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.)