In any case it is always easier to develop or modify a weapon to defeat a defence system, and a lot cheaper. This ABM shield of yours will be expensive, inflexible, easily circumvented and ultimately useless. It will be your Maginot line.
Yes, and if you read the concluding remarks, it says PRECISELY that.
"In assessing the feasibility of boost-phase missile defense using hit-to-kill interceptors or the ABL, we attempted to make optimistic assumptions to bound the performance of such
systems. In some cases we made assumptions that appear technically possible but may not be realistic on other grounds. An important example is the assumption in some of our analyses that interceptors could be fired as soon as a target track has been constructed, without allowing additional time for decision or assessment. In other cases we simply examined the performance that would be required to make the system workable, ."without making any judgment about whether such components could realistically be deployed. An example of this kind is our consideration of an interceptor having a flyout velocity 40 percent
higher than an ICBM’s velocity. We emphasize that the choices made in this study were used to obtain upper bounds on performance; their use does not imply that the Study Group endorses these choices as realistic in all cases. Given the results that follow from our assumptions, we conclude that while the boost phase technologies we studied are potentially capable of defending the United States against iquid-propellant ICBMs at certain ranges of interest, at least in the absence of countermeasures, when all factors are considered none of the boost-phase defense concepts studied would be viable for the foreseeable future to defend the nation against even first-generation solid-propellant ICBMs
