[Paul Ross]

Thanks for the ping. The needs for a complete SDI system continue to bark at the heels of those that resists.

You're welcome, and thanks for your echoing this insight:

Surely we need leadership that will look very carefully at the need for SDI and associated ground/sea based system integration, and realize, if we don't start to advance along the "just right path", it will not see the light of day for a very long time if at all.

Totally agreed.

Its mortifying to me, and simply awful that the current Administration thought they could have their political cake and eat it too...that they could just posture as pro-NMD Reaganites...but then deploy only like Democrats! Not actually standing up for what they claim to stand for. Limited NMD is no NMD. Getting general votes from the electorate for the principle of NMD, but then garnering RAT support for governance by not seriously and consistently implementing that principle.

Eveyone is simply flummoxed by this White House refusal to actually deploy. It admits the threats, but won't respond. It is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled absent a conclusion of outright political chicanery...that they really never believed in it...

FReeper Sandyeggo pointed to something Whittaker Chambers once said that resonates across a wide number of issues about this White House...but especially to me on this issue:

But if the Republican Party cannot get some grip of the actual world we live in and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means something to the masses of people-why somebody else will. Then there will be nothing to argue. The voters will simply vote Republicans into singularity. The Republican Party will become like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason, you go in, you find at the back an old man, fingering for his own pleasure some oddments of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is fine because the old man is not really interested in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel. . . .

[Marine_Uncle]

Rather dim view of things that's for sure. Sadly one can see the old man sitting there and reflected in not only this administration but the whole government. Has our will to get vital things done simply vanished.
GWB would surely have better spent capital on pushing for this new version of SDI then saying we should put a man on mars. The hell with mars. It don't mean sh*t. SDI and related system do. If he went on the boob tube today and told the world America is going to revise it's priorities on SDI and put manned space travel on the back burners, due to very real security needs, and pledge those funds and more to the SDI, most all would have little to say but to go along with it. Of course NASA and associated industries would cry to the high heaven but so be it.
Tell them to switch gears and compete with say Ratheon, Gruman and the others on sub systems for SDI.
At any rate. I feel your pain to some small degree.