As reported by David Willman in the L.A. Times.
The article reports that, despite $40 billion already spent on the dubious system, and another $10.2 billion flowing through the pipeline:
...government reports and interviews with technical experts suggest the planned upgrades, including a redesigned kill vehicle, are unlikely to protect the United States from a limited-scale ballistic missile attack, the system’s stated mission.
As Noam Chomsky stated at a peace and justice conference at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in the 1980s, it doesn't matter if the technology works -- that's beside the point -- all that matters is that the military-industrial complex gets paid.
Chomsky was referring to the Reagan administration's coveted Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or so-called "Star Wars," at the time.
Ironically enough, it was SDI that sank prospects for nuclear weapons abolition between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Both President Reagan and Premier Gorbachev were sincerely interested in, and on the brink of, nuclear weapons abolition, at their summit in Iceland in the mid-1980s. But Reagan's stubborn insistence on retaining the right to develop SDI, blocked the fleeting opportunity.
And now, three decades later, the U.S. and world are embroiled in fears of nuclear war, not seen since the end of the Cold War.