[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Skybird

The American ABM capacity is anything but "reliable" so far. Successes are poutnumbered by failures, and the successes scored so far were acchieved under cleaned and ideal circumstances. I would recommend not to read too much into it.

The SM-3 has a success rate of over 80%. The DoD is now planning on making land based SM-3 batteries.

I lost the list of PAC-3 engagements I had in OIF but it's record was really good.

And as I said: every area defence against incoming missiles can be saturated beyond breaking point.

Simple budgeting. A ballistic missile costs far more that a cruise missile. For example a Trident missile costs $29 million while a Harpoon missile costs $1.2 million. (That is 24 Harpoons for the price of one Trident). The different branches of the PLA are all fighting for the piece of the same pie so someone has to build fewer of something. If they build large numbers of DF-21Ds we deploy larger numbers of SM-3s to counter them, since they then can deploy fewer numbers of say C-803s it evens out.

I agree on the militarization of space, I would also mention cyberwar, and the neutralising of enemy C3I capacities. Imagine the US military suddenly being cut off from its global sensor network, or GPS and communication satellites disconnected. That would dramatically neutralise many of the advanatges of American combat forces. Their efficiency would go down, and their losses would go up. See this in the light of limited availability of platforms and soldiers, and limited tolerance of the American public for high own losses.

I sort of agree on the cyberwar thing, but I see it as more of a Strategic Weapon to damage a countries economy and infrastructure than something to disrupt the military. Optimally military computer systems should be isolated from general access to the world at large.

I do think that the current generation of military satellites are very vulnerable, they have do not defensive systems, it wasn't until the 1980s they started encrypting access to them! For recon sats shooting them down is fairly easy but hacking them would be difficult in wartime I think since there are such simple countermeasures; have them only accept new tasking while they pass over CONUS, and orders are transmitted at a random shifting frequency. Anyone tries transmitting new tasking from the CONUS they get paid a visit by the FBI, anyone outside of CONUS tries transmitting new tasking maybe they get visited by a Tomahawk.

GPS is somewhat harder to mess with since its a transmitting system. Simple to stop hacking, patch the birds OS to not accept new commands for a set period of time. Shooting down GPS birds is somewhat harder since they are in a higher orbit.

Our Recon Birds would probably be shot down quite quickly and have to be replaced by UAVs. GPS would generally be OK. Of course we can shoot down China's recon birds as well rendering their DF-21s useless as anti-ship weapons assuming we can splash their maritime patrol planes as well and destroy their fixed OTH radar sites.