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Alaska's three members of Congress are still trying to ward off the cuts the Obama administration has proposed in missile defense work at Alaska's Fort Greely. They are doing what members of Congress do - defending a huge pipeline of federal money for work located in their home state. But this is a classic case where the parochial interests of one state differ from what's best for the nation as a whole.

While more missiles at Fort Greely would be good for Alaska, adding them now, while the missile defense system is still unproven, will not give the nation more protection.

Sixteen missiles are in place, in two separate fields at Greely, and 10 more are in the works, Army Col. George Bond told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce last week.

That total, along with four based in California, "are more than sufficient to protect" the country "for the near term," he told the media afterward.

Right now, no likely adversary has missiles that can reach populated areas of Alaska. North Korea's most recent missile test was an embarrassing failure. Iran doesn't have long-range missiles, either. Russia does, but it's not considered a threat these days. Fort Greely missiles are not designed to protect against Russia, Col. Bond said Monday.

What the colonel didn't say, and what most Alaskans probably don't realize, is that the military planners cannot say for sure Fort Greely's missiles will be able to shoot down live, hostile targets.

The U.S. has put missiles in silos at Fort Greely without knowing whether the system will in fact work under real world conditions. Testing continues, even as more missiles are put into Greely's silos and made ready to launch.

In January, the missile defense agency made this report to Congress about the portion of the system that includes Fort Greely:

"The GMD (Ground-based Midcourse Defense) flight test program has made steady progress in demonstrating the functionality of the midcourse segment of the BMDS (Ballistic Missile Defense System)." Translated into English, that means, "We aren't saying for sure this part of the system works. We think it does, but we're still doing tests to prove it."

One critic has a very different view of how "functional" the missile defense system is.

Philip E. Coyle of the World Security Institute told Congress earlier this year: "U.S. missile defenses lack the ability to deal with decoys and countermeasures, lack demonstrated effectiveness under realistic operational conditions, and lack the ability to handle attacks involving multiple missiles."

Col. Bond essentially confirmed part of that critique on Monday. He said that a future test will look at how the entire missile defense system would handle an attack from multiple missiles. Deploying an incomplete weapons system is unusual, the colonel said. At Greely, it's a challenge to keep the interceptor missiles ready for launch 24/7 while the contractors work on some aspect of the system.

"That's why there are two (missile) fields" at Greely, Col. Bond said. One is ready to fire while missiles in the other are being upgraded with new technology.

It's true, there's some deterrent value to having an unproven missile defense system in place. An adversary has to wonder if its missile or missiles will get through.

To raise those doubts, though, Fort Greely doesn't need more than the 26 missiles already in place or in the works. Even if the nation's missile defenses don't work as advertised, an adversary knows that any missile comes with a return address and the nation where it came from risks a horrific nuclear counter-strike.

So the Obama administration wants to save about a half-billion dollars by delaying further missile deployments at Fort Greely. That's not great news for Alaska, but the decision is a reasonable way for the federal government to tighten up the budget while still protecting the nation.