Star Wars Meets Keystone Kops

Yet another in an unbroken string of failures, but this one with a hilarious twist:

The U.S. was forced to abort a May 25 bid to shoot down a long-range missile over the Pacific in a blow to its controversial anti-missile defense shield which it wants to extend over eastern Europe.

"The target did not reach sufficient altitude to be deemed a threat and so the Ballistic Missile Defense System did not engage it, as designed", Air Force Lieutenant General Henry Obering said.

The scheduled flight test was therefore not completed and deemed a "no" test, he said, adding an investigation would now try to "determine the cause of the malfunction."

Notice that the claim is that the test didn't "fail", because the intercepter didn't even notice the damn target missile existed, so it didn't bother to launch. The target missile didn't get up high enough for the interceptor to notice it because:

Retired Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile parts made up the target.

"We have a target modernization program to try to get some new target boosters because some of these that we use are more than 40 years old", Lehner said.

Think about this for a second. None of this stuff works anyway, although that hasn't prevented the Bush Administration from cheerfully trashing any residual goodwill it might have once had with Russia with a harebrained scheme to put anti-ballistic interceptors on the Russian border. But what, exactly, is this system supposed to do if it ever actually works? Our entire anti-missile infrastructure is utterly useless - not just because it doesn't work, but because it doesn't even attempt to work - against any nuclear warhead carried on a low altitude missile. A cruise missile, say. We aren't talking particularly sophisticated technology here. The proposed solution? Newer ballistic missles. Not the kind that a nuclear wannabe might use.

All that this failure has done is demonstrate to anybody who might be interested in actually attacking the United States how to successfully strike without ever having to worry that our utterly lame, yet fabulously expensive anti-missile technology might actually, someday, somehow, get lucky. You don't want a fancy new missle. You just want something that comes in low and slow. Something low-tech.