Since we’re mainly in a propaganda war now, reducing opportunity for attacks on bases, and the subsequent casualties that are the fodder for your typical MSM war reporting, I’d say it’s pretty important. Sure, they don’t win wars on their own, but they sure help.

The quote is “Quantity has its own quality” is attributed to Stalin when he answered questions as to whether the massive numbers of Soviet tanks being made where going to be good enough to go up against the highly – and overly – engineered German tanks.

Part of Soviet doctrine was that quantitative changes could bring qualitative improvements. Part of soviet-style marxist dialectics, and as understandable today after the ruin of the Soviets as medieval metaphysical arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

I don’t think that the Iranians would nuke Medina and Mecca: too easy for that to backfire, and they have borders. I have more horrific scenarios, and for the peace of mind of the readers here I will not go into them…

What would the Iranians do with an existent Israel and an inflamed West?

I liked how someone I don’t remember put it. That there is a “quality to quantity all on its own”.

The Russians have been operating by this principle for awhile now. They still do even. I don’t know why, but it just is.

America has always favored more individualism, and thus more personal initiative, less centralized control and micromanagement. Leading to that little joke that a Colonel in Saudi Arabia has the same authority as a Sergeant in the US military.

It is this introdcution of uncertainty that made war planning basically undoable, at least the kind of war planning that the Sovs loved to do. The US had radically different SIOPs and in many cases these were designed to be very, very flexible, with attacks under way changing to meet needs, based on better command and control assets.

Somebody said all war was based upon deception, but I think he should have added “all competently run wars”. All those spies and saboteurs working against our side in the US, was a big problem.

Personally, my theory and prediction about Iran’s nuke plans is that they are going to nuke Medina and Mecca and blame it on the US/Jews. This is based upon the sort of sectarian divide and conquer strategy seen attempted in Iraq by Shia-Iranian proxies and Al Qaeda-Sunni proxies.

Prayers for the Assassin first brought it up of course.

Getting back to the topic, there were two reasons why the Sovs were so hysterical about SDI: first, the Sovs were great lovers of something called “correlation of forces”, a kind of military calculus that formed the fundamental basis of their military sciences. It required, however, that uncertainty be something that could be quantified to a reasonable level and, above all, be accidental, not deliberate; second, they couldn’t even begin to match it and it meant that their huge, massive investment in strategic weapons – done at massive cost to their economy, in many ways crippling it – would become more or less worthless.

In regards to the first point, the core of their correlation of forces was to achieve numerical superiority, deny qualitative superiority (i.e. neutralize it, not pretend it didn’t exist) and be able to dominate any game of escalation that started up. They were basically the Sov counterpart of McNamara’s Whiz Kids, but unlike Mac’s kids, they never lost power. They could – and did – deal with uncertainty, but what really bollixes the works with their kind of calculations was the fact that something like SDI completely threw their game book up into the air and made it virtually impossible to achieve escalation dominance without actually going to war. In other words, the mere possibility of an even partially successful SDI program meant that whatever the equivalent SIOP they were using couldn’t be used, because there was no way of ensuring that, for instance, an attack on San Diego would actually succeed before they would move on to Colorado Springs (examples are random).

Let’s look at an example. In the non-SDI world, you assume, say, 3 warheads for San Diego, based on the likelihood of each warhead making it there and actually detonating at, say, 40%, which ensures the destruction of San Diego. But introduce SDI, and all of a sudden your likelihood of destroying San Diego with those three warheads drops to less than 100%, meaning that you need to either up the number of warheads to at least 5, actually 7 for the same probability, and you can’t be sure even then that whatever SDI assets defend San Diego don’t work perfectly and actually knock down 100% of any attacking missiles.

It is this introdcution of uncertainty that made war planning basically undoable, at least the kind of war planning that the Sovs loved to do. The US had radically different SIOPs and in many cases these were designed to be very, very flexible, with attacks under way changing to meet needs, based on better command and control assets.

That’s what really devestated the Sovs when it was clear that SDI was going to be funded – it made no difference whether it was achievable or not, it was the fact that the US was committing to field it by spending sums vastly in excess of what the Sovs could have spent that meant that it effectively destroyed Sov military power…by making it, according to how the Sovs actually planned to use it, marginally usable at best and a complete waste of resources at worst.

My general feeling is to at least double, maybe triple the upper rational limit I find. We tend to think using our technology in their climate, they tend to be (like any human) fairly creative. We have been caught numerous times because of that. Not that I particularly see how they could launch a dozen or so, but I sure hope planners are giving a fairly high limit to what they can take care of.

“Real damage is done with devices that are roughly the size of your refrigerator”

The problem is that we actually do have a detection system in place over much of the US, have for years. Not because of a terrorist threat, but because of the public health issues of radiation sources and catching domestic accidental leaks. With larger amounts of material it would take more shielding – I rather suspect that even going above and beyond my above “give them the benefit of doubt and then double it” that they would need well over a semi to transport anything they could actually get to detonate. And that would get caught.

“not to mention that as the size gets smaller, the technology needed goes up – exponentially even.”

You will note I said the same thing

“A dirty bomb is most likely, BUT for the amount of hysteria generated, the damage is not worth it. Especially if USA decides No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy is the policy de jour.”

This assumes that they actually have some place to bomb and the people actually care about their lives – if Al-qaida were to currently do this what else do we do? Plus this doesn’t take much to kill a few hundred thousand in some place like New York and is a small enough amount of material that it would be near impossible to detect. Heck, just dispersing a few pounds of alpha or beta emitting dust would be enough – while no short term deaths and the area is pretty easy to clean, imagine the panic if these things were regularly giving people a lung full of Strontium 90 and 100% case of terminal cancer in 10-15 years.

*shrug* I personally think something like that is going to have to happen to get the US fully behind the “offense” idea until we win. As such I think it *will* happen – we can not win until it does and until we win they will not give up. We like to navel gaze or think that moving the doomsday clock hands forward a minute will really show them (amusingly enough they were in the news a few months back blaming Bush for increasing the likely hood the terrorist would launch on us – so they moved the hands forward – same old same old).

http://russianforces.org/sprn/

This statement in the article cited by Neo is not correct. Russian anti-missle system which I described above is operational since 1990 and is much more advanced and capable than Arrow.

Ah—I was not trying to disparage you. Honest.

I was trying to make the point that, even granted that the original SDI was impractical, the present situation is much in its favor. Hence the calculation that even with an 80% success rate, a firing of three or four relatively inexpensive missiles, would almost ensure (>99% success for such a salvo) that incoming missiles would be defeated. If that seems like short odds, fire another one.

Further, I seriously doubt that any turd world country would be able to conduct a salvo of more than two or three. Soviets had that problem on their hands. Answer was a solid fuel rocket: technology far beyond ragheads (Note: I worked on the original Polaris solid fuel rocket when fresh out of college[I’m a chemist, ahem])…took the Ivans how long to develop one of their own? Long time…and still is somewhat problematical.

I do agree that the “suitcase nuke” is more likely…Only remember, it’s not really a suitcase size. Real damage is done with devices that are roughly the size of your refrigerator…not to mention that as the size gets smaller, the technology needed goes up – exponentially even.

A dirty bomb is most likely, BUT for the amount of hysteria generated, the damage is not worth it. Especially if USA decides No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy is the policy de jour.

In summary: in real life against a real threat, anti-missiles are a good sound bet. For the other threats, “A good defense is a good offense”…wink, wink, nod, nod. Go after the bastards in their own holes.