"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
...

I brought up Sprint because I am supposing THAAD's
range would be similar against an ICBM. 20ish miles. While the
Sprint had a much faster reaction time from a flight point of view, I
suspect that THAAD with more modern software/radar/etc. would know
*where* it needs to go sooner than Sprint did so it could launch
sooner than a Sprint could.

And you are still talking about a rather small range fan, so you are back
to
having to put quite a few sites into service if it is to be used as a
terminal defense against ICBM's for US targets.

I never implied that was the plan. Nobody has except you. To have a
terminal defense for every area in the US no matter what missile you
used would be extremely expensive. All anybody is saying is "hey if
THAAD has reliable terminal defense capabilities against ICBMs it
opens up our options". In time of crises you could deploy them
wherever you thought you needed them (obviously you're limited by how
many systems you have on hand).





Off the top of my head, I
can't think of many places we'd *worry* about *ICBM's* hitting us other
than
in the fifty states--in those other areas the threat will be TBM's, for
which THAAD should indeed be a capable response, as it has been designed
for
that primary role.

That depends. How long is THAAD suppose to be in service? Who's to
say China wouldn't try to hit a staging area with an ICBM?

Where? You'd have to posit China lobbing an ICBM at a target being used by
the US during a third-party operation? I don't think that is realistic
enough to worry about--somewhere in the same category as say, "Protect
against RN Trident attack against US target". As to staging areas where we
would be operating against the PRC, maybe Australia? But that is in IRBM
range. Anything in their own periphery they could hit with a shorter range
missile. Which IMO takes you back to the "only US-proper targets have to be
defended from ICBM".



Great. Wonderful. So you want to use THAAD as the second tier.

No. I'd want to use it in the terminal phase. "Second tier" and
"terminal phase" are not always synonomous.

You got three flight phases to deal with--boost, midcourse, and terminal.
We
stand a reasonable chance of deploying a system that can handle TBM's in
the
boost phase (i.e., ABL), but in many cases hitting an ICBM in the boost
phase is going to be kind of hard to accomplish (i.e., PRC).


There's an excellent report on that particular problem right he

http://www.xmission.com/~sferrin/BPI-Full_Report.pdf

(tried to find the original link but not too hard)



So yes, for all
intents and purposes, you are looking at a two-tier system against
ICBM's,
GBMI and terminal.

You might not be familair with this:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/kei.htm


http://www.orbital.com/MissileDefens...KEI/index.html



I don't do the "go to links" bit unless it looks like it is something worth
bothering with--a sysnopsis of the pertinent info is usually given with the
link.



I just went back and reread your posts, and no, you did not say that; you
instead forwarded AvLeak's posit that a single battery could deal with
TBM's
launched against the coast. My apologies for misreading your statements,
but
when you start out talking about THAAD in the anti-ICBM role, then it
sort
of sets the stage for that being the threat being covered.


No prob. Sometimes I think one or the other of us could state the
moon is round and we'd still end up arguing about it.


We're not even on the same page. Read my original post or two. I
never said anything other than THAAD has some ability in the terminal
phase against ICBMs and will be tested in such a role and that the
THAAD with a bigger booster will have the long range capability
against T-B-Ms.

And IMO THAAD in the anti-ICBM role is therefore a waste of spit; it is
too
short legged, and nobody is going to budget and support emplacing the
required sites to handle the coast.

Nobody has ever suggested that. What they ARE suggesting is that it
could be used as a MOBILE terminal ABM. That gives you more options
than if it had no ABM capability. Nobody has suggested deploying it
like the Nikes were in the 50's and 60's.

Which takes us back full circle to the "what targets would we want to
protect against ICBM threats other than those in the US" bit. I see great
utility in an anti-TBM capability to protect contingency forces in the
theater of operations, but I see danged little use for protecting them from
ICBM threats that would come from outside the T/O. If you change the focus
back to the US proper, then I still don't see a lot of gain in terms of
THAAD in the terminal defense role unless you want to build and deploy
enough of them to protect *every* target within the bad guy's range fan.
Protecting only SF, LA, and SEATAC merely means the bad guys hit Portland,
Monterey, and Eugene instead. Or maybe Sacramento. Or Phoenix (it is not as
if the PRC is going to limit their range of future systems to being able to
only strike the beach cities--witness that new SLBM they are developing with
a nearly 6K mile range).


Your Son-of-THAAD versus TBM's is more
interesting, but again IMO is not very likely to see the the light of
day--we apparently have outr hands full just getting vanilla THAAD to
work
as advertised.

All of them had problems. The only one that's been mostly successful
from the get go is the FLAGE/ERINT/PAC-3. And I'd be more surprised
if the upgraded THAAD *didn't* see the light of day. It's cheaper to
upgrade what you've already got working than to start over from
scratch.

But from what I have read, we don't really have *THAAD* "working" (yet). As
of this past January, only two of the planned eight intercept tests were
successful. Not a great track record as of yet. Hopefully it will improve,
and it will turn out to be a bang-up anti-TBM system. Which would be great.
Until that time, however, I'd be wary of corporate-sponsored "we are ready
to stretch/enhance it so it can *also* do..." stuff.


Spartan was also a "terminal" system, albeit one with a longer reach than
the lower tier Sprint. It only had a max engagement range of less than
500
miles, which kind of rules it out in the midcourse role,

Depends how you define "midcourse". Since GBI and Spartan both go
after the RVs in space the only real difference is that Spartan
couldn't reach out as far. Distance isn't what determines what
"phase" a missile is in. You have the boost phase which is
self-explanitory but midcourse is considered the entire time the RV is
in space. That's where both GBI and Spartan were designed to kill
their targets. It doesn't become "terminal" phase until the RV is
reentering the atmosphere. That's pretty much how the "phases" have
been differentiated from day one.

Take a gander at the max altitude that the *existing* THAAD acheives (at
least some 150 km), and by that reasoning it is a mid-course interceptor,
right? I don't think so.



especially as it
was based nextdoor to the Sprints at the defended location.

The Spartans and *some* of the Sprints were colocated mainly out of
convenience. If you check out this aerial if the Stanley R. Mickelson
Complex you'll see there are only 16 of the 70 Sprint silos located
there with the Spartans.

http://www.paineless.id.au/missiles/HSafeguard.html



The Sprints were spread out somewhat. How much I don't know. Miles
or tens of miles would be my guess. Since the ABM site was only
allowed to defend one location by treaty you'd WANT the Spartans near
the defended target for best coverage.

The Spartan's were tasked with "area" defense, the Sprints with point
defense. IMO, Spartan did not rise to what could be considered mid-course
intercept status.


Look at it
another way--the USN has two "terminal" defense systems against anti-ship
mi
ssiles, ESSM and Phalanx--one outreaches the other by quite some
distance,
but it is still a terminal defense system.

You find it's going to be an either/or in most situations. ESSM is
*replacing* Phalanx in some instances. RAM is replacing Phalanx in
others.

OK, my bad example; consider Sea Sparrow and Phalanx, from the near
past--plenty of vessels had *both*.



Vanilla THAAD will have a very
small range against ICBM's, making it of minimal use in the role.


But still better than none at all. If all it does is make an
adversary think twice then it's worth it.

But it won't, unless we deploy them around virtually every target set he
could strike! As I pointed out earlier, take SF from his list and he
replaces it with Sacramento. Are you willing to give up one but not the
other? I doubt you are.



There are only two places we really have to worry about ICBM's--Hawaii,
and
the West coast.

Yeah, for now.

For the forseeable future, with the caveat that "West Coast" extends inland
through the depth that the DF-31 can strike, which just about gets them to
Phoenix. There are a *lot* of major urban areas west of that longitudinal
line.



Could THAAD play a role in Hawaii, where the defended area
is finite? Yep. Could it play such a role on the West coast? Not really.
Is
anybody going to argue to deploy THAAD along the coast to defend against
ship-launched TBM's? Very doubtful, to say the least. This has all the
earmarks of some LMCO guy feeding a line to AvLeak in an effort to pump
up
THAAD, and little to offer in terms of real usefulness.

Well yeah, but five years ago if someone had tried to sell the idea of
shooting down airliners over the US it would have been met with
similar scorn.

Two successes out of eight intercept attempts, and that does not include the
earlier non-intercept goal failures. But they are ready to already start
*expanding* its capabilities? I don't think so.



My thoughts on it are this. The radar has a 600 mile range they say
so I'd think you'd need at least a couple radars with the coverage
overlapping enough so there isn't a spot they could come in close to
the coast and shoot off a SCUD-type. There's no reason the missiles
have to be colocated with the radar so you could have launchers up and
down the coast. You're not talking about defending against barrages
of barge launched missiles so it's more a matter of deploying five or
ten launch vehicles and spreading them out enough to get the coverage
you want.

It is a heck of a lot easier to just take down the barges before they
ever
get close enough.


Come up with a way to determine which one has a missile before launch
and I'm sure you'll have everybody's attention.

It would be a lot easier to set up an exclusion zone than it would be to set
up terminal defenses around all of the potential targets. You said we'd be
able to deploy these systems to protect these areas *when they are needed*,
right? So that rules out protecting against the "bolt from the blue"
scenario. If the threat is some scow launching a TBM, then taking out the
launcher is a heck of a lot more sensible than trying to take out the
missile after it is launched.




Look at the size. Current THAAD is a pretty small missile, and getting it
to
the range mentioned is going to take some pretty serious size increase.

Not really. Compare the dimensions of THAAD and SM-3 and SM-3 ranges
270+ miles. And according to the article they'll get a threefold
increase in coverage from software improvements alone with THAAD. As
far as size, even just a bump from 13" to 15" on the booster diameter
will give you a 33% increase in volume of propellant you can carry.

But aren't they talking about a three or four fold increase in range? You
are not going to get that by increasing the booster by 3 inches. As to the
software bit, that may refer to improving the radar and its capabilities,
for all we know.



Compare MLRS, at twelve rounds per, to ATACMS, at two per; MLRS can reach
out to around 60 or more klicks, IIRC in its latest GMLRS form, while
ATACMS
covers the 200-300 km gamut. One sixth the number of missiles.

Not even remotely similar comparison. A more accurate would be
Sparrow and ESSM. Similar front end, bigger booster, same launcher,
double the range.

But you are not talking about doubling the range here. And why does the
MLRS/ATACMS comparison not meet the same criteria, or at least come darned
close?


It must be:

"...Then one battery should be able to protect each U.S. coast against
a barge-launched ballistic missile, one of the threats officials worry
about. "

The only access I had does not indicate any of that:


http://www.aviationnow.com/avnow/new...story.jsp?id=n
ews/tha08204.xml


and I saw no specific ranges mentioned. The only "could be" I saw was
mention of possibly emplacing the system to protect Hawaii "years
earlier"
than 2009.


Yeah, that's a completely different article.



The as-the-crow-flys distance between Loring AFB and Homestead AFB
(pretty much the furthest north and south points on the east coast) is
1634 miles. Old THAAD had a range of 125 miles. Today's THAAD?
Don't know. For sake of argument let's use the 125 mile range. Now
the future THAAD with a bigger booster (the one claimed to defend a
coast with one battery against TBMs N-O-T ICBMs) would supposedly be
able to defend an *area* ten times the size of the current THAAD.
Doing a little math today's= pi * 125 miles^2 times that by ten,
take the sqrt, divide by pi gives you a range of 223 miles. So with
that figure it gives you a circle 446 miles in diameter in which one
THAAD launcher can reach out and touch. With minimal overlap you
could cover that 1634 miles with four launchers (this may have been
the way the journalist came up with his one-battery-per-coast idea).
Of course you wouldn't want minimal overlap. So bump it to five
launchers and you get about 150 miles of overlap at each intersection.
((446x5)-1634)/4 = 149 miles.

Whatever.

Whatever? Do the math.

Why *bother* doing the math when the critter has yet to prove that it can
reliably acheive the *lesser* requirements already in place?! And why bother
when protecting only against TBM's, and only when you think they *might* be
used against you (I assume you are still saying that this would be a nifty
"deploy it only when you need to" system) is pretty much worthless?



I'll be looking for winged pigs the day THAAD is fielded in the
West Coast protection role, and if it can't handle the ICBM threat, it is
an
utter waste.

That's absurd. That's like saying if an F-35 can't outperform an F-22
in the air to air role it's an utter waste.

No, that is not the same thing. The F-35 is intended to perform a somewhat
different set of missions, at a cheaper cost. OTOH, what you seem to be
saying (using your F-35/F-22 model) is, "Hey, we should go ahead and plan on
giving the F-35 the same exact mission requirements we have set up for the
F-22--forget about the fact that it is a program that has yet to prove
itself capable of doing its current, more limited roles...expand the
envelope!" Two successes out of eight attempts ain't a very good place to
start expanding your envelope.



That's why nobody in their right mind would put the launchers in a
little circle around the radar. They'd be WAY far apart.

Which means multiple bases, in a region that is not surfeit with active
bases. We could bring back the Presidio...

You're telling me there aren't four or five active military bases on
each coast?

Let's see, AFAIK Fort Ord is largely being passed over to the local
community as we speak, and there is nothing I know of between that location
and the Trident base up off the Puget Sound that meets your criteria. We
gave up those coastal artillery sites in between to the Park Service some
decades back... :-)



No, we have obviously been talking about two different things. I fixated
on
your initial ICBM post--mea culpa. That said, I see little use in
fielding
anything in that area that *can't* provide a relaiable defense against
ICBM's.

It's not *designed* to fill that role. Any ABM capability is a BONUS.

No, it was designed from the outset as an ABM system, just not one aimed at
the longer ranged/faster missiles in the ICBM class.

There's no sense in not using it in an emergency just because it
wasn't designed in from the beginning. Nobody would suggest taking
out helicopters with LGBs as a matter of course but it's been done.
If the ability is there it would be foolish not to take advantage of
it.

So you are saying it is a great system to have available if we get intel
that says Johnny Jihad is planning on putting up towards the coast in a dhow
with a Scud under a tarp, at which point we would presumable deploy our
THAAD systems around each and every possible target he could stike in that
manner? Sorry, but I still find that pretty lame. It is not going to be
worth spit against the unplanned-for launch, and it is not going to be worth
much against the more lethal (and just as likely) PLA DF-31 orPLAN JL-2 that
could threaten the region. IMO, let THAAD mature such that it can do what it
was intended to do--protect deployed forces from enemy TBM attacks. Anything
further is just buying into the contractor's change-order-yielded-profit
plan.


Let's be real here--we know that everyone says we are not deploying
BMD to defend against the PRC, but *really*...


Preaching to the choir.





True. If we were talking about ICBMs. Which we're not.

One of us was, and the other started this thread in that vein. To me,
anyone
wanting to install a major missile system to cover the Left Coast that
*couldn't* deal with the greater ICBM threat is a bit shy in the area of
common sense.


That's not at all what they're talking about. One battery does not
constitute a "major missile system". All they're saying is "hey this
bigger THAAD will be able to cover a coast with one battery. Since
we're going to have the systems ANYWAY let's cover that potential
threat (the TBMs launched from ships) and kill two birds with one
stone".

Well, we also have to worry about the possibility that they could send it
*into* the US via cargo container, and launch it from *within* our borders,
right? yes, I know that is a bit fascetious, but the point is that we can't
*afford* to dump the inevitable few billion bucks it would take to turn
THAAD into Son-of-THAAD on the basis of wanting to protect against an
*extremely* unlikely threat category. Develop vanilla THAAD such that it
actually reliably works as it is supposed to, deploy it as required to
protect US forces in threat areas, let GBMI handle the ICBM threat, and take
those extra billions you saved by NOT developing THAAD into son-of-THAAD and
use them to enahnce our targetring capabilities, or our countermine
capabilities, or our ISR capabilites...the things that we DO need to do, and
for which plenty of threats do actually exist.



What I'm talking about is think Patriot launchers at the end of an
airbase in the middle east instead of dedicated missile sites that are
bases in and of themselves as the Nike bases were.

But we have been talking about defending the Left Coast, not an airbase
in
the Middle East.


Are you telling me you REALLY can't follow that analogy?

See my earlier comments. Against a TBM threat to CONUS, either you have them
in place 24/7, or you are better off just planning on setting up that
exclusion zone while saving all of that additional R&D money.



Now, if
you are going to use THAAD in this role, you WILL need dedicated
launch
sites, and dedicated radar sites, and you will need a lot of them
to
cover
the metropolitan areas on the west coast.



Not so. Read above (many times if you need to).

Fine. You go right ahead and keep thinking that THAAD can kill ICBM's
at
the
same range it kills slower TBM targets. This is obviously pointless.


Well at least until you learn to read a little better it is. Quote
where I said "a single battery could defend an entire coast against
ICBMs".

I already apologized for that misunderstanding. But I am still of the
opinion that installing a *TBM* defense for the West Coast that can't
handle
ICBM's is ludicrous.

So you'd rather park the missiles in a garage instead of using them?
Brilliant plan.

No, I am saying that you have not shown where there is, or is likely to be,
a sufficient threat of that nature (TBM's versus CONUS) that can't be more
easily addressed with other means.

Brooks (Who, while he has historically has been pro-BMD, is getting a bit
tired of it turning into an endless money pit that sucks funding away from
more readily available and vitally needed requirements, and sees this
contractor-initiated ploy as just another attempt to pad the corporate
nest).