Sorry, Pigs still can't fly

A little over a year ago I had a post, And pigs still can't fly.

When Ronald Reagan instituted the Star Wars Missile Defense System it was pork for defense contractors because it would never work. Bush reincarnated the program and it was even porkier because now there is no enemy to use it against. One thing remains the same however, it still won't work.
U.S. missile defense test flops

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first test in nearly two years of a multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile shield has failed after the interceptor missile shut down as it prepared to launch in the central Pacific, the Pentagon said.

About 16 minutes earlier, a target missile carrying a mock warhead had been successfully fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, according to a statement from the Missile Defense Agency.

The aborted $85 million (44 million pounds) test appeared likely to set back plans for activation of a rudimentary bulwark against long-range ballistic missiles that could be fired by countries like North Korea.

In 2002, President George W. Bush pledged to have initial elements of the program up and running by the end of this year while testing and development continued.

Pork is one thing, but this is pork that is taking money away from the real threat. The threat today is international terrorism. Terrorists are not going to launch missiles they are going to put devices in cargo containers, only about two percent of which are being inspected because of a lack of funds. But there is still plenty of money for defense contractors to try to make pigs fly. I guess that tells us where the administration's priorities lie.

Well a year and a few billion dollars later nothing has changed and pigs still can't fly.
Test Failures Slow U.S. Missile Defense

FORT GREELY, Alaska (AP) -- Behind the heavy barbed wire at this snowy range are silos containing eight interceptors designed to shoot down incoming enemy missiles. There were supposed to be as many as 16 in place by now.

But after an embarrassing series of test failures in the ambitious, expensive and highly criticized program to build a national missile-defense shield, the U.S. military is slowing the deployment of interceptors while it conducts more testing.

Fewer interceptors than the military had hoped for have been installed at Fort Greely, an 800-acre complex at the edge of an old burned spruce forest, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Vandenberg has just two interceptors instead of four.

The government has spent about $100 billion on missile defense since 1983, including $7.8 billion authorized for the current fiscal year. Interceptors, however, have failed five times in 11 tests, even though some critics of the program say the tests have been practically rigged to succeed.

And why can't it succeed?

Philip Coyle, a former chief of testing for the Pentagon and a critic of the missile defense system, said that if highly scripted tests fail, it is hard to see how they could succeed in a surprise attack.

''The basic challenges haven't changed. Basically, hitting an enemy missile out in space, at 15,000 mph, is like trying to hit a hole-in-one in golf when the hole is going 15,000 mph,'' he said. He added that enemy countermeasures and decoys make the job even tougher.

This was never more than a billion dollar pork project for the defense industry. It never was going to work and now there is no enemy to use it against. If a nuclear weapon is launched at the United States it will come in a shipping container not a missile.