Re: [GZG] Monster ships

Charles Lee wrote:

>Thank you for responding with logig and fact. The fact that so much 
>has come to lead this time is evidence that missles and guided 
>munitions are powerful.

Of course they are. If they weren't, no-one would bother buying them.

>But think of the fact it took over two or three decades to come closer.

Except that it didn't. What took most of those two or three decades 
was for the (western) defence politicians to decide that the threat 
was serious enough to spend the money to develop a specific 
counter-technology. Once the money was granted, actually developing 
the counter-tech has usually taken around *one* decade, or less - and 
that's in peacetime. War tends to speed things up considerably. Also, 
Soviet/Russian and Israeli defence politicians have historically been 
*way* quicker to open their purses for defence tech developments - 
though their purses aren't as big as the western ones, and many of 
their achievements haven't been widely published in the west until
recently.

In the ATGM case, the first major use of ATGMs in combat was the Yom 
Kippur war in 1973. The Soviets used their first tank-mounted PD 
system in combat no later than 1982 (may have been earlier), and the 
Israelis fielded reactive armour in Lebanon in 1982. (Note that this 
was *combat* use, indicating that the respective counter-systems had 
finished development earlier than this.) The bigger western powers 
didn't really appreciate the ATGM/LAW threat (or rather, thought that 
their ECM systems and passive armours were sufficient to deal with 
it) until their own troops started running into insurgents equipped 
with half-decent AT weapons - mostly in the wake of 9/11, which was 
less than ten years ago... and the western hard-kill PD systems are 
coming online now.

For ships, the first ASMs were deployed during WW2 - but being 
radio-controlled, they were countered by dedicated ECM systems within 
a year. (Like I noted above, war does wonders for defence tech 
development :-/) The first reasonably autonomous ASM used in combat 
was the Styx (sinking of the Eilat, 1967). At most six years later 
the Israelis already had effective ECM systems in place to counter it 
(used in the battle of Latakia, 1973), and the USN deployed their 
first Phalanx gun-based PD system in 1978.

>Missle designers aren't sittin on their laurals.

Correct.

>Offence is easier to design and build than defence. This fact is 
>ferever been proven. A sdad fact of man's mind.

Not true at all. Defence only lags behind because it is pointless (or 
at least considered so by the politicians) to develop a defence 
against a non-existant threat. Once a threat is taken seriously 
enough by the people who control the money however, it rarely takes 
long until a defence tech against it has been developed. (Getting 
that tech into the field can take longer, particularly if there's no 
ongoing war at the time.) Once the new defence tech is in place, we 
on the offence side have to work our butts off to either come up with 
some way of outsmarting this new defence tech or come up with a 
completely different threat that requires a completely different 
defensive counter-tech. Merely outsmarting the new defence tends to 
be fairly easy for the defence tech to counter with minor adjustments 
of their own; coming up with a completely new threat is *very* 
difficult, and even when we succeed we can only expect to keep the 
upper hand for a decade or so if we're lucky.

To return to the tank-vs-ATGM example, it is surprisingly easy to 
design and build something that detects an incoming missile and 
throws a cloud of shrapnel into its path - the Soviets did that in 
the late '70s - but it is difficult as hell to build a missile 
capable of avoiding or surviving such a cloud of shrapnel. OK, if you 
know exactly how the specific enemy defence system you're up against 
works you can exploit its particular weaknesses; eg. the Hellfire and 
Javelin both dive onto their targets exploiting that the current 
Russian PD systems cover the horizon but can't fire straight up... 
but all the newer tank PD systems under development today (including 
the next-generation Russian ones) *can* fire straight up, removing 
that particular vulnerability. And so on.

So no, I very emphatically disagree with your notion that it is 
easier to develop better weapons that it is to develop defenses that 
counter them :-/

Regards,

Oerjan 

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