The Volokh Conspiracy

At least that's what the military commanders told me.

The thing about generals is that you don't get to be a colonel by telling the boss what he doesn't want to hear.

"Reasonable chance" doesn't sound so great when you're dealing with potential WMD warheads.

"Reasonable chance" doesn't sound so great when you're dealing with potential WMD warheads.

No, which is why we oufght to be spending more money on missile defense. Or at least, that's part of the message that the administration wants to send. We have some capability now that does help to protect us but the danger is great enough that we need to do more.

This message is also why I think that the Pentagon wouldn't necessarily have admitted it if we actually did shoot down the NK missile (causing the failure). While the positive publicity for MD would be good, it might cause a certain amount of complacency.

The primary purpose of these systems is deterrence. Yes, they'd surely be pointless if we were facing a Soviet threat where thousands of missiles would be launched. But when it's a matter of a rogue state that might only shoot one or two long-range missiles at you, it's sufficient to let them know that their missile MIGHT simply be shot down, at which point they would face overwhelming retaliation. It doesn't have to be a guaranteed defense to dissuade them from launching in the first place.

I think there is no chance North Korea will shoot a missile at the Unted States within the next 10 years. For one they are apparently not close to having a missile that can reach the US and even if they did, they can not put a nuke on it any time soon. Yes missile defense would be good if there was unlimited funds and we could attempt to protect ourself against any eventuality, but this is not the case. The military budget is limited and priorities need to be set. I think missile defense should be well down that priority list.

We can't spend money on everything that might be a threat. As it is missile defense is expensive when compared to things like improved intelligence capabilities and the actual threat of a missile attack is quite low when compared to things like terrorism. If I was North Korea and decided I was going to attack the US with a nuke, not something that i see happening, I would attempt to sneak it through are admittinlgy weak port security not with a missile that keeps blowing up before it goes anywhere.

Jimmy - I suspect that the military made a decision not to intercept when NK first announced that it would test. They knew that the NK missle wouldn't be armed, and if the interception failed it would destroy the deterrent effect of our system. Since there was no immediate threat, it made more sense to wait and either find a way to perfect our system or at least be able to maintain publicly that our system might work.

Word in the news at this moment is that the gov'mint is saying trajectory information acquired before failure indicate the Taepodong-2C missile was targeted for US sovereign territory in the vicinity of Hawaii. This gives political cover for shooting down the next such missile on the launch pad.

However, use of any ABM capacity is a tricky matter.

Japan is strengthing its reentry phase interceptor (our Patriot, or Israel's Arrow) program. Both of these systems are far advanced from what we saw in 1991. But this is of questionable utility for our domestic defense, as targeting and intercepting an ICBM warhead, coming in from space, is a much harder problem than targeting and intercepting a SCUD.

Then there's the matter of boost, or mid-phase interdiction. And here we have the problem of tipping our hand before everyone's all-in. In the case of our mid-course missile interceptors, there is the strong chance that they will fail. There has yet to be a successful test.

The MTHEL laser (which is fundamentally intended to supplant the Patriot system) has been successfully tested - and the results made public. Information on it's close cousin, the ABL system, is far more closely guarded.

The information I've been able to garner indicates to me that the ABL is currently a limited success, but not yet "up to spec.," as it is unable to deal with multiple launches, as one would expect when facing a REAL military power, in a REAL war.

However, I am reasonably confident an ABL, flanking the DPRK, could reliably knock down a single Taepodong, "like magic," seconds after launch. And it would be an impressive display of "shock and awe."

Permit me to display my ignorance:

Why can't a manned fighter jet shoot down an ICBM?

A more interesting question, perhaps, is what exactly the U.S. would do if NK fired one or two actual, armed ICBMs at Seattle (or Honolulu, or wherever), which happened to fail, and then announced that they had no more such missiles (or we ascertained this through intelligence sources). Traditional MAD would say that the U.S. would, automatically, launch a massive nuclear retalatory strike which would destroy either all of NK or all of its military-industrial complex, with unknown consequences (i.e. fallout, radiation) on the rest of the KP and nearby areas. But I'm not sure if that would actually happen; I could see public support for more limited conventinal strikes, or even a selective invasion/regime change, but not necessarily for a wholesale destructive retaliation.

There's a "reasonable chance," if we spy on everyone in America, read their e-mails, listen to their calls, monitor their movements -- and conduct midnight raids on their dwellings -- that we'll stop a terrorist attack.

We should be spending every last dollar of the federal budget not spent on a missle shield on spying.

Hell, "reasonable chance" is a far more demanding standard than the Veep's "1 Percent Doctrine." No?

Seems to me that the only sure thing in this whole situation will be the re-militarization of Japan, which I'm sure very few other countries in Asia are wanting to see happen.

Richard, wNK didn't announce the trajectory of the missile they were planning to launch. Unless you shoot the thing down right at the pad, tracking and getting a fix on the missile is a big part of shooting it down. We didn't have that information.

Again though, if I were President I wouldn't want to say categorically that we could shoot down any NK missile. It's well known that our system is far from perfect, so why make claims that it isn't. Provide the NK with some doubts and the American people with some comfort by saying we had a good chance of shooting it down. But encourage more funding by making the limitations clear in the context of a "real" danger.

Regarding what a reasonable chance is, the Probability of Kill, P(k), of a missile system is classified, but speaking as an engineer who's worked with similar programs, it safe to say for ABM systems a P(k) of much less than 95% would not be not considered good for much. So given that the standard doctrine is shoot-shoot-look, that implies a "reasonable chance" could be about 99.75%. If Bush was intending to acknowledge that the system wasn't quite up to spec yet [which might well higher than P(k)=95% for the scenario in question], the floor on a "reasonable chance" would better than 85%, since no one would consider a missile with a single shot P(k) of less than 60% even remotely reasonable, even under a much more stressful scenario.

Regarding the comment about shooting down an ICBM from an aircraft, that simply depends on the weapon used. Recall that we did a succesful test of an ASAT lauched from an F15 way back when. The problem with aircraft is not the lack of a effective weapon, it's the the loiter time; it's not practical to have aircraft flying around waiting for a launch. Ships and ground-based systems are much better at that.

"I find it rather amusing that in this case, North Korea touts its ability to fire missiles and we tout our ability to shoot them down. In fact, all of the tests have shown that neither country can do what they claim."

OTOH, if we did have a way to shoot down just one missile at a time and could keep it secret, secretly knocking down Nork test shots 30 seconds after launch would be an ideal solution to the problem posed by the Nork long-range missile program. Think of their engineers laboring forever to try to correct a non-existent fault in their design...

I'm assuming that our intent is as stated, to dissuade the North Koreans from testing long-range missiles. I'll go out on a limb and say that we'd really prefer to do it without pissing off the Chinese government.

It seems to me, then, that the ideal course of action is one that intimidates Kim and shows him that there is no realistic value in his course of action. In other words, create a situation that maximizes his risk and minimizes his potential reward.

Suppose we had and used some capability to destroy the missile 35-40 seconds into launch and then said nothing about it afterwards. How would that be distinguishable from recent events?

The North Koreans would either know how we did it, or not. Either way, they couldn't say anything about it. How stupid would they look complaining about us downing their missile when even we hadn't claimed to do so? What's more, not bragging about it is far more intimidating than bragging. It says, "We beat you, and it wasn't even worth mentioning".

The Chinese would likely breathe a sigh of relief at our courtesy, though they'd be somewhat concerned about their own capabilities.

The world at large would go on its merry way, happily ignoring the rumors of what had happened.

Even operational security would only need to be maintained for a few days afterwards. The rumors would float regardless, and the truth would be covered by the predictable noise. Those who would be angry about it would look nearly as silly as the North Koreans. Those who would be pleased about it would be dismissed as delusional.

anonassociate hits the nail on the head as to why deterrence doesn't work that well at deterring one or two warheads. There's enough political uncertainty that a potential rival could persuade himself that he could escape retaliation. Like maybe the North Korean leader in his scenario persuades himself that the US could never attack his country conventionally because he has an alliegance with the Chinese, who would deter the Americans back!

Or maybe a Saddam-like figure who thinks that, if he could successfully hit the Americans, all of the Middle East would rally to his side. With the enormous power of oil, America's allies would force them into quiescence.

The scenarios don't have to be true in order for deterrence to fail. They just have to persuade a sufficiently unstable leader that things will work out that way. Bin Ladin was quite convinced that the Muslim world would rally to his side after September 11th, after all.

Freder, if your understanding of the status of US ABM systems is as accurate as your understanding of the the difference between "topping" and "breaching" levees, that speaks to the value of your opinion on the subject at hand.

C. Owen Johnson: Nice to see there's another engineer with some related experience (although mine is somewhat dated) here. My personal background was in tracking and guidance systems.

While I would agree that a land or sea based system would be superior, the big advantage (in the case of directed energy weapons), is that you have the real estate to implement multiple-target systems. Loiter time isn't a big stumbling block. With multiple crews, and in-flight refueling, an ABL system can stay on station indefinitely.

Of course, in this day and age, that seems like a massive waste of resources. But consider that, pre-START, we had 1/3 of our B-52 fleet airborne at any given time.

Oops, I was thinking SALT not START.

None the less, further research leads me to believe that the 1/3 of the fleet on "airborne alert" was only maintained during highest threat levels, and then when even higher numbers were called for:

* SAC claimed they achieved the one-third alert level by May 1960. In March 1961, US President John F. Kennedy raised the alert level to half the force, and SAC claimed they met this goal in October 1961. In reality, it appears that some "imaginative accounting" was used to claim compliance, with the actual number of aircraft immediately available for combat falling well short of the stated goals. Given the logistical difficulties involved, the alert system was still impressive.

In the spring of 1959, SAC leadership had proposed an extension of the ground alert system, the "airborne alert" system, in which a number of bombers were kept armed and in the air at all times. While SAC proposed that a sizeable percentage of the B-52 force be kept on airborne alert, in practice the expense and complexity of the scheme meant that only a handful of aircraft were assigned this duty. Formally, SAC described it as a "training effort" in this timeframe.

The airborne alert system was greatly expanded during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, with alert status raised to a "threshold of war" level. Bombers orbited outside of Soviet airspace, the crews prepared to attack the instant they received the order. After the crisis the airborne alert force was reduced to a much more modest level, with about a dozen B-52s kept in the air with a load of nuclear weapons.

The reason for the shortfall seems to be a lack of resources. So, Drackmann, point taken.