Military Robot: Talon and Sword

Pentagon Sees Iranian ‘Ashura’ Missile As Worrying Development

PARIS - Iran’s announcement that it has developed the 1,200-mile range Ashura ballistic missile is being viewed with some concern by the Pentagon.

Although the Defense Department has long been projecting Iranian ballistic missiles to achieve that range, it was expected to be through upgrades of the long-known Shahab-3. However, the Ashura is “different,” says U.S. Missile Defense Agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering. “That’s what surprised us,” he said.

Moreover, Obering notes that the Ashura’s emergence indicates how much work Iran is putting into improving its ballistic missile defense capability.

Obering was here in Paris once again trying to make the case for a European site for the ground-based midcourse defense system. He noted that the Iranian effort underscores the need to proceed.

The Pentagon also has been talking to Russia to reduce Moscow’s anxiety over the emergent missile defense shield on its doorstep and has offered both radar data sharing and other inducements.

Obering says that one proposal would have the Pentagon proceed with building the missile defense facilities - emplacing a radar in the Czech Republic and interceptors in Poland - but that the European site would not become operational until a clear threat from Iran emerged. One trigger could be flight-testing of an advanced ballistic missile, for instance. Talks with Moscow appear to involve how to verify the difference between an operational and nonoperational system - the Defense Department would prefer to have interceptors already in their silo.

Moscow so far has been cool to the plan and proposals put forward, but Obering says more talks already are scheduled. And he concedes many more visits to Europe will likely be needed before political consensus is reached.

The Pentagon would like to start construction next year of the missile defense site, and hopes Prague and Warsaw will agree by no later than early next year. If that’s the case, the plan to get the missile defense site up and running would be delayed only six months from the schedule put forward earlier this year - the schedule change reflects a congressional cut in the project’s budget.

Testing of the two-stage interceptor would begin in two-three years, with the full system to be tested end to end and ready for operations around 2013. Obering notes that the change to the interceptor is minor. The U.S.-based interceptors are three stage, so the third one would need to be removed and the adaptor for the kill vehicle modified. However, he argues it’s not a major development effort.

Source: Aviation Week.

Space war and Futurehype

by Nader Elhefnawy
The Space Review, Monday, October 22, 2007

We are all only too familiar with futurists’ endless promises about how radically different tomorrow will be, and how often they prove to be far from the truth, a subject Max Dublin took on in his book Futurehype. This reality causes some to throw up their hands and instead wallow in a sea of non-threatening incomprehension, but the simple truth is that without some model of that tomorrow in our heads, planning of any kind becomes impossible. Accordingly, the art and science of predicting the future, for all of the flaws of its practitioners, is an indispensable one, and the question is not whether to cast it aside entirely (we can not), but how we might go about it better.

This is particularly the case in space policy, with its long time horizons and reliance on unproven technologies. That there have been erroneous predictions regarding that field is widely acknowledged, as in the discussions of how the pace of space development has fallen well short of the visions of the last three decades—often chalked up to an excess of enthusiasm (contributing to an underestimation of the technical challenges, and an overestimation of the prospects for near-term profit). However, the errors have not only lain with bright, shining futures that never came about, but also dark and forbidding ones, including the speed and extent with which space would be militarized, with all its implications for threat perceptions.

One of the most notorious examples is intelligence analyst Peter N. James’s none-too-subtly titled 1974 book Soviet Conquest From Space. As William C. Burrows noted in his sweeping history of the space race, This New Ocean, the book “would not find a place among the most penetrating works about the Cold War. Yet its author played a small but real part in promoting the very conflict that worried him.”

James’s book offered a sweeping portrait of a “total” Soviet space effort centered on the construction of a space shuttle fleet (specifically a vehicle which would start flying earlier, and with a higher performance, than America’s own shuttle, hauling twenty-five to fifty tons per mission from 1976 on); not one, but a network of orbiting space stations, some capable of hosting twenty crewmembers at a time; and a second fleet of orbit-to-orbit spacecraft for servicing them, “space tugs.” This massive, robust infrastructure would enable the Soviet Union to conduct space operations “on a routine basis, just as military aircraft are currently used in surveillance, reconnaissance, tactical or strategic missions.” Accordingly, James predicted that by the early 1980s

orbital space will be saturated by practically every conceivable Soviet satellite, from passive to aggressive space systems, from maneuverable spaceships which can seek and destroy orbiting U.S. satellites, to orbital weapons systems which can destroy terrestrial targets as well.

When joined with what he believed to be a Soviet lead in laser technology on the verge of producing viable weapons (and perhaps also revolutionary new weapons concepts derived from the scientific research these facilities would allow), they would translate into the ability to neutralize much of the US’s strategic forces. Given that at the time a Soviet strategic lead was emerging on Earth, he warned darkly that

if the current trends continue, by the early 1980s, the Soviet Union will not only be the most powerful nation in the world… but they could initiate a nuclear war and win it.

Reality played out quite differently. Not only did the Soviet Union not emerge as the most powerful nation on Earth by the 1980s, but it did not survive them. Not only did the critical technologies James described not exist anywhere by the 1980s (and there is a long way between inventing a technology and effectively militarizing it), but they remain part of the “future” today, two decades later.

In retrospect this does not seem all that surprising, and even the most hawkish might today be tempted to laugh—though they would probably do so for the wrong reasons, smug contempt having replaced panic as the excess common to examinations of the Soviet Union. When James wrote his prediction, the Soviet economy had grown more rapidly than the America’s for half a century (an assessment which the evidence still seems to support), and even if it was far from certain, parity between US and Soviet GDP by 2000 did not seem outside the realm of the possible. Besides, the 1960s had seen the Soviets turn, with breathtaking speed, an extreme strategic inferiority in the nuclear arms race into parity with the US in just a few short years—and shortly after that, the beginnings of an edge. What was to stop them from doing so in space, especially given that space technology was one of the few areas where even those most dismissive of Soviet capabilities recognized the Soviets as competitive? (The Soviet economy’s weaknesses were already becoming evident, but that it would all unravel as it did, and when it did, may not have been a foregone conclusion. Indeed, it was arguably contingent on the implausibly bad decision-making of the Soviet leadership from Brezhnev’s time on.)

James’s real error was a far simpler one: not the things he missed, but the things he wrote into the scenario. He started with thinly-sketched claims about Soviet capabilities and programs for which the evidence was slim, and then extrapolated from them in a frictionless universe where unproven technologies never disappoint and bureaucratic irrationality never gets in the way.

Such an approach may be acceptable in laying out the absolute worst case, as a way of establishing the extreme end of a range of possibility being discussed. Presented as the only scenario it is massively irresponsible, and the result a gross exaggeration that played into the willingness to believe and say the worst about Soviet capabilities and plans. James alleged that in the Middle East crisis of 1973 the Soviet Union armed the Arab states with nuclear weapons (a highly arguable assessment in the midst of the war, and disproven by the time the book appeared) and organized the oil embargo against the United States (an allegation I have encountered nowhere else, but only too consistent with the belief that the Soviet Union was the puppet master behind every untoward development). Indeed, he went so far as to compare the results of the Soviet intervention in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War to a Soviet victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis. (In fact, according to Robert Dallek’s new book Nixon and Kissinger, Henry Kissinger said to Alexander Haig that Nixon “made Brezhnev a Khrushchev,” the situation appearing to be exactly the other way around to the White House at the time.) From there, of course, matters only worsened.

Nonetheless, what was true of the Soviet Union in the Cold War potentially carries over to other entities, and where space is now concerned, seems most likely to do so in China’s case. Of course, even the most alarmist assessment of China’s military space program is a far cry from what James wrote about the Soviet Union: the consensus seems to be that China cannot conquer Taiwan, let alone the West. However, there is already a susceptibility to make this kind of mistake about Chinese capabilities generally. (Consider, for instance, how predictions about how large and sophisticated China’s nuclear arsenal will be at a given date consistently overshoot the mark.) Nuclear weapons and space weapons are not to be taken lightly, but futurists would do well to remember that overestimating a peril is all too easy to do, and carries its own consequences. The dangers of overreaction may not be talked about as much as those of insufficient vigilance, but they are no less severe.

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In addition to having written extensively about space, security and international issues, Nader Elhefnawy has written on science fiction and culture for numerous publications including The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, The Humanist, and Changing The Times, and is also a reviewer with Tangent Online.

Also read “Weaponization of space: who’s to blame?”.

Pentagon wants to create space vehicle to fire missiles anywhere on Earth

“The new program, dubbed Falcon, for ‘Force Application and Launch from CONUS,’ centers on a small-launch-vehicle concept of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus reveals in today’s paper. “The agency describes Falcon as a ‘a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from [the continental United States] in less than two hours.’”

Source: Washington Post via Raw Story.

Countermeasures: space based radar systems.

Iran, US: Prospects for a ‘hot war’

In the first of a two-part series, ISN Security Watch examines the chances of military conflict between Iran and the US, which some believe could come at the start of next year. By Kamal Nazer Yasin in Tehran for ISN Security Watch (01/10/07)

Regional nuclear war could trigger mass starvation

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could cause one billion people to starve to death around the world, and hundreds of millions more to die from disease and conflicts over food.

That is the horrifying scenario being presented in London today by a US medical expert, Ira Helfand. A conference at the Royal Society of Medicine will also hear new evidence of the severe damage that such a war could inflict on the ozone layer.

“A limited nuclear war taking place far away poses a threat that should concern everyone on the planet,” Helfand told New Scientist. This was not scare mongering, he adds: “It is appropriate, given the data, to be frightened.”

Helfand is an emergency-room doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, US, and a co-founder of the US anti-nuclear group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. In his study he attempted to map out the global consequences of India and Pakistan exploding 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear warheads.

Source: New Scientist.

Bullet-proof helicopters play key U.S. border role

TUCSON, Ariz (Reuters) - Pilot Rich Rouviere gazes through night vision goggles as he speeds the Black Hawk helicopter to where a high-tech drone far above has pinpointed 11 intruders from Mexico.As he sets the aircraft down in a swirling tornado of dust and debris, two agents in military style fatigues and flak jackets jump out and swiftly round up all but two of them, illuminated by a laser from the drone. From alert to arrest, the operation has taken 17 minutes.Welcome to a little known double act between spy planes and fast, military helicopters that is blazing a trail for the future of U.S. border security in a remote desert wilderness south of Tucson, Arizona.The Predator B Unmanned Aerial System, or drone, has been at work in Arizona since 2005, scouring the borderlands for drug traffickers and illegal immigrants from Mexico using high-powered cameras tucked on to its belly.

Silent and cloaked in darkness as it wheels miles above the desert, the spotting system cues elite tactical teams in Black Hawk helicopters to race in and carry out arrests, often many miles from the nearest highway.

“The UAS says ‘hey, this is what we see, we need you to come and grab it,’” said Rouviere, who alternates between flying Black Hawks and overseeing the Predator’s flights from a military base in southern Arizona.

Source: Reuters.

Computer games (or more precisely war-sims) like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter become more realistic as high-tech weaponry turns into “common-news”.

Heat Ray Too Scary for Iraq

Many a DT reader will remember the so-called “Active Denial System” – a giant millimeter-wave electromagnetic antenna mounted on a Humvee that could be directed at large, unruly crowds to disperse them without firing a shot in anger.

The ray heats the human skin to such an uncomfortable level that he has to retreat. It is the hallmark of the Pentagon’s non-lethal weapons development plan…and the most controversial.

Source: Defensetech.

Study: US preparing ‘massive’ military attack against Iran

The United States has the capacity for and may be prepared to launch without warning a massive assault on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities, as well as government buildings and infrastructure, using long-range bombers and missiles, according to a new analysis.

Source: RAWStory.

U.S. Military in Hunt for Bio-based Jet Fuel

Carbon reduction is not the U.S. military’s real goal. Instead the defense department’s main motivation in pursuing biofuels is to reduce its dependence on foreign oil. In particular, the Pentagon wants to make it easier to supply troops in foreign battle zones and distant military outposts—right now, the military has to ship fuel to Iraq and to its bases in Hawaii. “One of the things we’re looking at is being able to make smaller scale production facilities that might be able to travel with some of the troops,” says Douglas Kirkpatrick, biofuels program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Source: IEEE Spectrum.