Tag Archives: defense policy

Not Just for Northern Korea

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Arthur Herman, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute wrote of an interesting idea over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal.  The title of his article explains the idea: There’s a Way to Stop a North Korean Missile Attack.

He wrote about a means of implementing a boost-phase missile defense system.  The advantages of intercepting a ballistic missile during its boost phase—the phase immediately after missile launch—are several

  • the missile’s first stage, its booster, is the hottest of them all, and so the easiest to detect
  • the missile is moving at its slowest speed, especially compared to the missile warhead’s reentry speed, which is enormous
  • the booster is very large, especially compared to the warheads and decoys that are the missile’s payload, and so again very easy to detect
  • the boost phase is the least cluttered detection environment—those warheads and decoys, and any associated electronic countermeasures, have not yet been deployed, so there’s less need to sort the defense system’s target out of the clutter
  • the boost phase occurs at the earliest stage of the missile’s flight (of course), and so there’s both far more reaction time and increased opportunity to reservice the missile or to go after deployed warheads in the event of a boost phase miss.
  • debris from a successful intercept would fall closer to the launch facility as opposed to a terminal phase intercept, which debris would fall closer to the missile’s intended target, and with potentially catastrophic result if the terminal intercept occurs late (and at commensurately lower altitude) in the phase

Herman then pointed out that we have the technology.

A BPI [boost phase intercept] would be launched not from a ground- or sea-based system like THAAD or Aegis, but from an unmanned aerial vehicle waiting at 55,000 feet and equipped with infrared sensors that will detect missile launches from 350 miles outside North Korean airspace. Even a submarine-based missile could be detected minutes after launch, something neither THAAD nor Aegis can do currently.

The aerial vehicle would be equipped with a conventional antimissile missile of 225 kilograms, more than enough firepower to bring down even a large intercontinental ballistic missile.

And

There are already American-built unmanned aerial vehicles capable of carrying up to four interceptor missiles of this size, while conventional aircraft have successfully done BPI tests using missiles of this type. Putting those vehicles on a rotating patrol off the North Korean coastline would mean continuous surveillance and detection.

As implied above, Herman suggested deploying such a system to defend against a nuclear attack by northern Korea.  It occurs to me, though, that we should expand the deployment.  We should operate such a BPI system out of Alaska, Greenland, and eastern Europe, to defend against a Russian attack.  We should operate such a system out of Vietnam (a potential ally, and useful at least until we can recover the Philippines as a reliable ally) and enough additional locations in Japan to handle the People’s Republic of China, as well.  We should operate such a system out of southern Europe and Israel for the benefit of Iran.  And we should operate such a system along each of our coasts to handle someone’s submarine launches.

Of What are they Afraid?

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The People’s Republic of China has been vociferously objecting to the US deploying a missile defense system—THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense)—in the Republic of Korea, with the RoK’s blessing and at their behest.  The PRC has begun taking economic retaliatory actions against the RoK and threatening the Koreans and us with further, more serious action if we don’t desist.

So my question.

Ankit Panda, writing for The Diplomat, offered some thoughts last week, one of which centers on the PRC’s concern that the THAAD deployment, relying as it does on a particular radar system—two of which already are deployed in Japan—would let the US degrade a PRC second nuclear strike against the US.  To be clear: a second strike is an ability of one nation to respond to another nation’s (first) nuclear strike with a nuclear strike of its own, the second strike of an exchange.

Since it doesn’t matter that THAAD is incapable of intercepting the PRC’s ICBMs en route to the US, and the US has no offensive interest in the PRC (and not to put too fine a point on it, neither do the RoK or Japan, and neither of them have a nuclear capability even were they offensive minded), I have to wonder why the PRC objects so harshly to a nation having the capability to defend itself against a rogue nation, gang-run, that’s bent on developing nuclear missiles of intermediate and intercontinental range.  Especially when that same rogue nation constantly threatens Armageddon against the RoK.

Especially when that rogue nation is a client of the PRC.

As Panda put it,

To avoid the need for a massive nuclear build-up and to feel comfortable with its several hundred or so nuclear warheads for targeting, China needs to feel comfortable enough its intercontinental ballistic missiles can reliably penetrate US antiballistic missile countermeasures.

Just what are the Warring State PRC’s plans vis-à-vis the US?

What are the Warring State’s plans, via its madchild-run client, vis-à-vis the RoK?

Europe Going Nuclear?

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That’s what The New York Times says the European Union is talking about.

…a European Union nuclear weapons program.

Under such a plan, France’s arsenal would be repurposed to protect the rest of Europe and would be put under a common European command, funding plan, defense doctrine, or some combination of the three. It would be enacted only if the Continent could no longer count on American protection.

Leaving aside the cynically manufactured hysteria underlying this idea, there are a couple of flaws in it.  One is that it assumes that France remains a part of the EU.  A Marine Le Pen victory in this spring’s French presidential election cycle would toss the whole idea into the circular file.  Another is that the French, extremely individualistic when it comes to military action and their military, would agree to such a thing.  Another is that bit about American protection.  The idea that we’d withdraw it is someone’s straw man; we’ve only argued that it’s time for our treaty partners to pay the shares they committed to paying when they signed up to NATO.

And: would Germany trust France—could Germany trust France—to risk French existence defending an attacked Germany, or would Germany begin to acquire its own nuclear arsenal?  After all, this scheme depends on German financing for the French—to show solidarity, of course—and the money might be thought better spent on acquiring a German nuclear arsenal they could more directly and completely control.  On the other hand, could the Germans, with their guilt complex, trust themselves with nuclear weapons?

Of course, there’s an upside, too.  The notoriously unreliable French military participation in NATO would be ameliorated by getting those nuclear weapons more reliably included in the NATO (not EU) arsenal, fulfilling some of the requirement that NATO signatories actually live up to the they obligations incurred with their signatures.

Defense

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The People’s Republic of China objects to the US’ planned deployment of a missile defense system in the Republic of Korea to defend the RoK and Japan against northern Korean attack.  The PRC has already engaged in low-grade economic warfare, barring certain trade arrangements from going forward.  Now, however, the PRC is making threats against us and the RoK if we go through with the deployment.  Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang:

China firmly opposes the deployment of THAAD.  We will definitely be taking necessary measures to safeguard our own security interest.  All consequences entailed from that will be borne by the US and (South Korea).

Lou Yuan, a retired PLA general, was more explicit.  The PLA, he said,

could conduct a surgical hard-kill operation that would destroy the target, paralyzing it, and making it unable to hit back[.]

When one nation objects to another nation having an ability to defend itself, it’s necessary to ask after the motivations of the one—what does that nation have planned for the to-be-defenseless one, either directly or through a client?

Don’t Offend Russia?

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Heaven forfend.  Or at least that was Michael O’Hanlon’s (Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution) concern when he proposed An Alternative to NATO Expansion That Won’t Antagonize Russia.  Never mind that what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.

[T]hese two countries [Ukraine and NATO], as well as other Eastern European neutral states, get no protection from NATO.

I’ll leave aside the value of NATO protection as that organization is currently constituted, funded, and armed; that’s a separate discussion.  No, the nub of O’Hanlon’s misunderstanding is this:

They are also too close to Russia for NATO to protect them, absent the deployment of a large and permanent forward defense.

He wrote that as though he thought forward deployment would be a bad thing.  In some respects it would be, but not for the reason he thinks.  Forward deployment of lots of heavy units would be foolish; such units would simply be targets in the event of a Russian decision to invade (aside from the fact that, with modern weapons and Russia’s forward deployment of nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad and its deployment of nuclear cruise missiles in western Russia, such units would be targets anywhere they’re stationed).  On the other hand, forward deployment of smaller, but still combat capable, units would send a very clear message that any Russian invasion would be an invasion of much more than just the nominally target nation.

On top of that, they most assuredly are not “too close to Russia.”  They merely abut Russia.  Russia is too close to eastern European nations by O’Hanlon’s logic.  Then he suggested this in all seriousness:

It is time that Western nations seek to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in Eastern Europe today. The core concept would be permanent neutrality, at least in terms of formal membership in treaty-based mutual-defense organizations. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc from Europe’s far north to its south—Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; Cyprus plus Serbia, and possibly other Balkan states. …

The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner

It is, indeed, time for a new security architecture, but O’Hanlon’s idea is little different from unspoken surrender born of false premises.  Permanent neutrality?  Russia won’t allow it; it never has.  Russia commit to uphold another nation’s security?  It’s already partitioned Georgia and occupied parts of it, and it’s dividing up Moldava, working as it is to carve off Transnistria.  It’s partitioned and occupied parts of Ukraine, explicitly crapping on the Budapest Memorandum in the process.

O’Hanlon can’t be that ignorant.

This isn’t naïveté.  This is idiocy.  I repeat: what’s in American national interest is what matters, not that subset of it that won’t upset an enemy of ours.  The same holds for Europe, as well, most especially those nations of eastern Europe, under the Russian gun as they so plainly are.