BUSH'S PRIZED MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM FAILS TEST

Well, what else is new, right? As I recall, for the better part of a decade military experts have been saying a missile defense shield won't work. I remember back in Clinton's day they did a test but the laser wasn't able to track the target missile thus allowing the target missile to hit its target. That was back in '98 or '99. I remember 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl saying something about how Clinton wouldn't decide on axing the program and that he'd leave it up to the next president to make the final call. Well, of course, it's been King George's pet project and him going forward with it meant the violation of the first of many treaties America had signed with other countries.

Anyway, so just the other day the Pentagon did the first test in two years of this monster failure and predictable enough, it failed again. This time the damn interceptor missile didn't even get off the ground.

$10 billion a year on this program, folks.

Man, after letting 911 happen, not getting fully rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the "catastrophic" success in Iraq and now this--can the Pentagon do ANYTHING right?

Can I ask why this thing is even something we need? I mean, is Al Qaeda going to get their hands on an ICBM? Or are we expecting to piss off the Russians?

Check out an article about this very failure from BBC News.

Or check out this great post over at one of my new additions to TheBlogRoll: ArmsControlWonk.com. Here's the title of an essay quoted in the post to whet your appetite:

A REAL BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE, OR
How I’d Spend $8 Billion To Deal With Ballistic Missile Threats, or
You Can’t Fire A Ballistic Missile If A Navy SEAL Is Beating You With Your Own Severed Limbs.

'nuf said!

From the BBC News website:

Last Updated: Wednesday, 15 December, 2004, 10:02 GMT

Missile defence shield test fails

The first test in almost two years of the planned multi-billion dollar US anti-missile shield has failed.

The Pentagon said an interceptor missile did not take off and was automatically shut down on its launch pad in the central Pacific.

A target missile carrying a mock warhead had been fired 16 minutes earlier from Kodiak Island in Alaska.

The Pentagon is spending $10bn a year on the missile system, which was meant to be in operation by the end of 2004.

The Missile Defence Agency said an "unknown anomaly" was to blame for the system shutting down.



A spokesman said officials would now study data from the launch site at Kwajalein Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, to establish what went wrong.

In earlier tests, target missiles have been successfully intercepted in five out of eight attempts.

Wednesday's trial had been put off four times because of bad weather at launch sites and, on Sunday, because a radio transmitter failed.

A Pentagon spokesman told Reuters news agency the test had not been tied to the question of when the national missile defence system would be declared operational.

Philip Coyle, chief weapons tester under former US President Ronald Reagan, told Reuters: "This is a serious setback for a programme that had not attempted a flight intercept test for two years."

The goal, announced by US President George W Bush in 2002, was to have a basic ground-based shield in place by the end of this year.

The last test, in December 2002, failed when the interceptor missile did not separate from its booster rocket.

The programme has been nicknamed "son of Star Wars" after the original Strategic Defence Initiative - or "Star Wars" - outlined by President Reagan in the 1980s.

© BBC MMIV