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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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almarst2003 - 09:23am Apr 1, 2003 EST (# 10893 of 10895)

OH YES... AND ORDER!

Anarchy flourishes in wake of advances http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1048313348939

If facts contradict the theory ... just bomb some more. Those are "bad" facts we can deal with quite effectively, can't we?

rshow55 - 09:40am Apr 1, 2003 EST (# 10894 of 10895)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Because of format, this thread can't take anything to closure. But patterns discussed here at length, with much Bush administration involvement over many months - could establish a lot, beyond a reasonable doubt, by the standards jury trials take, if people with real power wanted that to happen.

Scorecard for the War by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/opinion/26FRIE.html

To know whether the allied forces are winning, there are six things one could watch out for.

To win, we need to handle a lot of things well. . . . As Buck Showalter knows - and everybody else knows - things matter when they matter - matter in the ways they matter - and it is disastrous and stupid to ignore problems that need to be faced.

If you keep score, you can often tell what those problems are. The US "isn't winning them all" in ways we have to care about.

Delusions of Power By PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/opinion/28KRUG.html is a wonderful piece - and very important. Krugman cites a wonderful phrase

. "incestuous amplification" defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

_ _

"Incestuous amplification" can lead to ornate , internally consistent and convincing systems of ideas - virtual maps.

Convincing because they are ornate, and internally consistent. But they may have nothing to do with the real territory - which has to be related to the maps by a MATCHING PROCESS.

Living Under the Virtual Volcano of Video Games This Holiday Season By VERLYN KLINKENBORG http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/opinion/16MON4.html contains a haunting, and very important, idea. .

" every human activity, serious or playful, eventually ramifies into a world of its own, a self-contained cosmos of enormous complexity."

But is that self-contained cosmos right? When one matches that complexity against checkable things - some things that are real may be mapped almost exactly - or even exactly. But even when the match is exact, the map remains virtual . I think that virtual mappings that are correct in every way that matter are precious - and think people are getting clearer on how they happen - by "connecting the dots" and keeping at it.

But virtual mappings that are correct are also hard-won - and almost always the result of tremendous effort, and many, many, many modifications and corrections.

How many ways are there to screw up a computer program (or a map)?

Anybody with real world experience ought to know that there are many more ways than there are to make ones that work, and are fit to purpose, when that purpose is complicated enough to be of real human concern.

In the Bush administration, we're seeing an astonishing amount of hubris. Delusions of Power By PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/28/opinion/28KRUG.html and much else by Krugman are worth careful attention as we look at military and diplomatic decision making by the United States under Bush.

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Is there any real evidence that our bombing has done as much "good" as harm - from strictly a US military point of view - as it has done harm?

Has anybody looked hard at that?

Facts aren't so comforting.

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