National Review:
Ronald Reagan is owed an apology.
In 1983, President Reagan gave a speech in which he called for the development of a missile-defense system. The project was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, but Democrats and their media cheerleaders mocked it as “Star Wars,” its announcement coming, as it did, shortly after Reagan’s equally detested “Evil Empire” speech. Reagan laid out a broad vision for a long-term investment in technological development, possibly involving everything from satellites to lasers.
Reagan’s critics especially hated the lasers. They thought he was just a goofy old man who’d spent too much time in the movies.
In a recently authored memo, the Pentagon’s chief weapons-tester (the acting director of Operational Test and Evaluation), upgraded our current missile-defense system from “limited capability” to “demonstrated capability.” This followed a successful test of the system, in which it was used to intercept and destroy a dummy intercontinental ballistic missile. The small change in wording represents a big change in confidence.
A missile-defense system is a textbook public good, which is to say, non-rivalrous and non-excludable in consumption: If a missile is stopped from hitting San Francisco, the benefit is not apportioned according to user fees. It is also a long-term project necessitating substantial investments in basic science, which means spending a great a deal of money following a great many promising ideas to a great many dead ends, which is how a great deal of science is done. Put another way: Developing a missile-defense system is precisely the sort of thing that the federal government exists to do. It is the opposite of the “free false teeth” school of government.
The path from “Star Wars” to the current system was not straight — there was never any good reason to suppose it would have been. Big ideas about space-based laser shields were displaced by an old-fashioned engineering approach: hitting an inbound missile with a faster outbound missile. The Clinton administration changed the name of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in an effort to cleanse the stain of Reaganism from the project. It is now the Missile Defense Agency, which is an avis very rara indeed: a federal agency that is generally regarded as both responsible and effective. It would like $8 billion in the next budget to continue its work. We ought to oblige — how much would we be willing to pay if we could somehow undo 9/11? “
Would it not be better to save lives than to avenge them?” Reagan asked. “Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are. Indeed, we must”…
