Are we about to get an operational missile defense?

O'Reilly said there would be no formal announcement that the system was operational. He predicted the capability to defend against enemy missiles and to continue testing and development work would be achieved within a year.

"It's just a matter of maturation," he told reporters after a speech hosted by the George C. Marshall Institute, a public policy group.

Providing targets for testing these systems would seem to me to be a big potential market for alt.space companies. I could see suborbital non-expendable vehicles being used for high volume testing of the detection and tracking systems.

Nonsense!

I've been assured for decades that missile defense is impossible and simply cannot work, by any number of politicians and activists.

They couldn't all have been utterly wrong about a technical question deeply outside their areas of expertise, could they?

Sounds like the right path to me. Missile defense can't spring from the ground fully formed. If you try and do that you're going to mainly end up with large paper studies, enormous waste and no missile defense e.g. Star Wars. Fielding an imperfect system and then continuing to test and improve it is the only way.

It will be interesting to see if history repeats itself and the present system is traded away in a future administration, with the excuse "it won't work anyway".

"O'Reilly said there would be no formal announcement that the system was operational."

Wouldn't the best missile defense system work somewhat like a doomsday bomb - you want your enemies to know that you have it an believe that it works?

I remember Reagan's "Star Wars" speech. The old man was right, it would appear. Yet again.

Also, the hysterical, cynically opportunistic and brain-dead reaction of the media and left side of Congress at that time was possibly the first occasion on which I questioned the standard soft-socialist orthodox mommyism in which I'd been indoctrinated as a student and young adult.

I remember thinking, with dawning wonder, as I watched their antics: these people are plain crazy, just unmoored from reality. They never think about anything other than their own near-term success, and would be delighted to become King of the Hill even at a cost that meant the Hill was a pile of sterile, radioactive rubble.

Watching the cynical moral corruption that is Hillary 'Faust' Clinton's campaign for President tells me nothing much has changed there.

> Wouldn't the best missile defense system work somewhat like a doomsday bomb
> - you want your enemies to know that you have it an believe that it works

If you tell Kim Il Jong that you're going to turn on your missile defense system at 12 midnight on December 17, it might encourage him to launch an attack at 11:30 on December 16. Better to say simply that you have a system with increasing capability, which might be operational soon and might be right now.

Don't you think this would also constitute an operational ASAT at least for high inclination sats?

If you tell Kim Il Jong that you're going to turn on your missile defense system at 12 midnight on December 17, it might encourage him to launch an attack at 11:30 on December 16.

You assume that his generals wouldn't stage a coup and would be suicidal enough to actually let him fire it.

Contrary to the prevailing public opinion and despite the terminal decline in their educational system, the north koreans still aren't anywhere near that stupid. If the US gets nuked, the upper brass knows that their family, friends and everyone they know will have about 35 minutes until they are turned to glass.