The battle for missile defence: the Americans started and lost

The concept of global missile defence appeared in the United States as a development of the so-called "silver bullet strategy”, within the framework of which it was considered possible to obtain an overwhelming superiority over the enemy by constantly maintaining a technological advantage over them. The enemy has bows, but you already have Gatling buckshot, the enemy builds the first trireme, while you’re finishing the star cruiser. And so on.

With the help of a radical increase in missile defence capabilities, Washington intended to significantly shift even the strategic nuclear balance. If the damage from a nuclear strike, with the help of anti-missiles, can be reduced to a relatively acceptable level, then this opens up the prospect of winning such a war.

It is from here that all efforts to promote the “Aegis” system, the formation of missile defence positional areas in Europe and efforts to improve the SM-2 missile take their basis.

In addition, the United States saw this as an opportunity to try to impose another expensive high-tech arms race on Russia, by analogy with "Star Wars", through which the USSR "broke".

All the more stunning was the result of the analysis conducted by the Hudson Institute on the current state of the US missile defence. In short, their summary boils down to a simple statement: why does America spend so much money on missile defence, if the effectiveness of the system has not been tested in any way, and tests of its individual key elements generally show a directly unsatisfactory result?

The conclusions of experts from one of the leading US analytical centres are confirmed by the response of the head of the Strategic Command of the US Armed Forces, Admiral Charles Richard, to the question about the ability of the national missile defence system "to repel an attack using intercontinental ballistic missiles from the Russian Federation”.

The admiral replied honestly and with military directness: "Our current missile defence systems are designed to protect us from rogue countries, and are deliberately made so as not to overlap with the strategic means of deterrence of the Russian Federation and China."

However, this was a discovery only for the American audience. Soviet experts came to this conclusion at the turn of the 60-70s It is theoretically possible, albeit with reservations, to cover any one isolated area of a relatively small space from a missile strike, even if it is extremely expensive. But the creation of an effective missile defence against a massive attack on the entire territory of the country is unrealistic purely physically.

The combat units of modern ICBMs are a so-called complex ballistic target. The composition of the means of overcoming the missile defence of a heavy ICBM for one real warhead includes at least 10 heavy false targets, about a hundred inflatable mylar balls covered with aluminium powder, a large number of dipole reflectors (metal rods, aluminium foil, fibreglass), active interference generators, and so on.

Thus, solving the problem of interception, a multi-channel missile defence radar theoretically should: detect all targets, make up their radar (and now also thermal) portraits, compare the result with the profiles available in the databases, as a result, select the most likely combat units from the total mass of markers, and issue target designation on them. Moreover, all of this needs to be completed in time at ranges that allow one to have time to effectively use the anti-missiles themselves.

In the conditions of a massive nuclear missile strike, this task becomes almost impossible. And if the combat units still begin to actively manoeuvre, as, for example, the Russian “Avangard” system, then their interception becomes an unsolvable task even theoretically. By the way, RUSSTRAT experts already wrote about this in February of this year.

In short, the head of the Strategic Command of the US Armed Forces admitted that America started the "new star wars" itself and lost. Money and time were wasted. All existing, and even promising, projects and systems that are being developed are not able to provide at least some effective defence for the United States against a Russian, and now even a Chinese massive missile strike. And the first one will be a blow, or a counter-strike, and will not have any significant role.