Excuse me?

[mdlbear]

In one of Condoleeza Rice's answers to a question by John Kerry this afternoon about the Ballistic Missile "Defense" system, she said "we've started deploying it" or something to that effect. Deploying what, exactly?

Comments

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

Bits and pieces of the various technologies have been out there for a while. Some of them are "deep black" classified. As I have never held a security clearance, I can name a few suspects:

• something in the hills above San Onofre that occasionally fires intense beams of light into the sky, crossing the bus bars of a nuclear power plant to do it
  
• Patriot, the Navy's Aegis, and various derivatives of high-accuracy missiles tied into radars for point defense
  
• a few very classified NRO satellite initiatives, including one that can detect thermal blooms from not just ICBM launches, but cruise missiles; another that can detect radiation well enough to distinguish radium-painted decoys from missiles carrying warheads
  
• NORAD's tracking (& targeting) system for space debris, tied into radars all around the world (including BMEWS in the UK, various arrays on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, a facility in central Australia watching the polar orbits, and a lot of Canadian radars that we try not to share with the Canadians, exactly what we do with the data)
  

That's just off the top of my head. But calling the pieces a "system" is kind of like walking into a junkyard, pointing at random wrecks and calling them a "car." Sure, the parts could be, with a lot of work and integration . . . and if this work is ongoing in respect to ballistic missile defense, Rice should shut up about it.

[trogula.livejournal.com]

Deploying what, exactly?

Tax money to defense contractors. We're deploying lots and lots of tax money to defense contractors.

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

My knee-jerk answer is "bullshit", but that's been going on for years and years.