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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 05:35pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3833 of 3866)

MD3818 lchic 8/20/02 12:11am is VERY important, and cites an article that is VERY important. http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,777100,00.html

lchic - 05:43pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3834 of 3866)

Shows the distortion
all out of proportion
the dominant entity
that has the propensity
to skew national thought think
that to war takes to brink!

Elsewhere Academia
is part of the scheme-ia

lchic2002

rshow55 - 05:48pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3835 of 3866)

mazza9 8/20/02 1:29pm is an interesting post.

I never said that "aircraft and airborne weapons don't work."

I DO say that we're planning to spend a trillion dollars on aircraft we don't need, doing so in a way that places a huge bet on technical conditions that can EASILY change - and obsolete that huge investment very completely. People who assigned me problems were very worried about that technical change - and how close at hand it looked -- in the late 1960's.

People should worry about the same things now - because after the work I've done -- the solutions are almost trivially easy. The "hard part" that is left could be solved by any high school math teacher who thought about it hard - that "hard part" is getting much better x-y-z resolution out of radio wave ranging than is now achieved. It is easily done.

Polynomial processing, including simple automatic calculus and differential equations --is also easily done - and computers are now 1000's of times faster than they need to be to do the computations. Getting them faster makes no difference to the jobs to be done.

What if air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles were as well controlled as birds, bats, and human animals are controlled?

With the actuators and thrusts we've had for fifty years?

Pilot facility counts for as much as it does - but not more.

That's why the military has cared as much about plane performance as it has. I was reasonably close to a situation involving Kelly Johnson's skunk words that involved the loss of seven planes and seven pilots in a row -- and I was assigned some key problems as a result. Issues of mixing and combustion were CLEAR matters of live and death. It wasn't stupid for those pilots to risk their lives. The performance (in this case, the performance of afterburners) was a BIG military issue.

I'm trying to think how to respond effectively, and in the national interest, to mazza9 8/20/02 1:29pm - - - one of Mazza's better postings.

mazza9 - 06:12pm Aug 20, 2002 EST (# 3836 of 3866)
"Quae cum ita sunt" Caesar's Gallic Commentaries

Robert:

Okay, I accept your involvment and expertise. My point is that the meeting in Crawford is touted as a reevaluation and redirecting of the military. We've already seen Rumsfeld cancel the Crusader since it was the wrong weapon for the 21st Century.

Massed tanks will have little or no effect on people who use poison gas on dogs and eventually people. Manned aircraft become less cost effective when today's virtual reality control allows the Unmanned Combat Aircraft to control the skys. No more G limits due to carrying the pilot. No parasitic weight for ejection seats and oxygen/life support systems.

Want to address the Eisenhower farewell address, then you develop the tools to meet the threat and not let the last generation of military leaders, who move on to private sector, waste our national treasure on last war's tools.

LouMazza

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