Great Guardian article on missile defenceFollow

It's pretty funny and if accurate makes a compelling argument.

1. Missile defence doesn't work and never will
2. Ignoring the above gives the govt. an excuse to shower the arms industries with cash
3. Russians generals cream themselves when they hear about it, they'll be getting a pay rise in response
4. Poland, will you never learn :(

Ridiculous. Poland is a clearly the prime target for Iranian aggression - the country poses the keenest threat to their interests and lies easily within striking distance of their advanced missile program.

Ignoring all the other issues, #1 is inaccurate. In terms of simple phisycs, it is very easy for a smaller missile to kill a larger ICBM if you can hit it. THe smaller missile doesn't have to have a large warhead, it just needs to have enough kinetic mass to destroy the launch vehicle. Obviously you need to be close enough to hit the enemy missile,. and preferrably you do so while it is either in the boost phase or when it goes balistic and cannot manouver effectivly.

The tests that have occured so far are all the C1 block derivitive target system missiles. The current version is the C3 interceptor, which contains massive sensor improvements. Couple that with much better ground based radar systems we have deployed recently, and the chances of a sucessfulk pre seperation kill increases dramatically.

The article assumes we won't know the direction or trajectory of an ICBM launched against us. While you might be able to make that claim in event ofa russian ICBM attack from a submarine, anything else, even land based mobile systems, you will have a pretty good idea where it will be launching from. No other country besides the US has a significant submarine launch program. The Chinese don't do submarines well currently, and neither Iran or North Korea has any hope of feilding an effective nuclear submarine.

Russia has enough missiles they could easily saturate any defense system we would build at this point, but on an individual basis, most of their missiles really just aren't that good. They don't cool their warheads for one thing, and their countermeasure systems are for the most part about 10 years out of date. They do have some very effective newer missiles, but those are really only available in very limited quantities.

Whatever else you say about the US, we do have better missiles, guidance systems, guidance computers, and sensors than any one else on the planet by several orders of magnitude.

the cold war was absurdly profitable for military contractors. our nuclear treaty with russia put tens of thousands of people out of work. general dynamics, raethon and a hoste of other big names who got fat off the cold war plunged, some into bankrupcy. the subsequent non-aggression packs with china put even more people out of work.

the missle defence system promises to change all that. cold war is good for bussiness. thumbing our nose at russia is good for the bottom line. Georgia is just a side effect. collateral damage.

most wars are started for wealth. weather is personal gain, or to keep a people or country from starving.

alot of you scratch your head as to why we pulled out of the treaty with russia when our own intellegance machine clearly states in one security paper after another our biggest threat isnt an intercontinental ballistic missle, its a hand held suitcase bomb.

alot of you scratch your head as to why, if iraq was known to not be a threat BEFORE the war started, why it started anyway?

you WANT to believe we did it for the right reasons. you WANT to believe your leaders wear the honor and integrity you envision in your cration of perfection when you think about our country as abadge they wont take off.

iraq for instance.

threat? investigation after investigation shows they posed no threat. some of them even before the war started.
morality? mabe, but then why didnt we go into sudan when hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being butchered and driven into the desert because of their religonal beliefs or lack of them?

money? think about it. yes, its costing TAXPAYERS billions of dollars a month. if you think about it, money isnt the reason if it is our country you focus on. but try focusing on the private companies reaping hundreds of millions of dollars, some billions of dollars in proifit in haliburtons case.

our treaty with russia.

threat? our own security papers say they were not a threat of any kind to us.
morality? there is nothing moral in walking away from a treaty we made in good faith.

money? hundreds of millions of dollars, billions in the case of the actual missle defence system. and there are bills right now in congress to REBUILD our entire nuclear arsonel to "update them"....just in case. all going to private contractors.

their social security fix.

security? we have all seen in the last 2 years that banking on the market to take care of our most at risk citizens would have been a disaster.
morality? there is nothing moral about hanging food and shelter on a roll of the dice with wallstreet.

money? brokers stood to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction fees handeling those tax dollars.

their medicare fix.

security? we have seen month after month HMOs being sued for not providing treatment and infact spending millions of dollars on laywers to find ways to deny paying for treatment.
morality? there is nothing moral about letting someone die because your lawyers say you can.

money? HMOs stood to rake in billions of dollars in profit from the tax dollars they would get to provide that non-treatment under this plan.
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get it yet?

follow the money if you want to know the why.

some of you are starting to get it. its a big reason why so many republicans are sick of the republicans. its a big reason why obama and hillary had such a strong showing of support while the repubs turnout was average at best.

most of you still dont want to believe your leaders would sell you out, your country out, your wellfare out to big bussiness. but alot of you are starting to open your eyes.

there are those that will refuse to look at whats staring them in the face too. the ones that still dont believe we tortured anyone. the ones that still believe hussin was responsible for 911.

we will call those people....republicans. the rest we will call americans.

Russia has enough missiles they could easily saturate any defense system we would build at this point, but on an individual basis, most of their missiles really just aren't that good. They don't cool their warheads for one thing, and their countermeasure systems are for the most part about 10 years out of date.

You can counter current missile defense technology with duct tape and a fireworks sparkler. Unerringly. I'd like it to work, but it does not, and it's nowhere at all near close. We still have difficulty hitting a missile who's trajectory is known two days in advance with zero attempts at countermeasures.


The Chinese don't do submarines well

While that's partially true, they do torpedos exceptionally well. The Chinese, right now could sink every US air craft carrier not docked in about an hour and a half. Possibly at the cost of a few submarines on their part.



Edited, Aug 21st 2008 11:07am by Smasharoo

The idea that missle defense doesn't work and never will is the same kind of thinking that preceded us breaking the supposedly impenetrable sound barrier or everything that caan be invented already has been invented. To make such a blanket statement is utter foolishness on behalf of the writer or those who continue to believe such a technology is impossible.

No, it really isn't. It's consistent with the last 10,000 of military technological progress where the axiom that in the tech battle between fortification developers and weapons developers, the weapons developers always, always, always, always, win.

The point isn't if missile defense will ever work, the point is that even if it reaches a point where it does work, countermeasures that render it completely useless will be developed almost instantly.


This real issue is not cash, the military industrial complex, Russian general's pay scales, but rather how Ivan perceives the encroachment of NATO into it's backyard. Poland has a legitimate concern with Russia being a historical threat to her sovereignty, but Russia is xenophobic enough to think that the West is actually a real military threat against her borders.

Yeah, no. If you want to compare the battle of wills and psychology here, Putin has handed the US it's ***. It's not debatable. He'll do one of two things about this. One: laugh and judo throw a goat. Two: use it as a pretext to invade Ukraine before they "become a threat" then laugh.


The fallout of the Soviet collapse is that we in the West failed to take into account the beating Russia's pride took with the fall of the Berlin Wall and glasnost. Whether anything could have been done differently is debatable, but the consequences are what we are left with.

Really? It's debatable if we handled their transition to capitalism well? REALLY?

Fresh approaches to defeating defenses will always come, but for it's intended purpose of defeating lower tech like Iranian missles, then no, it can be done, Smash. Scuds were defeated in '91 by Patriot systems and our abilities have only gotten better since then.

As for Poland and how that caused Putin to hand us our a$$, I'm don't understand what you're saying here, unless you're discussing Georgia instead but weren't being clear.

And third, sure it's debatable how we could have handled things differently at the fall of the Soviet Union. Looking back on it we have the luxury of hindsight, but back then a military coup, a "if we are going down, we're taking you with us" response, or any number of other scenarios were possible. We did what we thought was the most prudent course back then, balanced by our own national interests.

Totem

My estimation of US targeting systems has gone up a lot since we knocked that one sattelite of ours out of orbit.

Sure, it required a week of enough calculus to give math nerds orgasms, but the fact remains that we didn't miss.

Missile defense systems are sort of like an exploding game of pinball. You don't have to knock the other guy's balls off the table to win, you just need to make it as difficult as possible for him to land them where he wants them.

I visually witnessed Scud intercepts

Almost certainly not.


and visited the sites of several Scud impact locations near our locations. I even picked up shrapnel in our compound from an intercept overhead. They worked as advertised to my inexpert eyes.


What you likely witnessed was scuds simply falling apart on their own.

The actual number of scuds effected at all by Patriot launches is in the single digits.

I was there, that what I saw.

I know, and no joking around, thanks for that.

If it wasn't all planet destroying like, it's kind of amusing; first there are Missiles, next there are Counter-missile to knock the missiles out of commission, then there's a counter-block superrayz 2000 to block the signaling of the counter-missiles, then there's the Counter-Block Eliminator v2.1 to disperse the block, etc, etc.

First strike will take the pot.

If it were USA/Europe vs Russia then a missile defense system would be useless as the cost to Russians to build more missiles to compensate for those shot down by us would be less then the cost to shoot them down and it would be a waste of time and money for us. However, for use against a small lunatic nation like Iran, it could be an effective shield against their small launch capabilities and the higher cost to shoot down a missile vs. building more would not be relevant due to the overwhelming economic advantage that all the NATO members have over Iran. Even if the missile defense system was only efficient enough to save one out of a total four targeted cities in Europe, I am sure those in the saved city would be very happy we made the effort.

I think there is a solution to the problem with the Russians. They see the missile defense system as reducing their nuclear deterrent and therefore making their overall military position weaker. What if we amend our mutual nuclear missile reduction treaties to allow the Russians to increase their total missiles by a number equal to the number of missile interceptors on their border. So if we place 12 missile interceptors on their border, they get to build 12 extra missiles. We still get the defense against lunatic nations and they still have the same deterrent capacity.

It'd be a lucky break if Putin hung himself because the US is fairly impotent to do anything about him.