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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

The technical case against the ballistic missile defense 

By TigerHawk at 6/01/2005 10:22:00 PM
Josh Friess, a graduate student in the Physics Department at Princeton, explains the huge challenge that decoys will pose to any missile defense system. The problem is not merely "hitting a bullet with a bullet," but (these are my words) hitting many pellets of shot with many bullets. There are any number of assumptions baked into Josh's argument -- that our enemies will be able to develop decoy systems very easily, and that our "kill vehicles" will remain prohibitively expensive -- but if you think that missile defenses are the whole answer you need to read Josh's post (and examine the cool graphics).

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3 Comments:

By Blogger Pile On®, at Wed Jun 01, 10:58:00 PM:

I am sorry, is anybody making the case that missile defense is the only answer?  

By Blogger TigerHawk, at Wed Jun 01, 11:06:00 PM:

Probably only sloppy writing on my part, Pile. Good point.  

By Blogger Josh, at Thu Jun 02, 07:18:00 AM:

Hi TigerHawk,

Thanks for your comment, and your trackback. Glad you liked the post.

The thing is, it's actually very easy to include decoys, no matter how unsophisticated the enemy might be.

One of the articles I linked to, an analysis by Rand, writes:

"One way to saturate defenses during the midcourse portion of a missile’s trajectory outside the atmosphere is to deploy relatively inexpensive, unsophisticated decoys (such as balloons or fragments of the booster) in large numbers and to alter the appearance of real targets to help confuse sensors trying to sort the real and false targets, for example, by deploying the real targets in what amounts to another decoy (APS, 1987; Lewis and Postol, 1997)."

Mylar is really cheap, and though I couldn't find any references that gave numbers for decoys per missile, I see no reason why thousands of balloons couldn't be placed inside a single missile. (I'm told that they're uninflated when launched, and have small gas canisters that inflate them after the boost phase.)  

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