A system that may never work

... against a threat that doesn’t now exist.

So there were police everywhere, as I dropped my daughter off and headed for work this morning. The Boy from Crawford is in town (note, that in the interests of diplomacy, this blog will stick to relatively benign monikers for His Now Probably Relatively Legitimately Electedness for the duration of his stay, as it simply isn't proper etiquette to call too much attention to any similarity anyone might bear to a chimpanzee if and when that someone is a guest in one's nation and city), to eat some fine Canadian beef (hopefully not picking up any errant prions in the process) and smile for the photo-ops. Whether he will personally do any real selling of missile defense outside official speeches isn't mine to report; my guess is that probably he'll just make some official statements, and the details accompanying that particular devil will come later--usually, I understand, they leave the job of handling such matters to more bureaucratic types more qualified to pronounce such problematic and challenging technical terms as 'nuclear'.

The day before, a local Ottawa radio program (the CBC's All in a Day) had a pundit on discussing the sensible approach Canadians should take to the current US fixation with this initiative. His quite sensible conclusion: if we're good neighbours, we'll tell them to come to their senses. We're as against being blown to kingdom come as is anyone, but giant orbital space lasers just aren't a particularly sensible approach to such a problem--this millenium, anyway.

Now I'm not sure I can count on my prime minister to handle that. He's a bit of an opportunist, this guy, I'm afraid, and he's probably gonna be thinkin' what the hell... Georgie'll love our signature, might make it look like he's halfway multilateral again... and maybe we can find something for Bombardier to do now that no one flies anywhere any more. So, given that Monsieur Martin may or may not pull his weight here, I guess I'd better handle this myself, and do a few words.

And thus today seems as good a day as any to review The New Yorker's bit on missile defense, the salient conclusion of which is:

...the system, they explain, will remain in development; the Alaska installations will provide a more realistic “test bed,” while giving the country some protection from the threat of an attack. Their logic, however, escapes many military experts. The system is designed to attack only ICBMs. North Korea hasn’t tested a long-range missile since its last test failed, six years ago, and Iran has been developing missiles with ranges too short to hit Western Europe, much less the United States. Senator John Kyl, of Arizona, a leading missile-defense advocate, recently called ballistic missiles “the one threat that exists against us which we do not yet have a capability of defeating,” but in fact the United States does have such a capability, in its precision-guided missiles, which would surely be used to destroy an enemy ICBM on its launchpad if an attack seemed imminent. How to protect the nation from terrorists with box cutters and suitcase bombs is not so clear. This spring, forty-nine retired generals and admirals called upon the President to put off the deployment and to transfer the funds to the securing of nuclear facilities and the protection of American ports and borders against the far more immediate danger of Al Qaeda, rather than pursue a system that may never work against a threat that doesn’t now exist.

--Frances FitzGerald in The New Yorker, Indefensible

Now it might or might not surprise you to know that there's a small part of me that actually finds itself rooting for missile defense. That being the techie piece of my brain which, whenever someone says 'that can't be done', responds with 'oh yeah? watch me'. Yes, a small part of me, quite apart from considerations as to global stability and sensible spending priorities, actually roots for the boys in white lab coats at Lockheed et al who are trying to make this turkey fly (and this, of course, is the same part of my brain that actually thinks a B2 is a pretty cool piece of hardware, and which would kinda like to have one, notwithstanding that it's in the same general class of technology not infrequently used to scatter cluster bomblets into urban areas, so that children, mistaking them perhaps for errant toys from middle-East happy meals, might make gruesome headlines throughout the Arab world the next day).

But, techie fantasies aside, let's talk sense here, neighbours. It was, I believe, one of your own generals who, explaining the technical challenge of missile defense (by way, one supposes, of explaining why a great deal of Pentagon pork had not yet actually yielded any functioning magic beans), likened missile defense to 'trying to hit a bullet with a bullet'...

Yep. That it is. And, while a subsection of the techie part of my brain would like to say it's impressed when the boys in white do pull off such a feat, with or without a few cheats such as improbably detailed information on the planned trajectory of the targeted missile, most of the rest of that brain (a good part of which is the sensible techie part which tells me sensible things like 'do not write your CGI scripts in Forth') is just saying this:

Neighbours, that's actually a really stupid thing to try to do.

And yes, neighbours, yes it is. And I think we all know pretty well just how many reasons there are that it's such a stupid thing to do. Many (though not all) of which are nicely laid out in the article above. Among them:

1. None of the presumed enemies this system is designed to thwart yet have missiles that can reach North America,
2. A 'rogue state' or terrorist organization isn't going to bother with terribly expensive ICBMs when a rusting, leaking cargo vessel packed with a few explosives (nukes or otherwise) does the job pretty much as well,
3. If anyone does get around to ICBMs that can fly this far, modifying missile systems to deliver multiple warheads and or deploy various countermeasures (like Mylar dummies) is probably vastly cheaper than modifying your terribly expensive space laser frisbees to cope with it... and it's not like you're really gonna have time to rethink the research program when the damn things are already in the air,
4. You've already got a pretty effective way of stopping rival states from firing big ole' missiles at you: an air force they know can bomb and cruise missile them, their missile launchers, all their major cities and everyone they ever held dear into the stone age if they give you so much as the thinnest excuse to do so.

... and (to review) hitting a bullet with another bullet isn't a strategy. It's the pipe dream of a fevered techie on too much Jolt. And of his boss, eyeing the bottom line on the defense contract, and thinking 'well... for that much, we can make it look like we tried, anyway'.

I mean it, neighbours. From one occasional technophile to another, give it up, and spend the money where it might actually do some good. Like on your public school system, or something.

And welcome to Ottawa, George.