WASHINGTON -- The system designed to defend American cities and towns against a nuclear attack by North Korea is "simply unable to protect the U.S. public" and will remain ineffective unless Congress exerts rigorous oversight, according to a new report.
The report, to be released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, recommends that the Obama administration halt the expansion of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, known as GMD, until its technical problems have been solved.
"The story of this system is a cautionary tale about how the lack of appropriate oversight of a politically charged missile defense program has led to a system in tatters," said the report, written by three physicists with expertise in missile defense.
"Despite more than a decade of development and a bill of $40 billion, the GMD system is simply unable to protect the U.S. public," the authors wrote.
The GMD system is intended to thwart a "limited" nuclear strike by a non-superpower adversary, such as North Korea or Iran.
In the event of an attack, rocket interceptors at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County in California and Ft. Greely, Alaska, would be launched from underground silos. Once in space, the interceptors would separate from their booster rockets and attempt to slam into and "kill" enemy warheads.
The report notes that in "heavily scripted" flight tests that are "set up for success," GMD interceptors have often failed to hit mock enemy warheads. In the seven most recent tests, interceptors destroyed their targets just three times, the report says -- a finding consistent with conclusions of the Pentagon's operational test and evaluation office.
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/07/14/us-missile-defense-system-is-imply-unable-protect-public-report.html
It's not made to defend the public from ICBMs.
It's to defend military assets against SRBMs.
I just realized that I really fucking hate this world.
>>136806656
“Partly we are failing because it is the hardest thing the Pentagon has tried to do,” said Phil Coyle, who served as the Pentagon's chief weapons tester in the Clinton administration and in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama administration. “We’ve had more success with short-range and medium-range systems. But they are going more slowly, they are traveling in the atmosphere. That is different than traveling at 15,000 miles per hour in space. Especially when the enemy is trying to fool you," such as with countermeasures and decoys.
“Three of the previous four [tests] had failed — that is a 75 percent failure rate,” Coyle said of the system's recent tests. Even with its most recent success, “two of five is 40 percent. Forty percent is not a passing grade.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/07/05/north-korea-missile-defense-240246
>>136807273
Archived it for you
https://unvis.it/politico.com/story/2017/07/05/north-korea-missile-defense-240246
so the Star Wars project doesn't exist?