This Is A Stretch (And A Half)

The Weekly Standard is mighty impressed with the Navy's shootdown of a satellite yesterday...in many ways too impressed:

This is a major success for the Missile Defense Agency, the successor to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and it's going to be a tough pill for the program's critics to swallow. There have been two recent, successful tests of the missile defense system. In September 2007, the agency killed a dummy missile over the Pacific using one of its Ground Based Interceptors stationed in Alaska. General Renuart used the occasion to declare "that we have all of the pieces in place that, if the nation needed to, we could respond." There are up to 24 interceptors already deployed. And then in December the Japanese Navy knocked down a medium-range missile using the same, American SM-3 missile that was used in yesterday's strike.

Despite this good run, critics have effectively diminished the achievement by charging that the tests were rigged. This time was different. The administration bet big, and if the operation had failed, the program would have suffered a major, and possibly fatal, setback. Instead the bet paid off. It is the greatest PR boost the program could have gotten short of actually striking down a North Korean missile inbound to Hollywood.

The system will now be an easier sell to allies, and it should be a cudgel for Republicans in the fall. The "rogue" satellite cost more than a billion dollars. One suspects its destruction will be of greater value to this country than any mission it could have performed as a functioning spy satellite.

I'm sorry, but for any workable missle defense system the ability to shoot down an unpowered satellite should be a no brainer. The mere fact that the Pentagon kept heaping caveat upon caveat indicates that even this type of minimal performance isn't as cut and dried as they would like it to be.

I'll admit that the propensity of some Democratic critics to bet against the abilities of the American areospace industry always struck me as rather foolish, and I do think, in the end, such critics will be proven wrong. This excercise, however, isn't confirmation of the promise of missile defense. It isn't even a nail in the critic's coffin. All this shows is that our missile defense systems can crawl. They need to start walking and running before anyone can begin to crow.

Gleaned from Memeorandum