Newt Gingrich on the War on Terror: "None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war."

[SteveLaura 0]

In particular SDI was more of a physiological warfare than anything. Reagan knew that it would take decades to bear fruit. That fruit is now starting with systems that are being deployed.

In his book 'Nemesis', Chalmers Johnson goes into great detail about the 'Star Wars' program and how utterly unworkable and counter-productive the whole thing is:

Johnson says all the "rhetoric about a future space war is ideological posturing" similar to the "missile gap" nonsense beginning in the Kennedy years. The notion of wars from or in space are self-defeating because the adverse consequences from them affect us as well as any adversary. Waging one would be like firing a gun exploding in our face harming us as much as anyone hit by it. Dangerous orbiting space debris, already a growing problem, is just one of many serious consequences space wars would produce. Enough of it would threaten military and commercial spacecraft that, in turn, would threaten activities in space. Johnson notes the Air Force currently tracks 13,400 man-made space objects, only a few hundred of which are orbiting satellites. We also know of more than 100,000 smaller pieces of untrackable junk, each the size of a marble and millions more even smaller fragments.

The problem isn't their size. It's the speed they travel at - up to 17,500 miles per hour (same as the space shuttle), meaning when they strike an object they pack a wallop that can be lethal if large enough debris hits an orbiting spacecraft or satellite. Johnson quotes UC Santa Cruz professor of physics Joel Primack saying: "Weaponizing of space would make the debris problem much worse, and even one war in space could encase the entire planet in a shell of whizzing debris that would thereafter make space near the Earth highly hazardous for peaceful as well as military purposes....(and) will jeopardize the possibility of space exploration."

Review of 'Nemesis'

[Caladan 19]

If friggin' Gingrich is now considered a Republican in name only, the GOP's really run off the rails.