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Missile Defense's Real Enemy: Math
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?'"
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.
That's not math, that's known as attrition.
Sometimes you don't need the better soldiers, you just need more soldiers.
Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpkTHyfr0pM
(seriously, watch the series. It's pretty amazing)
Is this what we have degenerated to? When I read the title, I thought, "wow, someone has done the calculations to find the weak spots in the trajectories of the defense missiles or can calculate live the precise way to avoid them."
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.'
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Enemy plan:
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
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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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.
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.
During World War 2 the Germans had WAY more superior tanks. They had better armor, better accuracy, better range, delivered a more explosive package, plus the soldiers driving them were very well trained in tactics. They even had better camoflauge.
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 sucked, but we had a crapload of them.
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 "cheap" launchers and take them out.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
The real problem is that a missile interceptor is more expensive than the missile (or decoy) it is supposed to intercept. Take for instance Israel's Iron Dome vs. Hamas' rockets. A single Iron Dome interceptor costs $10k+, if not one order of magnitude more, while a single Hamas rocket is less than, say, $100. The same holds true for strategic defense missile systems: it's always a lot more expensive to intercept a ballistic missile than to send one. That's the real issue here. As long as missile defense technology doesn't become a lot less expensive (think e.g. some kind of futuristic force field shield of some kind that doesn't consume a lot of energy when idle), it will always be overwhelmed.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The word "math" is a poor substitute for "overwhelming numbers".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
The AEGIS interceptors are not as sophisticated as you'd think. All of the directing comes from the ship's powerful radar. The ship tracks the inbound missile, and when the timing is right launches an interceptor (the Navy calls them "Standard Missiles" or SMs). The missile has no idea where it's going or what it's supposed to hit, in fact it doesn't even know where IT is. It's only real link to the world is it's ability to listen to the ship's powerful radar. The same radar that detected the threat can also see the SM. It basically hits the SM with radar in a special way that tells the SM "go up", "go down", "turn this much" etc. and guides it into the target. At the very end of the flight there is a terminal phase that is a bit different, but it's still the radar doing the heavy lifting, not the missile. Most of this is called out in more detail in the wikipedia page for Aegis Combat System.
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.
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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