Did someone say, "Spartan?"
Did someone say, "Sprint?"
Posted on 06/25/2003 2:27:30 PM PDT by boris
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is busy digging silos for a limited missile shield in Alaska, but there remains a nagging paucity of evidence that the system will be able to defeat the simplest of ruses anytime soon: decoy enemy warheads.
In the vacuum of space, flying objects are largely free of atmospheric drag - a metallic balloon can travel at the same speed as the enemy warhead it is imitating. These countermeasures can be designed and painted to mimic stable or even tumbling conical projectiles. And there can be dozens of them deployed at one time, say experts.
Now accelerate this exoatmospheric shell game to 24,000 kilometers per hour and give yourself 60 seconds to find the pea - while streaking toward the target cluster at about 7 kilometers per second. Welcome to the single most difficult engineering challenge facing missile defense today. It is a problem that some experts say is insoluble with current or even near-future technology. The administration of U.S. President George W Bush is rushing to install a missile defense testbed in Fort Greely, Alaska, by the fall of next year. The system is being designed to shoot down enemy missiles as they travel through space in their midcourse flight phase.
"The midcourse [defense] segment has basically no chance of succeeding," said Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology and national security at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a longtime missile defense critic. For more than a decade, Postol has been poring over missile defense test data, pinpointing deficiencies and, occasionally, leaking sensitive documents to the press. The combination of simple decoys, limited optical resolution of missile defense kill vehicles and enormous speeds conspire to make the situation impossible, Postol said. "Nothing works for them in this cycle."
MDA spokesman Rick Lehner disagreed: "It's certainly not impossible or we wouldn't be doing it. Remember, [Postol] and other critics are not involved in missile defense technology development and are not privy to the scientific, technical and engineering advances we have made."
On that count neither is the U.S. Congress. Some lawmakers remain deeply frustrated with the lack of specific information about the missile defense program in general and target discrimination in particular. To date, Congress has not received clear information - either classified or unclassified - about the target threat or how the MDA plans to deal with countermeasures in the future, sources on Capitol Hill said.
Missile defense critic Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has seen no indication that the Pentagon is making any headway on solving the countermeasures problem.
"They have no enhanced discrimination capability," Reed said in an interview. "I don't think they have made any progress at all."
Reed and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) included language in the 2004 Senate defense authorization bill demanding more target information from the Pentagon. The House version of the bill did not include such a request.
Critics say the MDA has become increasingly tight-fisted with critical engineering data over the last 36 months and insist the timing is no accident.
In April 2000, the Union of Concerned Scientists, an anti-proliferation think tank here, released a scathing study of the countermeasure conundrum and concluded that even the simplest decoys could overwhelm the planned national shield.
The report said "a vast amount of technical information relevant to building and deploying countermeasures is publicly available. Any country capable of building a long-range ballistic missile would have the scientific and technical expertise ... to exploit the available technologies."
The most difficult ruse to counter, the report said, is a live warhead hidden inside a countermeasure balloon.
In the fall of 2000, after the missile defense flight-test dubbed IFT-6, the Pentagon stopped sharing countermeasure data.
More than three years later, the authors of the study, including Postol, say they see no indication that the MDA has effectively addressed the countermeasure problem. The Pentagon's lockdown on information hasn't helped, they say. "It's hard to get a clear sense of how much work is being done on this," said David Wright, senior scientist with Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program.
The MDA has budgeted $1.2 billion for target and countermeasures engineering through 2009 - about 2 percent of the total planned missile defense budget of $54.6 billion between now and 2009. The agency is scheduled to award a prime contract on targets and countermeasures mitigation later this year. Much of that work is being conducted within Project Hercules, led by Gary Payton, the MDAs director of advanced systems. The MDA declined to make Payton available for an interview, saying nearly 100 percent of the program is classified.
Contractors and organizations currently working in the target area include: Raytheon Co. of Lexington, Mass.; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory of Cambridge; the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio; Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio; Sandia National Laboratory of Albuquerque, N.M.; ITT Industries/Aerotherm of Mountain View, Calif.; and the U.S. Army Missile Defense Target Joint Project Office of Huntsville, Ala.
Aside from budget numbers, the MDA is reticent to disclose much about targets or countermeasures, citing national security. Lehner did confirm that a future test flight will introduce a tumbling warhead - particularly hard to hit because of its constantly changing infrared signature - but would not specify which flight. "We don't identify types of targets and/or decoys for flight tests so as not to provide this information to potential adversaries," said Lehner.
Postol sees another reason for the MDAs tied tongue: "They're just trying to keep their heads down and not say anything because there is nothing to say." In 2000, Postol obtained an internal Pentagon document which showed that three target balloons were eliminated from the test program back in 1998. Postol asserts they were too hard to hit and presented a liability. Lehner could not confirm the balloons had been dropped and said more have been added since. He said three balloons were used during the IFT-8 test in March 2002.
That intercept was successful, but critics immediately attacked the test as too easy and said the MDA had too much prior information about the decoys to make it realistic.
"There is an assumption that there will be enough intelligence on the threat that they can pass a map to the kill vehicle," said Wright, who added that decoys can be easily hidden before launch.
Rick Yuse, vice president of missile defense for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems, said the program is making progress and one day there will be effective remedies for decoys, "It's a difficult problem but not insoluble," he said. Reed is less hopeful. Congress recently approved the Bush administration's 2004 request of $9.1 billion for the missile defense program despite ongoing controversies over items such as countermeasures and balky boosters.
"They're making political judgements, not technical judgements," Reed said.
Close counts in horseshoes,handgrenades and nukes.
Maybe, maybe not. Any decision under the guise of a "technical judgement" that assumes that knowledge and capabilities are static and not readily subject to radical revision with continued scientific advances, could be said to be political, as well.
And who said "political judgements" are bad? It seems quite appropriate to me that a nation would make a "political judgement" concerning its security and how to utilize its resources, and then do whatever is necessary to make the technical aspects of the implementation materialize. Anything is possible, given the right political vision, commitment, and sufficient resources.
Mere "technical realities" represented as a snapshot of current capabilities and thinking should never solely dictate political decisions, especially when involving national security.
And how about this blurb:
Postol has been poring over missile defense test data, pinpointing deficiencies and, occasionally, leaking sensitive documents to the press.
A real quality researcher there.
True enough but it is very difficult to make the detection, the decision to launch and actually launch and deliver the countermeasure in that time frame.
For a missile defense system, the decoy threat is real and work on this problem goes back at least 30 years so one could assume some progress has been made. I would think that any definitive simulations or tests that have been made pro or con would carry a very high security level. You really don't want the bad guys having a clue as to where you stand with this.
OTOH, a little disinformation can be valuable. Kind of a Brer Patch thing if you are old enough to remember Song of the South. If we let it out that we can't handle a simple decoy (when in fact we can) then we dilute the enemy's resources when he develops clever decoy systems. That could be going on here. This is, I believe, a signal processing/software/detection issue and as the computers get better and the resolution of the radars in terms of pointing accuracy and tracking get better progress is bound to be made on this front.
This will all be moot when we get a really good Airborne or Space Based Laser nuke killer flying. That is the ultimate solution. Just destroy them all, the real ones and the decoys.
1) Travel at over 60 mph would suck the air out of your lungs.
2) Man couldn't fly.
3) Man couldn't fly faster than the speed of sound.
4) Man couldn't fly in space.
5) We couldn't land a man on the moon.
6) We couldn't hit an object in space.
7) We couldn't do it again.
8) We couldn't do it with 100% accuracy.
9) Color TV is impossible
10) Everything that was going to be invented was invented by the end of the 19th century.
The only thing critics don't criticize is their disastrous track record.
Don't you know the first act will be to call all the liberals to let them know how we solved the problem, so they can call all their commie buddies and let them know.
Liberals also like to refer static economic models when it comes to pushing their marxist agenda.
For a country that has a developed nuclear capability, say the PRC, they don't need ICBMs. It is better to put the nuclear warheads on long range cruise missles. Those can be built with a 5000 to 7500 mile range. There are no technical problems for cruise missiles with that range. They can be designed to fit into standard cargo containers and loaded onto, then launched from merchant cargo ships. True, if we were already at a state of declared hostilities they would be less useful, but in a Pearl Harbor situation they would work very, very well. And the anti-missile shield would not work against them at all.
Now before some pin-headed weasal jumps up and starts yelling "liberal weenie" I wish to point out that I am not saying an anti-missile shield is useless. I am merely pointing out that for a "middle tier" nuclear power going the ICBM route is neither necessary nor optimal.
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