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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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One shot, one kill A successful interception of the falling NRO satellite by a US Navy SM-3 missile fired from the USS Lake Erie (CG-70) occurred at approximately 10:26 p.m. EST last night. It was hit over the Pacific and much of it will have re-entered and burned up by the time you read this. Remaining shrapnel is in a low orbit and will be down within a few weeks at most.
Great shooting guys!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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Looks like the were testing the hardwere and sending a message.
I am sure that is something they were happy to get as a side effect. I also suspect that NRO was worried about top secret dohickeys falling into the wrong hands and State getting its knickers in a twist over the outside possibility that a hunk of Hydrazine ice would land in the middle of Beijing.
Those risks were all minimal, but remember, we are in an age when any risk is too much. I’d say the metrosexuals of the DC bureaucracy were begging the DOD to “do something”.
And the DOD was more than happy to comply!
As the late, great Jeff Cooper might have said, great marksmanship!
Well, the critics of Star-Wars-lite can no longer say that the test was staged or contrived now.
I, personally, was rather put out that the press corps didn’t applaud when shown the video at the briefing. But then I came to my senses.
Putin & Co. just bit buttonholes in their executive seat cushions.
In keeping with the spirit of the recent post concerning my favorite political columnist, I give you PJ O’Rourke on Bush and missile defense-
I, personally, was rather put out that the press corps didn’t applaud when shown the video at the briefing.
How could they? They have been telling us ever since Ronnie R proposed SDI that it would not work and was a waste of the money that should be used to extend benefits for the parasites who live off my taxes.
How does shooting down one of your own satellites compare with shooting down an ICBM?
I mean, I’ll admit to not knowing the physics of the matter, but I doubt ‘exactly the same’ is the right answer. I’m guessing there is a small difference in speed, size, altitude, trajectory, plus, there’s the little matter of knowing exactly where it is. I don’t think one of Russia’s missiles is going to be sending precise co-ordinates to US tracking.
Fergus, the satellite wasn’t sending tracking data, or anything for that matter. If it had been, it wouldn’t have been shot down.
As for other differences, the Hydrazine tank is smaller and speed was higher (orbital vs. ballistic). The rest was within the range for AEGIS as a Carrier group defense system.
Basically, nuking our carriers with a ballistic missile doesn’t look terribly reliable.
Star Wars vs. ICBMs does not need to be 100% to work.
Even at 50%, it forces an attacker to have to field twice as many missiles to get the same effect.
Even the mere threat of such a system forces an enemy to have to plan for it. The Soviet Union couldn’t afford this, tried anyway, and ran out of money even faster than they would have.
It is not the same; in some ways it is actually more difficult:
Speed: satellites go faster than ICBM warheads. I seem to remember that the minimum speed required to achieve orbit is Mach 25, while a ballistic warhead would, at the most, get to Mach 15 on the dive. Advantage satellite.
Size: the satellite was the size of a bus, while the average ballistic warhead is the size of a human. But that is only true if you are being attacked by a modern ICBM with MIRVs; an old ones (like the Scuds) would have a larger warhead too. Advantage missile.
Altitude/Trajectory: an attacking warhead would presumably always be getting closer (“it’s coming to get you”), while the satellite would cross the sky never getting lower. Shooting down something with great angular speed with respect of the launching platform is inherently more difficult than something that just keeps getting closer (though from the point of view of repeating the shot if you miss, the second is more problematic). Advantage satellite.
Tracking: the ability of precisely tracking objects in orbital or ballistic trajectories is old tech from the 60’s and 70’s. The US had a working ABM system then (Sprint/Spartan), and they did not have much trouble in tracking missiles and warheads, the problem was with getting to them; since they could not, they used interceptor missiles with nuclear warheads that only needed to get close rather than hitting the target. The modern ones literaly destroy their targets like a XVIII-XIX century solid shot: by smashing it to bits by the collision. Tracking is not an issue.
The satellite was completely dead (that’s why they wanted it trashed), so not even telemetry was being sent.
No, shooting down a satellite is not a perfect test for a ballistic attack, but I doubt that was their intention: the DoD just proved that even if they do not have an anti-satellite weapon (Congress would not give them the money), with a bit of work and some lines of code they could get one if Congress would get its head out of its arse.
As the Chinese have been working on destroying satellites for years (and much higher up) there anger was interesting.
“How dare you threaten our emerging monopoly”.
I would call tracking a split decision. While it is true that you will know where the satellite is 2 weeks from now, in the case of land-based missiles, you have a pretty good idea where they’re coming from, and where they’re going. Not perfect, but way better than guessing. Sub-launched missiles probably represent the toughest test, since you probably don’t know where they’re coming from. This is less a test of your interceptor however, than a test of your system logistics. Go from standby to launch in how few seconds? At this point, we know that the interceptor part works.
Bravo Yanks! A small step in a right direction.
I’ll bet the midnight oil’s going to be burning in Moscow and Beijing over this. We’ve just demonstrated that any Aegis cruiser can take out a low-orbit platform. Way different proposition from fielding a dedicated satellite buster that the other side can see coming.
One question they’ll be asking is, what’s the performance envelope? The NROL bird was in a decaying orbit, after all. How high can the SM-3 fly?
Hmm. How many countries have SM-3 equipped Aegis cruisers now? The Japanese, I think, and I’m sure they could make the necessary modifications, if not improve on them. China in particular has got to be thinking about that angle.
Final point. The US Air Force general staff must be smiling through gritted teeth – they had a kinetic-kill satellite-slayer a couple of decades ago, the ASM-135, but the beast got cancelled.
The town bully will then simply cancel your credit.
An artist on YouTube comments on the NRO satellite shoot, and wonders at what we humans have accomplished, and what is left for us to make.
Objectivists in particular will find this interesting and thoughtful young lady to be a breath of fresh air.
The F-16 missile was a technological tour de force but had limited capabilities. The one test done with it was nearly as messy as the Chinese test and on top of it took out a satellite that although owned by the DOD was still in active use on a long scientific study that suddenly became truncated…
As to whether politicians like the existence of an ASAT weapon or not they will just have to live with it. Technology marches on and these things become easier and easier.
The typical speed of microprocessors has gone from about 10 MHz at the time of the USAF vehicle to 3Ghz in a typical office computer purchased today. Lets look at some numbers. Orbital velocity for LEO, in nice round numbers is about 8kn/sec. To make this an easy back of the envelope, lets assume the rising missile is approaching dead forward at a suborbital velocity of about 5km/sec. Just a number I pulled out of the air for a qualitative analysis. That gives us a closing velocity of 13000 m/s.
So what is the distance closed by in the time it takes the CPU to do 1 clock cycle?
1989 13000 / 10000000 => .0013 meters
2008 13000/ / 3000000000 => .00000433 meters
One cycle is not enough to do much of anything, but these numbers should make it clear that with the CPU on your desk top you can do a lot of calculations in the time it takes to close by 1 meter. 23000 clock cycles is enough time to do quite a bit.
You could get quite complex in deciding how many operations happen per cycle but it is not really worth the effort for a rough number. In 1989 it usually took several clock cycles to accomplish one primitive integer operation whereas the modern pipelined and cached processor, once it has the pipe filled, is often churning out floating point operations almost at clock speed. (Especially if you are using the chip from a game machine!)
“NRO”? Was Jonah Goldberg behind this? The Jews control everything!
wm – That video was a breath of fresh air indeed. Nice tits. Was she saying anything?
>The town bully will then simply cancel your credit.
So, what?
Disregarding the horrible damage that’d to do to China’s spiffy new export-oriented economy, when the dust settled, we’d have learned our lesson, and have a “home security system” to boot. We’ve endured much worse, and that, with much less resources.
But in fact this won’t happen. China will find other ways to deal with this development. They’re not about to throw away a central component of their national strategy in a fit of pique.
Dear Midget:
No, she wasn’t saying anything, she was actually singing. It was this tune:
“Troll, troll, troll your boat…”
I nominate Super-Electro-Magnetic Midget Launcher as our Curt Jester. SEMML is terse, on-target, and always out to launch against the merde-minds.
So?,
If you think the town bully is in any danger of biting the hand that feeds it, ask Japan how well things worked out when they owned half of Manhattan a few years ago.
I hate to do this- actually that’s not true- this stuff is as funny as it is true so I really don’t hate posting it at all. Here is yet another PJ for you-
From “Trading With The Enemy?”
Tman,
Perhaps you’re right. But how long can you print money before there is a run on the currency?
I’m glad the press corps didn’t applaud.
Shooting down the satellite is good news and I’m glad it was done, but I want the press corps to be cynical and sceptical at all times, especially at government press conferences. This is because I think the government are always inclined to lie.
That they told the truth and demonstrated a real achievement this time does not diminish the chances that next time , in any policy area,they’ll tell lies and try to present a fiasco as a triumph.
Dale,
Thanks for the comments on digital power and how that must be taken into account here. Surely this is one point that’s considered when evaluating the prospects of the new private space venturers, Rutan and Musk etc.
But back to the SM-3, it turns out that processor-intensive, real-time signal digitization is driving a closely related revolution in radar. Have you heard of “digital beamforming”?
Check out this Popular Mechanics article – and look for it to be installed on an ABM-capable cruiser near you…
Pretty sure Mig-31’s Zaslon PESA radar could form multiple beams back in the early 80s.
True; if only they showed the same skepticism when the IPCC throws one of its bashes, we would all live in a saner World.
Huh.
I’d always wondered why they were putting such massively powerful radars on USN ships- yeah, getting a return off the moon is cool, but what is it good for?
Now I know.
Let them dump dollars. They have whatever they couldn’t dump and we have all of the slave-labor-produced electronics and poisoned dog food. (Speaking of which, the murderous thugs of Tiananmien are making noises about not letting foreign Olympic teams bring in food from outside, due to “concern” about whether or not foreign food is safe enough. Feel free to compose your own jokes.)
And when the run on the dollar is complete, assuming the butchers of Tibet manage to complete it, they’ll have exchanged X dollars worth Y (value XY) for, um, is there enough Euro-dominated anything to absorb that many dollars? (Or maybe they’ll buy rubles? Dinars? Petroleo venesolano? BWAHAHAHA!)
Coming back to the point, O’Rourke is spot on. Why would anyone oppose a purely defensive system with no offensive capability like NMD/TMD, unless he harbored evil intent?
And so the PRC will murder a few thousand more newborn children, Vladimir Putin will threaten to nuke the Ukraine, and the world will continue to turn. (But George W. Farking Moron looked into his soul, so it’s all good. We need an eye-roll icon.)
BTW, I don’t think the USAF is smiling. I think they’ve always considered space to be their playground. USSPACECOM is traditionally a USAF command. And they hate hate hate having their thunder stolen by the Navy.
Sunfish:
There is no such thing as a purely defensive system. BMD will be perceived as a first-strike enabler for the US. Given its recent history in Iraq, this will make other nuclear powers jittery. They will proceed to overestimate the US BMD capabilities, just as Moscow’s BMD was overestimated in the 70s – that’s what military planners do, and overcompensate, which in turn will force the US to overcompensate and so on so forth. In other words, an arms race may ensue. Also, under this scenario launch-on-warning may never go away, and in fact increase the chance of an accidental launch.
(BTW, USN’s BMD program is more sucessful, no doubt.)
BTW, those smited lol katz are great!
Sunfish said:
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Whirled Peas depends on me being taken hostage by Andropov as a small child, without even leaving the house.
(Okay, I didn’t forget, but I’d like to see one of the bastards ADMIT that his idea of peace requires that we be held hostage by whichever drunken power-mad bastard occupies the Kremlin or has the Mandate of Heaven.)
I’m sure that others don’t want to be at the mercy of an evangelical who regularly talks to God and believes in the rapture either.
I’d pull the rhetoric down a notch. In the world of 1960 MAD probably did save us. The anti-missile defense systems of the era simply were not up to the job and a truly effective systems was not even on the horizon. Even 15 years later when Reagan called for a shield to end the MAD-ness, it was so futuristic they called it Star Wars. Technology had advanced to where a deployable system was imaginable by the late 1990’s and we pulled out of the ABM treaty just at the time when it became possible to move to the next level.
One of the big advances in the new system’s the USAF is working on are multiple kill vehicles. A defense MIRV if you wish. The argument one could here to for make was the economic one: it was cheaper to add another war head or decoy on an offensive missile than it was to build a sophisticated interceptor. Way cheaper. You-have-no-idea how much cheaper.
Today’s cheap electronics and the possibility of multiple kill vehicles on one interceptor shift the cost equation in favor of defense.
Ultimately forget the rhetoric. It’s cost and capability that drive what we do. The rest is just political posturing and window dressing
The era of the unstoppable terror weapon, started by the A-10 (V-2) is drawing to a close.
Well,
Let us imagine we have an ideal world. It’s easy if you try. The US builds a bulletproof missile defence system. China and Russia scrap their ICBMs – what’s the point? They save a lot of cash and spend it on tax-cuts or better hospitals or an Olympic bid or anything.
Why will this not happen? I mean it’s fairly bloody obvious that NATO is not attempting global dominance and if the invasion of Iraq was controversial then Gawd alone knows how people would react to the idea of invading Russia and/or China. It will not happen because the bear and the panda are addicted to nationalistic big-dick contests. The Russians hate America and the Chinese see America as their only rival for global hegemony and it’s as simple as that.
I mean it. the Russians really do hate the USA. My wife was in Moscow when all the shit was going down in the Balkans. She had people apologizing to her in the street saying, “We don’t blame you Brits, it must be awful for you to be ruled from Washington…” This was around the time UK forces faced-down the Russkies at Pristina airport. She had a Russian lesson curtailed by an hysterical teacher who said, “This will be the end of the world” and pissed off to her dacha.
Let’s really wind the buggers up. Let’s suggest that Russia gets kicked off the UN Security Council and replaced by India or Japan?
Hell, why not the UK and USA (and whoever else) ditch the UN and let it absolutely become a talking shop for despots and gits. They can relocate to Darfur.
I don’t think it will ever stop then. Warheads may be actively cooled. They may be wrapped in baloons to hide them among hundreds of empty baloons. They can be made smaller still. So can the launch vehicles. Something like Midgetman deployed on a massive scale. (You can probaly do much better than Midgetman now). Then you have stealthy cruise missiles. Nuclear weapons in orbit, lunar orbit, etc..
Nick M:
OK, let’s imagine the scenario where Russia becomes a perfect liberal democracy with a bulletproof missile shield. Will the US scraps its arsenal and spend the savings on, I dunno, War on Poverty, or something?
Warheads are expensive. Once defense has the upper hand in economics you are into a spiral that drives the cost of the warhead up faster than the countermeasures.
Sure, there will always be some means of delivering a weapon. The point is never that you can stop everything, it is that you can stop enough, or make one mode of attack obsolete.
Warfare is an eternal battle between offense and defense. Offense has had the upper hand for some decades. It is not surprising that the pendulum is swinging back towards defense.
I am sure it will some day swing back to offense again, but it will be due to something new, not the old fashioned nuclear armed ICBM.
So?,
No, electronically scanned radar arrays do not create multiple beams, they create one which moves from one target to another fast enough to give the _impression_ of simultaneous tracking. Why they do it like that? Because computers in those days were not powerful enough to shape the radar emisions into anything but a very fast-moving single beam. What the new tech does is to have computers calculate in real time the emisions necessary from the elements in the array to produce multiple beams which track the targets simultaneously and without interuptions.
So?
Except the US has no interest in taking over the world whereas Russia and China are aggressive. I fail to see any hint that Russia will become liberal or democratic. Hell, they have a KGB man in charge now. Whatmore do you want?
Nuclear weapons in lunar orbit? You have now jumped the shark. Think about it! How much warning does that give?
The protectionists (Duncan Hunter and so on) have one thing right.
Once manufacturing industry is lost (and the workers off working in retail or whatever) it can not be brought back very fast.
Plant gets torn down, machines rust, skills are lost.
But the way to deal with this is NOT to have taxes on Chinese imports – it is to make American manufacturing competitive again.
This is not code for low wages – American manufacturing dominated the world when wages were the highest in the world (and the United States was the most important manufacturing country long before either World War – in case someone brings that up).
Taxes and government spending must be radicially reduced.
As must regulations – starting with the absurd concept known as “anti trust”.
And, yes, the pro union statutes must be repealed.
But that is not a ploy for low wages – indeed unions undermine the basis for high wages over time, by undermining industry.
For those that do not know:
A country with a large population can not do without a manufacturing base.
Services will not hold everything together on their own – and efforts to run an entire economy via services open the door to the credit bubble games of the financial industry.
Banking and so is a good and noble thing when it is putting people’s savings to work building productive enterprises.
It is a crazy and damaging thing when it is just creating money out of nothing and using it for ever more complext games.
It is also a national security issue.
Imported vital stuff for military production from hostile powers (because there are no American companies left making it) is crazy. But (again) putting taxes and other restrictions on Chinese imports is NOT the way to deal with the crazyness.
“But you have not talked about British manufacturing”.
That was not an oversight on my part.
Nuclear warheads sure are expensive, but the cost to the defender of failing to shoot one down is much greater.
How exactly are they agressive? Why would they not see the US as agressive? Military planning is done based on the potential adversary’s capabilities, rather than intentions.
At least he does not believe in Rapture and neither does he talk to God.
The warheads would be permanently parked in moon-earth orbit, so they would zip by rather fast and there’d be no launch warning. They may have a stealth shroud which is dropped before attack to make them harder to track. They could be configured to attack based on a signal, or the absense of one (dead hand mode).
So?,
Are you trolling us or is this for real? Do you know anything about orbital mechanics?
Which is a common but grotesque economic fallacy. The physical media was a trivial part of the value. It was the information (music) that people in Japan were buying (regardless of what the author thought of Michael Jackson).
Frederick Davies:
I don’t know what he knows about orbital mechanics. For all I know he may have a simple and elegant solution to a four-body system.
It seems that, every time a thread discusses the chicoms in any depth, he (or others with very similar writing style) shows up. I’d probably best put on my tinfoil hat now.
BTW, So?, what exactly was your objection to NMD/TMD systems with absolutely no offensive capability whatsoever? All I saw was some tangential remark about evangelicals and raptures.
You’re paranoid, let me assure you.
I have no objections whatsoever. It’s not my money at the end of the day. Others may suffer from paranoia all of their own, however.
“So?”
Your implied claim of moral equivalence between the President of the United States and the regimes in Russia and China, tells us all we need to know about you.
Paul Marks wrote:
But the way to deal with this is NOT to have taxes on Chinese imports – it is to make American manufacturing competitive again.
Great point, Paul! You deserve a definite pat on the back. It is interesting that the de-industrialization of the US (and much of Europe too) gets no attention from the Great & the Good. The ability to spin words or kick a ball is much admired, but the capability to make things is treated as insignificant.
Came across a fascinating old book recently — “How to lie with statistics”, by Darrell Huff (1954). A number of the examples have to do with claims in contemporaneous adverts & newspaper articles about US steel production. In 1954, apparently, people cared about things like that. Of course, that was all Before Britney.
I agree Perry. I never understood that particular line. The rest stands up well though.
Where did I imply this? Even if they were perfect democracies, they would feel insecure in the face of total US supremacy. This is basic psychology, not a moral judgement. I doubt that they’d try to match US security by building massive BDM systems of their own. More likely they would spend limited resources on new offensive weapons, deploy them on a hair-trigger alert, etc.. Offense is always cheaper than defense in the long run.
It’s possible. It’s also possible that, when we have discussions on this site where the subject is military matters with some connection to communist China, we’re likely to be visited by someone who doesn’t spend a whole lot of time participating in other discussion threads. That someone frequently has a writing style rather like yours.
If you took it as an accusation, I don’t know what else to suggest.
Then what’s your dog in this fight?