Several weeks ago—about a decade in Trump years, I would estimate1—I planned to write yet another article ridiculing our nation’s massive addiction to wasteful military spending, category “Star Wars”, springing off an article in Bloomsberg, by “the Editors” themselves, no less, “How to Blow North Korean Missiles Out of the Sky”, bemoaning the fact that, in fact, there’s no way to do that, no way to “hit a bullet with a bullet,” as “the Editors” so breathlessly put it.
And there isn’t. The Bloomsberg boys link to an article in Wired, titled “US Missile Defense Still Has a Long, Long Way to Go”, by Brian Barrett, a headline that I would describe as charitable in the extreme, for, based on Brian’s article, a more accurate head would be “US Missile Defense System Is A Complete Flop”. To save myself the task of rewriting what Brian has said, I’ll just quote him liberally:
“The US has tested the interceptor system [the “Ground-based Midcourse Defense” system] 19 times since 1999, succeeding about half the time. The most recent test, three years ago, marked another success, but three prior attempts fizzled. That kind of success rate is troubling, given the meticulously managed conditions.”
Brian talked with Philip Coyle, senior fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and former head of the Pentagon’s test and evaluation office, and Phil had a lot to say about the integrity of the Pentagon’s testing system, which strikes me as essentially non-existent: “They know what it [the incoming missile] looks like, they know when it’s coming”—information that neither the North Koreans nor any other “aggressor” is likely to be sharing with us when they launch a, you know, surprise attack.
But wait, there’s more—a lot more. As Brian tells us, “The tests also don’t account for decoys and countermeasures that could throw off the missile defense system—tactics that include technology that confuses the launch-detecting radar systems or infrared sensors aboard the interceptor [rocket], or a simple balloon traveling alongside the incoming missile’s reentry vehicle.”
Well, I’m sure the North Koreans wouldn’t be so sneaky—or so advanced—as to mess us up with a damn balloon, would they? That would be so unfair!
The absurdity of these tests—which cost almost $250 million apiece and do nothing more than prove that they’re a bad idea—was so overwhelming that I could do little more than chuckle over the fact that, while the Pentagon was going to waste surely several billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future, investing in such things as anti-balloon technology, on this latest edition of Star Wars folly, at least there was the consolation that, since the North Koreans were never ever going to attack us with a nuclear weapon—because they’re not that stupid!—mere folly would never turn into disaster.
Well, as I say, that was several Trump years ago. Right on cue, Vladimir Putin—aka Dr. Evil, aka Valdemort, aka Emperor Palpatine2—announced plans for a whole suite of fabulous new weapons that would totally blow the U.S. out of the water, including a nuclear-powered, ground-hugging cruise missile.
Neil MacFarquhar and David Sanger, writing in the New York Times, expressed some skepticism regarding the comrade’s claims, but swallowed whole the nonsense about our missile defense system: “While Mr. Putin may have been bluffing about these weapons, as some experts suggested, he cleverly focused on a vulnerability of American-designed defenses: They are based on the assumption that enemy nuclear missiles fly high and can be destroyed well before they reach their targets.”
In fact, Putin doesn’t need his super cruise missile to evade our missile defense systems. All he needs is a balloon.
Fortunately, there has been considerable pushback against the notion that Putin can achieve anything remotely resembling the world-beating arsenal he has proposed. Richard Aboulafia, writing in Forbes, explains why Putin’s bluff is nothing more than confirming evidence that he has, in fact, a very weak hand. But how likely is it that the Pentagon will let this bluff go unexploited. I’d say, motherfucking zero.
But wait, there’s more bad news. Chinese President Xi Jinping has decided that this president for life thing sounds pretty good to him, so that’s what he’s going to do. With two muscle-flexing autocrats in business, Pentagon planners are in Pentagon heaven. Two Cold Wars! Two Cold Wars!
Afterwords
If we’re lucky, trillions of dollars, but not millions of lives, will be wasted in this brave new world of unconscionable military conspicuous consumption, but only if we’re lucky. As I recently noted, the U.S. is addicted to a “Forward” foreign policy because it fertilizes the careers of tens of thousands of bright, ambitious, hard-working people—and subsidizes the jobs of hundreds of thousands more—even as it wastes our nation’s substance in unnecessary and often spectacularly counterproductive pursuits (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya). Both China and Russia seem anxious to get in on the game. The great danger is that muscle boys like Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping, by making a cult of not backing down, run the risk of backing both themselves, and each other, into a corner from which there is no escape other than either war or career-ending humiliation and failure. Back during the Cuban missile crisis, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev rather bravely chose the latter, and paid the price, being deposed only a year later. Would any of the three worthies aforementioned display Nikita’s self-sacrificing good sense? Time will tell.
UPDATE
North Korea is now talking about talking about doing something about its nuclear program. If something comes of this, Trump will have a right to crow, and he certainly will, but a real agreement would be worth having to endure even that. It’s “amusing” (so many things are these days) that über hawk Eli Lake warns us not to get our hopes up.3
- A “Trump year” is a flexible amount of time defined as the amount of bad news that, in the past, would typically occur in a given year. A Trump year typically lasts between a week or a month, but occasionally will shrink to a day, or even less. ↩︎
- Since I bailed on the Star Wars franchise early on, I had to look this guy up, but I’m assured that he’s worse than Darth Vadar. ↩︎
- Eli doesn’t want a nuclear war, but he does want a regime change, because that’s always worked out so well for us in e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. ↩︎
