Re: [GZG] Monster ships

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lBut I asked a
question to one person's complaint about the cost to effective power of
the MT MIssles,  What would be a reasonable cost.  I was an operations
specialist in the US Navy, A weapons user and studier.

--- On Wed, 1/13/10, Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 8:14 PM

Charles, 

One thing to keep in mind in your discussions with Oerjan:, he works in
the weapons development field. He knoweth very well what he speaketh. He
was also our number one front line man in working up mass/cost points in
the FB material when it was being developed, so his numbers will usually
be spot on.

:-)

Mk

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Charles Lee <xarcht@yahoo.com> wrote:

I wish I could meet you in person. I'ld shake your hand. A calm and
logical debater. We may not agree but I think both are lookin at the
others evidence and thinkin.

--- On Wed, 1/13/10, Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se> wrote:

From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Wednesday, January 13, 2010, 5:36 PM

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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