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Brings back memories of "Spies Like Us" - the golden era for Chevy Chase and Dan Akroid.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=DiIR8DF94aU

Patriot missiles have the accuracy of storm troopers.

buried for not being related to Luke

Ok, you can hate Reagan if you want to, but he was much more legitimate than his political descendents. At least Reagan was up against a legimate threat and was trying to maneuver in an environment of MAD nuclear war game theory. I don't personally agree with his philosophies and I am primarily a Democratic voter but you can at least understand where the man was coming from.

The Bushes are much much much much more f'd up. Panama? Iraq? Come on, those are much less justified than anything Reagan did.

Battlestar? Nope.

Bah, this was done in 1980 and only cost 25c to prove your skill. It was called "Missile Command".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Command

????

From my understanding, a falling object is not like a missile coming at you - not even close.

It's funny how dumb Diggers don't understand history. Had Reagan not outspent the USSR in military equipment and preparation, we may have well had to fight something a little more real than a "Cold" war. Reagan meant business, and the Soviets knew it. The fact that today we now have technology that can destroy a missle before it hits its target is a credit to Reagan's forward thinking.

You baby libs seem to think that the Cold War just "ended", and that Soviets decided to be nice guys and change their ways. They were labelled an Evil Empire for a reason - it's what they were. Reagan had the cojones to stand against them when previous presidents (read: Carter) were scurrying to accommodate them. The man, more than any other person, is responsible for there not being a Soviet empire today.

So go ahead and take your swipes against the man. It doesn't change the fact you owe him a debt of gratitude for his leadership during an uncertain time in our country.

Help us missile defense, you're our only hope.

The web link was a little innacurate, and turned some stuff around.
The Aegis system has been on our CG-47's and DDG-51s for a long time. We're just modifying the system that was origionally designed as an umbrella defense for our carrier battle groups agains soviet swarms of bombers and missiles. Considerably less expensive than developing spacebased lasers and such.

I'd have called it Missile Command. Because essentially that's what it was suppose to be like. Missile Command.

aegis is not star wars.

It's a biased an asinine tale that overly simplifies a rather complex subject and does so with a very skewed intent.

Reagan's "Star Wars" program was both a technological one and a political one. He and his advisers knew that the program's goals could not be achieved quickly but they also knew that the mere announcing of our intent to field such a system would force the Soviets to attempt to develop some sort of counter to it. And that this would force an even greater resource consuming burden onto the already weakening Soviet economy.

Within a few years the political aim of "Star Wars" had been met: the Evil Empire collapsed. With the Soviet Union destroyed and the Cold War ended, the Star Wars program was scaled back. But even an anti-military Democrat like Bill Clinton saw the justification behind having some ability to intercept nuclear missiles so despite his gutting the rest of the military he kept the Star Wars program alive.

Effecting an intercept of an inbound ballistic missile and/ or its warhead is no small feat. Even with billions invested it took a long, long time to develop the tech to do. A quarter century later the US finally has achieved this and we've begun deploying the system to defend us and our allies.

The current system is not capable of handling even what's left of Russia's nuclear missile force. It can however, handle the relative handful of launchers that North Korea has, that Iran is working on or even the ones which China can field. This is the main point of what Star Wars has become today. It eliminates the advantage of what these tinpot dictatorships are able to field.

Being able to stop even a single US or allied city from being nuked by such missiles makes the twenty five year investment in Star Wars worthwhile.

11 trillion will be spent on social programs in the next 25 years

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/trsummary.html

While the current system is a failure ( against MRVs with many decoys ) with a conventional warhead, an "upgrade" to a small nuke warhead might make it effective against older ICBM systems. However the Russians have sub based systems and a new generation of stealth ICBMs that render this system useless. This calls into question the wisdom of voiding the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. I see it as a miscalculation that has made the world less secure.

youtube link minus blog spam.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RnOt4aN2uyc

Where's Jar Jar?