America is highly vulnerable to a missile attack | Hacker News Reader

America is highly vulnerable to a missile attack

asiatimes.com

24 pointstomohawk52 comments

Worth pointing out the author of the piece, Stephen Bryen, is a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council (Source : https://www.usnews.com/topics/author/stephen-bryen ). This organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Foreign_Policy_Counci...) seems to have sided with some of the driving forces behind the US-led invasion/occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan. This doesn't invalidate the analysis necessarily, but it feels like this article is coming from someone in an organization that potentially falls in the particularly hawkish part of the policy spectrum.

Yep, a quick glance at his Twitter and blog make me discount pretty much anything he has to say.

This author is just trying to lobby for buying/selling weapon. I don't see why we should give this article any eyeballs. Also, the best deterrent is not a good defense system that this guy is trying to sell. It's the threat of 100 nukes erasing 50 cities of the invading country. That threat is real, and that's the US best defense at the moment.

That sort of reasoning (MAD) works great against Russia during the cold war. It is less robust once you factor in rogue and non-rational adversaries. I'm no saying you're wrong, but the risk from these actors isn't truly mitigated even by having overwhelming conventional and non-conventional weapons, second-strike capabilities (or anything really_.

> A good interim solution for the US would be to adopt Israel’s Arrow-3 for homeland security defense, buying time to develop a new and capable ballistic missile defense system.

You don't say...

I then looked up the author and learned quite a bit about his deep, controversial, hard-line connections to Israel and the promotion of its interests.

We ended the war in Afghanistan so now we need new reasons to fund the military.

>We ended the war in Afghanistan so

....we are ready for the upcoming Iran war.

Please no. This would be nothing but a miserable tragedy for all involved.

... except those on top reaping the profits. As it always been the case.

"USA, you can't have an Iran yet, you still have Syria on your plate."

Devil’s advocate for keeping the military huge for legitimate reasons:

America has been very sheltered from the realities of large scale violence. I think we assume everyone will opt for civil discourse, diplomacy, and trade to resolve disputes naturally now that the world is wealthier and allegedly more enlightened. We think that large scale violence is off the table due to greater knowledge and having more to lose.

We don’t know how important the hegemonic overwhelming military superiority of the US is a major disincentive for anything different. That disincentive diminishing could be disastrous.

It’s an old argument, but I think there’s truth to it.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be cheaper. Military seems very wasteful/not efficient.

Also doesn’t mean that hegemony doesn’t have its own dangers.

> America has been very sheltered from the realities of large scale violence.

America has not.

Since America’s wars have not been fought with broad conscription since Korea or any conscription since Vietnam, Americans who don't volunteer for military service have been sheltered from the realities of large scale violence, of which the US is, and has especially become over the time where most Americans were sheltered from this, itself one of the major inflictors of on others.

Which, I think, is an argument against the large standing all-volunteer military, not the argument for it.

To be clear I’m not necessarily in favor of a large standing military, have very mixed feelings about it. Am giving voice to the part of me that sees the legitimate reasons to want one.

Violence abroad is very different from the threat of violence at home, and my point was in regards to how destabilizing it is for a society to need to anticipate that risk in daily life. In general that risk is low in most developed countries, and I think it would be higher if there wasn’t a hegemonic superpower/that benefit is under-appreciated.

But I get your point. There is definitely a temptation to use a very big army if you have one, and that’s dangerous.

You mean to fund all the private contractors with no-bid contracts. Afghanistan cost the U.S. taxpayer $14 trillion. $7 trillion of that went to "private contractors" like Haliburton.

To me that's fairly breathtaking.

If it really is funding the military, yes. Let's do that. The military answers to the civilian authority in the White House. If we're talking Big Mil, on the other hand. No. Not a dollar more, please.

And who exactly is going to attack the US with a missile?

North Korea and Iran aren't developing ballistic missile's so they can launch an unprovoked attack against the US, they developed them so they can respond to a US invasion and keep their regimes in place. Russia's military is in shambles. The idea that China would attack their largest trading partner (who is capable of responding with at least as much force) is absurd.

Russia's military is OK.

It's not 2001.

While you don't necessarily have to buy into "they hate our freedom" level of rhetoric, it would be insane to suggest that America has no enemies that are a threat and thus is impervious to attack. What the US did to Iraq in the wake of 9/11 is shameful, but that 9/11 happened negates the idea that the US doesn't have enemies that would like to have this capability.

That's a straw man argument - no one is suggesting the US has no enemies that are a threat.

You're correct - no rational actor would attack the US. Now, if only I could trust that there would always only be rational actors I could sleep well at night.

Worrying won't stop a missile attack, might as well sleep.

China has like ... millions of prisoners, presumably being brain-washed and worse... wouldn't be hard to maybe coax them into becoming spies and immigrating here, and just causing turmoil.

Starting forest fires ... or doing some sort of home-made drone attacks against infrastructure (power grids, gas-lines, trains, etc) ... all china needs is for us to decline, not full scale war.

That's just what china might do... we've got plenty of enemies... but I still think the military is way bloated, and doesn't need half the $$ it has, because if it were guerilla tactics like this, it'd be a hard fought battle no matter how much money is thrown at it.

There's way more vulnerabilities facing us with climate change, etc than missile strikes IMHO...

First sentence captures the core issue: "Despite spending billions of dollars..."

I'd describe the issue as military capture - as opposed to state capture. Stand on the hill above the pentagon and look down upon the number of old defense brands surrounding the building, feeding off the mothership.

SpaceX has proven how ripe for disruption NASA and their old school contractors were. Our defense contractors have the same issue and no one is disrupting them. Every new capability is massively overpriced, under-delivered, and behind the innovation curve.

It never used to be this way. Kelly Johnson delivered the U2 and SR71 on schedule and under budget. It is very hard to imagine that happening today. The US government is getting absolutely screwed by their contractors, and it is perpetuated by the continuous public to private migration of military personnel, all cashing in on their career in government.

There are like 3 companies left in the entire country that can build fighter aircraft and bombers, after the mergers of the 1990s and 2000s. If you want to found a bomber startup, you must consider the fact that you will have only one customer: the United States government. And that you have to invest massive amounts of upfront capital to start rolling aircraft off an assembly line.

I don't know what the solution is. At this point, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman are quasi government owned entities, officially operating as private sector corporations. The government would never let them fail. The potential loss of technology and institutional knowledge from any one of these companies going bankrupt would be a legitimate threat to US national security.

> SpaceX has proven how ripe for disruption NASA

The story there might be murky, too. NASA bankrolls a lot of SpaceX R&D. US military then approaches SpaceX for extremely generous launch contracts, despite the fact NASA already paid for the R&D. There are some allegations that this double-dipping is used by SpaceX to commit price dumping on commercial launches

And who paid for those two?

[ø] https://www.americaspace.com/2012/06/06/top-secret-kh-11-spy...

Peanuts!

Makes one wonder what are they 'flying' now, how many of them to spare, doesn't it?

The People's Republic of China is highly vulnerable to a missile attack.

The Russian Federation is highly vulnerable to a missile attack.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is highly vulnerable to a missile attack.

For all the lack of coverage and cost of the American missile shield, these countries have no defense system against ballistic or cruise missiles.

A nuclear war with Russia or China would probably spell the end of both sides and set back mankind technologically and economically, possibly irreparably.

The only national leader who would seriously contemplate a missile attack against the United States, even a conventional one, is one who doesn't care about his own life.

Facts aside, this "article" reads so much as a planted piece to influence Americans to pressure who is holding the wallet to spend it on new cool gear.

Given the US track record and behavior since forever and specially in the last 2 decades, of course these countries are developing ways to at least make it impossible for those in charge in the US to bomb countries like they are ordering takeout food and their population just go about their business like nothing happens.

Fair is not a word I would use in realpolitik, but it's understandable.

Isn't everyone? Why haven't we abolished nuclear weapons like we have with Biological and Chemical? We were teetering right on the edge for years in the middle 20th century, and the new China/US cold war will put us right there again.

>Why haven't we abolished nuclear weapons like we have with Biological and Chemical

If you believe that the US does not develop, test and have ready bio and chemical weapons then I got a bridge to sell you.

there is a political theory called Mutually Assured Destruction that has been the bread and butter of nuclear arms diplomacy since the 50s.

We abolished biological and chemical weapons because they are considered obsolete tools of war after nuclear was invented. Who enforces the abolishment of bio/chem? States with nuclear arsenals. There’s little appetite in nuclear powered nations for nuclear disarmament. There is appetite for nuclear nonproliferation among nuclear powers, in large part because it maintains the power imbalance.

If you want to push for nuclear disarmament you’ll have to find a different model than bio/chem disarmament.

It's worth noting that the USSR actually kept a lot of anthrax warheads on ICBMs in a counter-value (i.e. against cities) role. But yeah, they're basically only useful for threatening revenge and aren't for actually fighting for the same reason that chemical weapons aren't.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

Because it's unenforceable, and nuclear weapons are the only deterrent against foreign invasion, which is a why many nations have desired to acquire them.

In the late 90s the US shifted its missile defense strategy to stopping small numbers of missiles, either fired from rogue nations like North Korea or accidental launches from more established powers like Russia. Defense against all out ICMB strikes from Russia or China was explicitly stated to not be a goal, as it could potentially jeopardize the status quo of mutually assured destruction and lead to increased resistance in nuclear disarmament talks.

For the mission for which GBI was designed to do, it performs adequately. While critics often cite an average lifetime success rate of about 50%, they fail to mention that there were lots of failures early on in the project and that over time the success rate has steadily improved. Further, for the intended mission, launching multiple interceptors at a single target to ensure a kill is perfectly reasonable. Preventing our destruction by large numbers of missiles is the job of our massive nuclear deterrent.

The Arrow 3 system was made in partnership with the very same people who made the GBI. While their specifications are slightly different as they are expected to deal with different threat vectors, they're using the same technology. The Arrow 3 isn't going to perform any better than the GBI will. Further, the Arrow 3 couldn't work as a drop in replacement - it would need new launch facilities built in new locations, new radar systems and control infrastructure, and of course a whole separate supply of spare parts and maintenance equipment. If we want the GMD program to defend against larger numbers of missiles, it makes far more sense to just build more GBI missiles, but again, there is no compelling reason to believe that we should want GMD to defend against more missiles than it currently does.

The only legitimate concern is that GBI was not designed to deal with hypersonic missiles. Arrow 3 is also not capable of this. For the moment, only Russia and China might reasonably be expected to have such capabilities, and they are deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation. The MDA is already working on anti-hypersonics, but the threats we face now and in the near future do not require it, and there is no pressing urgency to shift more resources to its development than are already allocated.

Hasn't this been known to be true for 50+ years now (MAD)? Why is this news?

Anything that pushes emotional buttons and gets clicks is "news".

Welcome to the modern internet, BTW. /s

Yes, for sure. Reminds me of the discussions during my childhood growing up in divided Germany.

How about nobody bombing noone? I am sick of all the wars. If we would all get our $hit together and pull on the same strings we humanity could stand a chance in surviving itself. Otherwise I am highly pessimistic.

I don't think it's possible for a country of the size of the US to have decent missile defense.

Israel has it for certain areas of high population density, not for the whole country. But that is also against relatively low-range missiles, not ICMBs, I believe.

Yea it is unlikely Iron Dome would prevent a ICMB. It could get luckily but it designed for less advanced rockets..

Though I think the tech is promising and could be used for US if international treaties did not prevent us from that.

Republicans are currently pushing for restoration of funds to purchase of Iron Dome for missile defense in the US. Evidently the Democrats who drew up part of the budget requests left that out. My representative sent a note to all on their list about what a bad idea it was to defund purchase of Iron Dome for the US. I realize we helped them develop parts of the system. I also understand that it may not be ideal for the types of risks we would face from missiles. Anyway. This article looks like partisan fluff pushing for more defense spending. I totally believe we need to modernize and upgrade things regularly so that we are prepared for future threats but, like others have pointed out, the idea that one of those nations will launch a few ICBMs at the US seems farfetched. Maybe in 10 years when their capabilities clearly surpass our own and our defenses are down because all the youngsters decided to smoke legal dope instead of serving their country building cool stuff.

The problem with this idea is that launching of ICBM's is not a rational move. People are attempting to use logic to make the claim that it would be illogical for any of these nations to launch them. This is true but I counter that Humans are not always logical and are more often than not use emotion over logic.

While I think the current risk is low, even looking at it from an emotional stance, I do not think it is as "far fetched" as many believe it to be

I agree that we are not always rational and that emotions do sometimes over-rule rationality. Maybe more often than anyone would admit.

That's why we have to be prepared. One day the US or one of our potential adversaries will be led by someone whose responses are driven by emotion or ego. As a result, their responses are more likely to be escalations of situations that could've been better handled with a simple, rational, proportional response. Maybe we already had that day.

"A good interim solution for the US would be to adopt Israel’s Arrow-3 for homeland security defense"

Which should be provided for free, given the billions in US military aid Israel has received.

When does it end?

seems like the alien hoax didn't work to get more funding.

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