"C Kingsbury" writes:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

The Missile Defense Shield (or whatever they're calling it) is being
*DEPLOYED* now, before it is fully developed! If it were merely an
experiment, it's lack of performance might be more reasonable.

But hey, it's only a trillion dollar bill.* :-(

Well, given the rather precarious attachment with reality that the Norks
have, count me as glad to see we at least have some chance of a shoot-down
in case they decide to go postal. Longer term we have to be thinking about
the Iranians as well. They're going to build their bomb sooner or later and
the missiles to carry it. Having intercept capability, even a 50-50 one,
reduces the odds that it will ever come to shooting.

The problem is this tends towards the emotional, away from the
rational.

There are always limited resources to secure our safety. Therefore
our dollars should always be funding those projects with the best
estimated marginal rate of return for security.

So the half-assed MDS (or whatever it's called), with a very sorry
history of performance and reliability, is being given tens of
billions of dollars, while obvious stuff like checking incoming cargo,
or trying to round up Russia's nuke material, is apparently
underfunded and proceeding much slower than it could. But those
aren't macho. It looks better on your resume to have done a mighty
missle project than rounding up loose nukes or figured out how to
check containers efficiently.

Islamic terrorists, and probably not even N. Korea, are not
fundamentally a military problem, but we are treating it as such.
There may indeed be military elements to reducing the islamic
terrorist threat, but military solutions should not be primary. Bush
and his idealogues are fighting the last threat, global communism, not
the current threat.