In case you missed it, the Washington Post had a good item about missile defense yesterday, but with an unhelpful headline that read, “Interceptor System Set, But Doubts Remain.” That’s an outrageously forgiving way of saying, “Ineffective System In Place, No One Thinks It Can Work.”
At a newly constructed launch site on a tree-shorn plain in central Alaska, a large crane crawls from silo to silo, gently lowering missiles into their holes. The sleek white rockets, each about five stories tall, are designed to soar into space and intercept warheads headed toward the United States.
With five installed so far and one more due by mid-October, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is preparing to activate the site sometime this autumn. President Bush already has begun to claim fulfillment of a 2000 presidential campaign pledge — and longtime Republican Party goal — to build a nationwide missile defense.
But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon, about whether a system that is on its way to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.
The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon’s chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system’s viability.
We’re talking about wasting $100 billion to protect us from a Cold War-era threat with a mechanism that doesn’t do anything effectively. Worse, military experts continue to try and warn everyone that “fielding a U.S. anti-missile system before it has undergone realistic testing risks inducing a false sense of security and locking the United States into flawed technology.”
Nevertheless, true to form, the right is going after John Kerry for not embracing this “flawed technology” enough.
Conservatives would have us believe that Kerry’s position is a sign of weakness, as opposed to a reflection of his good judgment. The Weekly Standard’s Duncan Currie, for example, described Kerry’s opposition to wasting billions on a system that doesn’t work as a bad thing.
That Kerry would slash the [national missile defense] budget comes as no surprise. Indeed, over the past 20 years, he has been one of the Senate’s most consistent opponents of missile-defense funding, testing, and implementation. His record speaks for itself.
[…]
Kerry’s record indicates a firm skepticism, bordering on outright hostility, toward missile defense. Perhaps the most salient indication of how little Kerry values NMD is the 2004 Democratic platform — which doesn’t even mention missile defense. (Not once.)
Kerry’s stance should hearten NMD critics, who include most of the Democratic party’s base. For it suggests that the progress made thus far at Fort Greely, Alaska, could be meaningless unless George W. Bush is reelected.
Of course, what Currie doesn’t mention is that the “progress” at Fort Greely is already meaningless.
[T]he Missile-Defense Agency has delayed — for the second time in two months and now until at least the end of the year — a crucial flight test of the interceptor.
The pathetic fact is, the interceptor isn’t ready for a test. Glitches discovered from the last test still haven’t been fixed. The test crews are stumped by the cause, so they’ve sent it back to the factory to see if someone there can find a solution.
And yet the Pentagon has decided that the thing is ready for production and deployment. The agency is proceeding with plans to deploy 10 of the interceptors over the next few weeks in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska.
[…]
The interceptors at Fort Greely haven’t passed development tests, much less operational tests. Yet they’re being hoisted into their silos as we speak — 10 in the coming weeks, 10 more scheduled for next year.
Conservatives call this “progress” that Kerry and the Dems should embrace. If interceptors that can’t hit anything and probably never will represents progress, I’ll take stagnation.
One last thing: some missile-defense proponents point to North Korea as the primary example for the ongoing need for their system. First, it’s ironic that the administration would allow North Korea’s nuclear program to expand and then use it to justify a system that doesn’t work. And second, don’t believe their talking points; Bush’s Star Wars is clearly the wrong solution to the North Korean crisis.