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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?'"
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."
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.
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
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.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The word "math" is a poor substitute for "overwhelming numbers".
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"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.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes