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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.

lchic - 11:24am Sep 2, 2002 EST (# 4129 of 4133)

PIAGET

http://www.papert.com/articles/Papertonpiaget.html

"" ...
Piaget's theory - four stages;
Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years),
Preoperational (2 to 7 years,
Concrete Operational(7 to 11 or 12 years) and
Formal Operations (11 or 12 to about 15 years)
http://www.georgewiles.com/massey/html/cogdev.htm

communication models -
http://www.brocku.ca/commstudies/courses/2F50/jakobson.html
http://www.worldtrans.org/TP/TP1/TP1-17.HTML
http://www.nonviolentcommunication.com/BookPages/nvcmodel.html

http://search.ninemsn.com.au/results.asp?cfg=SMCINITIAL&RS=CHECKED&v=1&srch=5&FORM=AS5&q=Piaget+%2D+four

wrcooper - 11:28am Sep 2, 2002 EST (# 4130 of 4133)

Showalter:

I am not saying I disbelieve you. I am simply asking you to substantiate your claim, which struck me as numerically fuzzy.

Stop stalling. Nobody's going to be fooled by your deliberate obfuscation and temporizing.

I want to believe you. Therefore, identify your sources so that I can independently verify them. How did you com e up with the numbers?

rshow55 - 12:39pm Sep 2, 2002 EST (# 4131 of 4133)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Just finished cooking, and doing some housework.

From the Coyle report, Cooper reads an estimate of 32 billion for that particular system. Some might suspect more - but let's accept the value of 32 billion dollars, for purposes of discussion.

My estimate of 1000 to a million times smaller cost for countermeasures was a guess - based on what I knew could work, and what I knew of costs. Engineers making judgements where exact magnitudes don't matter so much (what if the range was 500 to 500,000 times -- would it change the decision? ) often make guesses like that. Often, when PE tickets are at stake, carefully enough. I thought I was careful enough. I'm also willing to be corrected, on any assumptions I've made that are wrong.

1/1000th of 32 billion dollars is 32 million dollars. Still a lot of money.

Here's a countermeasure that I feel sure would work. Suppose you have your warhead placed inside a gold mylared spherical balloon - and it is one of N balloons, of the same reflective mylar, of the same sphericity, of the same diameter - from a given missile.

(And, of course, there can be more than one missile fired.)

For the detection systems of the Coyle report, or any other detection system I know of for midcourse interception - the decoys and the target would look exactly the same. So the hit to kill system couldn't hit, and couldn't kill. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong - but please explain the differences - and how detectable they'd be likely to be.

N could easily be greater than 10.

Adding some chaff would be easy, too.

The simple scheme above would defeat the system of the Coyle report (with its 32 billion cost) beyond any question. (A system with a 10% chance of hitting isn't an effective system. For control reasons, chances of a hit for N=10 might well be less than 10% - because the controls might not cope with the complexity of the target. )

Could those decoys be developed and deployed for less than 32 million dollars? My guess is that it could be done for less than a million. Maybe, for some engineers I know, for less than 100,000$ .

And there are many other schemes . . .

That's where my estimate came from -- though I went into a lot more detail - - and dealt with a lot of references from gisterme involving details.

The factor of 1000 to a million is fuzzy -- there are too many possibilities to have it anything but fuzzy. But it is easier to defeat MD systems than build them - very much easier.

Key questions for any MD system are:

Can it see the target?

Can it hit the target?

Can it hurt the target?

A "missile defense" system can fail on any of these questions - and ways to make it fail are many, and easy.

And there are so many ways of doing it -- in a world where N! increases very fast -- that means MD, as a tactically realistic defense system - isn't workable for any price.

(If you're able to fix up your "defense" for one countermeasure -- the next countermeasure will still be easy . . . and so on, and so on. It is a losing game for MD - at every stage.)

I've advocated interdiction or effective diplomacy for that reason.

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