What We Bought.

From the AP

A Giant 'Golfball' for Missile Defense

By KRISTA MAHRWed Aug 15, 3:40 PM ET

Last Friday morning, Colonel John R. Fellows watched from his Honolulu hotel room as what appeared to be a giant golf ball pulled into Pearl Harbor. The white dome, encasing the powerful military radar of which Fellows is in charge, was returning from a week at sea. "It just came in while I was sitting here," said Fellows, who works for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The Sea-Based X-Band radar was, you could say, right on time.

Or, you could say it was about two years late. Designed to keep an eye out for rogue missiles flying toward the United States, the SBX had been scheduled to report for duty in Alaska in early 2006, but a series of structural repairs and upgrades have kept it in warmer waters. For over a year, the nine-story radar that sits atop a self-propelled Norwegian oil platform has been coming and going from Pearl Harbor for fixes and tests - a delay critics see as symptomatic of an agency under pressure to deliver a national missile defense system that is still more fiction than fact.

The SBX certainly looks like something out of a 1960s precursor to Transformers, its round, white head ready to make a mechanical turn, sprout legs and stand up, streaming seawater and begin terrorizing the good people of Honolulu. But the 280-foot high, $900 million gizmo will soon be scanning the horizon for enemy threats, joining the growing suite of land-, sea- and space-based technologies that the MDA claims is the nation's first functional national missile defense system.

Since President Ronald Reagan initiated his Star Wars program, about $100 billion has been spent on U.S. missile defense. We don't have an invisible shield protecting us, but we do have two ground-based interceptor batteries in California and Alaska aimed roughly in the direction of North Korea, and plans to build more in central Europe aimed at Iran.

The SBX program has already touched many parts of the globe: The radar's prototype was built in the Marshall Islands; its semi-submersible converted oil rig platform was designed in Norway. The two parts were assembled in Texas, its 50,000 tons hoisted onto a ship, and sailed 15,000 miles around the tip of South America (it was too big to use the Panama Canal), arriving in Pearl Harbor in January 2006. Its ultimate destination is the more challenging waters of Adak, a farflung outpost in Alaska's Aleutian island chain, famous for terrible weather and 100-foot waves. The MDA claims the SBX is powerful enough to spot a flying baseball in San Francisco from New York, and more importantly, to tell the difference between a real missile heading for America and a decoy.
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What We Needed.





And What We Got.



From the Center for American Progress:

August 6, 2001: Bush Administration Warned 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'

April 8, 2004

Two and a half years after 9/11, the American public learned today that President Bush received explicit warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States – including activities "consistent with preparations for hijacking." Yet, there was no domestic follow-up by the Bush administration. No high level meetings. No sense of urgency. No warnings to FBI agents across the country.
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Because all the gizmology in the Universe can never make up for the catastrophically stupid idea of putting an dogma-powered imbecile behind the trigger.