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The recent performance of Israel, Jordan, USA, France and Britain in shooting down 99% of the 300+ drones and missiles fired at Israel by Iran, has caused some people to take a second look at the whole concept of missile defence, starting with one Noah Smith, who usually writes about US economics, which naturally had to include US military spending, since it’s so huge, Why so many of us were wrong about missile defense:

[F]or most of my adult life, I believed that ballistic missile defense was a hopeless, failed cause. From the 2000s all the way through the 2010s, I read lots of op-eds about how kinetic interceptors — “hitting a bullet with a bullet” were just an unworkably difficult technology, and how the U.S. shouldn’t waste our time and money on developing this sort of system.

I’ve read virtually nothing else since Reagan first proposed it in 1983, with the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) program quickly dubbed by critics as “Star Wars”, a superb piece of snark that headlined years of the sort of dismissiveness described by Smith.

To be fair (as he also notes), there’s still a big difference between the missile defence of today compared to the early dreams of SDI: there are no nuclear-powered X-Ray laser platforms sitting in orbit. But things like that were the product of Manhattan Project nuclear physicist, Edward Teller, who had long been known for his brilliance – and his stubborn adherence to wildly impractical ideas (like his 1940’s design for a Hydrogen Bomb that would have needed a ship to deliver to the USSR). The current systems can’t quite deal with ICBM’s and MIRVS (multiple warheads) either, which was the original focus of Reagan, Teller and company.

Still, while pro-SDI experts like Teller were sneered at by the MSM, the anti-SDI crowd of experts was cut far too much slack:

Missile defense critics were badly served by their go-to experts. The loudest and most prominent of these was Theodore Postol, a professor at MIT. He was a relentless lifelong critic of missile defense, penning numerous op-eds on the topic over the years. And his work was recognized by other scientists — he won awards…And Postol had plenty of scientific arguments on his side.
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But it seems that he didn’t reckon with just how amazingly good software (and hardware detection technology) would get. By the time the Ukraine War came around, the Patriot missiles that Postol had spent so many years assailing had become star performers, shooting down Russian Iskander ballistic missiles and hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. Now, Israel’s even more-advanced Arrow system is shooting down even longer-ranged, faster ballistic missiles

So Postol was smart and knowledgable, at least about the physics of missile defence – but he wasn’t an expert in all the areas required to make it work, like software, and this statement about him applies to many other “experts”, especially the MSM’s “go-to” ones:

But because he was so loud and strident and activist, journalists looking for an expert on missile defense would often find him and quote him. And op-ed writers looking for background knowledge on missile defense would read his writings and take them to heart. So his mistakes got amplified and became conventional wisdom.

Sounds like Michael Baker, Siouxsie Wiles (the pink-haired one) and others on C-19.

To be fair to the likes of Smith, the other experts who could have argued with or even outright contradicted the likes of Postol, were working on the very programs being criticised and because of security couldn’t say anything in public. As Smith himself says:

So we have an asymmetry here. The information about how good America’s weapons systems are gets kept behind closed doors, unveiled in secret Congressional briefings and whispered between defense contractors. Meanwhile, everyone who wants to criticize U.S. weapons systems is on the outside, squawking loudly to the press.

He also talks about another of those military weapons experts: one Pierre Sprey (who died in 2021), whose target was not SDI but modern fighter planes, especially the American F-35, the most expensive weapons system in history, at more than $400 billion!

I watched one of Mr Sprey’s interviews years ago where he tore down the F-35 and was impressed by some of his points. Turns out that I should not have been because, as this article from 2014 points out, Pierre Sprey’s Anti-F-35 Diatribe Is Half Brilliant And Half Bullshit. While they also have issues with the whole program – especially the cost and time required to build a plane that can perform multi-mission roles for the US Air Force, Navy and Marines – they look at each of Sprey’s attack points and tear them up. But there’s a basic reason he’s wrong on so many points:

[H]is inflexible, almost laser like obsession with stripped down, single role light fighters is where his arguments all come apart. It is also clear that his decades old arguments have not aged well as the technologies and aircraft configurations he so easily disregards have proven to be fantastic investments for America and our allies. Even his very own F-16 has happily grown into an almost unrecognizable medium-weight multi-role fighter compared to the one he envisioned so many years ago.

One of my suspicions about Sprey’s criticism of the F-35 was that it was increasingly being purchased by other countries, and not just the ones in NATO. Could so many militaries be wrong about a weapon system? It seemed unlikely (although the F-104 Starfighter is a cautionary tale), and the roll-call of buyers has recently grown a lot: Suddenly, The F-35 Fighter Is Everywhere.

One thing I didn’t know is that he had much the same criticism of the F-15 (“…too loaded up with junk”), which has a combat record of kill:loss ratio of 105.5 : 0. That is, no combat losses in fifty years of use by multiple nations. And according to this silly but informative video, “Shut up about the F-35”, Sprey’s early 1970’s recommendations for stripping the F-15 down were half-assed and rejected even back then. To keep saying what he does about the F-15 and stealth technologies in the face of their overwhelming battlefield success loses him a lot of credibility. But then according to that same video, his roles in the F-16 and A-10 programs were overblown and self-referencing to start with. The video is 40 minutes long but if you’re interested in this stuff, watch it all, especially the last three minutes where it points out that war-fighting does change, often rapidly, and so the people designing things like the F-35 may simply be ahead of their critics.

Smith finishes his article on the same note, quoting one of his MSM comrades, Matt Yglesias, in a rant back in 2006 about how missile defence was a waste of time in dealing with various Islamic Jihadist groups, which was a fair point back then, but:

Fast forward two decades, and this outlook looks dangerously naive. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s attacks on Israel, and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan or the Philippines show the importance of ballistic missile defense as a way of blocking attacks by invading states.

There’s no easy solution to the problem of reporting on military weapon systems, but as Smith accepts, he and other journalists and pundits at least need to be aware of their past mistakes and do better:

We pundits should talk to and listen to a variety of experts, not just the loudest and most confident. While recognizing that we don’t have enough time to become experts in everything, we should still try to understand the underlying technologies as best we can, as well as the details of the defense procurement process. And most importantly, in my opinion, we should keep the interests of the nation foremost in our mind, and remember that if the U.S. goes down, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power will hardly matter.

Wow! What a concept! Imagine if they applied that approach to every area they report on?