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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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rshow55 - 05:44pm Jun 11, 2003 EST (# 12487 of 17697)
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.

Here are key lines Eisenhower had me read in his presence.

" There is a great deal about closed politics which is essentially the same in any country and in any system. p 54

" We all know the ideal solutions. First, you can abolish some, though probably not all, secret choices as soon as you abolish nation states. Second, the special aura of difficulty and mystery about these choices will at least be minimized as soon as all politicians and administrators are scientifically educated, or at any rate not scientifically illiterate. Neither of these ideal solutions is in sight. p. 55-56

On committee politics:

" In a book of mine some years ago I wrote about a meeting of high officials:

"These men were fairer, and most of them a good deal abler, than the average; but you heard the same ripples below the words, as when any group of men chose anyone for any job. Put your ear to those meetings and you heard te intricate, labyrinthine and unassuageable rapacity, even in the best of men, of the love of power. If you have heard it once - say, in electing the chairman of a tiny dramatic society, it does not matter where - you have heard it in colleges, in bishoprics, in ministries, in cabinets: men do not alter because the issues they decide are bigger scale.

" I should still stand by each word of that." ( p 59 )

On hierarchical politics: (p. 60)

"The second form of politics I think I had better call "hierarchical politics" - the politics of a chain of command, of the services, of a bureacracy, of a large industry. On the surface these politics seem very simple. Just get hold of the man at the top, and the order will go down the line. So long as you have collected the boss, you have got nothing else to worry about. That is what people believe - particularly people who are both cynical and unworldly, which is one of my least favorite combinations - who are not used to heirarchies. Nothing could be more naive.

"Chain-of-command organisations do not work a bit like that. . . . . To get anything done in a highly articulated organisation, you have got to carry people at all sorts of levels. It is their decisions, their acquiescence or enthusiasm (above all, the absence of their passive resistance), which is going to decide whether a strategy goes through in time. Everyone competent to judge agrees that this was how Tizard guided and shoved the radar strategy. He had the political and administrative bosses behind him from the start (Churchill and Lindemann being then ineffective). He also had the Air Staff and Chiefs of Command. But he spent much effort on persuading and exhorting the junior officers who would have to control the radar chains when they were ready.

"In the same way, he was persuading and exhorting the scientists who were designing the hardware, and the administrators who had to get it made. LIke all men who understand institutions, Tizard was always asking himself the questions "Where to go to? For which job?" Often, for a real decision as opposed to a legalistic one, the chap who is going to matter is a long way down the line. Administrators like Hankey and Bridges were masters of this kind of institutional understanding, and they were able to prod and stroke, caress and jab, the relevant parts of the English organism so that somehow or other, in a way that made organizational diagrams look very primative, the radar chain got made.

Exception handling in hierarchical politics: ( p. 61-62 _

" I remember myself, very early in the war, being sent for by a high functionary, much to the bafflement and, I am afraid, to the irritation of my official superiors. I was a junior official, having gone in as a temporary a few months before; but I had taken on myself

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