April 17, 2024

I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THE “EXPERTS” TOLD US MISSILE DEFENSE WAS IMPOSSIBLE:

I checked Kosta Tsipis’ math back then and it obviously didn’t work, despite him being an MIT physicist.

Related: Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense. “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.”

They were saying this in the 1980s. Missile defense was obviously stupid and unworkable because that dunce, Reagan, had endorsed it. The experts knew better.

Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds