I’m generally not sensitive about these kinds of things, and when a conservative blog criticizes something I’ve written, I usually just blow it off. But today The Politburo Diktat had an item suggesting that I, among others, was one of the “lefties” who was wrong about a missile-defense system. Let’s explore that for a moment.
The site linked to a Washington Examiner item that says the U.S. has a system in place that “is poised to shoot down anything launched from North Korea that threatens the American homeland or the critical interests of our regional allies like Japan and Australia.” This development, the piece argues, has led long-time skeptics to become “noticeably absent.” The Politburo Diktat asks, “Where are ‘Star Wars’ critics now?”
We haven’t gone anywhere. The Diktat argues that a “missile defense system is, at this juncture, eminently desirable,” in light of recent developments regarding North Korea, and I’d agree that a system may very well be “desirable” — but that doesn’t make it work.
* The Pentagon’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system hasn’t successfully intercepted a missile since October of 2002…. And the last two times it tried to hit an oncoming missile, the interceptor didn’t even leave the ground. Things have gotten so bad that the Missile Defense Agency’s independent review team concluded last year that more tests may only undermine the GMD’s value as a deterrent.”
* A recent Pentagon Inspector General report found that security vulnerabilities are so serious “that the agency and its contractor, Boeing, may not be able to prevent misuse of the system.”
* “A little-noticed study by the Government Accountability Office issued in March found that program officials were so concerned with potential flaws in the first nine interceptors now in operation that they considered taking them out of their silos and returning them to their manufacturer for ‘disassembly and remanufacture.'”
And what happened during the North Koreans’ July 4th missile test? I’m glad you asked.
Our defense system was able to “track” the weapons, but as ThinkProgress noted, “The purpose of a missile defense system isn’t just to track missiles, it’s to intercept and destroy them. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system has gone through testing to see if it can do so, but it has failed consistently.”
Returning to The Politburo Diktat, the site boasted:
In the Eighties, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars,” was the bete noir of that decade’s moonbats. In lieu of leftwing blogs, the arguments raged in the editorial pages and in occasional marches and protests. The main thrust of the moonbats was that we could never build a system that would be impervious to the thousands of missiles that the Soviet Union could launch.
Things look differently now, don’t they?
Well, not really. It’s been a couple of decades, but there’s still a nuclear threat, the right is still championing a system that can’t offer a reliable defense, the left is still wondering why we’re investing billions in a system that might never work, the GOP base is still chest-thumping for no particular reason, and there’s still a conservative Republican president of questionable competence who seems puzzled by serious national security threats.
Come to think of it, things don’t appear terribly different at all.