[freemike]

The thing is,, we need enough of these to shoot down waves of thousands of missiles. Whenever a representation of an attack is shown, it is always of a few missiles. What would happen should they lob hundreds hour after hour. I never bought into this “first strike” thing. We need millions of these interceptors all over our nation.

[MrB]

The Wright bros didn’t try to load a couple of hundred people for a trans-Atlantic flight while they were testing their powered glider either.

[Robert A Cook PE]

The thing is,, we need enough of these to shoot down waves of thousands of missiles. Whenever a representation of an attack is shown, it is always of a few missiles. What would happen should they lob hundreds hour after hour. I never bought into this “first strike” thing. We need millions of these interceptors all over our nation.

Not really true: IF (big IF) Russia were shooting thousands of missiles at us, yes we would need (incoming missiles + 1) counter missiles.

But, North Korea has only a handful of long range missiles, and none are successfully tested. Yet. Only 2-6 nuclear weapons - and they would come from a very limited area under most reasonable circumstances.

So only one counter battery CAN remove most of the threat. Which is better than the democrats tactic: Surrender immediately because WE can’t be trusted with NAY defensive weapon, while THEY can be trusted NOT to develop ANY offensive weapon.

ONE counter battery means that NK needs

[Tallguy]

The thing is,, we need enough of these to shoot down waves of thousands of missiles.

That's not what we are doing. We are building a system that can take down a handfull of missiles shot in our direction by a 'rougue nation'. Russia, & increasingly China, could very cheaply saturate any system that we could build with ballistic hit-to-kill technology.

You'd have to build something like the orbiting "Brilliant Pebbles" system to take out a larger attack. The technology for that is still largely on the drawing boards from what I understand.

[sam_paine]

What would happen should they lob hundreds hour after hour

Then NORAD is a complete failure in that case.

After the initial attack wave, you're in a hot war and we'd better be saturating targets in the attacker's backyard before "hour after hour"

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The thing is,, we need enough of these to shoot down waves of thousands of missiles

Which country is preparing a wave of thousands of missiles?