Crossbow said:
Those points are not straw men and they have not been rebutted.
By the way, even if they were straw men, then they would not need a rebuttal beyond explaining why they are straw men.
I was referring to the point he made about transmitters, which I have already said to be completely a completely false and misleading complaint, but I have restated my case below. In this instance, he is attacking an already discounted (i.e. weaker)position. Hence, Straw Man. I apologize if my previous hyperbole was incorrect.
Here, I think, are some of the main points in all the posts. I'll state my case, as an insider, for each issue. Note that most engineers on the program are more confident than I am on defending these positions. As a skeptic, my mind is open to all sides, but as we like to say around here, it's not so open my brain is falling out.
- Scripted test/transmitters/waiting for fair weather doesn't count.
- Not enough successes/taking too long.
- It's taking too long/too expensive
- Enemies won't send nukes by air; they'll use some other method.
I will spell out each of these issues again. If you have more complaints I will respond to those as well. And so on.
1. Doesn't count...toward what? The system can pick up a missile using SBIRS (Space Based IR system) and have radars aligned within a mere fraction of the ICBM's total flight. It works through rain and even fallout. Assuming the missile comes from the Far East, what is the harm in pointing in that direction anyway during a preliminary test? If it was pointed away, we'd still have time, but for now we'd rather not add variables. Like I have said about 4 times already in the other posts, these are not full-system tests. The media coverage far outweights the importance. Now then, if you want to make an issue on the fact that Bush released the system too early, then I agree with you. The system works, but we need to develop it more.
Also, like I said in the other thread, at no time were radar components in play that used beacon information. They were there to fulfill teh ABM treaty at the time. So the media says that we didn't really track the missile, we just followed the beacon. Not true.
Remember the test two weeks ago? We aborted because of am unrelated system malfunction. Pretend the GMD system is a new type of car tire. You build the tire, get ready to road test it, and then the car the prototype tire is on breaks down. The test is canceled until the car is fixed. Now imagine the media makes a big fuss, claiming the tire is a failure because the test was aborted. That's pretty much what just happened here. See a pattern? I'm not one to claim "liberal bias in media", expecially after reading and enjoying Al Franken's "Lies" book and his chapter on dispelling that rumor, but this is just a whole bunch of jumping to conclusions.
3. Taking too long? I partially disagree with you. It went from concept to ground in about 18 years ('86-'04), with work yet to go. However, there were major funding cuts and political ressitance during Clinton's era. Also, how long did it take us to go from space travel to moon, 7 years? Yes, it is taking longer, but this is much, much harder. We aren't slowly ferrying people to the moon and back, we are sending a missile up to hit another missile. The delicacy needed to do that, whether by missile or laser, is astronomical...but not impossible.
As far as taking too much money, I'd say no. This year (its largest year), it's at $8B. This is less than a tenth of the defense budget. We spend much more in Iraq. With a $1.7T total budget, that's about 0.5% of the total budget. Compare that to what we spent on Apollo program ($3.7B in 1969) as compared to the 1969 Federal Budget ($186B), which makes it a whole 2% of the federal budget. They said we'd never get to the moon, either.
4. I won't quibble by how, or even if, the next attack will come. I vouch for the operability of the system and its need, but only in general. Yes, we do need to watch for threats coming from other areas, but not so much that we ignore every other method of delivery. The missiles that China, North Korea and Russia have right now are readily available, easy to use, cheap, and easy to get. Threat of missile attack, nuclear or not, is not an impossibility.
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