\n<\/p>\n
The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don\u2019t exist. Sometimes, the Defense Department cooperates with Hollywood and provides advice; other times, it takes a pass, especially if the subject raises touchy issues. The Navy, for example, naturally didn\u2019t want to help with Crimson Tide, deciding that the 1995 movie about a mutiny on a nuclear-missile submarine perhaps wasn\u2019t in the best interest of the naval service.<\/p>\n
Now the Pentagon is annoyed with the director Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s new movie, A House of Dynamite, a sweaty thriller about civilian and military leaders trying to cope with a surprise missile launch against the United States. It\u2019s not too much of a spoiler to note that in the early part of the movie, America launches GBIs, or ground-based interceptors, from Alaska\u2014a system that really exists at Fort Greeley, near Fairbanks\u2014to shoot down the mystery missile. Those interceptors miss. Twice.<\/p>\n
This depiction of a failed interception, along with some discussion in the movie about the overall chances of America\u2019s GBIs shooting down enemy weapons, has the very real Pentagon\u2019s Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, concerned. According to a mid-October internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, MDA felt the need to send around talking points so that the agency leadership \u201chas situational awareness and is not \u2018surprised\u2019 by the topic, which may come up in conversations or meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n
MDA is particularly concerned that the characters in A House of Dynamite accept that U.S. interceptors have only a roughly 61 percent chance of shooting down an enemy missile\u2014a problem described by the film\u2019s deputy national security adviser of \u201chitting a bullet with a bullet.\u201d This prompts the movie\u2019s secretary of defense to shout with frustration: \u201cSo it\u2019s a fucking coin toss? This is what we get for $50 billion?\u201d<\/p>\n
Having worked on (and taught) these issues during my career, I thought 61 percent was too generous, but MDA is having none of it. The film\u2019s 50\u201350 estimation, according to MDA, is based on dated tests and older prototypes. Today\u2019s interceptors, the agency says, \u201chave displayed a 100% accuracy rate in testing for more than a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read that again: 100 percent.<\/p>\n
Experts, including me, obviously have some questions about a claim like this one, but you don\u2019t need to be an expert to know that there\u2019s no such thing as a 100 percent success rate for anything. No weapons system functions at 100 percent by any measure, whether it\u2019s a kid\u2019s slingshot or an intercontinental ballistic missile. Military planners build redundancy into their plans and systems because they specifically reject the foolish assumption that anything is 100 percent functional. The world\u2019s an imperfect place; machines fail and the humans who run them make mistakes all the time. As retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, an adviser to the film, said to the ABC reporter Martha Raddatz this weekend: \u201cI don\u2019t know of a single technological system that is perfect with 100 percent accuracy. And remember, in this case, Martha, we\u2019re talking about literally a bullet needing to hit a bullet.\u201d<\/p>\n
I asked Joe Cirincione, a well-known arms-control analyst and author, whether there is any interpretation of MDA\u2019s claim that makes sense. The only way the agency can claim that the interceptors have displayed a 100 percent accuracy rate, he wrote to me, \u201cis by carefully selecting the data range.\u201d<\/p>\n
Specifically, the words more than a decade seem to be doing a lot of work in the MDA memo. Cirincione noted a recent analysis by scientists at the American Physical Society showing that the Pentagon used the results of only its most recent four tests, conducted since June 2014. \u201cThose four hit their targets,\u201d he wrote, but if the Pentagon \u201chad gone back 15 years, they would have had to include the three failed tests in 2010 and 2013. That would have given a success rate of 57 percent, which is about what the film uses and is, in fact, the approximate success rate over all 20 tests, going back to 1999.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the Pentagon has a point, doesn\u2019t it? Four tests, four hits, right?<\/p>\n
Well, no. Only two of the tests were against test targets representing ICBMs; the other two were against intermediate-range launches, which are somewhat easier targets. So, in more than a decade, the system has had two tests against a threat like the one in the movie, and those two tests succeeded under very controlled and artificial conditions. Cirincione and others call these \u201cstrapped down chicken tests\u201d\u2014highly scripted events where the target\u2019s location and time of launch is already known as part of the exercise.<\/p>\n
Why would MDA make such a risible claim? For one thing, inflated numbers are nothing new in the missile-defense world. More than two decades ago, the Pentagon official Edward Aldridge asserted that an earlier version of the interceptors would be 90 percent accurate against a North Korean missile launch.<\/p>\n
But more to the point, MDA is probably anticipating funding from the Trump administration for the president\u2019s \u201cGolden Dome,\u201d an idea that no one seems able to define beyond a Lockheed Martin executive\u2019s description of a \u201cdefense of our nation against all aerial and missile threats.\u201d Donald Trump, as I wrote last summer, appears to think of Golden Dome as a nuclear-missile shield over the entire United States that would function like Israel\u2019s Iron Dome system. But Iron Dome is a much more limited system, over a much smaller country, against much slower targets. A leak-proof shield against ICBMs is impossible, just as it was when Ronald Reagan first announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. (I worked on SDI-related projects in the late \u201980s; even back then, the goal was to complicate Soviet nuclear first-strike planning, not to seal America under a bubble.)<\/p>\n
Trump is not someone who deals well with nuance, and MDA may be guessing that \u201c100 percent\u201d is the kind of talking point he\u2019d like. (Trump long ago claimed that U.S. missile defenses are 97 percent effective, so MDA is upping the ante.) The president is also someone who watches a lot of television, and MDA is probably right to worry what could happen if someone turned a White House television to Netflix while A House of Dynamite was playing. Claiming 100 percent accuracy would be a hard sell even to a sympathetic public\u2014which is probably why the MDA memo was for internal use only\u2014but it\u2019s a very smart way to pitch something to someone like Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
The military was not involved with A House of Dynamite, because Bigelow didn\u2019t ask for their help: \u201cI felt that we needed to be more independent,\u201d she recently told CBS. Instead, she sought out former senior military officers and other wonks as technical advisers. (I was invited to the set and asked for some of my input on the film while it was in production, but I was not formally a consultant to the production.) And just as well, because even the most fanciful screenwriter is not going to write a scenario with a system that\u2019s 100 percent accurate. A House of Dynamite is fiction, but at least it\u2019s not science fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Defense Department is notoriously picky about films that depict military and national-security issues, and understandably so. Many movies that feature the military get a lot of things wrong, including innocent flaws such as actors who are the wrong age for the rank on their costume, or scripts that invent procedures or terms that don\u2019t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2129,1547,8448,1988,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-30996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-defense","9":"tag-good","10":"tag-militarys","11":"tag-missile","12":"tag-system"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}