Earlier quoted context omitted.
You (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars program. They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline. History has proven them correct. You can r…
You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead. So I don't know how they scored success. I score it: Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did. Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with m…
Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#32An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
This isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress. Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#33Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#34An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead. So I don't know how they scored success. I score it: Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did. Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with m…
Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.
From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF, the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read):
At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely.
Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new boosters).
2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil Defense, and we still need it).
3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the '90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).
4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.
5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.
Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.
Nowhere do I see the combination of "OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.
And History has proven them correct., and it couldn't be, since the proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.
Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF , the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read): At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely. Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, es…
This is sort of what I was getting at: this is no longer a technical assessment, but also (or even primarily) a geopolitical and economic one. A technical assessment would consist of "a defensive technological development that accomplishes X goal can be completed in estimated Y time." Anything beyond that is garbage.
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.
Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF , the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read): At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely. Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, es…
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#38Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#39The original article is at: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-co...
Re: Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
#40It pains me to say it, but that failure is one eventuality the second amendment to the US Constitution contemplated.