I continue to marvel at how easily the news has been taken that China is willing to use ballistic missiles against carriers. The Russians pitched a bitch and even Ronald Reagan backed off on Pershing 2's, yet the Chinese have drastically escalated the stakes in naval warfare and no one bats an eye. The US Navy considered conventional ballistic missiles for use against hardened land targets and the PUSSIES INSIDE THE PENTAGON killed the idea before the enemy could.
Amazing.
Its time to speed up programs like the ArcLight and the Prompt Global Strike...Not all is lost Solomon,unless they cancel these projects...and you are right...i really loved the Pershing 2 ,the Lance and the GLCM...The United States and NATO really drop the ball on ballistic and cruise missile development...
ReplyDeleteArcLight was killed over a year ago. (Predictably.)
Deletehey Nuno! i love ya and hate ya. everytime you come over you make me do Google searches! ;))
ReplyDeleteWhen you're in a very paranoid and tense state of affairs such as the Cold war, firing off ballistic missiles is something that could very quickly be misinterpreted by the enemy (the Russians had a few occasions where itchy nuclear trigger fingers nearly got the better of them) so conventional ICBMs is a massive risk to take.
ReplyDeleteNow it may be more feasible for China to use conventional ICBMs because no one is expecting a surprise first strike from them.
And the US has been working to counter them for years already with the development of SM3 and ASAT which would take out a key part of the system, the satellites.
think about what you just said. taking out sats. space warfare is a HUGE escalation. it will touch on everypart of every advanced society on planet earth if that becomes unrestrained. so if you want to compare then consider that.
ReplyDeletea nuke war during the cold war would have left Germany in rubble. unrestricted space warfare will put the entire western world in the hurt locker. in essence (including loss of life) which is deadlier?
Sol,
ReplyDeleteIf the Soviets had thought the missiles being launched were ICBMs it wouldn't have been Germany in rubble, it would have been a MAD scenario.
I'll take short-mid term non-functioning GPS and cell phones over a fiery nuclear death most days of the week. But not Mondays, I HATE MONDAYS.
And if the Chinese are launching missiles at a US carrier group shit is hitting the fan anyway. Whos to say they wouldn't start hitting GPS sats simultaneously. If they're going to poke the beat they may as well take out something they know is going to REALLY hurt the US and degrade its fighting ability.
All of this is why I support efforts like Galileo. Less likely to be hit in a US/China shootout and provides redundancy and backup to GPS type systems so the whole western world doesn't get quite as fucked.
Oh and I forgot to mention that I was assuming restrained warfare originally. Neither the US or China would want unrestrained satellite warfare (and the rest of the world would be pretty pissed off too, wouldn't take too many ASAT shots to render near earth orbit fairly unusable for decades). And obviously the key point here is, why the hell are Chinese firing at a US carrier? Their economies are so inter-dependent that a war between the two will cripple both and the rest of the world. Proxy wars are fine, maybe the odd limited standoff, but otherwise its an economic version of MAD.
That INF Treaty has a lot to answer for! I still like the SLIRBM concept but you really need a long range, super/hypersonic strike vehicle that can be accommodated in the 21 inch/24 inch VLS tubes. I'm thinking an air-breather payload (HSAD/LRASM/Coyote) for the SM-3 Block IIA stack.
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