The Pentagon's Pretend Defense

Codevilla is not just another Conservative pundit.  He also understands that some swamps are built in a Pentagon-like shape.

And inside that Pentagon-shape are a helluva lot of generals who have their heads stuck firmly up their asses.

...The current U.S missile defense budget comes to $12.9 billion—some $300 billion over the past forty years. But tiny, semi-starved North Korea has well-nigh built the capacity to overwhelm it. Because this year’s nearly $2 billion increase goes into the very programs that have made this possible, it cannot change our vulnerability. Nor would quadrupling that increase do so. 
 
That is because all such programs remain predicated on some unwise notions about our defenses. First, the official U.S policy since 1972 has been that we must avoid doing anything that adversely affects the capacity of the USSR/Russia, and China, to attack America with ballistic missiles. Hence, its corollary: Such “national missile defense as we may build will be limited to one “site.” Its fire control system will launch interceptors only after they have come into view of the site’s radar. 

Though the 1972 ABM Treaty is no longer in force, the U.S will not do fire control using any orbital systems that “substitute for” ground based radars. That reliance on surface based radars means that our efforts to defend against missiles not just from Russia and China, but also from North Korea and Iran, suffer under insurmountable inefficiencies.  Hence as well, the U.S will refrain from striking missiles from orbit, especially using systems “based on other physical principles” (read: lasers). In sum the money we have spent and are spending on missile defense is less a solution than a placebo....

Well, THAT's reassuring, ain'a?  We have a Nixon/Carter defense philosophy which begins with "Don't HURT the Bad Guys."

Reagan may have ignored that--because he killed off the Soviet Union by other means.  But this crapola is perfectly consistent with the Bush Boyzzz/Clinton/Obozo philosophy.

And every one of those people was wrong.  180 degrees wrong.