You can almost hear him choking on the words
How bad must it suck to be a “liberal” and continually be having to write these “Sorry, I’m an idiot, I got it all ass-backwards and wrong, mea maxima culpa” essays after reality has curb-stomped your stupid, stubborn, self-righteous ass yet again? No wonder they’re all so goddamned miserable, and absolutely determined to make sure everyone else is miserable right along with ‘em.
Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense
Writing about military spending is difficult.
No shit, Dick Tracy, where’s the fuckin’ squad car? Funny, innit, how that wasn’t your attitude AT ALL back when you were sanctimoniously ridiculing Reagan’s proposal supporting research into ground-based and aerial anti-missile defense systems as “Star Wars,” insisting the very idea was preposterous, impossible, and just downright insane.
A couple of days ago, Iran launched a major attack against Israel, in retaliation for Israel killing one of Iran’s military commanders. The attack included about 170 drones, 120 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles. But something pretty incredible happened — almost all of the drones and missiles were shot down before they could hit Israel, by a combination of Israeli, U.S., Jordanian, French, British, and possibly Saudi forces. Only a few ballistic missiles made it through, wounding one Arab Israeli girl severely and causing minor injuries to a few other people.
My thoughts on the geopolitics of this attack are going to be pretty familiar — the Middle East conflict is a distraction from far more important matters in East Asia, and we should keep our role to a minimum. The Gaza war has not fundamentally altered the balance of power in the Middle East; Israel and the Sunni powers are unofficial and uneasy partners against Iran and its proxies. Both sides are pretty brutal, and neither looks likely to dominate the other. U.S. resources and attention are far better spent elsewhere.
With that out of the way, I think the really interesting part of this story is that almost everything the Iranians threw at Israel was intercepted. Drones are slow-moving and easy to shoot down, but ballistic missiles are fast-moving and generally very hard to hit. Yet Israel’s Arrow system, jointly developed with the U.S., had little trouble knocking most of Iran’s ballistic missiles out of the sky — with some interceptions even occurring outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
That’s pretty interesting, because for most of my adult life, I believed that ballistic missile defense was a hopeless, failed cause. From the 2000s all the way through the 2010s, I read lots of op-eds about how kinetic interceptors — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” were just an unworkably difficult technology, and how the U.S. shouldn’t waste our time and money on developing this sort of system. For example, all the way back in 2006, Matt Yglesias — among my favorite bloggers, both then and now — wrote the following:
No excerpt, because fuck that noise. What we have here is yet another reliably-wrong shitlib idiot flapping his yap as if he knew a single damned thing about what he’s lecturing his intellectual betters about. SO…onwards.
In short, Matt and the many other critics of missile defense were right that missile defense will probably not provide us with an invincible anti-nuclear umbrella anytime soon.
Which nobody ever once suggested it might, you disingenuous fool.
But they were wrong about much else (as Matt has since acknowledged).
Gee, what a guy! Such COURAGE!™ Such STUNNING, such BRAVE! Why, the man’s literally a HERO!!!
The purpose of this post isn’t to dunk on Matt or any of the other critics — after all, I also believed missile defense didn’t work. But the way in which critics got this issue wrong illustrates why it’s difficult to get good information about military technology — and therefore why it’s hard for the public to make smart, well-informed choices about defense spending.
One big reason critics got missile defense wrong was that they didn’t understand the technological advances that were making it possible to “hit a bullet with a bullet”. No, the basics of rocketry and aerodynamics haven’t changed much in recent years. But the key to hitting a bullet with a bullet isn’t building a faster or more maneuverable rocket — it’s figuring out where the target is going to be. Advances in detection technology — better sensors, and especially better software to process the signals from sensors — have made it a lot easier to observe a missile’s trajectory to a high degree of precision. Therefore it has become more feasible to predict exactly where it’s going to go, so you can get an interceptor there first.
In other words, you didn’t even know what you didn’t know. How perfectly typical.
Why didn’t critics realize the central importance of detection software, and how fast it was improving? Well, because they’re not experts in the field. This isn’t a knock against them, or a demand that they “stay in their lane” — if you’re a writer who writes about politics and policy and budget priorities, you pretty much have to have an opinion on defense spending, because it’s a big and important part of the budget. No writer can be an expert on everything (except Brian Potter, but he’s one of a kind). So instead, as a writer, you go looking for domain experts to explain things to you, or at least point you to some good reading material so you can teach yourself the basics.
Would that it were so. No, what you and your insufferable “journalist” ilk always and forever do instead is simply assume a mantle of expertise your knowledge and experience can in no wise support, scold your political opponents as if they were semi-retarded puppies who have just piddled on the rug again, declare another “victory,” and then move on to the next topic you know precisely jack and shit about. Lather, rinse, repeat, ad infinitum ad nauseum.
Then, decades hence, after the raucous accolades from your equally pig-ignorant celebrity admirers have finally died away, the microscopically tiny handful of you possessed of even a wafer-thin scrim of honesty and integrity get to write another non-apology-apology like the above.
And that’s about it for me, I refuse to subject myself to another syllable of this self-serving twaddle. Those of you who wish to peruse the rest of the author’s rotgut self-justification, lame explication, and blame-shifting blather are perfectly free to do so, although I recommend against it.
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