is a worthwhile field of study - even just as pure physics, it can have merit. But this isn’t about pure science. It isn’t even really about defense. It’s about money and Bush’s re-election bid. Philip Coyle, director of the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation Office from 1994 to 2001, says, “Three years ago, the president was asked if he would deploy a system that did not work and was not adequately tested and he said of course not. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The system has no demonstrated capability that it would work in realistic conditions.”

Given a system that isn’t technically online yet and that won’t function worth a damn once it is declared to be so (watch for that just before the election), how do you feel about this from President Bring ‘Em On?

Bush has touted the system while campaigning for re-election. “We want to continue to perfect this system, so we say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: you fire; we’re going to shoot it down,” he said in a stop at Ridley Park, Penn., on Aug. 17.

Yes, the I-double-dog-dare-you strategy worked so well last time you tried it, you halfwit. Feel safer yet?