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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
19/08/08 "The
Guardian" -- - 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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