During its first few years, the Clinton administration cut funds for promising BMD programs inherited from the Reagan and Bush administrations. Indeed, only a handful of congressional Republicans kept the issue of missile defense alive. But in 1998, the country received a wake-up call with the report of the Rumsfeld Commission, which concluded that the lead time for developing ballistic missiles was much shorter than the administration was reporting. This was followed shortly by North Korean and Iranian missile tests. This reluctance is indicative of a widespread resistance to the idea of ballistic missile defense.
Opponents usually couch their objections in terms of cost and technical difficulty.
But the US aerospace industry is the envy of the world. It has made spectacular advances in missile defense technology. And tests are designed to identify problems. Failures are positive when they identify problems that need to be corrected while demonstrating that a system is still on track. The most recent test failure was the result of a malfunction in the Minuteman booster that prevented deployment of the kill vehicle.