Bail Outs For Incompetence? Been Going On For Some Time Now

Filthy, socialist, corporation-hating USA Today brings more class warfare, implying that missile defense might be some sort of boondoggle to transfer funds to corporate "defense" entities that might kick back a certain amount of the profits they receive from gov't. work to the politicians that vote to bail out the anti-missile missileers when their toys don't perform.

All told, the government has spent $144 billion on missile defense since 1985, according to the CBO.

And how has that worked out? Not too well for Mr. & Mrs. Hard-Working American Taxpayer, but just fine for the close-to-30-yrs.-of-failure corporations. That's 25+ yrs. of Reagan's SDI crap. Not the first ABM (as they called in the day, making it more difficult to connect today's pork to yesterday's) boondoggle, either.

The type of ground-based interceptors that would be deployed in Europe failed to hit targets in five of 13 tests, according to the Pentagon. They have not demonstrated an ability to detect decoys, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says. [...] In the most recent test of the U.S.-based system, an interceptor launched in December from California destroyed a warhead launched from Alaska. But a goal of the test was to see if the interceptor could distinguish a live warhead from decoys, and the decoys failed to deploy.

Heh. We'd heard the December test was "successful," as the target was destroyed. Unmentioned (or buried) by the biased old MSM was the failure of the decoys to deploy. (Must've been a very short announcement. Seriously, the Google™ only showed us the verbatim press release reprint from Oz & the LAT. And that fool Breitbart, who couldn't be bothered to provide a link. We'll link to him anyway.) Decoys that may be as simple as balloons.

Independent technical analysis has shown that Iran and North Korea, which has a nuclear program, could fool the system using simple countermeasures such as balloons, says critic David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

(Yes, we know. To be fair, they should also be identified as the Union of Commie Socialists.)

Charles McQueary, who directs testing for the missile agency, told a congressional committee last month that the U.S.-based system "has demonstrated a limited capability to defend against a simple long-range ballistic missile threat launched from North Korea," but "we still have a long way to go."

Always fighting the previous war, even if they never had the chance to fight it. (Fortunate for the rest of us, probably a bit disappointing for them.)

Physicist Richard Garwin, who helped design the hydrogen bomb and served recently on a commission to assess the ballistic missile threat, said in an email that because it can be so easily defeated by decoys, the "system is not worth deploying, because it will be useless."

Whatever. Something working (ever) or not is far from the biggest question in defense procurement. Nor is whether it's needed now or in the future, even if it works. Note that no corporations are mentioned in the USA-USA! story. And that our hopes for an in-depth look at what goes on here, as put forward in the opening paragraph, didn't quite pan out. There wasn't even an implication.