Ballistic missile defence and the politics of testing: the case of the US ground-based midcourse defence

One of the arguments of the Bush administration for the early deployment of a ballistic missile defence system was not only that this would provide some limited defensive capability, but also that it would facilitate ‘learning by doing’. In practice, however, this ‘capability-based’ deployment has failed to facilitate such technological advancement. Instead of enabling the improvement of the technology, early deployment, coupled with a series of flight-test failures, has led to a shift towards less demanding tests. Deployment has actually proved counterproductive because the need for the tests to be successful ‘public experiments’ has overridden any significant progression to more realistic testing. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.