I guess this gets filed under "Cats and dogs lying down peacefully together": there's going to be a joint missile defense exercise involving NATO and Russian forces going on right now, ending on the 25th. It's theater defense stuff, not the strategic defense stuff I studied back in college, which means everybody's thinking about the mullahs and the Norks and their homemade IRBMs. (Austin Bay)
This is another reason I'm never voting for a Democrat for any national office. 99% of them tried to strangle ballistic missile defense in its cradle, going back to the Nixon Administration when they buffaloed RMN into deactivating the sole modern BMD complex up in Cavalier, ND on the grounds that it was insufficient to protect us against a full-scale launch by the Russians. (Which is kind of like arguing against buying a compact because it won't haul your entire extended family, but they weren't being serious anyway.) They played a full-court press against the program for forty years, trying to persuade the public that treaties and proimises (with fscking COMMUNISTS???) were a better protection than actual interceptor systems, and that the military would never manage to make the "Star Wars" systems work. They forgot that the engineers' motto, appropriated by the WW2 Seabees, is "The difficult we do right now, the impossible takes a little longer." In the fullness of time, successful interceptor systems were built, tested, and eventually deployed.
Kinda looks like our dawgs want the SM-3.
This is another reason I'm never voting for a Democrat for any national office. 99% of them tried to strangle ballistic missile defense in its cradle, going back to the Nixon Administration when they buffaloed RMN into deactivating the sole modern BMD complex up in Cavalier, ND on the grounds that it was insufficient to protect us against a full-scale launch by the Russians. (Which is kind of like arguing against buying a compact because it won't haul your entire extended family, but they weren't being serious anyway.) They played a full-court press against the program for forty years, trying to persuade the public that treaties and proimises (with fscking COMMUNISTS???) were a better protection than actual interceptor systems, and that the military would never manage to make the "Star Wars" systems work. They forgot that the engineers' motto, appropriated by the WW2 Seabees, is "The difficult we do right now, the impossible takes a little longer." In the fullness of time, successful interceptor systems were built, tested, and eventually deployed.
Kinda looks like our dawgs want the SM-3.
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As for the Soviets, note that they not only didn't dismantle their ABM systems, they weren't too shy about fiddling around the fringes of the allegedly sacrosanct ABM treaty. Like the man says, "You could look it up." Sorry if I'm bitter and cynical about this, but I've been following the topic for close on forty years now, and the fact that we're just now getting around to having the kind of "thin" defense we could have had before I was out of high school (1977, for those scoring at home) is nothing short of obscene. Arms control treaties are a waste of time, money and diplomats...oh, wait, I'm being redundant.