I Feel SO Much Safer Now!

by pessimist

Just in time for the conventions to begin, the US military can now make the claim that we are defended against incoming missiles.

Uh, that's missile... singular ... One ... the loneliest number.

1st missile interceptor installed in Interior

A 55-foot-long rocket was installed Thursday inside a barren patch of Alaska's Interior, supplying the first component of a national defense system designed to shoot down enemy missiles. Crews at Fort Greely lowered the three-stage interceptor into one of six silos built behind a double perimeter fence reinforced by heavy barbed wire.

"We're coming to the end of an era where we have not been able to defend our country against long-range ballistic missile attacks," said Major Gen. John Holly, who heads the ground-based missile defense program for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. "While this system will constitute an initial limited capability, it is a vast improvement over our current defensive posture, which is nonexistent," Holly said.

Well, let's see. ONE missile in place divided by ZERO missiles it replaced ... hmmmmm, if my grade-school math is still functional,. that's about an infinite increase in the safety and security of the nation!

WHEW!!! Lead me to that ballot machine and let me vote for Dubya! WHAT A LEEDUR!!!!!

Five additional interceptors will be installed at the 700-acre complex - and another four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California - by the end of the year. Ten more will be installed at Fort Greely by late 2005, launching the Bush administration's multibillion dollar system.

Let's see... ONE missile in place, plus FIVE more in Alaska, and FOUR in California, and TEN more in Alaska next year ....

Anyone with less than twenty missiles in there arsenal better not ever think of messin' with the might of the US of A! We'll get 'em all!

According to Missile Defense Agency officials, the interceptors will be linked to a vast network of satellites, radars, computers and command centers. In an attack, satellites would alert the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, triggering a response by interceptors topped with optical sensors called "kill vehicles," while a complex radar system would track incoming enemy missiles.

Bash my Brain and call me Dubya, but didn't we get similar promises about our ready interceptors which could not intercept a single hijacked airliner on 9/11 because the system failed to notice or to activate? Makes me feel a Hole lot Bettur!

Congress has appropriated more than $10 billion for the missile defense system for the next fiscal year alone and MDA estimates for 2004-2009 run as high as $53 billion. But a group of independent economists estimates the entire system could end up costing as much as $1.2 trillion, Coyle said.

Time to fire up that Skule larnin' agin ... $1.2 trillion, divided by twenty missiles ... Why, that's a sheet load a'dineros! That's almost bigger than Karl's estimates of how many people are gonna vote for Bush this fall!

The missile defense system has been a boost to the town of Delta Junction five miles to the north. The remote community of about 1,000 people - about 95 miles southeast of Fairbanks - took an economic blow when Fort Greely landed on the list of mothballed military bases in the mid-1990s. The post covered 170 square miles next to Delta Junction.

The community has received almost $20 million in federal funds related to the missile defense project, including money to build a new school now located at Greely, said city administrator Pete Hallgren. "Residents see it two ways," he said. "One, it's providing jobs and an economy in Delta. The second thing is that people are very proud of the ability to house our nation's first defense against an incoming missile."

And what's the other way they see it?

You don't say! You Don't Say! YOU DON'T SAY!

You know, for the amount of money this is going to cost a government which isn't collecting any taxes, we could have had a better deal BUYING North Korea.

Come to think of it, it might still be on sale.

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