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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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lchic - 05:07pm May 14, 2003 EST (# 11655 of 11661)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

Friedman's for standards ....

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/14/opinion/14FRIE.html

British_Tommy's for homeland solutions (let them take revenge)

.... overall which is the swiftest solution to new beginnings?

lchic - 05:22pm May 14, 2003 EST (# 11656 of 11661)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

If Casey's visionary grand plans were right for the world - affordable food, energy, democracy and peace ... then ... How do modern leaders measure up? Are any moving towards that vision? Or, is there a need for R&D $ inputs ... to make the world cohesive and globally bonded to enable higher_technological_levels of interactive commerce and trade?

rshow55 - 05:43pm May 14, 2003 EST (# 11657 of 11661)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Casey was not a lot more visionary than Eisenhower - but more analytic (maybe).

He thought systems could be improved - but that meant something "radical" - that we had to understood how other systems worked when they worked well.

And hoped to be able to use the things that worked - without corruption - or, anyway, without too much.

- -

I've been thinking a good deal about what I can effectively say. My guess is - everything I need to, if I'm careful.

I think Eisenhower, and Casey, Truman, and a lot of other people of that earlier generation would have been appalled at some of the shortcomings of modern leaders - Eisenhower thought that a lot of the problem came from the superficiality of television.

Casey had "visionary grand plans" that would have seemed very reasonable to many good people - and whole extended populations of people - in 1890, or 1910, or 1940, or 1945, or 1950.

But he was asking some questions that have come to be thought of as "unamerican." For example -

How, exactly, did the fascists do the effective things they did - and could the good be separated from the bad?

How, exactly, did the communists do some of the effective things they did - and could the good be separated from the bad?

He thought it was sensible to consider such questions in detail. So did a lot of other reasonable people.

Much of the work AEA did was specifically linked to adressing problems that bothered Casey as a lawyer -and as head of the SEC. He wanted America to work better.

And he, like a lot of other people, was competing with the totalitarians - and wanted to find ways to actually deliver the things that people needed that otherwise might cause them to accept totalitarian approaches.

He wanted to make democracy and capitalism better - and felt that for some purposes - there had to be some effective exception handling. That wasn't a radical view in the top echelons of the US government from 1935 to 1960.

When C.P. Snow wrote The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in 1959, some intelligent people in government asked - why not? At the level of analysis - linear program - there were two key problems especially. There wasn't enough energy - or enough agricultural capacity. And it was also clear that - in some key areas - analytical techniques weren't good enough, either.

- -

At the same time, Casey, like other leaders, was

"up to his ass in alligators"

and often had to be distracted from "drain the swamp" level problems. But he knew those higher level challenges were there - dirty as his hands were - and wanted solutions.

He took it for granted that those solutions, often enough, would take government coordination and other help.

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