Due to lack of early testing and research, the Missile Defense Agency wasted $10 billion on four missile defense systems that were supposed to have the ability to identify and take out any missile heading toward the United States, reported the Los Angeles Times.
Prompted in part by an increase in anxiety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and further heightened by warnings from war hawks that North Korea and Iran were close to being able to attack the U.S. with long-range missiles, a number of programs were commissioned.
The Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX), a floating radar system, was supposed to be the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, able to detect a baseball-sized object on the other side of the country and determine if it was an actual missile or a decoy rocket.
After spending $2.2 billion on the project, the Missile Defense Agency realized that the SBX's field of vision was so narrow that it would have no use against a "stream of missiles interspersed with decoys," wrote the Times. It was supposed to be operational by 2005 but now sits at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
Not only was the project a massive waste of taxpayer money, but it left a gaping hole in the country's defenses, as the money wasted on the SBX project could have been applied toward land-based radar with more reliable capabilities.
The next failure noted by the Times was the $5.3 billion Airborne Laser system, which intended to use converted Boeing 747s to fire laser beams at missiles soon after they were launched. But it took researchers a decade to realize that the lasers couldn't be fired from sufficient distances, meaning the planes would have to continuously fly near an enemy's borders.
The we have the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a rocket designed to be fired from land or sea to intercept enemy missiles during their early stages of flight. After actually measuring the device and discovering that it was too long to fit on Navy ships, and after determining that to use the rocket on land it would have to be positioned vulnerably close to its target, the MDA shelved the program, writing off $1.7 billion as wasted.
Lastly, the Multiple Kill Vehicle was a $700 million cluster of miniature interceptors designed to take out enemy warheads and decoys. The MDA praised the project as a "transformational program" and a cost-effective "force multiplier," only to end the program four years later upon realizing that agency contractors hadn't conducted a single flight.
