I have been involved in some medium-large scale software development projects. After all of the specs have been attained, after every single feature has been signed off, after unit testing and global testing, etc, etc, EVERY software system that I have ever seen, whether I worked on it or not, ended up failing soon after being put into production. Often the failures were small other large, but in all cases these defects were not revealed until large quantities of REAL data were entered into the system. In more than 25 years of software development, I have never seen, or even heard of, a system that worked properly when first installed, no matter how much advanced testing was made. This most recent failure of the ABM was blamed on a software "glitch". It has been fixed. How many more are still hiding, just waiting for the right combination of circumstance to cause failure? I don't know, but I would bet on there being quite a few, likely dozens, possibly hundreds.

The ONLY thing that wood convince me of the effectiveness of a missile defense system would be a successful FULL-SCALE test with real incoming missiles. I am skeptical of all high-tech projects by bitter experience.

Large, complex defense systems are given only Mickey-Mouse testing in order to avoid embarrassment of the defense contractors and the Pentagon staff.