Mnemonic wrote on Mar 29
th, 2013 at 8:20pm:
Chard wrote on Mar 29
th, 2013 at 6:35am:
To be specific I've been employed by the US DoD and/or the aerospace industry for seventeen years now, the last decade of which ivve worked on air defense and missile defense projects. There's a reason why whenever Bobbo there posts I wonder if there really is a dick growing out of his forhead.
So you're an engineer, not a soldier? You work for companies like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics? I got the impression from some posts last year that you were a military guy, rather than someone who does R&D for the weapons.
Been reading my CV? Yes, I served six years in the US Army as a medic. During that I knocked out most of an electrical engineering bachelors, complteting that shortly after getting out of the Army. Pretty much walked off the stage at graduation into a job with Lockheed Martin where I worked on THAAD. Currently I work for the US Department of Defense with the Missile and Space Intelligence Center at Redstone Arsenal.
Mnemonic wrote on Mar 29
th, 2013 at 8:20pm:
Chard wrote on Mar 29
th, 2013 at 3:56pm:
For those that don't know, SM-3 is a new varient of the USN's Standard Missile family. The USN looked at the ABM mission and noticed the Aegis system and SPY-1 radar were perfectly capable of handling exo-atmospheric engagements, they just needed a missile with the range and altitude needed. Enter the SM-3 with a 500km range and 150km altitude ceiling, accurate enough to perform kinetic hit-to-kill intercepts of ballistic RVs and low hanging satellite.
Where ever you find a USN destroyer or cruiser there's half a dozen or more SM-3s in the VLS cells. At any given time there's six or more Arleigh Burke-class DDGs around the vicinity of Perle, same for Guam, Japan, and South Korea. Between SM-3 and land-based ABM systems like THAAD and PAC-3 we have more ABM capability around the Pacific than North Korea has ballistic missles.
I remember 12 years ago when there was a debate between the U.S., Russia and China over America's intentions to develop and install a missile defence shield. The U.S. experienced a number of failures and Russia and China suggested that the Americans should quit because not only was the program in bad shape, but the program itself was destabilising.
Two quick points...
1. China and Russia both like to talk about how destabilizing ABM is while developing ABM capability themselves. One of the better bluffs of the Cold War was the time the Russians managed to convince President Kennedy that ABM was destabilizing, Jack fell for it and cancelled deployment of the Nike Zeus system. Meanwhile the Russians had built a ring of ABM defenses around Moscow.
ABM is only "destabilizing" in the sense that it matigates or even completely removes nations with small deterent forces as a threat. For example, the UK has around 300 nuclear weapons, and if we assumed that each was mounted on it's own missile you could severly mitigate the threat with 300 ABM interceptors (depends on how good the ABM systems P-K ratio is). With 600 interceptors you'd have completely negated the threat.
My take on the issue is that anything that adds another layer of protection against a nuclear war is inherently a good idea. If people know you can blunt or even completely negate their attack then it's a lot less likely they would attack in the first place.
2. The US has been in the ABM game since the 1950s. We had the capability to perform hit-to-kill exoatmospheric ABM intercepts in 1962. Not sure where you get the setbacks thing from, because both China and Russia are aware that the only reason we haven't deployed massive amounts of ABM capability was due to treaty obligations, not technological prowess.
Quote:I didn't hear anything in the news about anything related to the "missile defence shield" until recently when China shot down its own satellite (well known as a test) and the U.S. did the same about a year later for an aging, failing satellite.
Thanks for bringing that up as it illustrates just how frightening ass-backwards the Chinese are compared to use in missile technology. The Chinese used a modified ICBM to perform an ASAT kill. We did it with a missile that fits in existing VLS launchers aboard a destroyer class hull and fired with the ship underway. Thirty years ago we did it with a missile you could fit undef the wing of a heavy fighter aircraft. Fifty years ago could do it with a fixed emplacement SAM half the size of a modern ICBM.
They're not whining about our ABM capability because the genuinely think it's destabilizing. They're just pissed off because we very publically rubbed their noses in just how far behind the technology curve they really are.
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