It is time to stop appeasing the North Koreans and take action. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed many $100s of billions to our debt, the result of wars of attrition. Our current response to North Korea continues this pattern and actually validates the North Korean threat. This has got to stop.

A country should be able to feed its people. If it cannot then it is a failed country. North Korea cannot feed its people, at least it seems as such.

Here are some steps I would recommend.

Step #1: Discontinue all aid until nuclear observers are allowed into the country and can operate freely (with NK observation but no interference). No aid without compliance, the blood and death is on those causing the problems, not on those who would try to help.
Step #2: Restore aid with the explicit requirement that aid distribution is controlled by a UN agency (with NK observation but no interference, I can't believe I'm supporting the UN...)
Step #3: I'm not sure, but the first two would placate the world in terms of North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and could result in the restoration of aid to the population (could, this is not guaranteed, the blood is on their hands). After that the next move is on the North Korean leadership. Have a couple of US carrier groups nearby and possibly bolster South Korean defenses as well...

It just seems like another excuse to prop up our bloated military-industrial complex. Do they really think NK will launch a missile our way, or is this just another example of security theater?

Will 'resolve' the situation themselves to prevent South Korea, USA and other countries to have to intervene when North Korea goes to far. They would be able to establish a government friendly to China and preserve their interests in the region. Also, they would be able to show their military power in a war every other nation will find just.

If by standing up you mean "give the DoD yet another excuse to flush billions down the shitter so their MIC buds can buy some more hookers and blow" you are correct. This "interceptor" is another Sgt York, looks good on paper but doesn't work IRL but hey, as long as the MIC can bleed more billions out of the pentagon its all good, see the F-22 and F-35 for examples.

To me the fucking sad part is our MSM is so damned bought and paid for they are ignoring all the evidence that shows NK is about as big a threat as those WMDs in Iraq. For those that didn't read the report, you know that "sat" that NK put in orbit, which just FYI but uses the SAME ROCKET that they would use to launch a nuke? Yeah we recovered the first and second stage, turns out its just an uprated SCUD. "Well so what?" you ask? Simple the USSR wasn't stupid and they didn't hand out their good shit to third stringers and lets be clear on this The SCUD is NOT a missile in the conventional sense, its rocket artillery. Its not designed to go any real distance but to be used in a artillery barrage similar to "Stalin's Organs" in WWII. Neither its fuel nor its engine is designed to be a SRBM much less an ICBM and is frankly more likely to explode on the pad (as several did in NK before the sat launch) or fall apart in flight. The ONLY ones that have to fear this is SK because any farther than that and this POS is gonna fall out of the sky in pieces. Hell they'd be lucky to even hit the North American continent, much less any city in the USA.

So yet again we get a "threat" that is all bullshit and hype so the DoD and MIC can play Scrooge McDuck and swim in pools of money while the American people get stuck with more garbage. Hell at least with something like SDI (which also didn't work) you were looking at a REAL threat in the USSR, the NK "military" if you can call them that are using 40+ year old ex-Soviet junk that frankly wasn't top line when the Soviets sold it, just as we sold the F-5 to those countries we didn't trust with the good stuff so too did the Soviets keep "export versions" which they actually called "monkey models" to sell to third stringers like NK. At the end of the day NK is a bad joke, the little fatty "dear leader" has nothing more than bodies to throw into any conflict as their tech is so old and shitty, remember how well that worked for the Japanese empire in the Pacific?

This is just more empty threats in the hopes of wrangling more aid but never let it be said the DoD ever missed an opportunity to crap more money away.

Or the system as a whole?

If the success rate is per interceptor, meaning that they have several chances to hit a warhead by using several interceptors then 50 percent isn't too bad. Fifty percent success (or failure) means that shooting say five interceptors at each warhead will result in a 95 percent chance of shooting it down, not perfect but certainly enough to make Kim Jung-Un realize he probably isn't going to inflict ANY damage with a suicidal nuclear attack. NK probably wouldn't be able to get off more than a few before the launch sites and command bunkers were nuked (can you say close to shore submarine based missiles on depressed trajectories?).

Of course if the success rate is for the system as a whole (doubtful) for example due to some basic limitation of the targeting radars, then adding more interceptors isn't going to deter Mr. Kim. He probably realizes that his attack is a long shot (ha ha) anyway and having 50 percent odds on taking out, say San Francisco is pretty good. So let's hope that the system is capable of targeting multiple interceptors at a single warhead so the odds are in our favor.

The best scenario is for to add more layers to make a multilayer defense. In addition to the Patriot missile batteries in South Korea and the Aegis missile cruisers offshore (can either of their missiles overtake an ascending ICBM launched hundreds of miles away?) whatever happened to the laser equipped 747s?

Now if Kim Jung-Un really wanted to make the U.S. worried, he should use his much more powerful (but extremely vulnerable and time consuming to launch) liquid fueled rockets to put a disguised nuke INTO ORBIT. Not only would it completely bypass the ABM defenses that are only protecting the U.S. from direct trajectories but it would reduce the warning time from 30 minutes to maybe 5 (or zero if an EMP blast was the goal). The only thing the U.S. could do would be to pre-emptively knock down EVERY satellite put up by NK which while easily doable, would really raise tensions. Of course NK would be violating the 1967 treaty banning weapons (especially nukes!) in Outer Space which is probably the only thing that kept us from accidental thermonuclear war but NK doesn't seem to pay to much attention to treaties.

So if NK starts orbiting largish satellites and testing re-entry vehicles, be afraid.

One side effect of all this is that the improvements in ABM systems is forcing China to upgrade its ICBM force. Unlike the Russians, the Chinese only had a few hundred (?) ICBMs capable of reaching the U.S. and no subs or bombers. They worried that if the shit REALLY hit the fan, the U.S. could launch a first strike taking out most of their missiles (not to mention iPhone production). The few surviving missiles would not make it through even the modest shield that is being built and thus the U.S. woud survive unscathed. So the Chinese are following the Russian model of bolstering their ICBM forces so that even after a first strike they would be able to overwhelm the limited ABM defenses in place.

This fear of an enhanced ABM system is one reason why China is (trying to) keep Mr. Kim from building ICBMs. Not to mention the fear that South Korea and Japan and possibly Taiwan(!!!) will decide they need a nuclear deterrent against North Korea. That would really complicate China's desire to become THE power in Asia (and make reunification with Taiwan much more perilous).

Five years maybe? Ten at the outside. The Chinese industrial base is so far beyond America's, both in terms of total productive capacity and terms of manufacturing technology, that it will be almost impossible for America to maintain it's current military superiority in the medium term.

After thinking over my previous (long) post a little, it occurred to me that the X-37 was probably designed with NK in mind.

For those of you not familiar with it, it is a extremely flexible winged spacecraft (looks like a mini-shuttle) operated by the Air Force. By extremely flexible I mean it can be launched into any orbit (including polar ones), has demonstrated orbital maneuvering capability, (very) long life in space, and considerable cross-range capability. And it can return objects from space with its cargo bay! It's too small to retrieve large commercial satellites (but not too small to retrieve a warhead) and can gently land on a runway with rubber tires not skids. It is not man-rated and does not have a docking port or any other features that would make it useful as a rescue vehicle.

It was rumored that it was sent up to spy on the Chinese space station but for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that the Chinese would see it coming and would be pissed, that was dismissed.

So when Mr. Kim starts launching more reliable "satellites" (the first one failed after achieving orbit), I imagine the U.S. will send up one of these with a good camera and radiation detectors to give it a close inspection. Maybe it'll even come into physical contact and probe it with robotic arms! If it really looks suspicious, perhaps it will stow it on board and retun it, presumably to Guantanamo bay (that way if there's a nuke on board it won't go off on U.S. soil). (Perhaps that's why it's a WINGED re-entry vehicle, in addition to giving it cross range capability, I'd imagine the g-forces would be less not to mention no annoying "thump" when it splashes down or lands).

Unlike China, it is highly unlikely that NK has developed space based radar that could detect something sneaking up on its "Satellite" from ANY direction. (Also, here's a question, does anyone know if the X-37 is stealthed?). In addition, even if the NK satellite did detect the X-37, it couldn't easily communicate that fact to the ground; I'd bet NK has only the most rudimentary communications and tracking support, probably limited to only when it's passing over NK. I'd even doubt their few "friends" in the world (China? Iran?) would be willing to help, especially if the North Koreans were using it as a cover for putting nukes in orbit! (That's not something you want to be associated with). So it's basically blind and dumb for most of its orbit, a sitting duck for the X-37.

If the next time NK puts a working satellite in orbit the U.S. follows with a launch of the X-37 remember: you read it here first!

Except that's not what they did this time. This time they:

1. Provoked
2. Talked
3. We agreed to cough up food aid
4. They launched a long-range missile and blew up a nuke, BEFORE the food aid was delivered. This prompted us to . . .
5. Cancel the food aid
6. They escalate the rhetoric
7. ????

This is why normally sober analysts are a bit worried. This is breaking the script.