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It occurs to me that English may not be the poster's first language.

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Oh you're one of those types. Don't you have some pamphlets to hand out, a sandwich board to don?

The end is near !!

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@ think you mean:

"Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there’s also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population -- to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don’t interfere with decision-making. And the press that’s designed for that purpose isn’t the New York Times and the Washington Post, it’s sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff."

?

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As Bismarck remarked, you'll always have a military in your country, either yours or someone else's. This is a capability the army needs to be able to fight a modern military. I would argue the wars that ABM isn't useful for are the ones like Iraq and Afghanistan, so your opposition to this particular system doesn't make any sense.

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If it were only the scud there wouldn't be a big deal. The scud is a V2 descendant that's barely accurate enough to hit a city - not useful as a tactical weapon. No, what the army is trying to deal with is missiles like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-21

The DF-21C using GLONASS or GPS has a CEP of 30-40 meters, which means you don't need a nuclear warhead to use it as a tactical weapon. It's expensive to use as a conventional weapon, but probably worth it for high-value targets.

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"If it were only the scud there wouldn't be a big deal."

I'm not saying the SCUD is a big problem. I'm just saying that not only can we be targeted by the missiles this system is designed to counter, but they've already have been.

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@offrdbandit
Er... Didn't the USA de-activate Iraq?

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Can you explain to me why America has taken it upon itself to go around de-activating the world all the while increasing its own military power?

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No. The Stinger has an exploding warhead that is impact fused. It must hit the target to detonate, but its main mechanism is an onboard explosive. The THAAD (and any other KKV) destroys the target by simply running into it, just like a big, sterrable bullet. Or, perhaps more precisely, maneuvering itself to get the target to run into it.

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oh wow! you are right.

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"the patriot system worked 100% in iraq."

" On February 25, 1991, a Patriot missile battery assigned to protect a military installation at Dahrahn, Saudi Arabia, failed to intercept a Scud missile, and the malfunction was blamed on an error in computer arithmetic. The Patriot's control system kept track of time by counting tenths of a second; to convert the count into full seconds, the computer multiplied by 1/10. Mathematically, the procedure is unassailable, but computationally it was disastrous. Because the decimal fraction 1/10 has no exact finite representation in binary notation, the computer had to approximate. Apparently, the conversion constant stored in the program was the 24-bit binary fraction 0.00011001100110011001100, which is too small by a factor of about one ten-millionth. The discrepancy sounds tiny, but over four days it built up to about a third of a second. In combination with other peculiarities of the control software, the inaccuracy caused a miscalculation of almost 700 meters in the predicted position of the incoming missile. Twenty-eight soldiers died..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud#Gulf_War

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"the patriot system worked 100% in iraq."

LOL. Please, do a little research into this and find out just how wrong you are.

"I don't know about ICBM's but it works for short range ones."

That's like saying that a body armor system, works against air rifle pellets, but you don't know about actual bullets.

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The original patriot actually didn't work anywhere CLOSE to 100% actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAC-3

"The U.S. Army claimed an initial success rate of 80% in Saudi Arabia and 50% in Israel. Those claims were eventually scaled back to 70% and 40%. However, when President George H. W. Bush traveled to Raytheon's Patriot manufacturing plant in Andover, Massachusetts during the Gulf War, he declared, the "Patriot is 41 for 42: 42 Scuds engaged, 41 intercepted!"[24] The President's claimed success rate was thus over 97% during the war.

On April 7, 1992 Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Reuven Pedatzur of Tel Aviv University testified before a House Committee stating that, according to their independent analysis of video tapes, the Patriot system had a success rate of below 10%, and perhaps even a zero success rate.[25][26"

Although that is really no suprise. That Patriot version was pretty much converted over night to shoot down missiles instead of airplanes. The new PAC-3 is a completely new monster which has FAR FAR more capable targeting, tracking, identification, as well as having more missiles.

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Congratulations, you have been a victim of US propaganda. The Patriot had a success rate somewhere between 0%-10%. Question everything you learn, citizen.

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"If I'm asking a question, then no, I don't know what I'm talking about."

But you're willing to assert "This unneccessary military spending needs to be cut back."???

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That'd make it a MASER or Particle beam, which do exist, but they're even less efficient in atmosphere than LASERs.

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