Some missile defense is better than none, according to Bush administration officials. Perhaps, but those few missiles ought to be shown to work exceedingly well if they are to be relied on. The missiles the administration has placed in the Alaska tundra, however, don’t meet that test.

Five missiles have been installed so far and one more is scheduled to be lowered into the ground this month. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is ready to declare the system operational. Other defense officials call the system “rudimentary” and “limited.”

“Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first rifle, our first ship?” Secretary Rumsfeld said in an interview with the Washington Post, which ran a series of articles about the system last week. “I mean, they’d still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for God’s sake, if you wanted perfection.”

No one has accused the missile defense system of perfection.

According to the Post stories, the lack of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon’s chief weapons evaluator, Thomas Christie, to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system’s viability. He estimated its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent.

The system involves 10 separate high-tech systems, including six satellites and ships at sea. So far, the interceptors have performed poorly in tests, even when given advanced information that would not be available in a real attack. Much of the system remains untested because the Pentagon has waived testing requirements.

Initially, the system is only meant to down an incoming missile fired by North Korea. Repeated intelligence assessments have concluded that terrorists trying to infiltrate the United States and obtain weapons are a much larger threat than missile attacks by North Korea or rogue states.

Congress has appropriated more than $10 billion for the missile defense system in the next fiscal year and the Missile Defense Agency estimates costs will run as high as $53 billion in the next five years. The system will take up 14 percent of the Pentagon’s total R&D budget by 2005.

Despite such expenditures, the Government Accountability Office concluded last year that the Missile Defense Agency was moving forward with “immature technology and limited testing.” “While doing so may help MDA meet the President’s deadline, it also increases the potential that some elements may not work as intended,” the GAO warned.

More recently, a group of 49 retired generals and admirals urged the president to postpone deployment of the missile system in favor of devoting resources to protecting our borders and port facilities against terrorists who might try to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States.

Rather than ensuring that America becomes safer, the push for a missile defense system shows that the Pentagon and White House, with the approval of Congress, are continuing to devote limited federal resources to a costly project when more attention and funding should be focused on fighting terrorism.