Not Your Sweetie

The Pentagon's Laughable Weapons Test
Fire missile. Miss target completely. Success!
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003, at 11:23 AM PT
It looked like a headline from the Onion, but it was from CNN and the story was real: "Missile
Misses Target, Officials Call It a Success." The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency had
conducted a test the afternoon of June 18. A Standard Missile-3, fired from a Navy cruiser 160
miles off the Hawaiian island of Kauai, tried—but failed—to intercept a target missile that had
been launched a few minutes earlier from the island's test range. And so it seemed another
setback had afflicted President Bush's most cherished military program.

However, the Missile Defense Agency's spokesman, Chris Taylor, saw the test differently. "I
wouldn't call it a failure," he told CNN, "because the intercept was not the primary objective. It's
still considered a success, in that we gained great engineering data. We just don't know why it
didn't hit."