Faith-Based Missile Defense

Things didn't go so well out on the test range yesterday.

The Bush administration's effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight test of the system in two years.

Pentagon officials could not immediately explain the reason for the failure. They said some kind of anomaly prompted the automatic shutdown of the launch sequence just 23 seconds before the interceptor was due to take off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. Plans had called for the interceptor to soar into space and knock down a mock warhead fired from Kodiak Island in Alaska about 16 minutes earlier.

Let's cut to the chase. The interceptor system is fundamentally flawed and subject to simple and effective countermeasures. The system has been unable to pass a series of tests that are so dumbed down that even a passing grade would give us little reason to believe that the system would actually work in the real world. Yesterday's test was delayed for months while the Missile Defense Agency tweaked the system, and even that wasn't enough to insure success. In the end, missile defense costs us $10 billion per year, and after decades of research and development, we have almost nothing to show for it.

Faced with these facts, you might expect that policy makers would just scrap the whole thing. You'd be wrong: missile defense is getting an increase in appropriations next year. Maybe you would expect the installation of the system would be delayed until all the bugs were worked out and it was sufficiently tested. You'd be wrong again: the system was installed earlier this year, just in time for Bush to take credit for it before the election. You might then expect that yesterday's failed test would delay the decision to make the system operational. Wrong again:

For weeks, Pentagon officials have described the facility as going through a "shakedown" phase and have insisted that the decision to declare it operational would be made independent of the outcome of the flight test. Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's top spokesman, reiterated yesterday that "the test was not connected to any decisions about operational capability."

This is our faith-based administration at work: it's decisions are made "independent" of the facts. We could be buying a lot of reality-based security each year with those billions of dollars. As it is, we're just wasting money and ignoring opportunities.