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Interceptor Missile Fails Test Launch
jangobongo writes "The US missile defense system suffered a serious setback today, just 2 weeks before it was scheduled to be activated. A target ICBM was launched from Alaska, but crashed harmlessly into the ocean as the interceptor missile based on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean shut itself down due to an unknown "anomaly". The cause of the failure could have been anything from a software glitch to a major hardware malfunction."
I read this article, and all I can think is, "Gosh, that target ICBM must be expensive."
Bliss is having no idea how much my federal government spent on the rest of the program leading up to this test. Just let me worry about this ICBM lying on the bottom of the ocean.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I try and be non partisan here but I have a few questions: How much money is this system costing? How are we supposed to justify the cost in addition to the $100 Billion (approx 25 Billion more than Bush said we would need before the election) we are going to spend in Iraq and Afghanistan next year? How are we supposed to pay for this with the dollar at an all time low against the Euro? How are we supposed to pay for this and have the tax cuts made permanent? How are we supposed to pay for this and reduce the deficit (at an all time high off of a budget surplus just five years ago)? How are we supposed to pay for this and the new stealth spy satellite program that is currently under congressional review? If we are truly at war, then we have to consider some history: There has never before been a time in the history of the United States where during a time of war, we have had a tax cut. If our soldiers (Semper Fi) are paying the ultimate sacrifice (1,344 US Military and a significant number of British, Spanish and Iraqi troops in addition to unpublished numbers of private contractors), then we should at home be expected to sacrifice as well.
The performance of this program really does make one wonder what we are getting for our tax dollars and investment given all the dramatic failures this program has endured.
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That way we wouldn't need new ways of blowing things up
This sig is intentionally blank
Unfortunately this expensive, worthless boondoggle will only continue. Meanwhile, the cost of university tuition is skyrocketing.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
The cause of the failure could have been anything from a software glitch to a major hardware malfunction."
And let's all speculate aimlessly until we know which.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
...but aren't we violating some sort of test ban treaty by testing the missle defense shield? If so...I wish we would at least make it effective, if we are already going to the trouble of violating international law. As I recall, this isn't the first time an interceptor failed miserably.
Ignoring for the moment the cost and the dubious necessity for such a system, what worries me more is:
'failed to launch due to an unknown anomaly'
What kind of engineering is this? With all of the possible metrology, the system 'shut down' due to an unknown anomaly? If the scientists and engineers can't grok what causes a 'shut down', then they need new jobs...possibly in the NYC sanitation department.
The system 'shut itself down'...ergo, a failure condition (anomaly) must have existed. I fail to understand how the 'system' knew about a problem that was bad enough to shut itself down, yet somehow the folks running said system aren't able to discern exactly what that was? Hell, even Windows has 'event viewer' and kernel dumps.
This cash cow needs to have her neck severed.
Some have said: A shameful waste of American money. An inducement to start a new nuclear arms race. Another dangerous precedent for continued American unilateralism.
Meanwhile, the thousands of cargo containers entering American ports everyday are rarely inspected.
Meanwhile, tons of radioactive materials are left unsecured in the former USSR.
And more nations are pursuing nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip to keep the U.S. from invading their countries.
Someone want to educate the current administration on asymmetrical warfare? And how the next threat is likely to be immune to missile interceptors.
Ideologically at least, I support the idea of national missile defense. But one has to look at this from a cost-benefit angle. A system that could probably stop ICBMs would be worth spending quite a lot on (though not necessarily any obscene amount of money). A system that can maybe stop ICBMs under ideal conditions will probably not stop them in real life. It's still worth a lot, but not billions and billions. This is money that could be much better spent actually protecting America. For example, what's to stop somebody from landing a nuke on our shores in a small boat? How many thousands of times less would it cost to patrol our shores effectively than fuel some military-industrial boondoggle?
English is easier said than done.
Prepare for the chants of "but it will after more development!"
Doesn't matter. It isn't needed. It tries to address a threat that is not there now and NEVER will be. Even the most hare-brained dictator knows that lobbing ICBMs at the U.S. mainland isn't going to work and will just result in the "liberation" of their country.
At least some of the world is trying to abandon the path of large-scale war and high-tech weapons as a means of resolving disputes and protecting your interests. Financial war can be messy but at least you don't get this.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
I think you're totally wrong. Iran knows full well that Israel has at least 200 nukes, all within range of Iran. Also, a nuclear strike on Israel would result in nuclear retaliation from the US. Iranians are not suicidal. Fact is, there is no 'rogue state' missile threat. That's a paranoid delusion created by the neocons.
Despite what all the official propoganda says, this system is primarily an offensive weapon.
As others have pointed out - no two-bit dictator with a nuke is going to launch it at the US (or any of our allies that might be geographically closer) because they know it is a sure ticket to "liberation."
But, what the US military, and anyone who bothers to think about it for 30 seconds, does know is that if the US premptively liberates a country from its two-bit dictator, then any nuke that guy has at his disposal will be launched just as soon as he can hit that red button.
Ballistic missile defense is designed to neutralize that retaliatory threat and thus make it "safe" for the US to liberate a country like Iran or North Korea. That's the reason all the talk about how "it will never work" because of decoys and whatnot doesn't make an impact on development - they don't (plan to) need to deal with a well-funded and well-planned attack, only the last-minute, "if I'm going down, I'm going to take as many of them with me" kind of attack.
Speaking as a US citizen and a WORLD citizen, I tend to think that the less free the US feels to throw its weight around, the better off the planet is in the long run.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What really frustrated the military and Busg about Sept 11 is that they had nobody to point the might of aircraft carriers at.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is evidence of the Bush's administration new policy of testing and deplying at the same time. The idea is that when the government used to test before deployment, Boeing would actually have to create a working system in order to get the bulk of their money. But they would much prefer it if they start getting their money before their system even works.
There were several tests of the missile defense system some of them succesful some not, but there were certainly not enough tests to ensure that the system would be operational. Yet the DoD decided to go ahead with building the system before testing was complete.
Now we know there is some kind of problem but we can't make major design changes because the whole thing is already being build. Lets just hope it is a software glitch.
Now everyone knows that a system as complex as that cannot work on the first time, but that is why you do tersting before you actually start depoying. This way you can iron out the bugs before you spend several billion dollars on a bunch of hardware that might turn out to be useless.
I think you're forgetting the fact that the original "Star Wars" program --the Strategic Defense Initiative --was a phenomenal success. It literally brought the Soviets back to the table at Reykjavik after the failure of Geneva, and then President Reagan's refusal to disband it caused Gorbachev to go home empty-handed, leading directly to the hard-line coup that signaled the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991/1992.
The purpose of a weapons system is to blow something up -- an enemy soldier, a city, an incoming missile. But the higher purpose is to cause the enemy to alter his plans before carrying them out.
I write in my journal
The part where the shutdown was described as automatic, the part where it was described as of unknown origin, and the part where it was described as a failure: None of these was accurately reported.
The first writethru was even worse. And don't even talk to me about Jim Wolf's story for Reuters. That was just a mess.
I write in my journal
This is yet another catastrophic attempt by the Bush Administration to circumvent the laws of physics and human nature. And like the other attempts, it is a (really, really, really expensive) failure. Why do we in the US put up with this? Boy, are we dumb.
We're already deep in debt. Running up the debt is the same thing as raising taxes. Bush wants to take the credit for tax cuts but unless you cut spending, you're just signing people up for a huge loan that they have to pay back later.
This debt was run up under Republican presidents and it is now skyrocketing under a Republican president and congress (while it decreased under a Democratic president and congress). There's no longer a Democratic red herring in the mix to throw people off the scent.
The big problem is that corporations are a lot more moblie than people are. Manufacturing is relocating overseas, but our workforce just can't do that. Guess who's going to be stuck at home to pay off the tremendous bill?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
it is always much much easier to throw a ballistic missile in the air than to intercept it. Ballistic missiles don't need any fancy electronics, they are essentially unguided.
... all you have to do is over load a particular sector.
and you dont have to triple strategic force
really all you have to do is cram more junk in a multiple warhead missile. Still relatively cheap compared to the effort required to detect all the junk and determine which piece of junk is a nuke and which is merely junk.
Though to be fair, it's hard to categorize the language spoken by Americans as "English". "Americanese" or just "American" is proabably a better name.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
an idiot.
Sure Iraq's military wasn't a threat to the US. However Iraq's money was. Just as Saddam was paying the families of homicide bombers in Israel he was sponsoring terrorism elsewhere.
Where do you think most terrorist come up with their cash? Bake sales? No, they are sponsored by governments.
Your ignorance is only outdone by your anti-American screed. France invaded New Guinea (?) I believe without UN authorization. Did a fair job of helping the wrong side when they did. Russia has been in Chechnya for how long? Russia has also been indirectly causing problems in Georgia and Ukraine as well. China still throttles Tibet and threatens Thailand all the time.
So the US invaded Afghanistan, is it better off than Tibet or Chechnya? How about all the countries in the former Yugoslavia/Chech areas? Are they better off after US action in the 90s of which the UN didn't approve?
The UN is a joke mainly because of countries like France. How many times do you see the UN condemn Russia of Chechyna? The UN is simply an anti-Israel and anti-American institution. It turns its head when homicide bombers kill civilans in Israel and then condemns Israel for striking back. It condemns America for invading Iraq but gave Saddamn a free pass at murdering his own people. It gives Sudan a free pass in genocide just like it ignored Rawanda.
Sorry bub, but the world sucks and most of it is not the fault of the US. It is the fault of countries that face away from genocide because they are afraid to get their hands dirty. Ignoring problems like the UN has done is far far worse than the US being in Iraq.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If I wanted to blow up New York City using a nuclear device, it would be by far easiest to load it into a container onto a container ship, offload it onto a speedboat off-coast (probably drop it off and have the speedboat pick it up so that the security people can't see what happened on the radar) and have a suicide bomber set it off inside New York harbor. Of course, you'd need a collusive captain on the ship.
However, answer me this: If you had an atomic bomb, wouldn't you agree that this is an easier and cheaper way to destroy New York City than to aquire, arming and sending off an ICBM?
Stop the brainwash
The Reds now own the congress and the executive branch--they're the ones responsible for funding this stillborn dog. We've poured boatloads of cash into this stupid program that, as someone else pointed out, can be easily circumvented (all it takes is one direct hit for the US to lose, whereas the defense system must be accurate 100% of the time. Good luck with that 100% from any govt. program). No serious, respected scientists have ever claimed that this was a viable program, but Ronnie Raygun got it into his pointed head that he was Luke Skywalker, defending truth, justice and white, blonde virgins from the Evil Empire. The rest is history.
Oh, and nice way the Grandparent tried to spin this out as having some kind of residual benefit. He is correct, it will be residual, but unlike actual legitimate research programs, the nuggets of knowledge we can salvage from this POS will be worth much less than the amount of hard-earned taxes we paid into it.
You know, these tax-cut and spend Reds are really annoying. I wish there was a party that was all about fiscal responsibility.
Yeah, right.
In order to understand why NMD is so stupid, it helps to take a look at global strategy-making in the nuclear age. During the Cold War, the prevailng idea was deterrence based on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (the acronyms just keep comin'!). That is, Russia had missiles and America had missiles, so if one launched an attack on the other, he knew that he himself would be wiped out by the retaliatory strike. Nobody wants to commit suicide, so nobody launches that first attack.
Now, with the emergence in the minds of many of America as the sole Superpower, we're out of MAD and into just AD: Assured Destruction. Anybody who attacks America with a missile will be wiped off the face of the Earth. Deterrence, it seems, has become total and one-sided; under these strategic conditions, who would possibly launch an attack of this kind that would require an NMD to shoot down? The stated bad guys are "rogue nations", by which we mean North Korea or Iraq before we took over or whoever gets on our shit list this week. These are nations, suposedly, run by out-of-control lunatics who could at any moment decide to obliterate themselves and their nation in a futile stab at the belly of the Beast, or something. The problem is that the people who run countries tend to have stakes in remaining alive, so the principle of AD means they're not gonna be launching any surprise attacks on us.
Now, there are some people out there who have demonstrated that they *are* willing to kill themselves in order to stab the Beast, those few thousands of people out there who actually fit the label "terrorists". They'd love to launch a missile attack if they could, but they don't run countries so they just don't have any nuclear missiles. If they had a nuke they could very well try to sneak it into a harbor on a boat or something, but there's not much a faulty system of anti-missile-missiles in Alaska is going to be able to do about that.
So why do we need a missile defense system to shoot down missiles nobody's gonna shoot at us? Because make no mistake, the Bushites are rushing the job on this. Incredibly, they're even suspending experimental and test requirements that are supposed to determine if these things actually work in their haste to get some kind of system up and running by, I think, 2005. They're desperate to deploy these systems, insisting on getting stuff that doesn't even work in place as soon as possible, just so they have something. Why? Part of it is simple Greed, of course. Those billions go into well-connected pockets and it's easy to keep the money tap flowing. But I think there's more than that; they really think they're going to need to be able to shoot down missiles somebody's fired at them. But where are those missiles gonna come from?
The stinky secret is that there *is*, in fact, a use for NMD in Bush's sick interpretation of the Assured Destruction world. By the principles of AD, nobody is going to launch a pre-emptive attack on America. Nation leaders have too much to lose and terrorists don't have them. So who would ever fire a nuclear missile at America? Why, somebody who'd already had a nuclear missile fired at them, of course. Deterrence will ensure that nobody launches an attack on you, but if you've already attacked them you can't really expect to deter them any more. The purpose of NMD is to provide a shield, not from pre-emptive attack, but from retaliatory attack from an enemy or its allies. It's to preserve America's ability to use nuclear weapons without fear of consequence.
Despite their ideological fixations and internal history-rewriting, the Bushites must be capable of understanding that America's conventional military is stretched rather thin at the moment. They're bogged down in Iraq, their soldiers are exhausted, and they just don't have a lot of conventional muscle to throw around right now. If something flares up and threatens their interests in a new l
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
> in a while...then we might get there faster.
We would...
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And don't hassle your neighbour to dig faster.