George W. Bush continues to have a silly affinity for an unworkable missile-defense system.
It hasn’t made a lot of headlines, but the initial deployment of his missile-defense program is just months away. The administration realizes, to at least a limited extent, that a missile-defense program is about as meaningful as weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. Indeed, Bush’s presidential directive on the policy admits this is a defense system that doesn’t actually defend against anything.
The United States will not have a final, fixed missile defense architecture. Rather, we will deploy an initial set of capabilities that will evolve to meet the changing threat and to take advantage of technological developments.
With this in mind, the Brookings Institution’s Michael Levi had a great item today in The New Republic about this “set of capabilities” and how Bush has fulfilled his promise to create a system before the end of the year, but failed to deliver anything that actually works.
For starters, the interceptors have never succeeded in realistic tests. The [Missile Defense Agency] press release tries to paper over that, declaring that “At the system level, we have been successful in four of the last five flight tests. …” What that means is that they’ve made sure that all the parts of the system will work together. But this completely avoids the central problem: The individual parts don’t yet work by themselves. It’s as if Edison had declared that electricity was flowing from his generator to his light bulb, but neglected to make sure he had a functioning light bulb design to begin with.
Levi also raised a good point about wasting limited resources that could be better spent elsewhere.
If the administration insists that the money stay within missile defense, it should directed towards research that could yield useful results. Better yet, it could be spent on other urgent needs, like securing nuclear materials abroad or protecting borders and ports at home. And regardless of where the money goes, the president should be humble. The “era where we have not been able to defend our country against long-range ballistic missile attacks” is far from gone.
Keep in mind, this is the same system that the administration bragged about, even after this report was released in May:
The multibillion-dollar U.S. ballistic missile shield due to start operating by Sept. 30 appears incapable of shooting down any incoming warheads, an independent scientists’ group said on Thursday.
A technical analysis found “no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack,” the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a 76-page report titled Technical Realities.
I feel safer already.