"Vaporware" missile defense

[Bluehawk]

Vapor ware?

Source link:
All Hail Vaporware Missile Defense! | Danger Room from Wired.com
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I'll be the first to admit that the combination of laser-equipped 747s and mirror-covered drones sounds like a rather silly way to blast ICBMs out of the sky. But in the missile defense world, even seemingly-goofy inventions can have a major impact.

One of the most interesting paradoxes of the Cold War is how much leverage that the United States got from Reagan's plans to build the Star Wars defensive system. Almost no one, even in the White House, thought it would work. The Soviets knew from their own research that it probably wouldn't work. And, if it did function as planned, the Strategic Defense Initiative would never have been "cost effective at the margins." It would always have been easier and cheaper for Moscow to add two units of offense to get around every one unit of defense from the United States. Given all that, why was the Soviet Union ready to trade away the store at Reykjavik, and during other arms negotiations between 1985 and 1988, if the U.S. would just promise not to build this thing that everyone knew we couldn't build anyway?

Part of the answer is that the Soviet Union sensed its coming economic collapse and didn't want to have to compete with the United States in any new area. Part of the answer is that the Soviets had an exaggerated sense of U.S. technical skill. But another, more interesting part of the answer, is that missile defense radically changes the game theory of war.

A few months back, I interviewed Pentagon guru Andrew Marshall for my book. I asked why the Soviets cared so much about missile defense, since they knew it probably wouldn't work. His answer was that the U.S. had done a series of war games in the late 1980s, testing out different nuclear war scenarios. If we fire these missiles, here, and they respond there, what happens next?

It turned out that if you put in a missile defense system, even one that was expensive and almost certainly didn't work, it totally changed the outcome of the games. Why? Marshall wasn't certain. But he posited that war planners have to assume that the enemy's weapons will function properly.

And, even if they don't, knowing that one's opponents have a missile defense system with even a one percent chance of succeeding can still totally alter the way one plans an attack.
In other words: even vaporware missile defense can matter.
[Photo: Lockheed Martin]

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