Making a show of rushing missile shield components into place before they are required, to complete a system that may not work anyway, is a Potemkin defense. It invites more of the cost overruns and test failures that have bedeviled the program. The Pentagon had to tell Congress last week of another round of setbacks in developing one piece of the Star Wars puzzle: an infrared satellite system crucial to the project. This will mean more lost time and higher costs for an oft-revamped plan that even Pentagon analysts have called a "case study" for how not to build a complex space project. Voters paying for this buy-now, fly-later dream deserve realistic planning and candor, not another slice of political pie in the sky.

Missiles, or databases. What will it be?