How to Respond to Editorials You Don't Like

Below is the text of a letter I wrote to the Daily of the University of Washington on 7 April, 2007. The editorial which prompted the letter can be found here. http://dailyuw.com/2007/4/5/us-missile-defense-or-fissile-pretense/

Its cute, witty title notwithstanding, Sigma Chang’s editorial on missile defense is a poorly-researched mess of untruths and inaccuracies. It is a perfect example of the ignorance, arrogance, and journalistic incompetence on which the opinion pages of the Daily rely.

Throughout his story, Mr. Chang utterly fails to provide any ghost of a citation for any of his dire and dubious claims. Whether listing the types of missile defense, giving the locations of US defense installations, or stating the weapons capabilities of our enemies, Mr. Chang writes not a word about whether his sources are the Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons, defense department publications, or arrogantuninformedcollegekid.org. Had he attributed any of his claims to sources other than whatever happened to be on the big screen at 1101 during dinner, it might be believable that the slightest bit of serious research contributed to this travesty of an article.

Or maybe not. Mr. Chang claims that only tests of short-range missile defense components have been successful, short-range meaning capable of traveling no farther than 50 miles. This assertion is completely untrue.

According to a press release by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) successfully tested their Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system on July 12, 2006. According to this article, which is easily found by a simple web search, THAAD “successfully met all test objectives for the flight test.” This test included the tracking and destruction of a target representing a hostile threat, essentially hitting a flying bullet with another bullet. Mr. Chang’s editorial makes this sound like a highly improbable objective, but the FAQ of the MDA’s website (which, again, is easily found by a simple Internet search), uses the very words “hitting a bullet with a bullet” to describe the kinetic energy method of missile defense. The FAQ goes on to say that this capability “has been successfully demonstrated in test after test.”

The same Lockheed Martin press release to which I alluded earlier states that THAAD is intended to defend against “short- to intermediate range ballistic missiles.” According to the MDA, an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) has a range of 3000 to 5500 kilometers. For those of you without TI-85s at hand, this is a range of roughly 1800 to 3400 miles. This information clashes violently with Mr. Chang’s claim that “ground-based missile defense doesn’t work against anything that could travel more than about 50 miles.”

In the one instance in which he gives numerical data, Mr. Chang alleges that the Raytheon-built Patriot system is effective against “70 percent of missiles in Saudi Arabia and 40 percent in Israel, with an individual accuracy rate of 25-33 percent.” These numbers do not speak well for the Patriot, as a grade of 70 percent usually translates into a C- at the UW. Before I elaborate on Mr. Chang’s statistics, I must point out that these numbers were recorded the last time the US used the MIM-104 Patriot system, which was during Desert Storm. This conflict occurred at a time (1991) when a large portion of the Daily’s demographic was still learning to tie their shoes. Additionally, the Patriot was designed for the purpose of defending against only short-range weapons in theater. It is a completely different system from the missile shield currently being engineered by the MDA. However, this total lack of pertinence does not preclude any of Mr. Chang’s misinformation.

Wikipedia’s entry on the Patriot states that, following the Gulf War, analysts could not agree on how to measure the efficacy of the system. Charles A. Zraket of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Peter D. Zimmerman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies testified that the disagreement rose from the definitions of success rate and accuracy. They defined success rate as the percentage of missiles rendered harmless, and accuracy as the percentage of Patriots which scored a hit. Because standard practice during the Gulf War was to fire three or four Patriots at each enemy missile, the system could have a 100 percent success rate – that is, it could have destroyed every missile it encountered -- and still have a maximum accuracy of 33 percent.

Mr. Chang also makes dubious claims about the capabilities of weapons currently possessed by North Korea and Iran. From where, oh where, was this information culled? Mr. Chang does not say, and I might discount these assertions for this reason alone. However, as an intern for Boeing last summer, I worked with a team of engineers and scientist from leading defense contractors and national laboratories on the very missile defense system disparaged by Mr. Chang in his editorial. I know for a fact that accurate and current information on the capabilities of both US and foreign ballistic missiles is classified. The sheer number of inaccuracies in Mr. Chang’s article shows that he is not a person who would be privy to classified defense intelligence, and therefore has no basis on which to expound on the level of threat posed by any hostile nation.

Almost as repulsive as the cesspool of misinformation presented in this article is the degree of knowledge its author arrogantly presumes to possess. Mr. Chang claims that, not wanting a missile defense radar, in their backyards, Czech villagers are more informed than our President on the efficacy of the missile defense system currently designed, tested, and built by the best engineering minds in the nation. I have already mentioned that not every bit of information on United States missile defense is available to everyone, including Boeing interns. But, from what I did learn last summer, I am extremely optimistic about this country’s missile defense capabilities. Imagine, then, the intelligence provided to the Commander-in-Chief of this nation. Is he less informed than any citizen, let alone an international studies student who would attach his name to a work showcasing such a woeful lack of research and writing skill?