by James Glaser
August 8, 2002

Every couple of months for years there have been front page articles about how the "missile defense system" has had another test and Bingo, right on target. That was then, now there have been some missed targets, remember, even in this testing phase, this "system" is costing billions of dollars. Also remember that a billion dollars is one thousand million dollars, sometimes we forget that.

The Washington Post reports that for the first time, military officials talking about test results insisted many of the problems were attributable to bad luck. Yes sir, that is correct, these military men are blaming failures, that were never on the front page, on bad luck and also "Murphy's Law" that if anything can go wrong, it will. Really these guys are pulling out Murphy's Law as an excuse for billion dollar failures.

Lets get back to the billions of dollars. They went on to say "Nevertheless, the results proved embarrassing to the administration, which is spending billions of dollars on missile defense development and has made the invention of workable antimissile systems a priority."

Some critics say this experience calls into question President Bush's intention to begin deploying longer-range systems that are much further behind in development

The system scored well in development flights from 1999 through last year. Those were the tests we read about in the papers. Only one miss in 11 intercept attempts against targets that included aircraft and cruise missiles as well as ballistic missiles. Every thing looked great, until this year, when tests would be run by the Army troops rather than the contractors.

The Post went on to report that, "Expectations ran high that the system would perform as well when it moved this year into a set of four more challenging tests." But in every scenario that was tried, something went wrong. Whether because a interceptor failed to fire, a ground computer misdirected an interceptor, a radar suffered an electronic glitch, or an interceptor's homing system proved inadequate.

Army Col. Tom Newberry said, "nothing that we've encountered so far would indicate that we've got some sort of a systemic problem, either it is in hardware or in software, on the missile." Now these PAC-3 missiles (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) cost about 4 million dollars each. They started out at 1.9 million each, but hey whose is counting.

Well someone is because this development stage was supposed to cost 3.9 billion that is $3,900,000,000.00, but as with most government projects, this one now stands at $6,900,000,000.00. I think our government should always write out the numbers they are spending so that, the country has a better idea of what is what. Some how these billions don't sound like that much.

Ultimately the plan is to build 1,159 of these interceptor rockets. At least we haven't ordered all of them yet and I am hoping that they work for the Army as well as they do for the contractor. Hey, is was working back at my garage, it must have been the ride over here.

Unable to certify that the PAC-3 interceptor was ready for stepped up production, Pentagon officials have put off the decision for at least a year and plan instead further testing once fixes are in place.

I think that it would be prudent to test a little more than four times before we go spending too many more billions of dollars. I think several years of testing and testing for every foreseeable way that these missiles might be called on in real battle. Also I would really like to see a money deadline. A deadline where we set a total amount of money for this testing phase and if they can't get it together to pass muster by the time they pass that amount of money, then it is over.

If our government will keep spending money on a project, then these development companies will keep working on it and with every test they will say we are getting closer. It does speak volumes that the Army could not reproduce the results the contractors said that they had. I remember a couple of scientists from England told the world that they had developed "Cold Fusion". The only trouble was nobody could duplicate their results from the work they published. Here everything is secret, but these contractors can't even reproduce their own results.

Money and more money, it always comes down to that, but sometimes it doesn't matter how much money you are throwing at something, it still doesn't work. Some times you just have to, "know when to fold them."