Uh oh, here comes missile defense again.

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites) on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to have ready for use within two years a bare-bones system for defending American territory, troops and allies against attack by ballistic missiles.

Hmm, something tells me that this decision wasn't in response to the British dude who claims that Bin Laden has acquired 20 "backpack" nukes from a renegade KGB agent. Besides, our military has recently missed three of the last seven times when attempting to hit a target considerably larger than a backpack, just down the coast (or up it when I'm at SB) at Vandenberg AFB.

Then again, given that most of the Bush Administration players are held over from Gerald Ford, perhaps igniting a new arms race ("rogue states" and other nations update their offensive capabilities to overwhelm our defensive "upgrade") is in the best interests of Rip Van Rummy & Co.

So far, the only Al Qaeda act to take place above sea level was 9/11 (and that was only a thousand feet up), and that could not have been stopped no matter how much money Dubya diverts from education/socialsecurity/medicare/etc to put into SDI, which deals with threats from our outer atmosphere. Well, at least tries to.

For a technical explanation as to what a dumb idea the Administration's announced tact is, here's a piece from Slate on the matter. From Fred Kaplan:

What the president did not say is a) that we've been through this before, many times, with equal exuberance, enormous investments, and no returns; b) that as recently as 18 months ago, the program's top general said it was still at an early stage and warned against rushing things; and c) that, no matter how good defenses might get, any "rogue" with enough sophistication to build and launch a ballistic missile can easily maneuver around those defenses. On this last point, it is worth noting that U.S. weapons scientists and intelligence analysts have known about these maneuvering tricks for more than 40 years; that no one has the slightest idea how to deal with them; and that Bush's current test program does not even attempt to do so.

Anyway, here we go again.