II. Newt to the Rescue
The sbx is only a small part of the missile defense shield, yet it alone is easily one of the most amazing things the Pentagon has ever built. Pictures don't begin to capture its Seussian unlikeliness. A giant white radar dome the size of a hot-air balloon sits upon a flat rectangular deck, which itself is perched upon six elephantine pylons. At rest upon the surface of the sea, the SBX stands like a mechanical creature from the deep recesses of George Lucas' mind, ready to swat aside pesky fighter pilots in their buzzing jets. With a little Industrial Light & Magic, the thing would seem more like a part of Star Wars (the movie) than Star Wars (the shield).

The design looks comically unseaworthy, a massive, top-heavy box bobbing perilously upon the ocean. Even as you stand on the dock, with the SBX towering like a skyscraper 282 feet above you, it's hard to shake the idea that you and a bunch of friends, armed with a case of beer, couldn't splash around in the water and tip the thing over. In reality, it is designed to be one of the world's most seaworthy vessels. It started off life -- built, curiously enough, by the Russians -- as an oil-drilling platform in the North Sea, one that could move around in high winds and choppy waters in search of crude. When this vessel "ballasts down" -- sinking its submarine-size pontoons beneath the shifting surface of the sea -- massive waves crash through its pylons as harmlessly as currents eddying around the creosote-coated pilings of a dock.

In its brief history, the SBX has been a source of ridicule. Although it was destined to work the Pacific rim of our defense, the entire unit was assembled in Texas, suggesting that some serious hometown earmarking went on somewhere. Unfortunately, given its massive size, the 50,000-ton vessel could not fit through the Panama Canal, so it had to be hoisted onto an even longer vessel for a slow and precarious journey around the tip of South America. Then, when the SBX finally arrived in Hawaii, constant breakdowns forced it to spend the past twenty months in and out of the docks of Pearl Harbor, getting fixed up. But to have made it this far -- up and running, grill out back -- is a stunning achievement for the SBX specifically and missile defense in general.

Ever since Reagan unveiled the idea of the shield on March 23rd, 1983, it has limped along with just enough funding to wheeze its way to the next presidency. Each commander in chief, believing he would make missile defense work for him, re-christened it so the bureaucracy would date its beginning to his administration. Under Reagan, it was known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Under Clinton, it was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. And in the first year of George W. Bush, it became the Missile Defense Agency.

From the start, the idea of an all-encompassing shield to protect us from communist warheads seemed like one of those occasional Pentagon proposals -- a bomb that doesn't destroy infrastructure, a weapon that turns the enemy into rutting homosexuals -- that is born of a wayward faith in technology and generally withers away after becoming public. Early reviews of missile defense, like those of Reagan's old movies, were mocking: shooting the moon on defense, as Time put it in a 1984 headline. By the time communism fell five years later, missile defense had not even moved beyond the drawing board. The idea seemed quaint, a relic of detente and an earlier time, something on the order of the office of the Federal Tea-Taster, a bureaucracy that continued getting funding long after it seemed fitting. Then, in 1994, Star Wars found a new champion in Newt Gingrich, who enshrined the need to "reinvigorate a national missile defense" in the only national-security-related pledge in his Contract With America.

Given that everything these days from border patrol to Hurricane Katrina appears to have a Pentagon-related solution, it's hard to remember that there was a time, not so long ago, when it was hard to come up with a good, intimidating national-security issue. Gingrich believed that the Democrats' skepticism of missile defense would serve as the key issue to flip the White House in 1996. Missile defense failed that test -- but it didn't matter. The shield had been reborn as a hot-blooded, Republican-versus-Democrat wedge issue -- one almost on par with abortion, gun ownership or gay people in love.

The shield got another break in 1998 when Kim Jong-il, the crazed leader of North Korea, fired off a Taepodong-1 missile. The launch was a technical fiasco, but it was a shot in the arm for missile defense. That March, Clinton signed the National Missile Defense Act, making deployment of the shield a central policy of the U.S. government. Then, after Osama bin Laden blew a hole in the Pentagon in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld plowed even more money into missile defense -- even though the system was designed to counter large, trackable strikes by an enemy nation rather than small, asymmetrical threats from isolated terrorists. Indeed, the shield's hasty progress from drawing board to hardware resembles nothing so much as the Iraq War: engineered by neoconservatives, founded on blurry threat assessments, approved over the complaints of enfeebled Democrats, its mission periodically adjusted to accommodate the prevailing political winds.

Today, thanks to Rumsfeld's devotion to the shield, missile defense is the single most-expensive weapons system in the American arsenal. The Bush administration has nearly tripled Clinton's average missile defense budget, to $11-billion a year -- a sum almost four times larger than the U.S. government's total spending on energy research. By 2013, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, missile defense will be costing us nearly $19-billion a year -- roughly half the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security.

Missile defense exists in a world of its own. It has a special budget process that exempts it from most congressional oversight, and it is pioneering a new acquisitions process that redefines the very nature of what constitutes a "threat." The system has a separate definition to denote what it means for a weapon to "work" and even what it means to "know" something to be true. The shield operates beyond the world of empirical testing, and outside the four service branches of the U.S. military. In many ways, it is a new mini-me Defense Department. It is America's Pyramid of Gaza, our Colossus of Rhodes, our Great Wall -- an infinitely advancing "system of systems" that, by the Pentagon's own description, can never be completed. It both works (in part or in theory) and does not work (as a whole or in practice). There is not, and never will be, a finished product. In time, the shield will shroud America and her allies, and a perpetual commitment to its everlasting need for further refinements and add-ons will be required to keep it functioning. Long after Iraq has taken its place next to Vietnam as a college seminar on U.S. quagmires, the missile defense shield will still be evolving into what it is: the true legacy of America's sage of postmodern military existentialism, Donald Rumsfeld.

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