re: #4 Glenn Beck’s Grand Unifying Theory of Obdicut

Our interceptors work 1/2 the time under ideal conditions when the path of the missile is known and the design of the missile is known. And decoys aren’t really that hard, you just stuff a couple of completely dummy warheads in the missile too. The idea that North Korea could manage to make nuclear warheads but is too dumb to figure out how to make dummy warheads is kinda weird.

Greely is an entirely untested site. Expecting an untested site to have a success on the first try is optimistic, to say the least.

We do know the flight path within seconds. We do know quite a bit about the rockets they do use. Thanks in part to Intel, in part to derivative designs, and the fact we bought numerous rockets from Warsaw pact forces and used them in tests of our own.

I did ask a man I know who used to work on US rocket systems. Delta program. What he explained is that each and every additional feature is hard to “close” or stay within stable flight parameters. The dummy warheads would need to have some way to deploy and disperse and all that adds weight that is hard to deal with in an already marginal or at best nascent system. It’s not a question of too dumb. It’s more a question of how far along you are in evolving designs and flight testing. Have we heard words of dummy warheads in any tests so far? Nope. What will never work is “just stuffing in” anything. Aerospace is far too demanding for some ad hoc addition of weight and complexity.

Did you note I said “send 3”? Okay send 4. Or six. Or eight. We can do that several times out of Greeley. Why trained professionals in one place are assumed to be incompetent & unable when the same training and equipment has resulted in astonishing successes (hitting a warhead at all) is obviously a critics speculation. The systems are getting better. A point the critics rarely even notice let alone admit.

What answer do you have for the relative effectiveness of having nothing in place to stop those missiles in flight? I prefer a fighting chance that does not point to first strike aka preemptive options. Which do you prefer?

I have a thought experiment for you & any BMD skeptic. Say a launch of one or two missiles happens. One fails outright. Say one gets intercepted by either the Navy or Greeley. Then we find the air is radioactive, we destroyed a nuke in flight. Compare our Presidents best options in that scenario to a successful hit anywhere. Then ponder which scenario is worth working toward despite the difficulty and expense.