Less*

It could have been 136 miles closer and would still have missed it by a mile.

"I know there's a dog." 😂😂

That was a very funny line when the show first came out. It’s hasn’t aged well. Mostly because I’m now 55.

You beat me to this comment by two days, dammit.

​@@fishbone3333Missed it by that much 🤏😂

@@fishbone3333 At least Tackleberry is still in charge of weapons. Too bad his aim has gotten worse since he was at Police Academy.

Leo failed a USAF reliability test so badly that a fellow airman pulled a gun on him. It helped set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to a hamburger almost ending the world. Ferris Bueller saved the day. Leo eventually ended up WHCoS by failing upwards apparently.

*wish

Israel’s Iron Dome is a working missile defense system, albeit one that intercepts much slower missiles. We have a working system now that would probably take out two or three North Korean or Iranian missiles. So missile defense has borne fruit. Could we build one capable of intercepting several thousand missiles? Maybe, maybe not. As for lasers, there is some possibility that pulse lasers might do the trick. But it’s still on the drawing board.

It seems supersonic missiles rendered this completely useless. Chalmers Johnson also pointed out that any Third World nation, including North Korea, could send a rocket into space loaded with gravel and explode it. The debris would render all satellites useless and make it impossible to launch new ones, rendering us unable to explore space. It would be a barbaric crime, but one that any nation contemplating its demise might be tempted to do.

@@jfallas Missiles have been supersonic for decades. You may be thinking hypersonic, but only two countries have that expensive technology and even those have been demonstrably shot down recently in Ukraine. And the gravel example is much harder that described. The space above Earth is big, to paraphrase Douglas Adams. Bigger than the surface of the Earth. There are already tens of thousands of tracked trash items in low-earth orbit. The Chinese and US anti-sat missions last decade added more than 30000 items of debris alone. And satellites continue to function there. It would take masses of gravel the weight of city blocks to become truly problemmatic, launched from thousands of rockets at great effort at huge $ a pound. In fact, Brilliant Pebbles was one of the intercept concepts 40 years ago, but it conceptually involved opening a bag of BB's right in the specific path of a ballistic missile. But knowing the path and hoping the dispersal of tiny objects crossed the trajectory to knick the target was more risky than just calculating and smacking into it with a big slug to vaporize it.

@@jfallas Patriot missiles have been shooting down Russian hypersonic missiles. There's no question that missile defense is hard, but it is by no means technologically impossible. As for the "load of gravel" attack, Chalmers Johnson studied economics, political science, and East Asian studies; I take his estimates of plausible technology with a grain of salt. In this case, he underestimates the volume of space. Do you have any idea of how many rockets filled with gravel you'd have to launch to make near Earth Orbit unusable?

Kessler syndrome/effect ?

This joke is right on target... landed as expected right in the dead zone.

"I understood that reference." - Captain America

back in the day, missile defense was politicized because it was seen as a "republican" project. So left leaning media loved to poke fun at it as a waste of money.

Nuclear ICBM's always were hypersonic. Nothing new there.

We need Ukrainians to figure it out. They are fucking wrecking Russia with Patriots, doing shit our guys said can't be done.

Yeah this is a dumb comment. Plus, hypersonic glide vehicles are 60s tech.

@@nutsackmania ... and nuclear bombs are '40's tech. What didn't exist in the '60s is super-computers and AI. Also, the fuel systems for '60s hypersonics were not terribly stable. The list goes on, but effective hypersonics were SF until the computers and metallurgy along with polymers, etc., made them much more effective. So yeah, it existed in the '60s, but the science was still incomplete.

Patriot batteries have been hitting Russian hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, a high percentage of the time. Lucy is too slow at yanking the football, any more.

Those aren't exclusive, don't let your anti-intellectualism shine.

Leo does the crossword puzzles & wants Margaret to call the newspaper when they misspelled Gaddafi as an answer. He has a daughter... who at some point was a child. He's never thumbed thru the comics section of the paper?

Patriot is/was NOT effective. In fact, if you read the data and not just believe what you are told, the kill rate was awful. And Iron Dome has only gone up against very simple and crude missiles. No chance these systems could reliably take out incoming warheads that had decoys and/or altered their trajectories in flight. ✌️

Ballistic missiles lobbed from across a border or the next state over aren't quite the same speed or difficulty as ICBMs.

​@@cconnorslet me mention the THAD

No, it doesn't. In fact, the kill/success rate of the Patriot was/is astoundingly low. When will people learn to stop blindly believing what the government/MSM tells them? ✌️

If you go to usaspending.gov and go to agency breakdown you might be surprised to find that the U.S. defense budget is smaller than the Department of Health by a pretty notable margin.

Instead of financing Columbus, Spain could have provided healthcare to 100 people 400 years ago.

Missile defence technology has come a long way since the early 2000s. GMD has demonstrated intercepting targets in space and now they use salvos of several interceptors for a single incoming warhead.

It's a show with a comedic scene, not real life criticism.

The whole show was about making political commentary. Of course it was criticizing missile defense. Did you listen to the dialogue? They were gaslighting that missile intercepts were a waste of money.

At the point the episode aired, reasonably reliable missile defense was about 15 years away. Not that long really given the difficulty of the problem, though at the time it was already 15 years since Reagan's "Star Wars" so it wasn't unreasonable to think the problem was insoluble.

@@bobwinters5572Successful repeated ballistic intercepts were happening with the cited program (NMD, later GMD) as early as 2005, only 4 years after this episode. There were aggressive disclaimers who staked their professional careers stating it would never work, spouting things like "it was physically impossible to hit a bullet with a bullet", trying to get the program defunded. Until they did it, again and again - another just this year with a complex target. There have been launch failures, but few "misses." And scaled down versions were created from it with great success. But the concept was made fun of just like this: derided as impossible, until it wasn't.

@@traceythomas6761 Yep. Hitting bullets with bullets has always been physically possible, it's just been out of the scope of our capabilities for most of human history. We spent decades on it, and now we can do it. This episode aired nearly 25 years ago. That's a long time to figure out how to do something important.

Bartlett is old enough to remember the Cold War. He was canoniocally born in the mid-1940s. He would have been a child and young adult during the Cold War and spent most of his adult life under the constant specter of potential nuclear war. Make whatever point you feel like making, but don't pretend you know jack squat about the show or the characters while you're doing it when it took me less than ten seconds of googling to find out you're full of shit.

Leo is a few years younger than Jed.

No, it is that Leo is the Catholic in this instance, and Jed is the atheist. Jed would like proof that something is going to work someday and Leo is the true believer who only needs faith. 🙄

@@phillipgathright8001 ?? Jed is the one who has a "talk" with God in the National Cathedral after Landingham's death, who knows the secret of the "shibboleth" verse in the Bible and uses it to determine the Chinese refugees are in fact Christian, he has a heartfelt conversation with Vinnick after it's revealed Vinnick is an atheist where he describes himself as a "New Testament kind of guy."

@johnkloosterman6277 Wow, dude. Totally missed my point. I said, "in this instance," referring to the scene in the Situation Room. Leo is the true believer in the missle defense system, and Jed is definitely not.

Yeah. Can you believe they actually accused Russia of planning to invade Ukraine? Insane.