Pentagon Boondoggle at $100 Million a Pop

It was a routine Saturday night on the California coast.

The Pentagon’s best and brightest prepared to blow

$100 million to smithereens high above the Pacific, and 15 protesters crashed the Vandenberg Air Force Base launch zone with boats and bodyboards, trying to halt the latest missile defense test.

Jon Aguilar, a 31-year-old Carpinteria man, was among the Greenpeace activists fished from the surf and hauled off to jail. What makes his story interesting is his background.

Aguilar is a former Marine.

“Star Wars makes no sense to me,” says Aguilar. He studied international politics and conflict resolution after a military career that included overseas work in intelligence and reconnaissance.

“It’s strategically illogical,” he argues, given the changing nature of global conflict.

He may have a point.

The news has been filled lately with details of an aborted plot by Islamic terrorists to blow up a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

I assumed they were talking about walking in, setting down a piece of luggage and disappearing.

But I could be wrong.

If they were planning to launch a suitcase bomb from a Pacific atoll at LAX, the missile defense shield might be our best hope of survival.

Of course, even then, there’s no guarantee the kill vehicle, as the Pentagon calls it, could locate the Samsonite.

In fact, before last Saturday’s test, which was the fourth at $100 million apiece, the head of the missile operation said there was a 50-50 chance of a perfect execution.

Look, there’s a 50-50 chance I can pick up a 5-10 split at Jewel City Bowl in Glendale, but I wouldn’t want you putting $100 million on it.

“The cost is mind-boggling,” says Aguilar.

You can tell he’s been out of the military for a while.

One hundred million dollars is nothing to the Pentagon, which wants to test as many as eight of these missiles a year instead of just one or two. With eight whacks, a 60-40 success rate might be within reach.

Speaking of which, they did everything but hand out kazoos Saturday night when the kill vehicle destroyed the dummy missile. The missile defense team sprung triumphantly from their seats and the chief announced a complete success, showing reporters a video of the collision.

Call me cautious, but I didn’t pop the bubbly. How do I know where they got that video? It could have been from “Battlestar Galactica” and I’d never know it.

The next day, sure enough. We learned that although the missile was pulverized, a critical radar system signaled that the kill vehicle had missed its target.

“We just need to make some modifications,” said a Pentagon flack.

Translation: Hey, Congress. We need a few billion more dollars.

Estimates for the antimissile system already range as high as $300 billion, which is a lot of clams. Particularly if the future of war is nerve gas in the subway and exploding suitcases in airports and train stations, rather than a nuclear shootout.

And that’s precisely the scenario painted recently in a New York courtroom by a convicted terrorist trained in Afghani camps financed by Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.

But these realities haven’t softened the resolve of the Pentagon or the Bush administration, which has pushed for a 57% jump in the missile defense budget.

“What they’re talking about is making nuclear war winnable, but it’s an unrealistic fear that anyone would be silly enough to launch an attack on us,” says John Pike, a defense policy analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

Even if some psycho launched such a suicide mission, Pike doesn’t think the missile shield can work.

“Let everybody who’s in favor of it go down to the missile range. The contractors can put on a big picnic, and all the members of Congress can attend, and we’ll fire a missile at them, only this time it’s a real warhead, not a dummy. If they’ll do that, I’ll start believing it can work.”

Now we’re getting warm.

If you think of missile defense not as a military project, but as a $300-billion corporate picnic, it begins to make perfect sense.

They spent $75 billion on Star Wars and got nowhere.

Fifty Nobel laureates felt compelled to sign a statement declaring the whole thing insane.

Something has gone wrong three times out of four with the Vandenberg launches, and the Pentagon says they’re on the right track.

Why not just come clean and call Star Wars and all its descendants the biggest pork project in government history, and let the corporate execs of Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin take their bows?

Meanwhile, Jon Aguilar, the ex-Marine, may find out Aug. 6 whether he’s going to jail. At a hearing last week, he found a comment from a prosecutor somewhat ironic.

“She accused us of costing taxpayers money.”

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com