U.S. gives up on upgrading missile defense

[ckramer]

Lawmakers say the Bush administration has decided to abandon efforts to improve its current system of ground-based ballistic missile interceptors.

"After many years of investment in this midcourse interceptor, (the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency) has now essentially decided that the first generation (ground-based interceptors) will also be its last generation," said the Senate Committee on Appropriations in a report accompanying its version of the 2006 defense appropriations bill.

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency continues to seek billions to develop and deploy the interceptors, including up to 40 in Alaska by the end of 2007 and some in Europe after that, but the committee said it had abandoned plans for further improvements to the interceptor currently being deployed -- a process known as "spiral development" in which systems are deployed before they are fully developed and then upgraded as technology improves.

link


What a waste of money!

[VegasWolf]

1. Humm, deploy a non working system and then hope that in a few years

improvements will allow them to make it work!!! Spiral development my ass, should be called chimpanzee development.

[jpak]

2. I was just thinking the other day what happened to this program

Chalk up another costly boondogle to ChimpCo and the GOP.

At least they admit they made a mistake (and the tests must have gone REALLY badly for this to happen)....

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Yup. Defense contractor Corporate Welfare Queens from day one.

[TrogL]

4. They must be taking their playbook from Microsoft

Release a buggy product, then make it work years later (or maybe never).

Go figure.

[LatinoSocialist]

6. you LInuxer, you...

I use PCBSD (www.pcbsd.org)

[radar]

5. So that's why...

...The senator wants to keep "the bridges to nowhere," as opposed to giving the money to build them up for future New Orleans/GulfCoast works.

Show off all those fancy lawn ornaments to the tourists.

[papau]

7. 10 billion a year for how many years(?) down the tubes - thank God we

did not have Gore as President during those years or else we would be a weaker nation.

:-(

[WhereIsMyFreedom]

18. I'm pissed as hell

They've been literally flushing 10 billion down the toilet each year for years. Nothing ever came of any of that money spent, nothing. By contrast, NSF produces huge amounts of valuable research every year, but they only fund it ~4-5 billion. Just think of what we could do with a 10 billion dollar NSF. Of course, that wouldn't be making their donors rich. Too much of the NSF money goes to liberal elites. :eyes:

:rant:

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

8. Reminds me of the Kelsey Grammer flick about the Bradley

Fighting Vehicle development project. Pretty typical, and most likely realistic.

The Pentagon Wars (1998) http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1800315743&cf=info&intl=us

[Richard Steele]

9. "Spiral Development" is code for "FLUSHING Billions down the toilet"

This was crap from the get-go.
Never worked, never was going to work.

But hey, let's keep giving Billions
to Defense Contractors anyway, just in case
someone invents something that makes it work
SOMEDAY in the far future!

Might as well do something with this record-breaking
budget surplus that B*shCabal™ has handed us, right?

[yellowcanine]

10. Wait a minute - we spent billions to deploy a non working system and

now we admit that it will never work but we are going ahead with the deployment anyway? Is it just me or is that nuts?

[november3rd]

13. Corporate welfare

Ever hear of it?

[sofa king]

11. Heh. Spiral deployment.

Costs spiral up...



Rocket spirals out of control.

However, in related news, I'm happy to report that my five-year-old niece has seen the fallacy of missile defense.

"Why not just shoot a whole bunch of missiles at the same time?" she asked.

She's gunning for your job, W.

[november3rd]

12. star wars

they're going to jump to space-based interceptors. the longer they wait to develop them, the more expensive and difficult it will be. that was Dick Myers's thing: put weapons in space. We'll probably also hear that they're going to keep running space shuttle flights until the new crafts are ready in 2010.

[Warren Stupidity]

20. AFAIK they haven't even started on the shuttle replacement.

The chance of that getting off the ground by 2010 is rather remote. But never mind we are going to rebuild a supersized version of the Apollo moonshot capsule and go back to the moon 'cause it seems we have nothing better to do with the remnants of the SS trust(not) fund.

f*ing morons. corrupt vile shitheads. jail. all of them.

[Shakespeare]

14. This is bad news.

It's a clear signal they're throwing all of the money at the (unworkable) space-based system now.

[Canuckistanian]

15. They're soft on defense!

They're endangering every American life! They're emboldening the enemy!

[6th Borough]

16. The money has already been transferred from our wallets to private firms.

Mission accomplished.

[Kolesar]

17. The Rockwell B-1B heavy bomber was deployed in a non-working mode

The bomber was "designed" to fly low and a radar control system would enable it to climb and descend with the terrain. It did not work. 100 planes were delivered and the taxpayer had to pay for a second round of electonics development.

Now the airplane is being idled. 1/3 of them are mothballed.

[eridani]

19. This system is just like voting machines

We don't vote often enough to give the complex software involved a real world workout, so it never really gets debugged. The missile defense situation is much worse--howthehell do we EVER do a realistic beta test.

[punpirate]

21. Frank Gaffney has pretty strong ties...

... to the White House through Libby, and he's been pushing sea-based systems through his think tank. There's also been a recent paper by Richard Garwin supporting early-intercept schemes, that mid-course plans are too easy to fool with counter-measures.

And, then, there's the Russians' announcement that they'd produced a new missile with steerable warheads. Topol-M, I think it was called.

But, since they have already gotten the Alaska and California plans in place and installed, there will be ongoing maintenance costs for the mid-course system and regardless of what they're saying now, there will be technical upgrades without ever testing them. It's now a cash cow.

I'm not even sure they've gotten the X-band radar system for Alaska installed and running and properly tested yet. As of this past spring, the platform was still having the radar installed, and then it had to be moved through the Panama Canal and up the coastline to the Aleutians (it's part of a sea-based system).

[Kolesar]

23. Wow. Nice summary ... eom

[truthisfreedom]

22. we should send them the duct tape they told us to buy. then we can combine

one defense system that doesn't work with another defense system that doesn't work and maybe Red Green can help them fix their useless system with ours.