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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."
"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.
But I am le tired...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Wow, is that really a quote from Wookieepedia to explain to Slashdot readers the story in Return of the Jedi?
You really know your audience...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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>
Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.
Not to mention the side benefit of generating productive tech, instead of just destructive tech. The problem with the moon missions is that the big defense corporations running the US just can't justify such large profits with moon missions. The population (or its politicians) are much less willing to fund if there is no fear factor. Fear does not drive the moon mission development like it does for military expenditure unless you try and use the fear of China doing it first to our exclusion, but even then it's still not the same kind of primeval motivation == less profit.
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.
Actually, you're wrong.
In the first place, the Patriot missiles were only partially successful. Since they weren't intended for the purpose of defending large areas, that is acceptable, and they've been improved since them. But the Patriot missiles are a short range defense.
There have been previous successful tests. A simple google search turned up the following:
Reuters
Military Defense Agency
Heritage Foundation
Funny you should mention that. The effectiveness of Patriots in Gulf War I is hotly contested.
Both sides rely on subjective arguments about what constitutes a "successful intercept", neither have any hard data on how many (if any) Scuds were actually downed, and the folks that were having the Scuds aimed at them said that they were getting through pretty well, so I'd have to conclude that the preponderance of evidence is that Patriot was a propaganda weapon in Gulf War I.
I should note that plenty of money has been thrown at defence contractors since then, and there's certainly no technical reason why AMBs can't work. It's just that nobody has shown that they do.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
some of the biggest gains in tech come during war or threat of war. this technology will undoubtably have beneficial technologies used for non military things. GPS was first created for military purposes. now look at it. just because you don't like the idea of being able to survive/defend against a missile attack because it's some how bad form to live when your enemy wants you dead, doesn't mean that there will be no other gains from it. i'm pretty sure that there is moon shot technology used by the military today. some private sector tech gets used for bad things too.
Perhaps the more important question is assessing whether the future of warhead delivery is fancy ICBMs or cheap-ass panel vans.
ICBMs are cool as symbols of military/industrial/scientific might and are, for the moment, the last word in penetrating the borders of a hostile power; but they are tricky to build, extremely expensive, and (even if difficult to intercept) trackable back to their source.
They are pretty much exactly the weapon that you would expect as a culmination of the US/USSR "two nuclear superpowers staring at each other across well defined, and substantially closed, lines" period. In a period of relatively open trade, assorted third parties, and general proliferation, though, it isn't at all clear that you can expect the next warhead to come by ICBM, rather than by Fedex...
Even if it actually worked, a lot of this missile defence stuff reeks of wrinkly old guys shoving money at their contractor buddies in order to finally have the weapons systems that they wanted during the cold war.
You make an interesting point.
However, I'd like to make the irrefutable counter-argument that missiles and rockets are cool while inspecting ships, planes and trucks is boring.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
***Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.***
Naw. Returning to the moon, while feasible, is pointless, and the chances that you were going to get to Mars were pretty close to nil. That's my idea of a boondoggle ... if not yours. If you ask me, the US manned space program has been stuck on a wrong track for four decades. First, you learn to build cheap reliable transport -- which may take half a century or more. Then, and only then, do you start seriously putting people into space.
This test, on the other hand is a test of a DEFENSIVE system, not another tool for getting into trouble. As a result of stuff I did many years ago in another life, I actually knew something about this stuff at one time. I personally think that it is probably impossible to build an effective anti-missile system -- at least for use against significant opponents. It's simply cheaper for the guys building the missiles (them) to create and deploy countermeasures than it is for the defenders (us) to overcome the countermeasures.
But we don't know that for sure if that's true if we don't do our R&D. And that's what this is -- Research and Development.
What is a boondogle IMHO is the Bush administration initiated deployment of "operational" anti-missile systems that almost certainly would not work worth a damn if called into action. If you ask me (and no one did or will), that never even rose to the level of stupid.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
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.
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
Well then have a nap, THEN FIRE ZE MIZZILEZ!
(for those terribly confused: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end)
x86, oh yes, I'm pro.
Funny but that world existed for about 20 years. The US pretty much could have nuked any nation on earth at will from 1945 until around the mid sixties.
The old Soviet Union had no effective to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental US until the early to mid sixties.
The USSR could have hit Europe, Japan, and Alaska but odds are that maybe one or two bombers might hive gotten through to the US and the few ICBMs the USSR had would have been destroyed on the ground. That is one of the reasons that the USSR put missiles in Cuba so they could have a workable threat to the US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Umm, no.
A couple of things. First, one must consider that "countless" innocent civilians were NOT killed by the two atomic bombs. About 240,000 total was the count (over a period of several months - the immediate casualties of the bombs were closer to 150,000). Note that more were killed in one night of routine bombing of Tokyo than in both atomic bombings combined.
Second, the assertion that "Japan was finished by the time USA dropped the bombs". Remember Okinawa? Two months before the atomic bombings, and the Japanese managed to inflist 50,000 American casualties for one small island? Now, imagine extending that to the invasion of the entirety of Japan...
Third, if Japan were indeed "finished" before we dropped the bombs, why didn't they surrender after the first bomb was dropped? It's not like we dropped them on the same day - plenty of time to get to a radio and cry "uncle" if they were so inclined.
We won't even go into the oddity that both cities (and several others) were spared conventional bombing for years. The AAF wanted, if we actually used the Bomb, to get information on the effects of the Bomb on undamaged cities. So they made a list of military targets (Hiroshima's Naval Base comes to mind) that were put off limits for bombing. I understand that the AAF brass had to do quite the song and dance to justify to their subordinates not bombing those cities for years....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
Actually, the reason the Japanese did not rapidly surrender immediately after Hiroshima is more complex. Bureaucratic inertia insured a pretty slow response. (The leaders did not even meet for two days following the attack, and debated the issue for half the day) The Emperor himself had been pushing for peace for some time following the Japanese defeat at Okinawa, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, as well as political subterfuge by Stalin (who played on Japanese hopes of Soviet assistance while preparing his own attack against Japan), fed fire to an already heated debate among Japanese leaders. In an all-too-familiar story, political infighting prevented the country from taking prompt, sensible action.
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.
Did I say it was a 'self evident thing'? All I said was that Germany was fighting twenty times her population and five times her GDP by the end of 1941.
Whatever else you might think of the German war plan, declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor was the height of insanity. It allowed FDR to get a free (in terms of political capital) pass to fully enter the European war and to implment the "Europe first" strategy that condemned the Third Reich to a slow death by a thousand cuts.
Had I been in Hitler's shoes I would have condemned the Pearl Harbor attack and done everything I could to muddle public opinion in the United States. Imagine FDR trying to explain why he was prosecuting an undeclared war in the Atlantic with resources that could have been used against the Japanese. Imagine trying to sell Congress on the notion of sending supplies to Stalin while the Philippines were being overrun and the West Coast was perceived to be in danger of coming under attack.
The other side of the coin is the Japanese stupidity in going to war with the United States. By most accounts we defeated them with just 15% of our war production, the rest went to Europe. That should give you an idea of just how great of a disparity there was between the Japanese and American economies in the 1940s.
You can say that they were banking on a quick victory and a negotiated peace, but it seems to me that you've already lost if you are relying on your enemy to throw in the towel when he has the resources to beat you. It also ignores history -- the United States had proven itself willing to fight a total war against it's own people during the American Civil War (see Sherman's march to the sea and Sherdian's valley campaign), why would the Japanese or Germans make the assumption that we wouldn't be willing to do the same against them?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse
Key difference: The US had forward operating bases. You can't reach the USSR from North America with 1940s/1950s bomber technology but you can reach it from Turkey, the UK, Japan, Italy, Iceland, Norway, etc, etc.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.