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Personally I would be against some type of space based antimissile system. It would have a lot of disadvantages.
1) It would be impossible to hide it. An orbiting defense system could be seen by anyone with a telescope.
2) If an enemy wanted to destroy it, they would simply keep lobbing space junk at it until they hit it and destroyed it.
3) A space based laser would seem to require a lot of energy to power it. Where would that energy come from? Probably a nuclear reactor of some kind. That sounds very expensive -- especially if you had three of these orbiting lasers in geosynchronous orbit so as to cover the entire Earth.
4) If we tried to put missiles in space, that would be even more expensive. Even a limited antimissile system would require one or two hundred missiles. It would be incredibly costly to do that in space.
Putting missiles to shoot down ICBMs on ships would be much cheaper than putting them in space. Also you could move the ships around to hide their location. There is really no nation on Earth that could take on the US Navy right now. It is completely dominant. That means ship based missiles could not be destroyed by an enemy. We could also move the ships around to protect our allies if we wanted to. It would also be possible to move the ships off the coast of a rogue nation like North Korea. That way the USA could shoot down any ICBM before it gets out of the atmosphere. When an ICBM is launching it can't deploy decoys. Also it is moving slower and makes a bigger target because of all the heat it's engines are putting out.
We don't want a massive star wars defense but we do need a limited ABM system on ships. That way Iraq and Iran and North Korea can't blackmail the USA in the future.
{;-) Dan in Cincinnati
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