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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?

applez101 - 11:40am Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9904 of 9910)

kangdawei - "defence or death" - hmm, a tad doctrinaire, but I'll bite.

Yes, by all means the US should develop sufficient defences against all manner of attacks...but the US does have resource limitations and can't pursue all aims at once with the same high priority.

So, what's the point of building a suit of plate mail armour when a dagger in the side, or a cloud of smoke can defeat the wearer? NMD is akin to this allusion.

What the US and just about any nation needs to do is ask itself the following questions:

"What defence challenges am I likely to face?"

"What is the best means of meeting and defeating those challenges?"

"What is an acceptable risk/loss relative to the cost of that defence?"

"What do I now have in place that provides protection against that risk?"

When it comes to WMD missile attacks - the opportunity from both a technical and political standpoint is so low; the existing defence providing through MAD munitions is strong; such that NMD is a 'luxury' project: not a vital one for America's national defence.

Furthermore, there is no guarantee that an NMD technical solution will work...and nothing devised thus far has been tested under anything like battle conditions.

Given that the Pentagon itself doesn't foresee a useful product coming from this testing phase for easily a decade at the earliest - this talk of treaty abrogation is not only too early, but dangerous. The most hardened militarist would recognise that such talk only affords 'the enemy' time to develop countermeasures to such an expensive missile defence solution.

Taking the larger view, it has been international conventions that have held the most sway in meeting political aims (ultimately the same goal of military force)...so why should those be abrogated and avoided in favour of military force? Seems very 'back ass-wards' to me. :)

kangdawei - 12:48pm Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9905 of 9910)

applez, i'm going to ignore your questions for the moment, but just for the moment. i'll get back to them.

first i have to ask rsho (and you if you're interested):

you seem to imply that there are important military systems that will be starved if we "waste" the money on missle defence. please, tell me, in your view, what weapons systems would YOU like to see heavily funded? what technological advances of the combat kind are YOU interested in funding?

rshowalter - 01:23pm Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9906 of 9910)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Wonderful question. Let me post this, and get back to it. There are some.

You aren't insisting that the total military budget be increased, I hope. I think, perhaps, we might do things more neatly, in spots.

rshowalter - 01:23pm Sep 29, 2001 EST (#9907 of 9910)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD9901 kangdawei 9/29/01 11:05am includes this:

"you are careful to ignore Rumsfeld's point about satellite technology looking impossible in the 60s and growing to become mundane today.

Satellite technology looked very difficult in the 50's and 60's - - but not impossible.

Steve Kline, my old partner, knew John Pierce (NAS, NAE, longtime director of Research at Bell Labs, coinventor of the communication satellite) - - I got to meet him, and read some of his accounts about satellite development. It was difficult - - - but there weren't show stoppers that anybody could argue were very likely to be impossible. The things that were done were done by ordinary, hard working, brilliant engineering.

So far as I know, nothing actually worked in reality on the key satellite problems, which were control problems, until considerably after those things worked on paper.

And people like Pierce worked hard , and with plenty of sophistication to find solutions. And rejected a lot of proposed solutions that weren't workable.

Anybody of the scientific and engineering stature of Pierce advocating missile defense, as the administration proposes it, today?

Not to my knowledge.

On missile defense, in the areas of lasar weapons, the "hit a bullet with a bullet" project the Coyle report deals with, and the "smart rock" programs, I believe that there are real "show stoppers" - - - FAR tougher problems than any involved in getting satellites up -- and many of them. That's how it looks to me - at least, if one makes reasonable assumptions from the open literature. I've said that this could be checked, and have described what I mean by that. I think the checking should happen.

I think recent posting by gisterme are strong evidence of how badly this checking needs to happen. People are in binds where they are "losing their cool" . . . that means they aren't facing problems they know how to solve - - and they've been stumped, and stumped badly, for a long time.

Doing so should be in the national interest, because of what would be clarified, whether I'm right or wrong.

Rignt now, people are muddling along, and it is a mess that is never going to be anything but a black hole for engineering talent and money.

And standing in the way of solution to problems that endanger the world, and need to be solved.

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