Our military readiness - missles

Not so much - from the Los Angeles Times:

U.S. missile defense system is 'simply unable to protect the public,' report says
The system designed to defend American cities and towns against a nuclear attack by North Korea is “simply unable to protect the U.S. public” and will remain ineffective unless Congress exerts rigorous oversight, according to a new report.

The report, to be released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, recommends that the Obama administration halt the expansion of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, known as GMD, until its technical problems have been solved.

“The story of this system is a cautionary tale about how the lack of appropriate oversight of a politically charged missile defense program has led to a system in tatters,” said the report, written by three physicists with expertise in missile defense.

“Despite more than a decade of development and a bill of $40 billion, the GMD system is simply unable to protect the U.S. public,’’ the authors wrote.

The testing process is rigged to produce favorable results:

The report notes that in “heavily scripted” flight tests that are “set up for success,” GMD interceptors have often failed to hit mock enemy warheads. In the seven most recent tests, interceptors destroyed their targets just three times, the report says -- a finding consistent with conclusions of the Pentagon’s operational test and evaluation office.

Personnel conducting the tests know the speed, location and trajectory of the target ahead of time, as well as when it will be launched – information they would not have in a real attack.

Emphasis mine and they still failed four out of seven times. The worse thing is that they will not just launch a missile from North Korea and try to nuke a West coast city. If they wanted to cripple us, all they would have to do is get a container ship within a hundred miles or so of the coast and fire their missile straight up. No time for defense and the goal would be an EMP, not an explosion. A nuke detonating at 300 miles altitude would kill the power grid over much of the continental United States - each substation would need new equipment and it would be six months minimum to get electrical power restored.