asymetric warfare

In message
US army next-gen guided-bombs are essentuially UAVs with 90% explosive
filling. They are big and will show up on radar. At this point the gun turns
and fires at the bomb/missile before it gets close enough to do damage.

Firing at it, and inflicting enough damage to give you a decent chance
of surviving, are very different things. Bombs are a tough target
precisely because they're wrapped in a thick steel case and the filling
is nowadays rather insensitive: you're trying to (a) inflict lethal
damage on a rather small guidance unit, and (b) hoping that the
munition's ballistic course then lands it where it won't harm you or
yours.

It would increase a fighter's patrol endurence from hours into days at
little extra fuel cost. That's not silly. That's *very* useful for a
cash-strapped military.

Who's flying and how do _they_ cope with 96 hours at a time strapped
into a cockpit?

And
what makes you think that things like AWACS will be able to fly in the near
future? Very simple rockets could be built as first stages to older
missilbes, or clusters of older missiles, which could put them in enough
danger that commanders draw them back beyond their useful distance. If
something cannot be used as effectively it's as good as badly damaged.

Why is this only valid for the US side?

Even if they slow the USAF down an hour, that's an hour's warning more than
a country without such a system woudl get.

So what? This might be crucial for El Presidente to empty his safe,
round up a few of his favourite mistresses and catamites, race to the
airport and fly away from the warzone. Doesn't stop the US force from
achieving _its_ aims, particularly if they included "get rid of El
Presidente".

America's boastful tendencies do not change the laws of physics. Stealth
aircraft do not reflect radar back at the origin radar - but they do
reflect. If you have an array of linked radars the others may well pick up
the reflected radar pulses, even if the origin array does not.

Absolutely true. When you get that working reliably and usefully in
practice, patent it and become wealthy.

The purchase of a few AWAC systems (minus aircraft) would not break the bank
of most middle-ranking nations. Linking them together is a computer problem.

They're only useful when flying: AWACS grounded because someone cratered
their runway are just as useless as AWACS you never bought.

Again, reducing the range of US navy fighters by 200miles is going to be
worth it!

That's a standard planning assumption, you're adding nothing. (The
published figure is actually 25 miles, not 100... the sea is large and
even a CVN is small by comparison with missile search ambits)

Plus they have to keep supply-ships away by a similar margin. That
would have a devistating impact on the army's ability to fight a sustained
battle.

This is the standard planning assumption for the USN: it's not healthy
to be in sight of the coast. How do you plan to add to that?

By contract, obscenely cheep. Could probably be done for a quarter billion
dollars. In any population you usally get enough people who will fight, and
in war the actual guns and AT weapons will usually fall into their hands.

Fight for what, is the problem? And how do you cope with the minor issue
of bank raids and other robberies by cheerful criminals using these
Government-issue weapons for unauthorised ends?

After that it boils down to tactics. An RPG-7 can disable any tank in the
world with a good side-shot. And massed against the front they can do enough
damage to disable one.

Trouble is, getting enough shots from the front, or a good flanking
shot, is a lot harder than the armchair theorists seem to think. And the
costs of unsuccessful attacks tend to be high, and the Lessons Learned
are not widely promulgated among the attackers.

You'd think so wouldn't you? Or at least the government would like you to
think so. Truth is that western reactors have more safety systems than their
russian equivolents, and therefore really are safer. But all that safety
gear counts for very little when it's burnt or blown up,

Russian reactors use carbon moderators, that is, very pure coal. US
reactors use water for moderation.

Which burns better?

Also, compare the standards for containment buildings, which you have to
get through before you can burn or blow through anything directly
associated with the reactor core.

At the very least the sudden and violent removal of several
cooling towers would have a disabling effect on power-outout, causing
brown-outs over a large areas and many days.

Quite so, but the same goes for hitting any power station or substation.

--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk

Derek Lyons skrev i meddelelsen ...

You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today.

The entire idea behind assymetric warfare is to refuse to play by the
enemy's
rules - so if fighting the US use a doctrine not reqirering an C3I
infrastructure,
which can be attacked - have lots of small dispersed units capable of
operating on their own initiative.
If you can devise a doctrine without a conventional decision cycle noone
can get inside it.

A "not so smart" bomb made out of an inflatable boat, 2 suicidal maniacs
and a lot of explosives almost taking out the Cole - thats assymetric
warfare.

Forget about taking and holding terrain - just inflict casualties.

If you can't beat the enemy's physical strenght attack his will to fight.

--------------------------------------
Carl Alex Friis Nielsen

Love Me - take me as I think I am

"peter" wrote:

I think almost everyone is missing the point about assymetric warfare. All
the comments are based on US/NATO type equipment standards, and military
objectives. The whole point of assymetric warfare is that you don't follow
the standards, you go for what you can achieve where you can achieve it with
what you can get. 9/11 was a classic example.

Yep. 9/11 is a demonstration of what happens when you *don't* have a
strategy or an operations plan. You raise a great sound and fury, but
accomplish nothing.

Assymetric warfare is about doing the unexpected, with the unexpected by
surprise, that negates the defences and allows success.

That works when the asymmetries as small. (For instance the Japanese
never expected our submarine campaign.) It fails when the asymmetries
are large as there is not military way to overcome them.

If you haven't got the budget of the US, you dont try to emulate them and
expect to win, you have to think out of 'our' box.

If you haven't got the budget of the US, you are not going to win
many, if any, victories of sufficient size. Your goal instead must be
to win on the political front, and there the 2nd-2rd tier nations have
the advantage.

D.
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(George William Herbert) wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:
You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today. The days of grinding towards the Capital worrying only
about the front line and hoping a golden bullet takes out the Leader
are dead and gone. This is 2003 not 1943.

What made you think I didn't know that?

Some of your brushing aside of C&C issues in various places in this
thread.

What, did you think I'm going to post *all* the good
countermeasures to a US attack in an open forum?!?!?....

No, no more than you'd expect me to.

D.
--
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"Carl Alex Friis Nielsen" wrote:

Derek Lyons skrev i meddelelsen ...

You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today.

The entire idea behind assymetric warfare is to refuse to play by the
enemy's rules - so if fighting the US use a doctrine not reqirering an C3I
infrastructure, which can be attacked - have lots of small dispersed units
capable of operating on their own initiative.

Which sounds pretty on paper, but the reality is that those units will
be picked off and killed individually, they emphatically won't win the
war for you. They won't stop your country from being occupied, they
won't accomplish much beyond dying gloriously. (And they won't exist
in the kind of country that's most likely to take on the US because of
internal politics.)

If you can devise a doctrine without a conventional decision cycle noone
can get inside it.

OK, you first.

A "not so smart" bomb made out of an inflatable boat, 2 suicidal maniacs
and a lot of explosives almost taking out the Cole - thats assymetric
warfare.

ROTFLMAO. That's suicide. Or did you notice the attack didn't touch
the heart of the CVBG?

Forget about taking and holding terrain - just inflict casualties.

If you can't beat the enemy's physical strenght attack his will to fight.

It might work, but it probably won't.

D.
--
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at the following URLs:

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"John" wrote:

America's boastful tendencies do not change the laws of physics.

But seemingly yours do.

D.
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"John" wrote:

Nuclear buckshot will kill most things, and doesn't need to be too accurate
either.

ROTFLMAO.

D.
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In ,
John radiated into the WorldWideWait:
"Duke of URL" macbenahATkdsiDOTnet wrote

John's cutesy-pie combat methods were interesting, slightly, but
suited to a 1930's Boys' Book of How to Have a War.

Everything after the SUV/otto-76 was a bit tongue in cheek though.

Peter did a fine job of dismissing them all.

In the case of the SUVs Peter didn't.. To dodge a tank round all
you need do is side-step half the width of your vehicle. Claiming
that the tanks will close to ploint blank range is stupid when they
are facing concentrated AT fire. I'm also not sure he understood
the potential of the Otto-76 to shoot down smart munitions.

And I especially agree with the last one - countries where all the
citizens are heavily armed are not countries like Iraq, where
people the ruler doesn't like get fed alive into shredding
machines. So they aren't the kind of country we'd be needing to
invade.

However the question wasn't about poor countries, but

Straw man.
I did NOT say a word concerning the wealth, relative or absolute, of
countries. In fact, I don't think ANYone did.

middle-ranking ones, which I took to mean ones comparable to most
european nations.

Both the *stars* of Old Europe, Germany & France, have a history of
mass slaughter of citizenry when a new "leader" takes office.

"peter" writes:

I think almost everyone is missing the point about assymetric warfare. All
the comments are based on US/NATO type equipment standards, and military
objectives. The whole point of assymetric warfare is that you don't follow
the standards, you go for what you can achieve where you can achieve it with
what you can get. 9/11 was a classic example.

If some one out there is planning on using cruise missiles for example, he
wont build them to Tomahawk standards, he wont select tomahawk like targets
and so on.

Assymetric warfare is about doing the unexpected, with the unexpected by
surprise, that negates the defences and allows success.

If you haven't got the budget of the US, you dont try to emulate them and
expect to win, you have to think out of 'our' box.


Aren't you forgetting something? In addition to Thinking Outside The
Box, don't they have to implement a Paradigm Shift or something like
that?

You're about ten years too late to pat yourself on the back for dispensing
privileged knowledge to the masses on this one. Everyone here gets the
point about Asymmetric Warfare. We understand it, really.

We are trying to explain to you that Asymmetric Warfare is not a Magic
Word that wipes away some very hard problems in weapons technology or
military science. There are *reasons* the US/NATO do things the way
they do, and if it is't the most efficient way possible it does at
least allow the concentration of enormous resources on those Very Hard
problems with the result that the US/NATO and company have some Very
Impressive capabilities.

Invoking the Asymmetric Warfare buzzword does nothing to counter those
capabilities. It isn't clear that they even *can* be countered, save
in kind, but if it is possible it will involve a whole slew of very
hard problems in its own right, and that the amateurish solutions
posited here are not going to cut it.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

Owe Jessen writes:

Am Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:37:41 +0200, schrieb "tadaa" :

Just to give some figures: GPS will give you 5 to 30 meters accuracy
(as long as the US lets you have it). Galileo will give you about the
same accuracy. I suppose the US can jam both. I'd guess if they could
not, they would not have increased the accuracy publicly available and
would make much more of a fuss about Galileo.

I doubt that US can jam Galileo just by turning a switch as it it with GPS.
But they probably will develop some jamming feature against the Galileos
signals.

I heared that turning back on selective availability is not much of an
option anymore because the economic aplications that depend on it are
too valuable to lose and that the SA cannot be targeted in a small
enough area.


The cost of losing even a limited war, trumps pretty much every other
economic consideration. Since the subject here is how the United States
might be defeated in war, GPS cannot be the answer - either it isn't
decisive for the hypothetical adversary or it is, and if it is the
screams of all the world's commercial users won't stop the Pentagon
from pulling the plug.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *