Missile Defense's Real Enemy: Math 589
An anonymous reader writes "Since the 1960s until the present day, missile defense has been a hot topic. Ronald Reagan popularized the concept with his 'Star Wars' multi-billion dollar plan to use lasers and various technologies to destroy incoming Soviet warheads. Today, America has a sizable sea-based system, dubbed AEGIS, that has been deployed to defend against rogue states missiles, both conventional and nuclear. However, there is one thing missile defense can't beat: simple math. 'Think about it — could we someday see a scenario where American forces at sea with a fixed amount of defensive countermeasures face an enemy with large numbers of cruise and ballistic weapons that have the potential to simply overwhelm them? Could a potential adversary fire off older weapons that are not as accurate (PDF), causing a defensive response that exhausts all available missile interceptors so more advanced weapons with better accuracy can deliver the crushing blow? Simply put: does math win?'"
Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course there's an element of "the country with the largest army wins" (for a given definition of win), but the idea that these systems are stupid enough to shoot down missiles that aren't going to hit targets is laughable.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Informative)
Israel's defense system has a simple solution. It's programmed with a map showing which areas are populated, and which expendable. On detecting an incoming rocket*, it estimates the impact site and only fires an interceptor if it is heading for somewhere populated.
*The ones Israel is being showered with at the moment are numerous, but very cheap and simple - barely even guided, just enough to hit the right city, sometimes.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right but its not as if those older less accurate weapons are not accurate enough to resulted in an estimated impact zone that is not "expendable". At the end of the day you have to have more interceptors than I have missiles. I can barrage you with cheap munitions that are designed to just rain down over a general area, like you know a city, with just some basic magnetic guidance to keep it on a strait course. Sure maybe these things don't fly fast enough and have no hope of evading your interceptors; but they do consume them. Once your out of expensive weapons I can bring out my good ones to use on your high value targets.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would honestly be more worried about conflict escalation ladder here. If an enemy launches 10K small missiles that have the potential to kill 100K citizens, the US might escalate the conflict and fight back by launching 50 nuclear warheads which would kill 50M enemy citizens, and so on and so forth, until nobody's left to tell the tale.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what nukes were developed for. Make the destruction so bad no one would dare attack us and those who do will be glowing in the end.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
"What they were developed for" != "what they got used for". Initially nukes were used to actually level Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Nazi Germany was in the crosshairs but they didn't last through the development cycle). Later came the whole MAD thing, semi-accidentally.
Both history and technology usage are funny like that, mostly not according to any original plan.
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That's what nukes were developed for. Make the destruction so bad no one would dare attack us and those who do will be glowing in the end.
That's what Death Stars are developed for. Make the destruction so bad no one would dare oppose us and those who do will be motes of dust in the end.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
At the end of the day you have to have more interceptors than I have missiles.
Not if my interceptors are laser or other energy weapon based. Think Missile Command (loved that game at the time...) Sure we may be a ways away from that now, or I should say as far as the *public* knows we may be a ways away from that, but we'll get there...
Why are you even on Slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
How long until missiles are mirror-coated?
It's just pathetic that a Slashdot reader doesn't realize that no mirror made yet would be able to last for more than .00000001 seconds against the kinds of lasers that can melt through a warhead in flight.
No real-life mirror is a perfect reflector of energy at all wavelengths, the smallest degree of loss, or any dust whatsoever means absorbing a tremendous amount of energy from the laser which in turn destroys the mirror instantly.
The warhead sure will look pretty on the ground though.
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A mirror works by absorbing photons and then re-emitting them. Any mirror substantial enough to protect a missile will be too heavy for a missile.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, this is how this scenario really works:
Assuming you have enough "cheap" munitions in a coordinated attack designed to overwhelm interception defenses, the attacker would require several strongpoints with lots of weapons (no way you could ransomly distribute that level of coordinated attack with enough munitions to overwhelm defenses).
The defender would have a firing solution on every strongpoint in seconds, and would lob off artillery and/or their own rockets and/or air strikes. Your coordinated attack designed to overwhelm defenses is cut-short by a conventional counterstrike before it has the time to do so.
The reason they build desenses like these to handle a cerain number of projectiles is because coordinated attackers make for easy targets. You typically see rebels taking pot-shots in smaller numbers where they can quickly disappear, and enemies in the next country over have known-quantities of ballistic missiles.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming you have enough "cheap" munitions in a coordinated attack designed to overwhelm interception defenses, the attacker would require several strongpoints with lots of weapons (no way you could ransomly distribute that level of coordinated attack with enough munitions to overwhelm defenses).
Yeah that's what the Navy thought when in their asymmetrical war games and the entire carrier group was (virtual) sunk.
Assuming the enemy cannot possibly be coordinated enough to launch an attack without being concentrated in one convenient spot for counter-attack is the kind of arrogance that is going to get a lot of people killed in the early days of the next war.
Remember, too, there's a difference between overwhelming a defense systems ability to track and down targets, and overwhelming its ability to stay supplied with ammo.
The rebels take pot-shots in small numbers because they only have a small amount of material and never want to risk over-exposure or the chance of a decisive conflict (that's not what guerrilla warfare is about). However guerrilla tactics can display extremely high levels of coordination, and if adopted by a military force that can afford ballistic missiles then they could also afford to use overwhelming numbers of smaller portable weapons.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Informative)
You act as if the Navy learned nothing from that. They learned plenty, operational plans changed, engagement tactics have changed and how to react to small vessels has changed.
As has been pointed many times on Slashdot, the Navy's plan for Iran is to sit outside the gulf in the Arabian sea where those small vessels can't reach. They then use air-power to wipe out all those vessels, docks and marinas that could be used before they move any ship back into the gulf.
Everyone likes to run around and say the Navy is a bunch of idiots and they ignored the problem by refloating the group and restarting the war game. The point is that what they could learn from those tactics had been learned and that there wouldn't have been value in continuing the war game on the same rules or declaring the games over while they were spending the money on the games. In other words they learned what they could then continued to learn more about different things. Now there are morons on the DOD that want to build Littoral combat ships but from what I understand they are in the extreme minority. Most of the Navy's leadership understands that the value in a navy is in the carrier grouping and it's air power, not the combat vessels. The future of the navy is to dramatically scale down the number of personal on board with automation and potentially even bring about carriers that carry massive numbers of drones along with carrier groupings armed with rail guns and other offensive weapons that allow even further stand off power.
There are no "cheap" munitions. (Score:3)
A ballistic missile is not cheap. It may sound reasonable to say they can "barrage you with cheap munitions" but there really is no such thing. Sure, you can save some money by not putting a nuclear warhead on it, but the missile is still going to be the most expensive part of it.
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Your asterisked issue is the whole point.
Set a missile to appear that it will land someplace harmless, and once it's over land, alter it's course. Costal cities are probably safe, but anything too far inland is will make a nice target, save the costal shots for the end of the barrage.
The author has a point. Although it's only damage mitigation, rather than prevention at that point, a mainland missile defense system would probably be a good backup.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Set a missile to appear that it will land someplace harmless, and once it's over land, alter it's course.
Then it's not a cheap, mass produced expendable missile anymore.
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It's less cheap, but it can still be fairly cheap.
Alt, you could have a bunch of cheap mass produced missiles that appear like the nicer missiles until the nicer missiles change directions and the cheap missiles don't. Increase the design cost a few bucks with placing weights at the right spots to give it a sufficiently similar flight profile until guidance systems turn on, maybe some cheap electronics to appear like it's running telemetry systems (not bother with the processing/nav bits, just radar pulses
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember reading a possibly apocryphal tale about different attitudes to deploying decoys on nuclear missiles in the Cold War; supposedly the US military went to a great deal of trouble building decoys that looked like nuclear warheads, whereas the British saved a lot of money by making the warheads look like decoys.
Make your smart missiles look like dumb missiles until they're too close to engage, and the job is done.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Insightful)
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How 'bout they launch at each other to test it. Save the rest of the world a whole lot of bother.
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Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Insightful)
For a ballistic missle, yes. That's why its a ballistic missle.
They arent steered. They are aimed. They go where pointed and no where else.
Once again, certain individuals prove they are speaking without knowledge of the subject at hand.
The author also proves lack of knowledge by talking about ballistic missile threats to ships at sea. That is essentially a non-issue.
Guided missiles are a whole nother beast to start with, for which we already have close in defense systems, and even then that's only a last resort. The best way to stop a guided munition is to never let it get launched in the first place. IE, take out hte plane or ship that tries to launch it. The number of attackers required to overwhelm the close in defense systems in such a scenario is so large that it is simply, again, a non-issue. They would never get the chance to even launch in such numbers.
The entire article and half the poeople posting are completely clueless.
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
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Has anyone tried to build a two stage ballistic missile? The first stage sort of gets in in range of the missile detection, and the second evades any interceptor by altering course mid-flight.
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Probably true, but saying so doesn't make you credible ... or right. This is Slashdot. Lots of people call someone "clueless" without necessarily having a clue themselves. You'd get more people to read and think about your posts if you let the strength of your argument stand on its own.
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Set a missile to appear that it will land someplace harmless, and once it's over land, alter it's course. Costal cities are probably safe, but anything too far inland is will make a nice target, save the costal shots for the end of the barrage.
I'd argue the reverse there. Any missile with enough range to hit inland cities is not going to be that cheap.
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Missiles with that capability are expensive and heavy.
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It's also been shown that Israel's defense system would not scale well to large countries, such as the United States. It's a start, but still a long way from a solution.
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So then make sure they will hit targets.
You can save money by only making every Nth have a warhead instead of a brick. So long as the mass is the same the interceptor system cannot tell them apart.
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Re:Simply put... No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. This is an incredibly stupid article and the implication that this is some inherit law of math is outrageous... Somehow the missile defense installations have a fixed amount of resources but the enemy doesn't? Come on!
One of the most basic rules of warfare is this: a strategy if a winner if it costs them more than it costs you. A missile defense is still a valuable tool if interceptors cost less than what they're intercepting regardless of whether or not what they're intercepting would do any damage because the enemy still had to build the thing. And from the same perspective if an enemy is going to build a missile why not just put a ton of TNT on it and point it in the general direction of a city? Even without guidance (which would add meaningful cost, unlike the TNT) a city is a big enough target that it presents a credible threat anyways and so needs to be intercepted.
Arg, this is just ridiculous!
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They had another V1/V2 countermeasure.
The Germans had no direct way of knowing where each missile hit. They could rely on their calculations, which were not going to be reliable in predicting the impact site, or gather information on impacts from what intelligence they could access.
Therefore, by working with the newspapers, reporting V-weapon attacks, they reported impact zones significantly different from the real ones, to pull German aim from London to the countryside.
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Of course there's an element of "the country with the largest army wins" (for a given definition of win), but the idea that these systems are stupid enough to shoot down missiles that aren't going to hit targets is laughable.
Not at all. The "will it hit it's target" question is not one that can be easily answered in enough cases that the math does not matter. All I have to do is get close and I look like enough of a threat to draw a response. It's possible that defensive systems could collect enough information (flight profile, radar signature, exhaust temp) from a possible threat to make guess on whether or not it's worth shooting at, but that's a losing game in the end. All the adversary has to do is make his crowd pleasers
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Wrong. There are two types of missile to defend against: guided and ballistic.
Of those, the only one you need to ask "will it hit its target", ie, where its even a question, is ballistic. And in the case of ballistic, it's an easy to solve question. The ballistic arc is nearly 100% predictable; it's basic physics, trivial physics. Your comments about Flight profile, radar signature, etc, all are meaningless. If you can get close enough to be a threat, you are a threat, and thus will be intercepted. There is
Re:Simply put... No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Though, they arent called ballistic for the hell of it.
Right. They're called that because the majority of their flight is ballistic. So it's an accurate term, even if they do incorporate terminal guidance.
They aren't called "ballistic" because terminal guidance is verboten, as you are implying.
still most of these people cant tell the difference between a ballistic munition and a guided one
Though I do. And I also know that being in the "ballistic" category does not categorically prohibit having terminal guidance... something you apparently do not understand. Fortunately weapon and defense system designers are smarter than you.
This is the only aiming/steering that modern ballistic ICBMs perform after launch... However, once each RV reenters the atmosphere, that's it. It is back to being a purely ballistic path again.
Shows what you know. [wikipedia.org] There are lots of ICBMs with terminal guidance -- you know, guidance during the phase that begins once the RV reenters the atmosphere when you said it is 'purely ballistic' -- dating back to the 80s.
since you want to be an obtuse arse
You're so funny!
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Exactly: this applies to any military engagement, no matter what the technology. See, for example, Napoleon and Hitler's invasions of Russia.
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But it's worth considering that the tactical advantage might not stay there. For example, it may turn
That's not math (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes you don't need the better soldiers, you just need more soldiers.
Re:That's not math (Score:5, Insightful)
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
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That's not math, that's known as attrition.
Stop. You are making sense.
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"That's not math, that's known as attrition."
Um, yeah. Attrition is math. Simple addition and subtraction, but it's still math.
Navy Fire Control Computers Know Math (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpkTHyfr0pM [youtube.com]
(seriously, watch the series. It's pretty amazing)
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Exhausting happens at both parties (Score:2)
Numerical superiority, not "math"... (Score:2)
And I expect that a highly numerate society would understand the probabilities well enough not to wage open war against a numerically superior adversary.
Hence the "global economy" that we have today.
Math? (Score:5, Informative)
No. When they say math, they mean, "a lot." Nothing more mathematical than that. Shoot a lot of projectiles at the target, and one of them will get through. We've degenerated mathematically past the level of a two-year-old and down to that of a rat or something. Chickens can even distinguish between 'a lot' and 'a little.'
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The point holds, though. Interceptors are highly sophisticated devices - they need to exactly hit a small target in three dimensions, while both interceptor and target are moving at great velocity. Your basic attack missile, on the other hand, can be as simple as a garage-made rocket with a chunk of fertilizer on the end. For every interceptor one side makes, even a comparatively low-tech and poorly-funded attacker could build many missiles.
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No the point is that attrition works, but the writer stupidly called it "math" when it is no such thing.
The interceptor math is a solved problem, easy enough to do on the back of a napkin.
The only problems have been designing/engineering a system to sufficient tolerance to carry it out, but that isnt math either.
Target ID is already an inherent part of the design.
And if such a tactic were used, it would be readily/quickly seen, and rather than waste anti-missle interceptors, we would just find the enemy "ch
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addendum: this reminds me of people inherently misunderstanding the system in question. a question i come across commonly of "why doesnt the radar pick up all the birds, and trees, and dust, and ...". the answer is: it does pick all those things up, its just been designed to ignore them.
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It's not about the long term survivability. (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of AEGIS and related defenses, the goal is not necessarily to be able to absorb/defend against anything and everything that the enemy throws against you. The goal is to survive long enough to turn the attacking launch site into a glass parking lot (or a steaming hole in the water) before they can destroy your offensive assets. In the mentioned case of Iran, I expect the goal would be to absorb one or two 'provocative' attacks. If there was full out attack, though, I'm pretty sure they would not have the opportunity to launch all the missiles...
Why so many of these stupid questions on /. over the last few days? I feel like I'm reading Digg. And not the good Digg.
Not exactly new (Score:3)
Aegis was state of the art, the best SAM system yet devised, but it had one major weakness: Tico carried only ninety-six SM-2 surface-to-air missiles; there were one hundred forty incoming Kingfish. The computer had not been programmed to think about that.
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But lets get realistic here, the intention of the AEGIS ABM system was NOT to counter the Russians or China, who we know full well could overwhelm our ABM systems. It is to counter "rogue" states that will have smaller, less capable ballistic missile programs and might be "unstable" and attack with a few of them. It is to prevent the people/states that might be crazy enough to sacrifice their entire populations just to get in a spiteful blow to the US. If
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
If you can stop a significant fraction of the missiles, that still gives you a massive reduction in total damage, provided of course your enemy doesn't have so many weapons even a few percentage points can wipe out everything. And besides, it still gives an advantage even in that case: if you need to fire all your missiles, and you need to fire some of them later on, that means the defending country has time to retaliate (so you can't rely on first strike-advantage), plus all their missiles will still hit,
Um, really? (Score:3, Informative)
Ever since the advent of anti-ship missiles, a big part of naval surface warfare tactics has been managing to get enough anti-ship missiles on target at the same time to overwhelm the target ships' defenses, so this is pretty much "Duh!"
Also, AEGIS is a 1970s naval air defense technology for protecting against anti-ship missiles and aircraft. It's only recently had an ABM capability added. It is true, as I understand it from public sources, that the VLS systems most often used with AEGIS are difficult at best to resupply at sea and pretty much is never done.
Yes Math wins! (Score:2)
After the defense systems of a naval vessel get overwhelmed and it goes down in flames, the country that owns that vessel stomps big-time on the attacker.
War isn't a "No loss evan" scenario .. its a question of balancing resources against potential threats. And given that the military spending of the US is around double that of all its "enemies" combined - who the hell is going to try to pull off a stunt as proposed??!?!?!?!
can target discrimination win? (Score:2)
imagine Nut Korea shoots off 43 Rong Dong missles, 16 Ding Dong noisemakers, and is fuelling six nukes. the Rong Dongs will get halfway to nowhere and hit the water. the Ding Dongs spark and arc and in the end do nothing. the nukes would be the real threat after the radars clear on the Aegis cruisers.
if you get a look at any weapon, it will have definite characteristics that are generally repeated with every shot. it is moderately well known that repeatable data can be programmed for recall, and since t
Cold War scenario (Score:2)
This is the Cold War scenario with a couple of string substitutions: s/land/sea/g and s/artillery/missiles/g. The US spent over 40 years developing strategies to counter that scenario. Rest assured, they have a smart answer, or rather several of them. I believe
The only way to win is not to play (Score:2)
War Games got it right.
Dumb article name (Score:2)
Red Storm Rising (Score:2)
This was the premise of the first naval battle in Clancy's Red Storm Rising. TFA is neither original nor insightful. Even armchair strategists understand the concept of attrition.
Saturation (Score:2)
I've always thought several thousand simple, relatively stupid, cheap "cruise missiles" could pretty easily defeat a carrier battle group. When I say "cruise missiles" I'm talking about pilot-less drones that are really small air craft (could even be built of wood) with a warhead aboard. You wouldn't even need them to be completely autonomous, though a auto-pilot would probably be a good idea. You'd need a satellite up-link to control them (and to diminish the possibility of someone jamming your control
Really complex problem (Score:2)
In the recent example of Israel and it's alleged shield, the success depending on the ability to acquire a threat quickly, access the target, and make a judgement to destroy or ignore. Based on information in the media, a enemy who could launch a hundred missile quickly from diverse location could overwhelm the system, take it out if locations were known, and then be free to attack targets. A country like Iran cou
Return Address (Score:2)
I still occasionally wonder if Mecca is on the US doomsday nuke 'em all list...
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This is why I don't read slashdot (Score:2)
This kind of crap is why I hardly read slashdot anymore, after 15 years of daily reading and tens of thousands of comments...
Sure! That could happen... if our missile defense systems are designed by morons.
Otherwise, no, that wouldn't happen, because a defensive system will be p
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What are the alternatives? I cannot find any comparable tech blogs that aren't dumbed down. Slashdot was never that great, but the SNR was better than average in the early days.
Enemy has to do math as well (Score:3)
The enemy would need to have a massive ICBM missile force. That is not very feasible. How many of our enemies have a budget for that? I don't think even China has that kind of money .. and if they could allocate such a budget .. corrupt politicians would allow only a small percent of it to go into actual weapon acquisition .. they same way they take money off highway contracts. I don't see how any of our credible adversaries could organize a massive missile force coordination while we remain clueless.
Always have a shaved knuckle in the hole (Score:2)
Sure, Its happened before (kinda) (Score:2)
American tanks sucked by comparison. They were easy to spot, they had very poor armor, their accuracy was crap, range was crap, and the soldiers driving them were dunces by comparrison.
But we still overwhelmed them and won with sheer numbers. Our tanks suck
Real enemy: It just doesn't work (Score:2, Insightful)
Since the 1960s until the present day, missile defense has been a hot topic
TRANSLATION: We've been trying to get it to work for 50 fucking years but we can't seem to get two object moving faster than bullets to collide.
That's the real problem. They can barely even shoot down those first cheap missiles. They can't compensate for evasive action at all. It's been nonsense for the last fifty years and will be for the next fifty years.
It's a matter of cost-effectiveness (Score:5, Interesting)
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A cost of 100-1 is perfectly acceptable if you just need to win a arms race with the Irans/North Koreas of the world.
AEGIS was designed to defeat this (Score:3)
Attacks as described in TFS are called saturation attacks. Since the advent of the guided missile, this has always been a big headache for naval designers. Early missile-equipped ships had 2-4 radar directors, each capable of guiding one missile to its target. Navies wanted more, but there are constraints (financial, weight, systems complexity) to the number of directors you can add.
The US Navy was the first to develop a partial solution in the shape of NTU ('New Threat Upgrade'), a system where one director could guide several missiles. This meant that the weakest link was now the missile launchers: even the biggest ships has only two twin-arm mechanical launchers so they were limited to a couple of missile launches per minute.
The whole point of AEGIS was to provide a ship with enough defensive capability to defeat saturation attacks by the biggest threat on the planet: the Russian naval airforce.
This meant using a phased-array radar that could track hundreds of targets, directors derived from NTU that could guide up to 18 missiles at once, and a vertical launch system that can fire more than 30 missiles/minute.
In the end, it becomes a financial problem. A Ticonderoga-class cruiser has 128 missiles on board, that's easily $120M in missile inventory. AEGIS isn't cheap either.
As missiles become cheaper, the calculation changes. The recent Israeli successes with missile defence using missiles that cost $100k instead of $1M shows that Defence departments are well aware of this.
Still, anyone contemplating an attack on US Navy vessels usually has to contend not with one ship, but with a battle group of several of the best-defended ships on the planet, plus potentially an aircraft carrier that carries more firepower than most of the world's air forces.
Is this a poorly considered question? (Score:3)
Yes, of course it is possible. Here is why it is not likely and a poor argument against missile defense.
(1) Witness Iron Dome in Israel. Combining human intervention with advanced software, Iron Dome does not attempt to take every missile. Instead the system is designed to identify and destroy only those that are a threat to people. It was very effective. Older inaccurate missiles that are not on target will be ignored.
(2) Old missiles fielded by poor countries (see NK) are poorly maintained and are more likely then not to simply not fire.
(3) Poor countries with large number of missiles are going to have awful command and control. They aren't going to be able to launch a coordinated attack.
(4) Older missiles have bad range. Who cares if NK fires a bunch of scuds, what will they hit? They can barely build a handful of long ranged stuff, and that doesn't appear to be changing.
(5) Richer countries like China aren't looking for a strategy that wipes the enemy out via surprise. They want a credible deterrent, which is best achieved by a limited number of advanced, hidden, city busters.
21st century warfare doesn't rely on missiles (Score:3)
Plenty of people have already pointed out the idiocy in the details of TFA's argument, so I won't go into that. The core assumption underlying the whole thing is wrong too: wars are not fought with missiles any more. The nations that can afford enough missiles to pose any kind of threat at all to each other are the wealthy, highly populated ones. All the wealthy, populous nations are economically interdependent now, and always will be. Economically interdependent nations don't wage war on each other. All wars for the foreseeable future will be started by second- or third-world rogue states using terrorism and guerrilla tactics, and ended by first-world superpowers using espionage, tactical bombing, and drone strikes.
Nobody capable of launching ICBM's at us could conceivably ever want to. There is nobody we'll ever need to launch ICBM's at ourselves.
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You can whatif yourself into a deep, deep bog. There are unknown variables, and the answer to the question must rely on them.
You can put a big divisor on this, however, with the fact that a nuclear winter trumps most cards, dystopic science fiction scenarios notwithstanding.
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Both have too much to lose. At one point, they appeared reasonable, but it was never reasonable that Russia would have attacked us directly (appearances aside), they played a better-intel/counter-intel game, not a better-military game.
More likely if N. Korea, or possibly Iran get a missile system in place, we might have a group desperate and nuts enough to do this (not so sure about Iran in either category), but for the most part, we currently don't have a serious threat due to lose of a trade partner, or r
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A nuke that gets shot down can explode by nuclear explosion before being destroyed by the enemy. Think about 50 000 nuclear explosions mid sky. I'm pretty sure that it would be pretty close to killing all life on earth (I know, some extremophiles would not be affected, whatever, humans would have a hard time.)
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Depending on the type of nuke, it can be fairly difficult to accidentally set one off by shooting it down. More likely the conventional explosives in the nuke will go off in an uncontrolled manner and spray a relatively small amount of radioactive material on the ground.
I'm also not sure why you would have 50,000 nuclear explosions mid sky when there's only about 17,000 nukes still in existence, with fewer than a quarter of them active. Russia is estimated to have the most with about 8500 warheads of which
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Some think that wiping out all human life would essentially be the equivalent.
The problem with averages (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with averages is this: Only a small percentage of the population are in jobs that require advanced algebra, trigonometry and calculus. Although I went through differential equations in my undergraduate, and still enjoy math, I do not need it for my IT Management job. Statistics I use infrequently. Algebra I use somewhat (but not advanced). When you are measuring the US population average against other country averages (and in many cases just a subset of those other countries) you are not getting to the crux of the issue -- how does our top 2%(or whatever the appropriate number is) compare against other countries' top 2%. If our universities are producing engineers with much worse scores than our counterparts, then I will worry.
On a side note: When trying to make fun of another group's intelligence, you should write a post that doesn't make you sound like a 9 year old who forgot his ADHD medication.
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Agreed, calculus was one of my favorite subjects in high school (the other being Latin), but I don't need anything remotely that advanced as a sysadmin. Basic seventh grade algebra gets me through the day-to-day. I know some people who do need high level math in their job and they're brilliant.
As a side note, your post is insulting to 9 year olds. I know many 7 year olds who can write better than the original poster.
Re:The problem with averages (Score:5, Insightful)
In a democracy, you can't get away with having a small minority with all the knowledge. The whole population needs to be informed enough to do basic math and critical thinking. A basic grasp of statistics, algebra, and how to do a budget would make a huge difference in the ability to evaluate what politicians say and have a well-functioning democracy. If you can't decide for yourself, the facts just become another political football with competing claims.
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The problem is that the Laffer Curve is such a simplification that it can be used to trick people to work against their best interests. Besides the points the sibling AC posted there are a couple of other points.
With a drop in taxes why shouldn't your wage go down. You make $100,000 with a take home pay of $50,000. Taxes are reduced to zero. Your wage is cut back to $55,000. You should be happy as you're making $5000 more then previously and your employer is very happy as his profits have gone up by at leas
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Your claim is justified neither by experience nor theory. But even if it were, the employee then sees that being an employer is a very good thing, so he quits and starts his own business, realizing he can greatly undercut his old employer's prices because his old employer has a profit margin exceeding 45%. The ex-employee sells goods for 75% of what his old employer did and has a higher personal in
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If our universities are producing engineers with much worse scores than our counterparts, then I will worry.
Umm.. the US does not seem to be producing[0] engineers like other countries[1] are. You could probably start that worrying you speak of.
[0] - www.freep.com/article/20121017/BUSINESS01/310170028/Reuss-U-S-lags-in-producing-engineering-grads
[1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/12/polands-universities-turn_n_2285849.html [huffingtonpost.com]
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Because then you'd need to launch all your missiles from within a relatively small area... and that would make them much easier to detect upon launch as well as much easier to stop. Missiles are not airplanes that can be launched from all over and then group up. They carry limited fuel and have relatively limited flight control so you want to take the shortest path possible to minimize detection and countermeasure time.
tangent (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, before you fire 100 missiles we've killed you (Score:5, Insightful)
Fire 100 "cheap missiles" to get intercepted
Wait for the US to use up it's anti-missile capabilities shooting those down
Fire more, more better missiles to hit target.
What would really happen
Fire 6 "cheap" missiles
Die in a hail of US missiles you have no defense against
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Or they launch six each from many small vessels and land based launchers. Launch the expensive ones mixed in with the cheap stuff.
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I think the idea here would be to have many archers.
Not like disguising fighting vessels as merchants or fishing vessels is anything new.
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As long as there are Pastafarians in the world, his Noodley Goodness shall keep the strainers always full, but never running over.
Math has nothing on His Noodleyness.
tilt the machine and put in another quarter (Score:2)
seriously, folks, dump the game and replay.