John Tierney: “Mr. Chairman, again, it's all very interesting what we hear for comments from our colleagues. But the interesting part…”

“Mr. Chairman, again, it's all very interesting what we hear for comments from our colleagues. But the interesting part of this is it does matter whether it's short and medium-range or whether it's long-range. The short and medium-range, some of the testing has, in fact, been effective and does lead us to believe and experts to believe that there might be an effective defense against those. But the experts look at the long-range system and they say, you know, we are procuring and we are deploying way ahead of our capability. These do not work. There has been no realistic operational testing to indicate that they would. There have been sporadic tests that have been successful on some aspects of it. There have been a number of tests that have been abject failures on a large part of it. The fact of the matter is, if we're going to have defense, it should be smart defense. We have spent $150 billion so far for nothing, nothing in terms of that long-range missile system and its effectiveness. You want to spend another $217 billion to $250 billion in the next several years when we have other pressing needs, the ones that the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accountability Office, the 9/11 Commission, our own common sense tell us are the more likely threats to this country, some asymmetric threat, some weapon of mass destruction by a terrorist group, or some short-range or medium-range missile coming in our direction.”