Tightening the belt

You know things are bad for the economy when the President calls for cuts in Missile Defense spending. Ah, but before you start praising the GOP for being so fiscally conservative and responsible, realize that:

If approved by Congress, the cuts will reduce the Missile Defense Agency's 2006 budget to about 7.8 billion dollars from about 8.8 billion dollars the previous year.

Personally, I think $7.8 billion is still too much money to be spending on a system with a 20-plus year record of failure, including this week's most recent failed attempt.

Even the Pentagon is hedging its bets on the potential for a real success:

Pentagon spokesperson Larry Di Rita stated that the Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense System being deployed in Alaska and California has, at best, a “nascent operational capability.” It is unclear what he meant by this, as “operational capability” has a very specific meaning for Pentagon weapons programs: in order to reach this level of development, they must have passed very explicit testing milestones. According to Di Rita, “We haven't made a declaration that we are now hereby operational. I don't know that such a declaration will ever be made,” and, instead, there will be a “focus on testing and evaluation of the system." This comes on the heels of a flight test failure in December 2004. Di Rita explained the Pentagon’s attitude toward missile defense: “The system is what it is, and it will get better over time.”
(Defense Daily, Jan. 18, 2005)

The Center for Defense Information has a pretty good breakdown of just what's wrong with pouring billions of dollars - not to mention wasted time, energy, and resources - into the doomed Star Wars program.

If Missile Defense were an after-school program, you can bet your Halliburton stocks that Dubya would have cut it already. Funny how double standards work.