re: #475 Obdicut

Hey, I support giving shitloads of money to engineers and high energy physicists and the rest.

But we don’t, and we won’t, have a working Star Wars system. If we had spent the money directly on figuring out tactical missile interception rather than ICBM, we’d have a much better version of Iron Dome now. Instead, the research has to be adapted.

But I totally am on board with just shoving money at physicists and material engineers and shit. I love that. And arguably fantasy projects that have no real chance of coming true set a nicely high bar. But we’d have a much better missile defense system now if they had focused on tactical missile defense from the start, rather than anti-ICBM defense.

but back in the 1980’s the big threat was seen to be Soviet ICBMs. So that’s where the research dollars went, into stopping that threat. Later, when other threats took priority, monies were channeled towards dealing with those.

But one bit of tech that came into wide use in the 80’s has proven useful for countering rockets.