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| Science & Technology |
| Katyusha World: surviving in the age of very short-range missiles. |
| 2006-07-28 |
| by Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal Melodramatic images of war are now televised all day long. The images out of Israel this week have produced something new for war-soaked living-room audiences. One might call it Katyusha World. The all-too-visible reality for the inhabitants of Katyusha World is that there is no defense against incoming rocket barrages other than hiding and hoping. The Hezbollah militia has decided to use unguided artillery Katyusha rockets like bullets. They fired more than 1,500 of them this week at Israeli population centers. Hezbollah is believed to possess longer-range missiles made in Syria and Iran for which Israel also has no defense. They would simply land and explode. It was only a few weeks ago that all of us were learning how to pronounce "Taepodong," a long-range ballistic missile that North Korea periodically lobs as a "test" in the direction of the unprotected population of Japan. After this week it is getting hard to pretend that the threat of missiles is something we don't have to think about. Up to now Israel has regarded Iran's long-range guided missiles as the primary threat of this sort, and in the 1990s developed the Arrow ballistic missile-defense system. Uri Rubin, former head of the Arrow project, told me in an interview from Israel this week that the relatively poor accuracy of the cheap Katyushas has been an argument against investing in an expensive anti-Katyusha defense system. This cost-comparison calculus was one reason Israel shelved plans to deploy Northrop Grumman's THEL system, whose lasers routinely have shot down Katyushas at the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Speaking this week about the earlier decision, Mr. Rubin said, "You also have to compare the cost of no defense"--for lives or infrastructure. Mr. Rubin shared with me an unpublished paper he wrote with Dan Hazanovsky on "The Emerging Threat of Very Short-Range Ballistic Missiles," or VSBMs. In times past, the world worried about huge, Soviet-style missiles. Mr. Rubin says smaller, free-flying rockets are now evolving into relatively sophisticated and accurate ballistic missiles, "thanks to the steep decline in the cost of accuracy--the falling prices of onboard inertial and satellite navigation systems, the availability of cheap, commercial grade, high-speed computing power and low-cost control systems." That is, the same dynamic that makes cheap, fast electronic products available to consumers will do the same to electronic missile weaponry. . . . Historically the Democratic Party has committed itself to suppressing the development of anti-missile technologies. This opposition dates to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. During the Cold War, when the enemy was the Soviet Union, opponents of missile defense opted for the policy known as mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Sens. Biden, Levin, Kerry and Kennedy all in recent times have spoken out against missile defense. The party's platform in 2000 opposed "an ill-conceived missile defense system that would plunge us into a new arms race." But closing off missile-defense technologies today means we default again to MAD, or a kind of MAD Jr. This was made explicit last Jan. 19 when French President Jacques Chirac threatened a nuclear strike to deter terrorist attacks on France. "Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction and destruction," he said. "All of our nuclear forces have been configured in this spirit." In a similar vein, it is generally believed that Japan could--and probably would if necessary--assemble several nuclear devices within 30 days. Whatever the argument in the Cold War years for protecting populations with a strategy of mutual assured destruction, it makes no sense now when negotiating partners such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il represent the antithesis of any known concept of good faith. Also, in the case of an enemy like Hezbollah and al-Qaida, which hides itself among civillians, the MAD "deterrent" means you threaten to destroy a whole bunch of innocent people for whom the bad guys have no concern in the first place. Is it even possible that could be moral? As Robert Kaplan pointed out in the Journal last week in his review of "Terrorists, Insurgents and Militias," the biggest strategic problem today isn't past notions of big-power miscalculation but new rogue regimes whose ideology means they "cannot be gratified through negotiations." Absent any in-place protection against the missiles described here, "defense" means either an Israel-type counteroffensive, nuclear retaliation or--the Democratic preference--open-ended diplomacy, cease-fires and negotiation. None of these suffice. Widely available tables showing the proliferation of missiles listed by nation boggle the mind. Put simply, in terms of post-launch, we are behind the curve. We are heading toward two election cycles amid a world unsettled by missile threats--in the air or on the brink. To the specter of North Korea and Iran delivering WMD by long-range missiles, now add Katyusha-like strikes from very small rockets and missiles. Come 2008, we may see a Republican candidate who understands these issues running against a militarily ambivalent Democrat who has to learn them, like an unguided rocket, on the fly. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #8 I dunno. Tolerances are lower for rockets and they don't weigh as much. I always thought that the reason the Soviets adopted the katyusha is that if you just want to take out a grid square, it's cheaper than arty. And in a world of precision engagements, a GPS guided rocket will always be cheaper than a GPS guided shell and the cost curve should be steeper as well for the rockets. Bulk seems to be the biggest problem to me since the rocket propellant will take up more space than a propellant charge bag(s). Anyway, those are the tradeoffs I see. Overall I think that the dynamics are very simillar to going to CAT3 and CAT5 cabling for 10baseT and 100 TX ethernet. With 10base2 and 10base5 we used a real quiet, predictable medium (coaxial cable) to move bits. From 10baseT and on, we used a really cheap crappy medium (phone wire) and then used the power of the silicon to make up for the inherent crappiness since silicon was cheaper than coax. My guess is that we will find it cheaper to put sophisticated electronics and solid state IMUs on crappy rockets than try to put them on shells turned on a lathe. The accuracy is the same. The cost and overhead is lower for the rockets. I'm guessing that within five years there will be a cheap RPG seeker out there that can hit the thinly armored engine deck of a tank 80-90% of the time. Abdul points, pulls the trigger, runs like hell and -- boom -- mobility kill. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2006-07-28 15:22 |
| #7 Course your reloads are kinda pricey, slow and trickier to move. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-07-28 14:42 |
| #6 Excalibur costs $50K (per strategy page) a pop plus you still have the overhead of the gun crews. I can't find a number for a GPS guided katyusha, but a JDAM kit costs $18K. The difference in cost is mostly due to acceleration. An artillery shell experiences 12K G's going through the tube. A rocket, only 10-20. You don't need special components for those kinds of accelerations. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2006-07-28 13:12 |
| #5 Won't the Excalibre shell do most of that at a lower cost per shot? Also isn't there some multi/programmable fuse system that will reduce the number of shells the artillery carries? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-07-28 12:47 |
| #4 I don't mean to hurt the feelings of any red legs, but the days of tube artillery are numbered. A sergeant and a PFC in five-ton truck can do the job of an artillery battery now. Cheap guidance, fire direction computers, and GPS means you get better accuracy than guns and eliminate the FDC, survey section, met section, etc. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2006-07-28 12:40 |
| #3 There is a peculiar philosophy of the give-and-take of short range rockets and artillery. Optimally, someday, there will be a small laser that can pop them mid-flight at little cost. But in the final analysis, this only treats the symptom, not the disease. Granted, for a military unit engaged in combat operations against a terrorist enemy that keeps throwing such things, the laser is a fine idea. This is because the military unit is otherwise engaged in hunting down and eliminating the terrorists. But a civilian population should not have to live under a protective umbrella, without seeking to end the cause of their complaint. This is because no defense is perfect. Sooner or later a lucky shot, or some fix, will let those rockets or mortars get through. For this reason, there is not just justification, but a compelling reason to go after those individuals who launch or fire such weaponry. Until they are eliminated, the disease will remain. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-07-28 11:15 |
| #2 It's not necessarily killing that does it. Sherman accomplished the same result as WWII without, relatively, a lot of killing. But the enemy must believe they've been utterly defeated and scream to surrender. We have not so utterly defeated an enemy, with the possible exception of Grenada, since WWII. Israel has not so defeated an enemy since 1973. Israel's problem here is that it has defined the enemy incorrectly. It's enemy is not so much Hezb'Allah as the Lebanese who choose to support them. Not so much Syria as Iran who is paying the bills and calling the shots. Until Israel finds a way to utterly defeat its real enemies, it will continue to be dejavu all over again. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2006-07-28 09:28 |
| #1 Also, in the case of an enemy like Hezbollah and al-Qaida, which hides itself among civillians, the MAD "deterrent" means you threaten to destroy a whole bunch of innocent people for whom the bad guys have no concern in the first place. Is it even possible that could be moral? Exactly the process the Allies used in bombing the Axis in WWII. Was it moral? The enemy at Shanghai, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and elsewhere demonstrated it didn't give a fig about civilians anymore than the terrorists. It got back in compound interests what it played out. Notice how the older generation of Germans and Japanese never had stomach for further military adventures. Three generations later, they still make only tentative steps in deploying their security forces beyond their borders. Cause -> Effect. Part of the problem is that all human beings do not think the same. The vast efforts in the West to minimize collateral damage and raise the value of human shields, to include those who contribute to the ability of the terrorist to operate among them, has only created the 'moral' issue. If the technology was still at the WWII 'dumb' bomb level, would we even be concerned? Not as we are today. In effect, we have created the problem by being too concerned about civilian casualties which have been part of the very definition of war to begin with, by developing these capabilities. The overblown emotions of the MSM, which ignores the absolute low numbers of American casualties in the Iraq operation when compared to any other major historical conflict, also demonstrates its ignorance in the number of Frenchmen and Italians [after they switched sides] who died in Allied bombing and ground campaign in WWII. In order to accomplish the goal of ending the original Axis of Evil, you had to fight your way through the geography and population. That's life and death. Hasn't changed much since the Eygptians and Hittites faced off over 4,000 year ago. |
| Posted by: Hupaigum Pholuse1530 2006-07-28 09:01 |