Yet Another Missile Defense Failure
The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency once again missed hitting its desired target during flight test of an interceptor missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara.
The failure of the $214-million test Friday involved a ground-based defense system, designed by Boeing Co., to defend the U.S. from long-range ballistic missile attacks.
The Missile Defense Agency now has a testing record of eight hits out of 16 intercept attempts with the “hit-to-kill” warheads. The last successful intercept occurred in December 2008.
So hey, that’s only zero successes in the last four and a half years in tests that we control, and the Dec 2008 test “success” failed to deploy a realistic decoy, even though the primary objective of conducting it was to see of the system could distinguish decoys and defeat countermeasures. In the beginning we were feeding telemetry directly from the initial target trajectory to the launch control and kill vehicle, literally placing a transponder on the target saying “here i am, here’s my flight plan.” We haven’t had a successful test ever since we started implementing more realistic protocols, and we’re still doing things that no adversary ever would, like making the intercept sites aware of the date / time of the test and direction of the threat. We’re also spin stabilizing the target vehicle in all of these test, which makes a (simulated) warhead much more accurate but conversely much easier to hit, a courtesy the North Koreans aren’t likely to duplicate.
I’m so damned glad that George W Bush unilaterally scrapped the ABM treaty for this giant fail cake, which caused the Russians to withdraw from the START II treaty talks and usher us into this new era of nuclear dumbshittery.