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Northrop to Sell Laser Shield Bubble for Airports
NeoPrime writes "CNN Money web site has a story about Northrop Grumman forecasting development of a laser shield 'bubble' for airports and other installations in the United States within 18 months. The system will be called Skyguard — a joint venture with Israel and the U.S. Army. It will have the capability to generate a shield five kilometers in radius."
Unless this "shield" protects the airport from terrorists attempting to board a plane, what use are they? When was the last time a plane crashed into an airport building? Now if this was the White House or tother big military places, sure, but your standard domestic airport? Why?
I hadn't heard anything about airports being threatened by ballistic missiles...
Presumably, the more likely concern would be shoulder-fired SAMs shot at approaching/departing aircraft. A system that could actually acquire and zap such a thing from anywhere around the airport grounds would have to be highly automated and very fast... I'm a little concerned about false positives. A lot, actually.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I would like to see solid evidence that they are effective and that they eliminate a threat before the government pours billions into this technology.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
You never know if the reporter got it right or if the publicist had an overactive imagination, but the big threat people are worried about is some dude hiding in the weeds and shooting one of those shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles at an airliner trying to take off or land. There has been talk about equiping airliners with countermeasures against heat-seeking missiles.
The way the countermeasures are supposed to work is that most heat seekers are not full-fledged imaging devices but are instead rotating scan devices, and if you know the nature of the threat, you could pulse a heat source on and off to throw such a missile off target. I really think it is a stretch for a laser to stick in an airport control tower to actually shoot down a missile by zapping it with the laser. I think it would be a much safer thing, especially around a civilian airport, to spoof such a missle by pulsing it with IR to confuse the scanning seeker, or if that doesn't work, to blind an imaging sensor with a thermal pulse.
It kind of makes sense to provide a central, airport-based spoofer/blinder instead of having distributed spoofer/blinders on all of the aircraft. That avoids the old-aircraft retrofit problem, and the planes really only need this protection as they are landing and taking off -- those shoulder-launched missiles don't go very far. It would also make a lot of sense to provide protection against heat-seeking missiles because terrorists in theory could get a hold of them and they are small and portable to sneak around with. It would also make more sense that the laser system would be a spoofer/blinder kind of countermeasure rather than a Star Wars type of shoot-down ballistic missile defense.
Given what we have seen of insurgent guerilla tactics in Iraq, popping RPGs at departing flights would bring do wn a plane. Perhaps not everyone on board will get killed because of the low altitude, but terrorism is all about terrorizing a population. That laser shield isn't going to do much, is it? Moreover, the laser is pointless unless it is deployed at all airports because terrorists with a man-portable surface to air missile would certainly do enough research to figure out which airports do not have the defense system and act accordingly. Or they would just go to Japan and knock down a plane bound for the United States. This appears to be more comfort food for a worried nation's spirit.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
For example - the (normal) northbound departure from San Jose goes over about a jillion small industrial buildings and hard-to-inspect back alleys. A single person on one of the roofs under the departure route could badly damage departing aircraft with a rifle. A .223 or better would hole a wing (and fuel tank) with no trouble, and with good marksmanship, I doubt the Kevlar blade containment shields would stand up to a 50 cal round. No missile needed. No help from the can of laser whupass. Hell, the jihadi would probably even get away, although I understand that's supposed to be optional. How many billions are we going to spend on this? Do you feel safer? I didn't think so.
Weaponizing civilian installations such as airports is a horrible idea. Sooner or later this system will accidentally shoot down a civilian aircraft. It's like weaponizing cars. You think there won't be mishaps? Increasing the number of ways an airplane can crash does not decrease the overall airplane accident rate.
Perhaps we should concentrate our efforts on finding people who want to commit homocidal acts and imprisoning them.
Or maybe stop international policies which cause people to want to commit homocidal acts against our airports.
While I'm at it...maybe we should stop trying to identify all the people that are not homocidal maniacs in a brain-dead attempt to find the homocidal maniacs by a process of elimination...
Does fear run your life?
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I don't have an exact figure, but there are roughly 500 airports with commercial flights into and out of them in the United States. Some of them only have a couple of scheduled flights a day. At, say, $25 million a pop, it will cost $12.5 billion dollars to equip all those airports with such a system, plus operating costs (presumably you have to have at least one guy babysitting the thing).
And you pretty much have to install these things everywhere an airliner flies. Terrorists aren't stupid (well, actually the evidence is that most of them are, but that's another story. Assuming they're stupid isn't a good idea IMO). They'll realise that if these systems exist, they should pick somewhere that's unlikely to be equipped with it. So while the planes at LAX and La Guardia land and take off with laser-guarded safety, our friendly local terrorists cruise on down to Bum's Rush, Iowa, and take potshots at the one RJ that lands there every day.
But assume these things *do* get installed in every airport in the country. What do our terrorists do? They scrap plan A - missiles at airplane takeoff - and go to the equally lethal plan B, a couple of tonnes of explosives under the grandstand at the local high school football game. Or any one of plans C through ZZ. So we've blown 10 billion dollars to achieve very, very little.
This is almost a quintessential example of protecting against a movie plot threat.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Don't worry about it. If decades of Star Wars have taught us anything it is that (1) you always run tests under artificially optimal conditions, and (2) it doesn't actually have to work to get more contracts.
As to why rockets keep landing on Israel, well, consider how many people have been killed by all those unguided Kassam rockets. According to Wikipedia, thirteen people have been killed by Palestinian rocketeers after hundreds of tries. That's far less than one suicide bomber can do in a pizza joint. In the great scheme of things they're more of an annoyance than a danger - they're a psychological weapon. There's probably a hundred ways Israel can spend two billion dollars that will save more than thirteen lives over four years.
How long before one of these things mistakes a passenger jet for a rocket? Who's going to man the thing? I mean, Aegis Combat System is more or less the same thing and it shot down a passenger jet and there's relatively few Aegis systems. Imagine having these things at every major airport. I dunno, I don't think I'd be very comfortable flying with these things up and running.
I'm concerned about false negatives as well. Face it....this thing will NOT be perfect the first time out. IIRC, the Patriot system shot down a British Tornado, mistaking it for a hostile aircraft.
A false negative will be almost as bad as a false positive.
"It didn't detect that missile, the airliner got shot down, 300 people dead, $25B wasted....SHUT THE SYSTEM DOWN!"
So, make it hard for mortar shells and Katyushas and Qassims ... a Cessna in the landing pattern with a few hundred pounds of explosives won't be detected as dangerous until it is too close to be stopped. Ditto for cars coming to the curbside loading zones.
I have always marveled at the willingness of the military industrial complex to come up with expensive ways of guarding against rogue cruise missiles, which are expensive and unlikely compared to the simplicity of stealing a Cessna and cruising over the border like any other returning drug plane. Or pack your nuke into a stolen cargo ship, packed down in the hold under enough metal barrier cargo to keep its radiation hidden, and sail right into a harbor.
Osama bin Laden is notorious for doing things cheaply. I can't believe he has much interest in stealing cruise missiles when he could steal Cessnas or a cargo ship.
This recent North Korean volley of missiles made me wonder if anyone at the top actually was worried about it. I think rather they saw it as a wonderful opportunity to spend more money on useless weapons to make it look like they were defending liberty. Osama bin Laden and his ilk have nothing to retaliate against and nothing to lose. North Korea and Iran do. Their glorious leaders may be crazy, but they're not stupid. If they actually did land a warhead in the US, even just a few hundred pounds of dynamite, there would not be a single dissenting voice trying to talk the US out of pulverizing their countries. They know that, and we know they know that. Even their own citizens know that.
Infuriate left and right
Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all?
Ya know how we caused the Soviet Union to collapse by forcing their military to spend, spend, spend?
$10B here and $10B there and pretty soon you're talking real money.
For a couple hundred thou the terrorists could drive America to complete, parnoiac economic ruin (not to mention social ruin) buying worthless "security."
I think that's why they call it "terrorism."
KFG
There's a chinese expression that literally translates to "spear and shield", meaning paradox. There was a weapon merchant selling spear and shield, claiming that his spear can cut thru any shield existed, and that his shield can protect against any spear existed.
Looks like Northrop Grunman is doing the same thing here, selling on one hand space laser gun that can destroy anything from outer space, and protective shield against laser gun on the other hand.
Someone is getting screwed somewhere.
If we spent the 9 billion putting up guard rails around roads with drop-offs that don't have them we would save thousands more lives.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Well it's good to see that genocide has finally lost that bad-boy image it got during the reigns of Hitler and Stalin...
Really, you can argue all you want about whom was there first and who stole what from whom, but what it comes down to at this point is that there are two groups of people who desperately want to protect the areas which have been their homelands since birth.
Neither group is going away. At this point it's coexist or cease to exist.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
A billion dollar security shield to make us feel safe while terrorists take over planes with box cutters.
Brilliant.
LOL, that's simply an absurd concept. Airports don't have anything to fear from the sorts of 'tactical' battlefield rockets that this would help against, and I'm extraordinarily doubtful that it would do jack *shit* against an RPG.
Oh, and regarding it's promising utility against shoulder-launched SAMs? Yes, I've seen the test films on laser-missile defense and, in a clear sky with no clutter, no ground interference, it can take out AAMs in a second or two...of course, if Terrorist Abdullah is going to fire a SAM-9, he's not going to wait until that 747 full of people is 2 miles away on a departing vector at 5000' giving the laser a nice multi-second chase solution. He's going to nail it when it's 1000 yards away, 150' in the air, loaded to the gills with fuel, engines on HOT, and the pilot has no altitude to cope with the consequences. This laser system going to detect, track, power up, and fire early enough to kill the warhead in that case? (Not to mention to track and compensate for, I dunno, that landing JAL 747 full of 300 Mall of America shoppers that's about to cross the beam during firing????) Um, no.
And can you imagine the maintenance contract on a ultra-high powered system with that sort of a hair-trigger, that has to basically sit "charged" 24/7? Egad. Yeah, I BET Northrop is hoping to sell a few of these.
-Styopa
Well, this kind of new defensive weapon is always rolled out in several phases.
First phase is characterized by an upsurge in Northrup's market cap. That's just begun. All Aboard!
Second phase is characterized by initial installations and mild cost overruns (not to exceed 250% of estimated costs). Given the current Administration in Washington, that is almost certainly going to start before Nov 2008.
The next phase will see something "unexpected" happen, that will have the nickname "laser chaff" (possibly other nicknames, depending on how the decoys are actually implemented by the nasty, clever blackhats). Somebody's gonna die.
Then Northrup's market cap will drop again.
The trick to mastering this new technology is appropriate monitoring of potential terrorists' phone calls and email so you can know when to tell your cronies that it is time to trim their portfolios of Northrup stock.
The whole thing does point out the critical need for improving and expanding Homeland Security's capabilities for monitoring email, phone conversations, and the like. When it comes to protecting stock market portfolios of the rich and famous, we can't be too careful.