The Bush administration is zealous about so many nutty things it’s hard to keep track. Missile defense (“Star Wars” and its ilk) is one of them I had almost forgotten about. Apparently they hope to spend over $10 billion per year to develop a defense that doesn’t work against an enemy that doesn’t really exist.<\/p>\n
Physicists have long known<\/a> that the missile-defense plans are mostly scams; they are wildly optimistic, overhyped, undertested, and usually misrepresented. It’s just hard to shoot down a bullet with another bullet; and when the incoming bullet can use countermeasures, it’s practically impossible. Now a group of generals and admirals<\/a> is saying the same thing: this is a colossal waste of money, let’s spend that money doing something useful like, say, protecting against terrorism. The military experts have an uphill battle; they don’t appreciate that the administration finds the battle against terror kind of boring, and is easily distracted by shiny objects.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Bush administration is zealous about so many nutty things it’s hard to keep track. Missile defense (“Star Wars” and its ilk) is one of them I had almost forgotten about. Apparently they hope to spend over $10 billion per year to develop a defense that doesn’t work against an enemy that doesn’t really exist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}