Skeet shooting Gangnam style

There's been much hemming and hawing about whether the US and Japan should attempt to shoot down any North Korean IRBM launched as a test outside the North Korea border. The US is bigging up its ABM capability and claiming that it certainly could shoot down such a missile if it wanted to. Japan has been spinning up Patriot PAC-3 interceptors and its Aegis destroyers. But should the US and Japan actually shoot at a North Korean Musudan if Kim Jong "Chubbycheeks" Un actually lets one loose?

Darn tootin' they should. This is a great information-gathering exercise. We are fairly certain that if NK fires a Musudan that it's just a demonstrator, so there's no particular pressure to nail it, but it will be a great validation of the sensor-and-shooter systems set up around North Korea. They should pick the element of their defensive system for which they have the least concrete performance information and fire a couple of munitions from that system at the IRBM. By all means they should keep more reliable interceptors in reserve, and fire those off once the questionable interceptors have entered the killing zone, but their primary aim is to monitor how well those questionable interceptors react to a typical IRBM target. This is not a manufacturer test, it's reasonably representative of the distances and climb profile of a real nuclear-armed IRBM, and the exact launch time is not known, so it should give the USA and Japanese military good data on how well their systems would actually react to an IRBM launch.

Normally you'd worry about giving defence performance information to your opponent in a situation like this, but North Korea's sensors are likely so poor that the US and Japan can pretty much make up whatever they want to tell the world about when the missile was detected, what interceptors were fired and what actually happened at the interception. When they show the footage of the interceptor striking the missile, don't believe that they're showing you any significant amount of the information they've actually gathered from the launch.