Posted on 08/15/2017 8:44:26 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu wrote 2,500 years ago. It’s a lesson the US military largely forgot after the Cold War, when we got in the habit of building huge, easily targeted bases. Now we must relearn deception as Russia, China, and other adversaries field, not only their own precision weapons, but the satellites, drones, and other sensors to find targets for them.
But what does deception mean in the 21st century? Once it required recruiting courtesans as spies and camouflaging troops with tree branches and green facepaint. Now it involves putting out fake news on Facebook and concealing missile launchers in commercial shipping containers.
“It’ll drive the Russians bananas,” said Tom Karako, missile defense director at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. CSIS made the video above to illustrate how a Patriot launcher might be removed from the standard-issue trailer and installed in a CONEX container. The Russians are already working on a similar concept for their Klub-K cruise missile.
Since the Russian Katyusha rockets of World War II, it’s been standard practice to build missile launchers onto the back of trucks. Even full-sized ICBMs can be moved around this way and hidden in tunnels to avoid detection and destruction, a favorite tactic of both China and North Korea. But when these truck-mounted missiles are on the road, they’re pretty obviously weapons. It’s like hiding a needle in a haystack: You may have to sort through a lot of chaff to find your target, but when you do find it, it stands out.
Putting missile launchers in shipping containers, by contrast, is like hiding a needle in a stack of needles: You can easily find something that looks like what you’re looking for, the problem is finding the right one among millions. The standard 20-foot-long CONEX box, invented by the US Army Transportation Corps for the Korean War, is now used around the world, with more than 20 million in service. They’re abundant in both civilian seaports and on US Forward Operating Bases, where empty ones are often converted into storage units or even housing.
What if one were a hidden missile launcher? Could you find it?
An enemy satellite, drone, or spy could easily spot the containers and transmit their coordinates back to headquarters for an attack. But unless an agent looks inside each box, a precision-guided strike on any given cluster of CONEX boxes might hit hidden US missiles, spare air conditioners, or empty containers. That makes it much harder to wipe out the US military’s missiles in the kind of preemptive strikes favored by Chinese doctrine – and anything that makes preemptive strikes less attractive helps to keep the peace.
Ping.
I believe this concept first originated in Russia and they might have fielded or even marketed a naturalized, box concealed version for I believe the klub.
It was either one or two years ago.
No sale. The USA and Russia have never been more aligned.
The EU, islam, 65 IQ Africa, blm, anitfata and all the rest of the lazy and filthy scum are our enemies.
You call out Russia, you expose your ignorance or evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs
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Interesting article.
I have to wonder about the caption on the photo, though.
“What if one were a hidden missile launcher? Could you find it?”
Well, yes I could. Drop a 1000 lb bomb in the middle, and see which one explodes like a missile.
The author is woefully ignorant of history if he thinks that was the extent of subterfuge in WW II. To confuse the Germans about where the invasion would occur, there was a HUGE deception effort:
Wiki: Operation Fortitude was the code name for a World War II military deception employed by the Allied nations as part of an overall deception strategy (code named Bodyguard) during the build-up to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two sub-plans, North and South, with the aim of misleading the German high command as to the location of the imminent invasion.Geographic reach of Bodyguard:Both Fortitude plans involved the creation of phantom field armies (based in Edinburgh and the south of England) which threatened Norway (Fortitude North) and Pas de Calais (Fortitude South).
Don’t forget, it was Jimmy Carter who authorized the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison and Reagan who killed it!
The Peacekeeper Rail Garrison wasn’t going to run on civilian rails. It was going to have many 20-mile long rail lines and the missiles would shuttle from “station” to “station” on that limited rail line. There was about a 20:1 ratio of dummies to real missiles. The dummies had the correct weight, size, and electromagnetic signature to match the real missile cars. The system was even going to have locations where the Russian satellites could monitor the missiles.
Uhh, Reagan proposed the Rail Garrison in the mid-'80s, in response to Congressional resistance to funding the missile program (mostly due to the belief that our silos were too vulnerable). If Carter started the M-X ball rolling, it didn't include a rail car component at that point. IIRC, the early plans called for some sort of "horizontal trench" concealment.
I don't think the rail garrison was killed by Reagan, either - the Congressional Budget Office was still looking at funding land purchases for the system in 1988. I'll bet it was Bush 41 who pulled the plug.
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