|
|||
I'm highly skeptical about this whole business, but that's because I know something of the history of military weapons testing. The problem is that the tests aren't really what we engineers would ordinarily consider reasonable, which is to say that they don't represent real-world or worst case circumstances. Rather, they are deliberately chosen to be as benign as possible, usually to the point of being completely unrealistic. The purpose isn't to prove that the system would really work, it's to get brownie points to take to Congress to get more money for the program. So, for instance, there were tests done of a surface-to-air missile intended to hit an enemy jet. They were tested by firing at a drone, a pilotless plane flown by remote control. The drone flew relatively slowly, in a straight line at a constant speed, and these are things a real hostile jet would never do. Worse, the drone contained a transmitter and the missile which hit it was homing in on that transmitter -- and generally speaking, hostile jets don't tend to have such transmitters. A more realistic test would have had the drone maneuvering violently, not carrying a transmitter, but on the other hand actively using counter measures (such as dropping flares or ECM). That's what you would do if you were really trying to find out if the missile was any good. Problem is, it would have failed an embarrassing amount of the time and the program might have been cancelled. The military's traditional approach has been to get the program approved and get the weapons deployed, and then figure out how to make them work, and discard them if they don't. This is, as you might imagine, extremely expensive and the Air Force has been one of the worst offenders. The history of weapon acquisition is full of programs where there were a series of four or five tests all of which failed, after which someone said "That's good enough. Deploy that sucker." Today's test is extremely suspect. The administration really needed a success, so I wonder just how reasonable a test this was. For instance, the interceptor system seems to have known exactly when the target would be launched and exactly on what trajectory it would be coming. The true target was not accompanied by any decoys and wasn't using any countermeasures. Odds are that it wasn't using "stealth" technology, though a real warhead definitely would do so. But they got their kill and that gives the President the political ammo to stand up and say "See? It works!". I don't buy it. Only I'm going to have to buy it, because the President wants to use my money to pay for it. I don't think we should build a missile defense system because I don't think it can be made to work, and even if it did it wouldn't remove any serious threat. It couldn't be large enough or comprehensive enough to stop a major attack from an established nuclear power, and any rogue state or terrorist group who had a bomb and wanted to attack the US wouldn't use a ballistic missile to deliver it. This system can't stop cruise missiles, or smugglers. If you defend against one form of attack without addressing others which are simpler, easier and more likely to succeed, you're wasting your time (and my money). (discuss) Update: Yup, it was unrealistic, alright. |
|||
