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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

bilbobaggins0 - 06:40am Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8204 of 8214)
Bush is NOT my president.

The last thing our nation needs is some kind of "limited" anti-nuc capability that will never be used - and most likely won't work given the current intelligence forecasts.

We need a restructuring of the military that gets rid of the fat, maintains air superiority, and stresses disarmament globally.

possumdag - 07:02am Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8205 of 8214)
Possumdag@excite.com

Air superiority - as in ... ?

mazza9 - 03:08pm Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8206 of 8214)
Louis Mazza

World Tribune Headline

Israel claims regional shield after Arrow-2 downs Scud in test

Complete story at the following URL http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/breaking_7.html

Missile defense can work.

LouMazza

rshowalter - 03:25pm Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8207 of 8214)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

At the level of what the Patriot Missile was supposed to be able to do in the Gulf War, missile defense can work -- and is important.

At the same time, reports of "successes" in this business have to be considered with some reticence. For example -- the "unqualified triumph" of the last US missile defense test has been qualified recently.

applez101 - 03:38pm Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8208 of 8214)

Lunarchick, others - ref. seduction of missile defence

To this, I would like to take a headline from The Onion's seminal work on the 20th Century ("Our Dumb Century") and the 'Military-Industrial-Oedipal Complex' ;-p

applez101 - 03:50pm Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8209 of 8214)

Rshowalter - on so-called 'theatre' defence systems to which you may be referring to:

A fast missile, near-supersonic or supersonic, will be terribly difficult to shoot down in the distance of a shared theatre: like US bases across the Sea of Japan against a launch from China or Korea.

Reaction time will be extremely limited, advanced warning and monitoring also poses a challenge, and hitting the aggressor missile at the highest point of its launch arc is itself a big technical challenge (it would be easiest to hit them while they were still on the ground, and that poses legal problems and worse insecurities).

Now, admittedly, we have made significant progress with the likes of the Aegis destroyers, but even then they act best against few targets, and then mostly slower-moving aircraft.

Besides the incredible difficulty of hitting that kind of threat in such limited space, the biggest trump card remains the 'shotgun' method of multiple 'dumb' rocket launches.

Furthermore, subsequent studies have shown that the Patriot missile interception was poor-to-none, because the cheap elements of the Scud that fell off during final descent confused targeting radars. The Patriot was more likely to hit a piece of useless vehicle debris than hitting the warhead.

Also, we need to differentiate with the 'kill' methods under discussion. The so-called kinetic 'kill vehicle' under research to counter an ICBM threat is trying to hit the missile dead-on with its own warhead. A Patriot, OTOH, simply tries to get as proximate to the target as it can before it detonates itself, spreading out a hail of metal fragments, hopefully damaging or destroying the threat (again, originally designed for aircraft, not missiles).

So, where a missile defense system would be most useful, at the scale of a theatre, is one of the most technically difficult to achieve.

It is also unfortunate that such a missile defense system has gotten wrapped up in the disagreeable politics of an ICBM defense system.

applez101 - 03:59pm Aug 28, 2001 EST (#8210 of 8214)

Another thing to consider is where this interception battle will be fought.

In the case of Israel and the Patriots, I'd argue that is a terrible battlefield, with debris of all kind raining down on your populace (something rather inevitable given response times for a theatre defence).

How long do you think the Japanese would put up with continued US military occupation if a crumbly bit of radioactive missile material came crashing into Tokyo? I'd rate a policy of immediate explusion and neutrality-declaration quite possible.

Funny how the Canadians really thought that nuclear-armed Soviet bombers would get shot down over the northern 'wilderness' instead of crashing into their populated south (whilst gambling that the majority of ICBMs would head for America instead of Canada).

In order for interception to be most acceptable to a threatened populace it had better be close to ironclad and with little or no 'collateral damage.' Something that no missile defence system has been able to achieve.

Really, any given nation has been lucky to only face one threat at a time.

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