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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

applez101 - 01:40pm Sep 30, 2001 EST (#10008 of 10016)

Kangdawei -

a) ref. poverty: you will find that whilst Bin Laden is relatively wealthy, many in his organisation are not. Furthermore, the majority of volunteers for suicide duties are amongst the ranks of the poor.

Therefore, for maximum impact per $ invested, poverty is a reasonable target.

b) "This list is a) irrelevant to the problem of global positioning of forces b) will be done whether or not we have a missle defense, c) doens't really contain any military items at all.

So your answer on where to spend increased military funds: nowhere.

It's what I thought.

Scratch an anti-NMD person and you find an anti-military-spending person"

-That's just spin-doctoring of the least constructive sort on your part. As I stated from the start, *defence* extends far beyond mere military force...and it can well be argued that it has been the decades of concentration on military force alone that have made the US so resoundingly vulnerable to these 'asymmetrical' threats. When tools exist to handle these threats effectively and inexpensively, why not employ them? What use are 50,000 reservist weekend warriors in border patrol or consular services? None, they haven't the training for spotting dodgy documentation or an understanding of local politics afield to spot suspicious characters.

For any given problem, one should employ the tools best suited to dealing with it.

Got yourself a standing army foe: fine, send in your army: it is entirely appropriate and useful. What we've got, however, is a secretive organisation embedded in communities everywhere: the military is particularly ill-equipped for dealing with this type of challenge. Police forces, OTOH, are well-used to this type of problem.

applez101 - 01:43pm Sep 30, 2001 EST (#10009 of 10016)

I suggest folks check out www.economist.com for a number of interesting articles concerning this topic, which to be fair, is somewhat afield from the forum topic.

rshowalter - 03:04pm Sep 30, 2001 EST (#10010 of 10016)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Enough of the cards are dealt, and time pressures are great enough, that it seems to me that we have to figure out what we have that we can use now - - - and not hope for salvation from changes that won't become operational for years -- and won't be shaken out for years after that.

If we have courageous, dedicated, competent people using the weapons now in our arsenals, we have more destructive force now than we can use, more than the world could really tolerate. What gimmicks can offer real advantages - in terms of the problems we're facing? Not any that I can see, though you can describe systems that would have their uses.

We've just seen a demonstration of what a small group of dangerous human animals, like ourselves, can do with weapons fully designed and operational 6,000 years ago -- knives.

What's so hard about solving our problems with the tools, people, relationships, and knowledge we have now?

If there are clear reasons why things that need to be done can't be done - - then we've identified a locus of problems to consider and solve.

I think a lot of people are kidding themselves and each other - both about what their capabilities are - - and about the areas where they "don't understand."

I'm afraid the world could end, but don't see why dealing with the risks takes all that much change from the configurations people are now in.

What's so hard? People seem in a terrible funk.

rshowalter - 03:16pm Sep 30, 2001 EST (#10011 of 10016)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We need to restore confidence in the systems we've had running a good while, fix a small number of relatively simple snafus, change a few rules in interational relations that make for explosive instabilities and multiple hypocrisies, distribute resources we have sitting around better in a few spots, and get nukes down.

These are immediate problems. None ought to be particularly difficult, compared to lots of other things people do easily. What's so hard?

I hate to think of the answer. Because it occurs to me that as a species, we're at "the end of the road" -- and that God would have reason to get tired of the whole show.

All solving our problems really takes is a sense, often enough, that when it really matters, checking facts is morally forcing. We're in danger because of fictions -- many, many too many of them.

We wouldn't have to surrender to what ought to be a plain moral obligation to check facts consistently, just a lot more often. So that elaborate systems of deception that are prohibitively expensive, unjust, dangerous, and usually "hiding in plain sight" can be found, in a step by step fashion, and fixed, step by step.

What's so hard? Why is everybody in such a funk?

Maybe for the very best of reasons - but it sure seems childish to me -- the big problems aren't hard - - and if we fixed a few of the big ones, we'd have time to handle little ones as we wished to.

People do lots of beautiful, sophisticated problems all the time. Any single edition of the NYT Sunday edition has more logical facility than it should take to solve every big problem the world has.

The things that could kill us all, when you look at them, are really stupid.

rshowalter - 03:19pm Sep 30, 2001 EST (#10012 of 10016)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Oh yes, a few thousand "crazies" running around have to be dealt with, and their supporters have to be dealt with, in ways that are somehow workable.

Or we have to learn to do a tolerable job of defending against them, without doing ourselves far more damage than they could ever do to us.

Or both. What's so hard?

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