I'm encouraged by the laser systems they just deployed on some Navy vessels. Pinpoint accurate, rapid fire, and about $1.50 a shot. Gotta think they can (or have) scaled these up for missle defense as well.
I suspect that some of the launchpad failures by the Axis of Evil members might well have been "assisted" by similar devices, but we'll never know.
Shooting down a terrestrial anti-ship cruise missile, coming straight at you at 1 nautical mile is worlds apart from shooting a mach 5, crossing geometry target, hardened to survive atmospheric re-entry, at 200-300,000 feet, and having to account for the refraction of the laser through a massive atmospheric gradient. So in short, that system wouldn't be the starting point. It would need to be a grid of systems that were all space based, and none of us has/had the clearance to know what's going on with that right now.
