Whenever a weapon system is proposed, the question in the title is the one that must be answered first: What’s the mission? What will this system be expected to do, and in what circumstances? The reluctance to provide a firm answer to that question is one of the things that make possible the phenomenon that haunts every defense engineer’s nightmares: “requirements creep.”
Way, way back when Robert McNamara – remember him? – was the Secretary of Defense, there was a lot of discussion of “missile defense:” that is, the creation of a shield against ballistic bombardment over the United States, or portions thereof. McNamara opposed such a system, not because it was technologically infeasible at the time (though it was), but because he saw it as uneconomical. He argued that an enemy determined to attack the U.S. ballistically, if confronted with a missile shield, could increase his offensive forces sufficiently to overwhelm the shield with numbers. Moreover, such an increase would be cheaper than expanding the missile shield it was intended to defeat. So economics was on the side of the notional attacker. McNamara was very economics-oriented.
In McNamara’s time, designing a system to intercept and destroy incoming ballistic missiles was thought to be beyond the current technological frontier. Adding the requirements of economy and indefinite expansibility defeated the proposition altogether. But the idea of missile defense would not go away. It was revived with much controversy by President Reagan in the Eighties. With the advances in technology since McNamara’s time, it was beginning to look possible – barely.
But that nagging question in the title remained to be firmly answered. Just what would the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) systems be required to do, and under what conditions? For the technology required to make the SDI feasible wasn’t the only thing that had advanced since the McNamara years. Missile tech had leaped forward as well. Air-launched cruise missiles, in particular, had become a huge factor in planning for possible assaults.
Not long after SDI became a subject for discussion, Reason magazine proposed the following problem for consideration: Imagine two missile shields of equal cost and complexity. Shield A is guaranteed to stop 80% of all incoming warheads. However, the remaining 20% will get through to their targets. Shield B will stop 100% of incoming warheads… if it works. But there’s only an 80% probability that it will work. If it fails, all the incoming warheads will get through. Which of those systems would be preferred by strategic-defense planners?
The title question looms behind both shields. The planners must confront its major ramifications before any other consideration is addressed. For the answers would determine the planners’ eventual orientation:
- What’s being defended? Population centers, military bases, or ICBM installations? And which ones?
- What weapons would the shield be intended to defeat? How many of each?
- What’s our defense posture:
- Would we be poised to strike first? If so, to what end: counterforce or countervalue?
- Would we launch our forces upon credible warning of an incoming attack?
- Or would we retaliate only after being struck?
- Who is envisioned to be the enemy? Are there several such? Can a system be designed to stop an attack no matter who is attacking?
The above is an incomplete list. Yet even in its paucity it illuminates the problem of requirements specification. It’s guaranteed that any system designed to meet some proposed threat would confront “requirements creep,” possibly sufficient to make the system impossible.
The reason this is on my mind, of course, is President Trump’s proposal that the U.S. construct an “Iron Dome” missile shield like that deployed by Israel. All the questions that have tormented planners in the past will arise again, as will all the objections to any proposed answer. The technological, economic, and political feasibility of each proposed system will be hammered ruthlessly. More, those opposed will object to anything that might make war look more likely. What systems might do that is a question separate from all the others, and equally important.
Brace for a long, loud, and highly acrimonious public debate.
2 comments
If there is a nuclear war the U.S. is target #1. Estimates are that in an all out nuclear war 2 billion people will be killed. But Russia and China have built massive shelters for their essential people, factories and their military assets. The U.S> has not. If an attack does happen it will be 15-25 minutes for the first nukes to hit the U.S. and there is no actual plan to warn the general public simply because there is no place for them to go to protect themselves. There is a nuclear shelter for key people in DC but little else anywhere in the U.S. about 25% of the U.S. population will die within hours with most of the rest dying in the next 6 months from radiation effects and lack of infrastructure. Simply put we have little to no defense against a nuclear attack and we have little to no facilities to allow our population to survive a nuclear attack. Historically and logically and given human nature is seems far more likely than not that sooner or later we will have nuclear war and kill 2 billion people.
Given all this, we should do something to prevent this mass destruction and do something to allow lives to be saved. Switzerland requires fallout shelters to be built into homes. They have large shelters in most cities capable of accommodating the entire cities population. Switzerland has plans to allow all their citizens to survive. Shouldn’t we at least have some similar plan for U.S. citizens?
I remember reading once that Israel had tried to shop the Iron Dome system out at international weapons conventions, but no one would buy it, because the general consensus seemed to be that no other nation on the planet would need such a system, as they would declare total war after the first such rocket attack against civilian targets (and justly so), and there would be no need for defense against any potential second attack that would never DARE be launched.
Meanwhile, after every such clear and overt act of war by a nation recognized by the United Nations, huge international pressure is flexed against any potential response by the victim (kinda like what Alvin Bragg is doing to the citizens of New York City, come to think of it), and yet at the same time, precisely no one is surprised by the number of resolutions by the UNGA/UNSC against Israel compared with those Human Rights Exemplars like Iran, North Korea and China (more resolutions against Israel than against every other nation on the planet COMBINED), and so Israel had to build a system that will protect the innocent people that the UN doesn’t care about, using an excellent system that no one else on the planet would tolerate needing.