Saturday, November 19, 2005
BULLSEYE
I've been following the developing success of missile defense here since I began blogging. Thursday, 17 November marked another milestone: A ship-launched interceptor scored a direct hit on a warhead after the warhead had separated from its booster at an altitude of approximately 100 miles. The opponents of Star Wars used to use simple impossibility of missile interception as an argument -- their weakest. Step by step, that argument is being shown for the error that it was.
The other arguments against missile defense -- that it can be overcome by decoys and sheer numbers, and that it lends itself to an arms race -- are also fading over time. The first argument had more merit during the Cold War, when we faced an opponent capable of mass-producing large numbers of ballistic missiles. That isn't the case now and won't be for a while. The second falls to the same fact. Missile defense is now a tactical weapon with strategic importance, and need only be effective against relatively small numbers of missiles to be meaningful.
Beyond this, the technology developed for interception of ICBMs is applicable on the scale of shorter-range weapons and will become highly significant as it is deployed at the battlefield level and against terrorist rockets in Isael and elsewhere in the war against Islamofascism.
GB, THHOTA
posted by Greg 5:19 PM
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