The Anti-Anti-Missile-Missile-Missile

Seriously?

We are still talking about missile defense?

Look, I get it. Defense contractors give a lot of money to pols. So we give them plum deals like new boomers, Reagan-class supercarriers, new Joint Strike Fighters designed to shoot down, well, apparently our own planes, since we're the only ones making planes anywhere near that advanced. Fine and good.

But the thing of it is, those things work. The new submarines actually go underwater. The JSF actually is the most technologically advanced plane ever built. The Osprey...well, the less said about that $20 billion boondoggle, the better.

Whereas, as detailed by Fred Kaplan, not only is there no particular reason to expect that missile defense works, or may ever work, as it is initially designed, but it's also an incredibly expensive system which can be overwhelmed in the simplest of fashions.

It seems to be the policy of this administration to do everything they can to exacerbate the modern-day problems of assymetrical warfare. This concept is simple - if you can do vast amounts of damage with little effort or expenditure (say, by hijacking two airplanes with $30 worth of box cutters and fly them into skyscrapers), then even a small, well-organized force can deal significant damage to a superior power.

Which is part of the problem with being the biggest player in town - you are more exposed to these sorts of attacks. It's part of the nature of being a superpower, and it can't be entirely helped.

But to my mind, the worst thing you could do is make a huge deal out of this issue, and actually go out and spend those (hundreds of) billions of dollars trying to counter the actions of a few dozen people holed up in a cave in Pakistan. It hurts your economy, lowers national morale, and, if you fail (as these sorts of things almost always do), makes you look weak on the international stage.

So, sending the US Army to fight a guerilla civil war in a faraway land is a bad policy. Sometimes it will have to be done, but you had better be damn sure it's for the best possible reasons. Similarly, spending tens of billions of dollars to build a defense system which can be overwhelmed by an enemy simply launching two missiles simultaneously is worse than just unproductive - it actually pushes them to work faster to build missiles, and to build more of them. And since, presumably, the cost of developing and deploying a missile is much less than an anti-missile system, it's an economy of scale that we are going to lose, every time.

But, it's good to know that the Democrats managed to shave $290 million, or a whopping 3.3 percent, from Bush's requested allocation of $8.9 billion this year. Leaves me feeling really fucking optimistic about the future of the union, that 3.3 percent.