National Treasure

I try not to throw around phrases like 'National Treasure' lightly, but I do firmly believe that Fred Kaplan, who often pens explanatory pieces about the military and national defense at Slate, fits that profile to a T.

His latest piece, on this week's Navy shoot-down of a falling satellite, is a good representative of his too-often unheralded quality.

A lot of the coverage this week has made the implication, although it's never outright stated, that this is somehow a good indicator of our ability to develop a functional missile-defense program. And make no mistake - a bullseye hit on a flying satellite is a remarkable achievement. As Kaplan says:

Think of it: An SM-3 missile, fired from a cruiser in the Pacific Ocean, ascending 133 miles and colliding dead-on with an object the size of an SUV that's zooming through outer space at 17,000 miles per hour. Truly remarkable!

Remarkable, indeed.

But, as Kaplan points out, like the much-ballyhooed successful missile defense shield tests, all this test proves is that we can build a shield capable of protecting us from a single projectile, launched at a known time, from a known place, flying ballistically (i.e. launched to a high speed, but now flying only under the influence of gravity, like a very large cannonball.) Or, as Kaplan succinctly puts it:

The satellite shoot-down, as well as some previous testing, suggests that the missile-defense system, once it's installed, might be able to shoot down a) one decoy-less missile b) fired from a distant, known site c) along an arc within range of our radars and interceptors.

But the key point, really, is that even if we could overcome every technical obstacle, the concept of a missile shield is almost self-defeating. No shield could possible defend against hundreds of missiles, launched from multiple sites towards multiple targets almost simultaneously. So, the existence of a missile shield encourages our enemies to radically build their stock of deadly weapons, not exactly an ideal outcome for anyone who likes being alive and wishes to minimize the chances of those events which might alter that status.

The fact is, it's much cheaper to build a missile than a missile defense, so any expenditure on a shield system could be counteracted by a much smaller expenditure by whatever enemy nation we're supposedly protecting ourselves from, while the vastly larger number of missiles in the world increases the chance of an accidental launch, or the missile falling into the wrong hands, or any of a dozen other calamitous possibilities.

Finally, as Kaplan says:

The smart way to play an arms race is to develop weapons that force the enemy to spend more money to counter them. A ballistic-missile-defense system pushes the enemy toward alternatives that cost less.

Submarine-based cruise missiles, attacks on a subway system, or even Eli Lake's wet dream of a suitcase bomb set off in an American city. These are the sorts of things that we really ought to be defending against. Instead, we are spending $10 billion a year to defend ourselves from an attack that only a madman would dare attempt to perpetrate. It's enough to make even this Fool feel a little cynical about the whole affair.