Damned 4300-character comment limit

[unixronin]

This is a followup to caged_admin. 

You're reading too much into "space superiority combines the following three capabilities..."

Am I?  I think that's subject to interpretation.  The statements quoted in the article lead me to believe that the USAF, at least, thinks it can and should interdict space and prevent any access to space from any nation we consider hostile.  I see no indication there that they have any intention of waiting until a state of war exists to do so; doing so is locking the stable door after the horse has already bolted.  Washington loves to put on airs as the world's cop, and if we have the capability to prevent anyone we don't like from launching anything without our prior permission and on-site inspection of their payload pre-launch, I no longer trust Washington not to try to do it.

I strongly suspect that if I look hard enough, I can find studies showing non-Apocalyptic outcomes for using nuclear weapons

Oh, certainly you can.  You can find lots of studies from the 60s and 70s, during which period official Pentagon strategic policy called for first-strike use of nuclear weapons against Soviet forces in the European theater in the event of a Soviet land invasion of western Europe overwhelming the conventional defenses on the ground.  (Military opinion at the time was virtually unanimous that a massed Warsaw Pact armored assault would, indeed, roll right over the NATO forces opposing it.  I believe Generals Westmoreland and Hackett both wrote detailed analyses which concluded that there was an overwhelming probability that a Soviet land invasion of Western Europe would go nuclear within the first 24 hours.)  These plans were largely based on two ideas -- that the Russians wouldn't launch in return (a conclusion with which Hackett and Westmoreland vehemently disagreed), and that a war in which only Western Europe got turned into a radioactive wasteland would be a US victory.  ("Better dead than Red," after all.  It'd be for our own good.)

Granted, the Pentagon intended that its own first-strike should consist only of "tactical" weapons, which at the time meant, say, 50kt to 350kt.  But look what we're saying here.  If you live ten miles from ground zero, it's small consolation that the Pentagon considered it a tactical warhead.

all those nukes we've launched at sovereign nations because we wanted to "use some up"?

I quote DIRECTLY from my own original post:

"At least with the strategic nuclear arsenals, anyone with three brain cells to rub together has the wit to realize that you can't actually use the damned things...."

I don't know about your reading of those words, but when I wrote them, I intended them to acknowledge fairly clearly not only that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to use, but that pretty much everyone has the sense to realize that.

(Though it must be noted that when Muammar Khadafy was shopping for a nuclear bomb for Libya, no-one would sell him one because, friend and adversary of the US alike, no-one trusted him not to go nuke Tel Aviv or something like that.  It must also be noted that prior to Gulf II, despite being repeatedly and directly questioned on it by the press, Bush repeatedly avoided making a direct statement that the US would not use nuclear weapons against Iraq.  He COULD easily have just said, "No, we have no intention of using nuclear weapons in the Gulf."  But instead, he just weaselled with what amounted to "No comment" every time the question was asked.  Why?  One could speculate he wanted to leave himself the option in case it all dropped in the pot.  Notice I'm just making a speculation here, explicitly not asserting that launch coordinates for Baghdad were secretly transmitted to the Minuteman silos.)

Or the time President Clinton ordered B2 strikes on random Asian targets "because we had some...

Not against "random Asian targets", no.  We prefer carefully-selected Asian targets.

But seriously, we're sure eager to start blowing the hell out of "undesirable regimes" all over the world, Because We Can.  We have this delusion that almost any war anywhere in the world is our business, and it's our duty to stick our nose in.  Space-based surface-bombardment weapons would alarmingly increase the reach of that nose, and would give us the power to strike, without warning, any target that a KH12 could see.  I do not trust any government with that power, and particularly not one with our government's record of interfering in the internal affairs and governments of foreign nations.

(Well, OK, maybe the Swiss....)

Are you really saying that if we were to fire off a space-based laser....

No, of course I'm not.  I'm saying exactly the opposite -- I'm saying the fact that these are weapons which can be used without cataclysmic consequences makes it very much more likely that they will be used.

Have you noticed that the Chinese are taking a big interest in space?

Why, gee, no, I hadn't noticed.  Until you mentioned that, I was quite convinced all those Chinese announcements about planning to go to the Moon and Mars were just rhetoric to make the decadent Western capitalist running dogs spend money they don't have, and the Long March 2 boosters they keep having problems with keep blowing up because they're fakes designed to make us think they have a space program and bankrupt ourselves trying to beat it, just like we psyched the Soviet Union into spending itself into economic collapse.  (Like we need any help spending ourselves into bankruptcy; our government spends money it doesn't have like a drunken sailor with a wallet full of someone else's credit cards.)

Sarcasm aside, we have damned little room to complain if the Chinese don't honor treaties.  We honor treaties only when it's convenient and politically expedient for us to do so.  Evil?  I guess that's all a matter of your perspective, isn't it?  According to most of the Islamic world and China, after all, we're evil, and frankly, in some respects I'm not sure they're wholly wrong.

You're worried about China?  Screw China, they're backing off the saber-rattling and concluding that capitalism has its points.  They know where the bodies are buried, they're aware of the global balance of military power, and they have better things to do than heat up a military superpower struggle when they can win more easily economically.  Worry about militant Islam instead; those guys hate our guts.  We're the Great Satan, remember?

I don't think it's possible to stop any nation that has launch capability at all from covertly putting ASAT devices in orbit against need, unless every satellite package launched gets a pre-launch tech inspection by a multinational inspection crew, and you know how unlikely it is that will ever happen.  With the number of covert military payloads the US flies, we'd be among the first to scream bloody murder.  But that's a relative non-issue; all ASAT systems can do is kill each other and other satellites, and while that could no doubt greatly inconvenience us, it's not going to be directly life-threatening to anyone.

It's the surface-bombardment weapons that bother me most.  I fail to see how they're applicable to keeping other nations from placing weapons in space, unless you're advocating pre-emptive strikes against non-US launch facilities.  (It's that old "encourages foreign military adventures" clause again.  I think we have QUITE enough encouragement already, thank you.)  And if we think we should be preventing any other nation from putting weapons in space, what are WE doing putting weapons in space?  Who the fuck died and appointed US God and gave us the right and authority to police the whole of near-Earth space, anyway?  We signed international agreements promising to restrict the exploration of space to peaceful scientific purposes.  Deploying orbital ground-bombardment systems would be a very big step away from those agreements, and it would set a very bad precedent.  I really don't think we need a race to see who can build the most and nastiest orbital weapons platforms.

All in all, I wouldn't be nearly as concerned about this if all they were talking about was capability to take out another nation's satellite intelligence and communications capability in the event of a war.  But that doesn't appear to be what the Air Force wants.

The gripping hand is, what the USAF wants and what the USAF gets are often very different things.  (They didn't, for instance, ever get SLAM, aka "Pluto", for which we're all much better off.)

Comments

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's possible to stop any nation that has launch capability at all from covertly putting ASAT devices in orbit against need, ...

Just for the record, it's possible. It's also completely unnecessary. Don't ask for a cite on this, because I can't supply one, but I believe that we actually had a female fighter ace back in the late days of the cold war. She was ordinarily assigned "ferry duty," flying fighters between bases or theaters in non-combat areas -- but she was somehow tapped for a few ASAT missions. She earned her "ace" status for five confirmed satellite kills. In her trusty F-4.

It's simple. Take a claymore mine, or any other ordnance that can simulate a large shotgun. Mount it on the nose of an AIM-90 missile or equivalent. Launch upward from the fighter's top ceiling, pop the top at the missile's ceiling, and "shotgun" a satellite in orbit. Relative velocities assure a "kill" with even one or two ball-bearing hits -- and it's not like the satellite is going to dodge, or anything.

Any nation that can field a credible air-superiority fighter has the tech base to do that. Satellite-based weaponry will simply create a new intelligence war (identifying "armed" satellites versus hiding the fact that they are armed). We would be poorly advised to start such a war, since recent experience indicates that we could not win it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's assorted variations on this theme. A solid-fuel sounding rocket with a payload of ten kilos of metal cubes or ball-bearings is perfectly capable of accomplishing the task, if all it has to do is loft the payload straight up, not achieve orbit. That's perfectly capable of killing most satellites in LEO.

This, however, while perfectly true, is somewhat peripheral to the point I was trying to make there.

(And as for covert ASAT weapons in orbit, while you can track every payload a nation launches, you cannot -- without onsite inspection -- verify that the fully functional communications or weather-monitoring satellite they launched last week does not also contain, say, a small thrust-vectoring missile with a fragmentation warhead.)

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

I'm not disagreeing with you, unixronin; quite the opposite. My comment was not really peripheral; it was intended to expose another dimension of the overall strategic situation.

Your parenthetical comment above simply states explicitly what we both understood, and what sparked my mention of a new intelligence war. The "stealth silo" you posit would not be limited to the type of ASAT weapon you suggested, either. There's no reason why the stealth weapon could not be an osmium penetrator with a video guidance package. (Thor, for the uneducated: an orbital weapon that uses nothing more than mass and gravity to destroy anything from armored vehicles to hardened bunkers.)

The only saving grace about this is that commsats and such pretty much require equatorial orbits to do their jobs efficiently, whereas orbital bombardment weapons need polar orbits for any kind of strategic or tactical flexibility. "Stealth silos" such as we are talking about would be either very narrow in targeting scope, or deployed in such numbers as to be frightfully expensive -- even for an economy as large as ours or those of the EU or China.

This in itself could be a goad to the "military economists," who might fret about deploying a weapons system that can only be used, for example, against Iraq/Iran/part of Turkey. The temptation to pick a fight in that region just to get some use out of all that pretty hardware might be hard for some governments to resist.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Three very valid points. I suspect that any such systems that are openly deployed will, though, eventually be deployed in very large numbers, regardless of the cost. We have an established tradition in this century of spending money we don't have yet, and the current administration is spending money as though the stuff was going out of style. What's another trillion dollars against the Pax Americana?

At least in this case there's no reasonable way to sell the stuff off after a crash, the way former Soviet states have been selling off T72s, T80s and MiGs to anyone with hard cash.

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

At least in this case there's no reasonable way to sell the stuff off after a crash, the way former Soviet states have been selling off T72s, T80s and MiGs to anyone with hard cash.

unixronin, you are going to give me nightmares. This simply isn't true; instead of selling the weapon, a government could simply sell the I/O methodology and control codes necessary to launch and guide the weapon to its target. This would have the effect of leaving the selling nation with insurance, because that nation could be certain (unlike the T80s) that the weapon would never be used against the seller. Why? Because the selling nation would also have those codes, and could interfere with (or self-destruct) the weapon during its reentry phase.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's very true, but there's two ways to look at that.

1. Since they'd be unable to physically take possession of their purchase, a potential buyer of weapons of that class would probably be unwilling to buy just access codes to such a system without some kind of guarantee that those access codes were in fact valid and wouldn't, or couldn't, be changed out from under them. This is what I was originally thinking, along with the fact that the buyer has no way of knowing that the same access codes haven't also been sold to their enemies or to half a dozen other buyers. Without the ability to change the codes themselves, and verify that they have been changed and that the old codes no longer work, the shoe is actually on the other foot -- the buyer cannot be certain that the weapons they've theoretically bought, or bought access to, will not be used against them.

2. On the other hand, this raises the point that if the buyer CAN change the codes and disable any prior codes, then the seller in fact cannot be certain that the weapons will never be used against them, except by putting lockouts in the firmware which cannot be overwritten by the buyer and which prevent the system from accepting targets within areas specified by a designated set of geographic coordinates. (And perhaps this, too, could be defeated by someone who could come up with a way to lie to the weapons platform about its own position.)

One could, in fact, hypothesize a scenario in which a post-collapse US might:
(1) Upload new firmware to the orbital weapons allowing multiple levels of access codes.
(2) Install a set of "master" codes, a root account in effect, invisible to the possessor of any lesser set of codes.
(3) Install a set of visible command codes (call them code set A), which are then sold to Buyer A, along with instructions for how to change those codes, disable set A and replace them with set A1, and verify that set A does not in fact work any more. At this point, Buyer A could reasonably believe that they have full and irrevocable control of that system, while in practice the master codes (call them code set 0) are actually still in effect and have full power to override set A1 at any time.
(4) Repeat the above for buyers B, C and D, etc, etc.

The owner of such a system could do this more or less indefinitely, reselling access to the same weapons systems over and over, each buyer thinking they have purchased exclusive control, and the deception need never be discovered until either, say, buyer B launches a weapon that buyer A believes is under its sole control, or a buyer tries to execute a "prohibited" launch and it is vetoed using the root code set. This is why I say that there's no reasonable way to sell it off -- because "ownership" cannot be clearly verified.
That said, a buyer may not think it through all the way, or may simply be willing to accept that degree of uncertainty.

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

I wish you had worked through that scenario last night. I was too busy with practical matters to do so for myself, and it might have saved me one nightmare.