Tag Archives: Defence

Dear America, Your Missile Defence is not Broken

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@CampaignReboot, mak­ing a good point as always, ear­lier linked to this CNN arti­cle which bemoans the state of the United States’ mis­sile defence pro­gramme after the fail­ure of a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor test.

Just to rein­force his point, let’s look at how insanely dif­fi­cult a task a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor (GBI) mis­sile has.

An ICBM launch is first detected by detec­tors, usu­ally radar, at sea, on land, and in space. All this data must be fed back to the mis­sile base and analysed by a com­puter within a few minutes.

A GBI attempts to inter­cept it while it’s in its “mid­course” phase, which gen­er­ally lasts for around 20 min­utes — but it’s not as if the GBI turns around and tries again if it misses. You have one chance to inter­cept dur­ing that time win­dow. Dur­ing the mid­course phase, the ICBM is in space, over 1000 kilo­me­ters above the Earth. It’s mov­ing at sev­eral kilo­me­ters a sec­ond. In this test, it was over 4000 kilo­me­ters from the GBI’s launch point.

It’s around 10–20 metres long.

And you have to hit it.

This is, shall we say, not a triv­ial challenge?

Any­one assum­ing that their country’s mis­sile defence sys­tems entirely remove the pos­si­bil­ity of nuclear attack is kid­ding them­selves. Mis­sile defence is just a part of the great game of deter­rence played by the world’s few nuclear pow­ers. If any­one launches, the world is still screwed.

Luck­ily for any remain­ing Cold War doom­say­ers, the GBI’s 50% inter­cept suc­cess rate is pretty nicely matched by the Russ­ian Bulava ICBM’s 53% test suc­cess rate. And if your Red (/Green?) ter­ror of the month is North Korea or Iran, can you imag­ine their mis­sile pro­grammes hav­ing any­thing like the suc­cess rate of the Rus­sians’ or the Americans’?

So if all the ranty CNN com­menters could get over it, it would be appre­ci­ated. The US needs mis­sile defence, even though it isn’t per­fect and never will be. Aegis has a bet­ter record than the GBIs any­way, did you for­get that you had that too? North Korea is not going to nuke you tomor­row anyway.

Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.

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On Sun­day, Britain’s Defence Sec­re­tary Liam Fox called for the upcom­ing Medal of Honor game to be banned by retail­ers (BBC). Appar­ently he finds it “hard to believe any cit­i­zen of our coun­try would wish to buy such a thor­oughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remark­able lack of under­stand­ing of the peo­ple he is sup­posed to rep­re­sent. And since when has there been an expec­ta­tion that Amer­i­can games should be “British” anyway?

Appar­ently it is “shock­ing that some­one would think it accept­able to recre­ate the acts of the Tal­iban against British sol­diers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing between fic­tion and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Tal­iban. It’s called mul­ti­player. Would Mr Fox pre­fer that the mul­ti­player was Amer­i­cans shoot­ing Amer­i­cans? Because that’s just as morally dubi­ous, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politi­cians los­ing their shit about Coun­ter­strike because zomg half the play­ers are being ter­ror­ists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi sol­dier in multiplayer?

I won­der if the Defence Sec­re­tary ever got the chance to play Cops and Rob­bers as a kid, because, you know it’s no dif­fer­ent. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Rob­bers doesn’t glo­rify vio­lent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glo­rify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appre­ci­ated if you could please go back to get­ting our real sol­diers some MRAPs and some more heli­copters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!

Preying on the Mantis

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In Dou­glas Car­swell MP’s blog post “Is Man­tis going to fly?”, he bemoans the amount of money the Min­istry of Defence have spent fund­ing BAE’s Man­tis unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle (UAV), sug­gest­ing instead that we should not have invested in it and should instead have bought exist­ing off-the-shelf UAVs, by which he pre­sum­ably means the MQ-9 Reaper. He goes on to pre­sume that a Man­tis pro­cure­ment con­tract must no longer be on the cards, based on the response he received to his ques­tion to the Sec­re­tary of State for Defence.

With all due respect to Mr Car­swell, I do believe he’s missed the point here. Not only has the Royal Air Force already bought 13 of the Reaper air­craft, but they have already seen oper­a­tional use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BAE's Mantis vehicle (picture from Wikimedia)

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle (pic­ture from Wikimedia)

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle is, as Par­lia­men­tary Under­sec­re­tary of State Peter Luff says, a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor — a one-off pro­to­type built in order to prove the tech­nol­ogy behind it. There never was a pro­cure­ment pro­gramme for the Man­tis. Sure, BAE received some fund­ing from the Min­istry of Defence, though as this Defense­News arti­cle sug­gests, it may not have been all that much. Mostly it seems like BAE and the other con­sor­tium mem­bers threw their own money into the Man­tis pro­gramme, and the MoD put some of their own research bud­get into it in the hope that the Man­tis would suit Britain’s needs bet­ter than the Reaper does.

As I write this post, Mr Car­swell has updated his own to address the com­ment of “an angry reader” (not me, by the way) who points out that “Man­tis is just a demo project… We’re just see­ing if we can do it bet­ter”. The MP’s response is to bring up the SA80 rifle and the Future Lynx and Eurofighter pro­grammes. Issues with the SA80 and with the Typhoon have been widely broad­cast in the press (though I can’t find any­thing par­tic­u­larly damn­ing about the Future Lynx from my brief online search). But the fact that the Man­tis is a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor is still rel­e­vant here — the SA80 and the Typhoon are in active pro­duc­tion and use by our armed forces, the Man­tis is not.

Maybe with our glo­ri­ous 20/20 hind­sight, we should have aban­doned the Eurofighter project and bought F35s and F22s. Who knows — it’s not as if those are the epit­ome of suc­cess­ful pro­grammes. But shy­ing away from tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tors entirely, par­tic­u­larly ones that are largely privately-funded, would result in stag­na­tion. Britain is one of the few coun­tries that main­tains a high level of mil­i­tary research of its own, rather than com­mit­ting to buy­ing all our gear from the Amer­i­cans or the Rus­sians. While I don’t pre­tend to have any big num­bers to throw around, I would imag­ine that the defence sec­tor is rea­son­ably impor­tant to the British econ­omy, and it would be in poor shape indeed if the Min­istry of Defence no longer wished to invest in the kind of tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor pro­grammes that fur­ther our country’s engi­neer­ing prowess.

(Dis­clo­sure: I’m a for­mer employee of Qine­tiQ, a mem­ber of the Man­tis con­sor­tium, though I’ve had no involve­ment with Man­tis itself.)