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US Missile Defense Test Fails
KingRobot sends news that a recent test of a US missile defense system has failed. The test of the Groundbased Midcourse Defense interceptor apparently had a problem with the sea-based X-band radar. Both the target missile, launched from the Pacific, and the interceptor, launched from California, performed as expected. "Yesterday's test was intended to quell doubters of the entire missile-defense approach, with the target missile deploying countermeasures. Critics of the GMD programme say that tests thus far, which have not included such spoilers, have been too kind to the intercept tech. The [military] isn't disclosing whether the intercepting kill vehicle had simply failed to reach the 'threat cluster' of warhead(s) and decoys, or whether it had reached the cluster but hit a countermeasure rather than the actual target."
Fire Zee Mizzilez!!!!
"Now Commander, that torpedo did NOT self-destruct. You heard it hit the hull, and I was never here."
Sure it failed.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
Post news about your failed test, when in all reality it's probably fully functional.
Reminds me of the Second Death Star in Return of the Jedi.
The Death Star's superlaser was revealed to be operational before the construction of the station was completed, surprising the Alliance attackers during the Battle of Endor. The Alliance ground forces on the forest moon of Endor managed to deactivate the energy shield surrounding the battlestation, and the Rebel fleet proceeded to destroy the station from within, signifying the beginning of the downfall of the Empire.
Bring on the enemy missiles! We've got quite a surprise for you!
There is exactly one instance of missile defense working that I'm aware of, namely combating Iraqi Scud missiles back around 1993.
But the important thing to realize about this version of missile defense (and its predecessor, Star Wars) is that they don't need to work to accomplish their real purpose, which is funneling large sums of taxpayer cash to defense contractors.
I am officially gone from
Oh no!
The government has a glitch with an insanely complex missile system.
Good to know, but *Yawn* "Film at 11" me and wake me when it's fixed.
Did the test fail, or the missle? The difference is that a failed test means you don't get any useful information about the device under test, whereas a successful test means that you found out whatever you wanted to know about the device under test.
Example: a test to determine whether a cellphone fails when immersed in water. If you find that your water has been shut off, you have a failed test, because you can't even try immersing the phone in water. If your water works and you immerse the phone and it stops working, the test is successful and your result is that the phone failed. If it still works, then you have a successful test and a phone that didn't fail.
</pedant>
Few people know the real story behind this, which is quickly being covered up. The sea-based X-band radar failed because it stopped mid-test to install a Windows update. As all available bandwidth was consumed by the critical IE6 patch, the message "Please wait while Windows installs your updates. You will be able to resume your hostilities at the conclusion of this operation."
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This system will still force our adversaries to build more complex rockets and delivery systems. Rocket science is tough even for the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans. So maybe in their attempt to upgrade their rockets to bypass our barely working defense systems, they will make even more mistakes than we did, and their rockets will fail all on their own. Based on resent missile test from Russia and North Korea it might just work.
"Free" medical care? Who the fuck is going to pay for THAT? Yeah, I didn't think you had an answer.
Reagan's whole schtick did exactly what it was designed to do: bring down the soviets through intimidation.
Who still uses X band? Ka band and Laser are used more.
kumbayah, rose-colored glasses view of mankind:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/31/iran.protests/index.html?section=cnn_latest
FTFA: "Meanwhile, state-run Press TV quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday as saying that the nation will deliver a harsh blow to "global arrogance" on February 11.
Press TV offered no details on or explanation of the statement."
What would you have us do in the face of such threats? Ignore them? Sure, he's probably just waving his dick around to gain populist support at home, but what if he's not? This shit-for-brains incites genocide practically around the clock. Come to think of it, isn't inciting genocide against some kind of UN law? I'm pretty sure it is. Once again, the UN is exposed for the impotent and decadent international debate club that it is...
Maybe we should spend a little more money on literacy and math, since you fail at both.
... your ass will follow.
US medical spending is over $2.5 trillion http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/Washington-Watch/13016
US defense spending is $685 billion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
Free your mind
mainly because iran employs a diabolical tactic that no american interceptor can defeat: if a missile of their's is shot down, they merely photoshop some more:
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/10/iran-you-suck-at-pho.html
however, i would encourage american military planners to adopt iran's own dark tactics against it, and photoshop lots of missile interceptors. that should do the trick
and if the combined powers of fark photoshop and 4chan were militarized, we could bury iranian internet warriors in sheer volume of photoshopped missiles. throw in some lolcats, general ackbar, gold paint sniffer dude, and that guy riding a missile from "dr. strangelove", and iranian missiles will be decisively defeated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The idea of missile defense goes back to the 50s, but the tech wasn't goon enough then. It was revised in the 60s, and Macnamara announced I think in 68 they were starting an AMD program. Reagan started the Star Wars program in the 80s as a means to force the Soviet Union to outspend its production capability and bankrupt itself, all the while we were spending less than it looked like. He had no intention of actually putting lasers in space, etc. Turns out he was right. The Cold War arms build up bankrupted the SU. Guess he was smarter than he looked.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The U.S. government has NO money. It is deeply, deeply in debt because for many years it spent money it doesn't have.
Perhaps the real purpose of the "US Missile Defense" is making money for the people who build it.
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. One example is that bad news is kept secret from the taxpayers: "The [military] isn't disclosing..." Look at the news from the U.S. government directly: Missile Defense Test Conducted. The short public relations piece says:
1) "A target missile was successfully launched..." A trivial success, that is only a missile launch of a missile designed to be destroyed.
2) "... a Ground-Based Interceptor was successfully launched..." That is another trivial success.
3) "However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected." Note that there is no information about the extent of the failure. The real news is presented in an intentionally confusing manner, in the last sentence of a paragraph.
The U.S. government hides what is being done with the taxpayer's money. That benefits the rich and powerful companies that get money from the government, and hurts the nation and every citizen. If you let the corruption happen, expect that life in the U.S. will get much worse than 15% of people being out of work, stopped looking for work, or underemployed.
Wasn't there an issue with the internal digital clock getting out of sync with real time?
Reagan is dead, his "Starwars" waste of money should join him. We could easily have free medical care for everyone if we cut the defense department to a reasonable size.
I hate to break it to you but nothing is "free"......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Jeepers dude - give away the whole story why don't you...
Word game?
If you haven't seen the West Wing, this is what it says about missile defense.
Good Grief!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I know everyone is freaking out about how missile defense is defective by design and this proves their greatest concerns. However, go look up Aegis BMD/SM3, which is one of the other missile defense programs. It's the most successful program so far, having something like 12/15 successful flight tests. And not all the tests are hand-holding exercises, including the satellite shoot-down, which was remarkable since SM3 was not designed for that. I believe THAAD has also had some recent, successful flight tests too. In fact, I'm pretty sure GMD is the one missile defense program that hasn't had any successful tests. I don't know why we still give Boeing money.
So if the missile defense system doesn't 100% work on the first try with a realistic test, then the entire program was a waste of money and we should give up immediately? By that logic we should have canceled the Apollo project after Apollo 1...
"it's a trap!"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I dunno, isn't it more credible if some tests DO fail?
It's a government contract - of COURSE it's rife with collusion, padding, selective data, etc. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to develop the tech.
-Styopa
We could easily have free medical care for everyone if we cut the defense department to a reasonable size.
Even if we ignore that there's no such thing as "free" medical care, it still remains that most people can pay their way for medical care. At least with anti-missile systems, the government does something that can't otherwise be done and it is a lot less waste (by two to three orders of magnitude) than "free" medical care for people who don't need it.
Who still uses X band? Ka band and Laser are used more.
The "X" makes it sound cool.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This is the equivalent of shooting a bullet out of the air, with another bullet.
And that's just not possible.
This whole idea should never ever have passed the first smell test. The only question people should ask now is "Who is benefitting from this?"
Any project with a budget as large as ... well, the amount that's been wasted on this, needs to be able show proof of concept, set targets, meet them, and have a fixed deadline. Otherwise, you're just pissing away good money after bad.
Indeed, and the word "care" lacks definition as well. We have free medical care today, if you define care as whatever you can manage to do for yourself.
When the price of ANY service is TRULY free, there is no way that ANY society that exists could truly afford to provide it. Demand will be infinite, and so will cost. No "free" healthcare system is truly free. Now, it might be lower cost than it is in the US (I'm not fan of the status quo), but don't be under any illusions that there are no tradeoffs.
How would it be a good thing to increase our spending on entitlement programs when they already consume nearly 54% of the annual budget. Even if you canceled all of the defense spending, you would only be able to sponsor another program the size of Medicare, which has been a failure for the most part and still would not be able to provide free care to everyone. Defense spending is only 16.85% of the federal budget for FY2009, Medicare+Medicaid is nearly 21% and growing. This should be a stark reminder why we don't actually want more systems like this. The military budgets are inflated fighting wars, the Medicare and Medicaid budgets are perpetually growing without reason.
I'm in favor of cutting programs that can't prove their success, but that cut is made with a knife that is double sided. If we are going to be cutting defense programs that don't work, the entitlement and welfare programs that don't work need to be cut as well. With the utter and complete failure most of our social systems have been on improving domestic living conditions and their lack of positive social impact, it's about time we go item by item and make each one prove their existence. Note, proving a need for their existence would require more than a morality excuse, but a true analysis of their cost and effect.
Ka Band, Laser? Resolution/Discrimination is phenomenal at K band, but range can be a problem. As wavelength goes down, you start getting real issues with propagation through the atmosphere. The attenuation from water vapor can be severe...
I remember following our "missile defense" tests in the news about 6-7 years ago. The tests kept failing until the military stuck a GPS unit or some such in the target and scored a hit. They then proudly proclaimed success. I though, "how stupid do they think we are?" Then, I watched the misinformation campaign unfold where that little detail of the doctored test was omitted and only the "Missile test hits target" continued to propagate through the media. We crossed the line into complete Corporatism a long time ago.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
i have a few friends i can rib.
Nuclear van
Saying that because a missile defense system cannot protect against every possible delivery vector is like saying that we may as well not bother with greenhouse gas controls because coal mine fires are doing it anyway.
It's just a non-argument.
This is my sig.
This system has been failing since at least the late 90's (That's when I first started tracking it in the Marine Corps). The few successes it has had have been predefined configurations where they had a known flight path and pre-set intercept path. The entire thing is staged. And what's worse is that it fails even the majority of these staged intercepts.
People balked when Obama talked about dropping the missile shield in eastern Europe but honestly, these missile defense systems are a joke. They would do squat to improve our security and are costing us billion of dollars as they feed the military complex industry.
Scrap the system IMO, use the money to help offset the deficit, and the good will of the Russians to compel Iran to drop its uranium refineries.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Two decades and what have we got to show for it? A bunch of rich industrialists. We've needed to cut spending for decades, let us start here. There won't be much to defend if the government taxes us to death to pay for these useless toys.
Blar.
I mean, look at the invasion of Afghanistan. Yeah, occupying and rebuilding that place was gonna work out just fine. History, what's that? Don't even get me started about Iraq...they didn't even have anything to do with 9/11.
Blar.
I am not entirely sure that was his idea. I think he really just wanted to use SWI for its intended use. I have a book on the Joint Chiefs of staff reading list called nuclear debates in the 21st century, and it has multiple essays that claims that SWI was auctually bad and just had a destabilizing effect.
... and getting away with it. See, in the environment where more and more countries have their own nuclear weapons and means of their delivery all over the globe, that $500B a year army the US has becomes almost worthless, since you can't really attack anyone due to fear of nuclear retaliation against the US or its allies. See e.g. North Korea and Iran. And US army has not done any actual defense before or after WW2.
The NMD was probably sabotaged by leftists in league with the Obama administration. They want the USA to be a giant and defenseless nuclear target so all the third world people can take their revenge upon the evil Americans. There would be nothing that would make the leftists happier than a bunch of white cities in ruins.
This is my sig.
The hell you say?!
That was English with a Scottish accent _in a Russian uniform_.
"Comradsh, today we shaill into hishtory."
[UID-HeinzIntel]
The tech doesn't bear a close enough resemblance to a member of the Something Awful forums?
While the Pentagon said it had received no prior notice of China's missile test, it added that U.S. space-based sensors "detected two geographically separated missile-launch events" leading to an "exo-atmospheric collision."
An ex-movie star fake cowboy who discovered late in life that he was a genius. Star wars was just a convenient excuse to enrich his So-Cal military corp constituency. Easy to ignore the prior 30 years of USSR cold war spending and their Afghani quagmire taking their toll. Just a little lag time between the failure of the USSR and the failure of the USA, and for the same reason. Nothing more...
Well, here's the thing. You can't just wave your hands and say "of course it's a worthwhile investment". Whether it's worthwhile depends on 1) how much it costs (including opportunity costs - in other words, what other good things could be done with the money), 2) how effective the defense system is, 3) how likely the threat is, and 4) the consequences if the threat actually manifests itself. If the consequence is "a major US city is wiped off the face of the earth"... well, that's pretty bad. But if the chances of that happening are 10^-9 over the next hundred years, the cost to defend against it would consume the entire US GDP for a hundred years, and said defense is only 10% effective anyway (to choose an extreme example), then clearly, this would not be a worthwhile investment.
Of course, in the real world the chances of an attack are probably somewhat higher (although realistically, pretty damn small), and GBM is probably more effective and certainly less costly than the extreme case discussed above. But does that mean it's worthwhile? Not necessarily. Although it's essentially a political question, we ought to at least approach it with facts to the extent we can. Discussing the consequences in isolation doesn't really help anyone make an informed decision about what to do.
When von Braun was developing the V-2, they launched 600 rockets before they hit a military target. If we were serious about missile defense, there'd be about one test a week, instead of one test a year. The US built over a thousand Minuteman ICBMs in five years in the 1960s. Yes, it would cost. But it would work.
Surely, al Qaeda and similar organizations would dearly love to drop the big one on some US city (or sail/drive it in... whatever). So why haven't they? There are a couple of reasons. 1) all the concern about loose fissile material has had an effect - uranium/plutonium are actually pretty hard to get ahold of. The US has worked with the Russians for some time now to get their material cleaned up, and the various other countries with known or suspected nuclear capabilities have proved to be not so eager to provide nuclear bomb ingredients to a bunch of folks who are, well, crazy. 2) Even given the requisite materials, nuclear bombs are not so easy to build. Sure, there are plans out there on the internet, but plans only get you so far. You have to have either sufficient experience with executing the plans to be able to do so effectively, or you have to gain the experience via an RDT&E program. That's kind of hard to pull off when your organization amounts to a couple hundred guys living in caves in Afghanistan. The chance of AQ being able to put together a bomb that actually works, without any kind of testing program, are pretty damn small.
This is not to say that we shouldn't make preparations to defend against this sort of thing - we should. But it's important to establish reasonable expectations for what you can and should be able to do, and what the enemy's capabilities are, so you don't go overboard defending against something that's almost certainly not going to happen.
Aegis BMD is already pretty well-proven system (see the "Stellar" series of tests). Not to mention the fact the we've actually used it to shoot down the satellite - which was, you know, shooting a bullet with a bullet. Whether the system is cost-effective is another question, and one far more open to debate. And to be sure, more development is going to be required. But saying "it will never work" at this point just makes you look silly - it already HAS worked. Several times.
Because the US military is just riddled with commie-loving leftists who want the US to be a giant, defenseless target.
Dude, you've got a ways to go before you're up to the Slashdot-troll standard. Try a little harder, willya?
And why do you love the terrorists so much? FOX News warned me about people like you! [/teabagger]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You underestimate the "defeatist" Soviet personality and culture vs. the American "can do" attitude by a very large margin.
+++OK ATH
He's making a joke about police speed RADAR and RADAR detectors.
+++OK ATH