Doubts Remain on Interceptor System

[Nancy Waterman]

This was on the front page of the Wash Post. On the other side of the front page was the story of how the war is going far worse than admitted. Both are stories of Bush pretending things are goping well when the reality is that they are not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58080-2004Sep28.html

But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon, about whether a system that is on its way to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.

The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a confident judgment about the system's viability. He estimated its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent.

"A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible capability," said retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who headed the U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s. "I cannot recall any military system being deployed in such a manner."

[Chef]

1. Star Farce

There is hardly an issue that raises my hackles as much as this one. Congress, both dems and reps, don't have the balls to stop this corporate welfare program. Won't work, don't need it. We aren't trying to bankrupt the Soviets any more. Just ourselves.

[natrat]

2. no worries

someone will get very wealthy off this, thats all that matters.

[lil-petunia]

3. hold yer horsies, just a sec

This aspect (the most expensive and expansive) of the entire SDI proposal, involves having a superfast satellite system capable of spotting, identifying and classifying ballistic missile launches from the USSR. Believing that the launches would take the fastest, shortest route over the arctic, the only place to put up a space based defense would be in northern Alaska. that way, we could get the anti-missile missile launched and hopefully, ready to hit the warheads when they are overhead, in outer space. Given that you only have something on the order of 8 minutes from a USSR- based launch to spotting, identifying, recognizing a threat, starting up your defense computers, warming up the missiles, programming them, then launching them at a window of time that is exceedingly narrow, and hit a target moving at 15,000 mph.

Did I mention that the target would be larger than a breadbox, but much smaller than a typical office desk?


The entire defense system is predicated on
a) ballistic missiles in high arc trajectories (sent into outer space, then falling back)
b) the enemy being the USSR, perhaps China
c) being able to spot, ID and predict the path of the missiles right after launch

Timewarp to 2004.

the USSR no longer exists. China is an ally. (So shrub tells us) there are no Ballistic missiles aimed at the US.

Today's weapons directed at the US will not be ballistic. China and Russia have supersonic cruise missiles which have longer ranges, much higher speeds and greater payloads than US cruise missiles.

(An aside- the US could have researched supersonic cruise missiles, but decided that it was too expensive, and instead, wanted to rely on the new expensive Joint force manned, attack fighter)

The anti-missile system we are building - for $100,000,000,000 - is incapable of even spotting a supersonic cruise. The satellites cannot ID, nor track them; plus they can be launched from air, sea or submarines. This system can only hit ballistic warheads (and even that is questionable) A supercruise flies at about 100 feet; the ballistic warhead can only be spotted, targetted, and hopefully hit at altitudes of over 100,000 feet.

Perhaps North Korea's missiles could be a threat to our west coast, but even they use a reduced arc profile, flying way too low for our SDI system to spot; observe trajectory; react in time by launching counter missile; and have time for our defense to actually hit the warhead. This system won't even help defend against the only country building nukes to be used against our allies and ourselves. Even worse, the SDI missiles cannot head down to defend against a reduced arc launch. They don't have enough fuel, and they would probably burn up in the much thicker, lower atmosphere before hitting the target.

Thank you, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice and Mr. Rumsfeld.

[maine_raptor]

6. And one other point to add to the list.

Software. It's estimated that the programming package for SDI will have between 10 and 100 million lines of code. Now while parts of the system can be tested as separate modules, a full up testing (or beta test) is impossible without actually firing missiles at the United States. This is because parts of the system will be in orbit and the calculations performed their will depend upon the precise conditions experienced by the spacecraft at the time, something that simply cannot be simulated on Earth.

[lil-petunia]

7. a very good point, it is. Imagine if they used WIndows OS.

It would be like saying, "Hey, don't shoot, I must reboot!"

[Ezlivin]

15. Don't laugh - they ARE using Windows

Much of the military has standardized on the Windows platform. While there are some specialized pieces of software still being written, most of the software runs atop Windows.

http://www.giat-industries.fr/asp/us/pdf/us_ftech_finders.pdf

[lil-petunia]

18. don't joke about that. It scares me.

Are you serious? Yes, you are. shit.

[maine_raptor]

19. Actually, the software in the orbital parts and

interceptor missiles is written in some very esoteric language, mostly "assembler-like" code, that carries a set of specific codes, options and calculations designed just for that task.

However, the ground-based stuff does use a variant of both the Windows and Unix operating systems.

[VegasWolf]

8. Me thinks that one of the Haliburton subsidiaries is getting rich. n/t

[daleo]

14. Excellent post

The whole program is one of the most spectacular frauds ever perpetrated.

[johnfunk]

4. A big and costly boondoggle

First, it does nothing to make the world safer or less prone to the wielding of WMDs.

Second, if we lived in a world where such a system would have a deterrent force, the law and appropriations should stipulate that the big-ass defense contractors use our nation's technology schools and universities to develop, prototype and test such a system.

You can be sure that over in India, tech companies and universities (and their tech schools are fantastic, BTW) are probably doing just that -- right now -- and at a fraction of what taxpayers are being soaked for in this country.

[natrat]

5. nothing here

move along

[struggle4progress]

16. kick

:kick:

[bemildred]

9. Doubt? What doubt? There is no "doubt".

This turkey will not provide any useful protection.
In fact, it is a destabilizing factor, and hence positively
dangerous.

[canuckforpeace]

10. Link

I have posted this on a couple of other threads. The Union of Concerned Scientists says it won't work

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0513-02.htm

[KoKo]

11. They screw up everything they touch....they are incompetent in safety,

security, econmics and being able to govern this country. All of them...arrgggggg...

[Barrett808]

12. No discussion is complete without MIT professor and patriot Ted Postol

Postol Criticizes Missile Plan

The Tech: What are your main qualms with the National Missile Defense Plan?

Postol: The current system, which is hardware that we can talk about, is perhaps the most vulnerable of all missile defenses I’ve looked at in my career. Basically, it’s a missile defense that has no chance of working. First of all, it operates at a very high altitude in the near-vacuum of space, and at these altitudes there is essentially no air drag to cause a light object to blow up relative to a heavy one. So a feather and a rock travel along together. This means that building a decoy that could travel along with the warhead is a nearly trivial task. There are some details that matter: you want it to heat and cool with the sun like the shell of the warhead, but these are things that any intelligent MIT undergrad could figure out. In fact, I’m sure if the intelligent undergrads at MIT were involved, there would be much more effective countermeasures than these guys are now considering as realistic. But basically, because you’re operating in the near-vacuum of space, you have this extremely large vulnerability due to the fact that there’s no air drag that your adversary has to contend with when they deploy countermeasures. So an inflated balloon in the shape of a warhead looks like a warhead. A traffic cone off the street looks like a warhead. A balloon with a stripe on it can look like a warhead. You can’t see the shape of the object, so when the balloon slowly tumbles, and the stripe comes into view and disappears, its brightness will change much like an object that was maybe precessing in front of you. So you can virtually simulate or emulate all the signals that you could possibly exploit for telling the warheads from the decoys with the simplest of objects.

Now what the missile defense advocates would like you to believe is that we have some adversary, say North Korea. Let’s just do a little logic here. Advocates of this missile defense system are claiming there’s some adversary out there who’s got the vast industrial and scientific base needed to build an intercontinental-ranged ballistic missile, the independently-vast scientific base to build nuclear warheads -- because that’s a different industrial and scientific activity -- and the ability to build the heat shields to put the warhead in so it can survive re-entry, but they can’t figure out how to deploy a balloon along with this warhead. That’s what they want you to believe, and if you believe that, I’ve got this bridge out here I want to sell you. So basically there are really extraordinary leaps of faith required to believe that this current system has any chance of working, and I don’t think it’s in the American interest to build a weapons system of this scale that has no chance of working. In fact, it could provoke responses on the part of potential adversaries that would eventually leave us in a much less secure situation, because if people respond due to concerns about what this system might do or might become at a later time, then what you’re going to have is a responding enemy while you have no capability to offset this response. So in the end you’re worse off. It’s sort of like waving a plastic gun in front of a frightened person with an AK-47. It’s just not very smart. So the system has really no capability. I think it’s just a bad idea to build weapons systems that don’t have a chance of working and then basically misinform your population in telling them they’re protected. I think there’s a moral question here that really gets to the heart of what science and engineering ethics are about. For example, if you’re an engineer and you know a bridge could fall down while people are on it, and you just tell them, “Go ahead, it’s safe, don’t worry,” that would be an unethical act. And to willfully and knowingly look at a weapons system that’s supposed to protect American citizens and know it’s not going to work but tell people otherwise is no less immoral than telling people that that bridge is okay. I think there are very far-ranging issues here.

(more)

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V121/N30/30postol-transcript.30n.html

[lovuian]

13. Its called 100 Million dollars for Junk

which isn't going to work....

[Strelnikov_]

17. It Is $100 M Of Junk, Problem Is We Paid $100 BILLION

Makes you pine for the day when they only wasted $8 B on a weapons system that does not work.