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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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rshow55 - 03:46pm May 16, 2003 EST (# 11721 of 11722)
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.

I flat-out missed gisterme's posting of #11684 of 3:19pm May 15, 2003 EST http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.baAMaGWja6b.91541@.f28e622/13294 yesterday. (I tried to respond to his question 11683 about N. Korea, though I didn't have much to offer.) #11684 was very interesting - not easy to anwer, but important to me. I have no excuse for having missed it, but did until just now.

Gisterme cited rshow55 - 12:40pm May 15, 2003 EST which included these lines

"...That takes rules of exception handling. And institutional responses.

To get them, some poor souls have to "break some rules" - within limits..."

Gisterme asked: What poor souls would those be, Robert? What are the rules they have to break? What limits are you talking about? How would individuals breaking rules within limits have anything to do with institutional responses?

Here are short answers:

What poor souls would those be, Robert?

Poor souls stuck with responsibility to deal with problems (maybe big, compelling problems) where specific bodies of usages and rules classify solutions out of existence have to be prepared to violate the rules - or strain them - at the same time that they ask for modifications of the rules, arguing that the exceptions serve larger purposes. Sometimes - when a system is evolving - arguing that the exceptions should be handled in an organized pattern of exception handling.

What are the rules they have to break? What limits are you talking about? How would individuals breaking rules within limits have anything to do with institutional responses?

Sometimes procedures are set up where exceptions are accomodated within a system. To circumvent a chain of command is to break a body or rules -and in the military these are compelling rules. Even so, I was told that anyone anywhere under MacArthur's command with access to a telephone or phone link was two phone calls away from Douglas MacArthur during the last three years of MacArthur's campaign against the Japanese in WWII. MacArthur was a stickler for protocol - and for chains of command - and yet he had a well organized system of exception handling. I was told that it really worked.

I suggested an organized system of exception handling - to deal with a general body of problems - in http://www.mrshowalter.net/ScienceInTheNewsJan4_2000.htm You can call the suggestion "conservative" or "radical" from various perspectives. It is both. I believe both Eisenhowers (Dwight and Milton) would have approved, and think Casey would have approved of it. Steve Kline definitely did.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/ScienceInTheNewsJan4_2000.htm proposes an organized response when some basic rules of academe and the professions need to be challenged - for example when there is reason to challenge an "established assumption of a discipline" against the will of that discipline - in ways that the usual procedures of disciplinary power and protocol forbid.

In general, if a set of procedures and rules makes something impossible, and yet it is important to get that thing done - you need an exception or body of exceptions - and an exception making pattern that does not tear up the system (too much). But at the same time, "breaking the rules" may be a matter of life and death - in the fields of military function, medical function, and elsewhere.

Sometimes there have to be exceptions because the right rule for one purpose is just the wrong one for another purpose that sometimes has to be served.

AEA was an attempt to answer a number of questions. Here's one:

. "How do you get radical change, optimization, that can actually work in detail, when you have to modify a very large complex system that is already set up and running, involving many technical and interpersonal committments already in p

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