Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
It’s a difficult task. I’d also like to point out that they do real-world testing because they don’t know if the technology will really work in the real-world: sometimes it needs to be tweaked. This is one of those times. No big deal.
So did the sub-launched one off the coast a few weeks back...
doesn’t matter since they can fire missles from 35 miles of our coast anyways and we don’t know they are there....
IIRC, START will do away with missle defense(for us) any way.
another brilliant Obungler idea.
We need beam weapons.
Damn it.
We’re running out of time.
Sometimes they work sometimes they don’t, I’ll take that chance over getting nuked though. At least there is something to try. I hope they keep working on it and Obama doesn’t try to kill it.
So if half the missiles miss, that means you need more than 2 launches at each inbound to insure successful interception. Lets call it five launches to be safe. That’s easy - you just install 5X number of launchers for each suspected inbound. If we discount Russia (MAD) then for china we need about 120 interceptor launchers to cover ground and sea based missiles.
That should easily cover the stray N Korean or Iranian launch. Still cheaper than the effect of one nuke hitting any American city. What’s the problem?
Failures are rare but they do happen. That said they could do this back in the mid 60s according to my dad who worked at the missle base on the Marshall Islands at the time. He didn’t go into detail.
No, for NK & Iran we need the courage to whack their threats pre-emptively.
A NK launch would be somewhat limited, since they don’t have a large number of the type of missile that could reach US territory. In a case like that, I would expect at least two interceptors would be launched against the inbound target. Also, if tensions built up beforehand, I would hope that the test aircraft with the high powered laser would be deployed also to help stop an inbound warhead. After that, let a Trident empty it’s tubes on North Korea!
Why is the US even letting on that these test even happened, let along report their success or failures?
Could you imagine 65+ years ago reading “Tests on the Mark VI torpedo found it to have defects in it’s depth setting”.
Or if the Trinity test had been a dud “Today in Alamogordo, NM, the Army’s first test of an atomic weapon was a failure”.
Well, it was a missile, after all...
No one today would consider the AIM-9X Sidewinder a failure; but even today it does not have a 100% success rate. Early on the Sidewinder was selected not because it was such a killer, but because the Navy Sidewinder FAR exceeded the performance of the USAF radar-guided competitor.
My point is that this exo-atmospheric kinetic kill device is NEVER going to have 100% kill ratios, even when out of development and initially deployed. To expect otherwise is only the expected territory of our politicians.
Kwaj ping
Why the heck does the gubmint announce to the world every time one of these tests fails? Seems counterproductive, unless it didn’t really fail and this is misinformation.
Just as it was intended to with START pending before the Senate (see, guys. you aren’t really giving away anything valuable here)
It’s no secret that the Russians do not want the United States or her allies to be protected by missile defense, and believe that New START forbids further development of missile defense. Last December, in the midst of the treaty’s negotiations, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, “By building such an umbrella over themselves, our partners [the U.S.] could feel themselves fully secure and will do whatever they want, which upsets the balance and the aggressiveness immediately increases in real politics and economics.” After the treaty was signed, the Russians effectively declared victory on the matter. Their government issued a statement that the treaty “can operate and be viable only if the United States refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.”