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?'"

Comments

Simply put... No.

[beelsebob]

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.

[SuricouRaven]

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.

[DarkOx]

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.

[Artraze]

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!

Re:Simply put... No.

[Nutria]

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.

Re:Simply put... No.

[war4peace]

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.

[Dins]

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...

Re:Simply put... No.

[0123456]

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.

[default luser]

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.

Once your out of expensive weapons I can bring out my good ones to use on your high value targets.

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.

[dywolf]

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.

[ColdWetDog]

Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

Re:Simply put... No.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Chris Burke]

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.

[asylumx]

Just a note: Nobody knows which of these approaches was more effective, since neither of the two countries have ever launched any of the described weapons.

Re:Simply put... No.

[dcollins]

"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.

Re:Simply put... No.

[Chris Burke]

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. 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!

Re:Simply put... No.

[rahvin112]

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.

That's not math

[jader3rd]

That's not math, that's known as attrition.
Sometimes you don't need the better soldiers, you just need more soldiers.

Re:That's not math

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

Navy Fire Control Computers Know Math

[EmagGeek]

Here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpkTHyfr0pM

(seriously, watch the series. It's pretty amazing)

Math?

[phantomfive]

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.'

It's not about the long term survivability.

[Red Herring]

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.

The problem with averages

[MyLongNickName]

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.

Re:The problem with averages

[Stone Rhino]

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.

Yes, before you fire 100 missiles we've killed you

[raymorris]

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

It's a matter of cost-effectiveness

[cpghost]

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.

tangent

[NotQuiteReal]

The word "math" is a poor substitute for "overwhelming numbers".

Why are you even on Slashdot?

[SuperKendall]

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.