nick cobb
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 Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 6:28 pm Post subject: A Great Article - Please Read! |
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Published on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
The US Missile Defence System Is the Magic Pudding That Will Never Run
Out
Poland is just the latest fall guy for an American foreign policy
dictated by military industrial lobbyists in Washington
by George Monbiot
It’s a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates
what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a
US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to
this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This
proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will
stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic
and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile
defence system.
The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be
stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their
purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental
ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don’t possess. This is why
they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in
Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.
They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile
defence, according to the Pentagon, will “protect our homeland … and
our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack”; as long as the
Russians wait until it’s working before they nuke us. The good news is
that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is
only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for
the past six decades.
The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has
achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn’t know it if you read
the press releases published by the Pentagon’s missile defence agency:
the word “success” features more often than any other noun. It is true
that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles
fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the
ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these
tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.
All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been
rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known
before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system
doesn’t have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy
missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they
are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the
appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less
realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when
testing its GMD system.
This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence:
it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy
attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official
at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out,
there are endless means by which another state could fool the system.
For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of
dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or
bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system
inoperable. You can reduce a missile’s susceptibility to laser
penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance
technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another
multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply
forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles,
against which the system is useless.
Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it
so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the
system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race
helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion
dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions
of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran
could outspend the US.
The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since
Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have
accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year
tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be
$110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper
in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon
invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence
programme to evade the government’s usual accounting standards. It’s
called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it
ensures that the costs spiral out of control.
Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that
“the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation”.
Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials
think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the
programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There
are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme,
no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against
which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still
incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars’ worth of diplomacy
could do in an afternoon.
So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail?
I’ll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists
because it doesn’t work.
US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats
to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to
toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities.
Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding
the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations
with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork
barrel of all, the magic pudding that won’t run out, however much you
eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other
manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the
system will never work.
To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the
threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the
likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own
corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian
generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new
deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets.
Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed
into becoming America’s groundbait.
If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a
rational engagement with international problems, or even as an
effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong
place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It
seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of
the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander
to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not
really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies
which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world
with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current
administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and
what the political kickbacks will be. |
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