[Salon] Fwd: Evidence of 33 Years of Missile Defense Failures and Their Implications for the Future - Guest Post by Ted Postol

Attachments6:43 PM (1 hour ago) to salon Dear Colleagues: Attached is a video file I put together showing two nearly identical failed attempts to intercept ballistic missiles that occurred 33 years apart. The first of the two engagements occurred on December 20, 2024 in Tel Aviv. The second engagement occurred 33 years earlier in Riyadh in January 1991. I am indebted to Wesley Toland, a graduate student in International Relations and Security Studies in the Master of Public Policy Program at Portland State University for calling the video of the December 20 failed engagement to my attention. The video of the 1991 engagement comes from the video files my colleague George Lewis and I compiled during our study that showed the Patriot missile was a complete failure during the Gulf War of 1991, which the US government had misrepresented to the public as having a nearly 100% intercept rate. For those of you who might be interested, I am including as an attachment with the video, an article that George and I wrote that describes many of the details of the Patriot missile’s failures in the Gulf War of 1991. Although the attached video of the engagements shown in 2024 and 1991 differ in minor details, they both basically show interceptors failing to come close enough to the incoming missile-target to detonate at the appropriate time. In both cases, the interceptors detonate behind the incoming missile-target. What is actually happening in both cases, is that the interceptors were not close enough to the target-missile for their fuses to detect the presence of the missile-target. As a result, the warheads in the missiles did not detonate on a signal from the interceptor's on-board fuse. When the interceptor passes the target-missile without detecting it, the ground-radar, which is monitoring the entire engagement, issues a command to destroy the interceptor so that the interceptor will not fall to the ground as a single large unit. This results in the interceptor detonations occurring behind the incoming missile-target. The fact that both the engagements shown on the videos from 2024 and 1991 exhibit exactly the same kind of system failures indicates that the interceptor guidance systems were sufficiently poor that they were not able to guide interceptors close enough to target-missiles for a chance at an intercept. This indicates that the missile-defense technology improvements in the guidance and control deployed in 2024 has not improved sufficiently relative to the defense guidance and control that was available in 1991. The implications of this observation are significant. · First, this indicates that the fundamental limitations in the precision-tracking ground radars and on-board interceptor sensors have not significantly advanced to make it possible for interceptors to reliably intercept fast-moving low radar cross-section ballistic missiles of ranges from 600 to 1000 or more km range. · Second, it almost certainly indicates that additional vast amounts of funding for air-defenses for use against such long-range ballistic targets is very unlikely to result in higher intercept rates. · Third, it does NOT indicate that air-defenses cannot be useful against aircraft, cruise missiles, and certain boost glide missiles like the ATACMs, which slow down substantially as they glide towards the end of their trajectory towards a target. In contrast to the situation against ballistic missile-targets, there is no doubt that modern air-defenses are extremely capable against aircraft. As such, they may have a potential role to play in modern warfare. However, the cost of missile defenses is enormous and there are valid questions about whether or not these systems will be viable without important upgrades in the future. I emphasize that their potential role is still ambiguous because the introduction of drones that carry warheads that are sufficiently damaging to destroy air-defense systems raises questions about the utility of air-defenses in any extended war. What we have seen in Ukraine is the use of drones to force air-defenses to defend themselves by expending interceptors against relatively innocuous targets, thereby depleting their interceptor loads that could otherwise be used against aircraft or threatening cruise or gliding ATACMs missiles. One way this problem might eventually be addressed is if air-defenses are redesigned to have a large number of relatively inexpensive short-range interceptors and antiaircraft guns to deal with drones (Russian air defense systems already have substantial capabilities along these lines). This would allow Western air-defenses to deal with drones while allowing them to maintain their more capable and expensive interceptors for use against aircraft and cruise missile targets. Here again, the challenge will be to build sufficiently inexpensive interceptors and guns that can reliably be used against massed drone attacks. Unfortunately, Western military contractors have no incentive to do this since they can make much larger profits selling the bigger and more expensive and profitable systems. Also complicating the situation is the drive in United States (and elsewhere) to privatize critical military enterprise has resulted in a loss in the government expertise needed to control the voracious conduct of defense contractors. This situation exposes a fundamental structural problem that the West, and particularly the United States, has not solved relative to China and Russia, which remain the principal focus of US and Western hostility towards these rising powers. My own conclusion is that as long as United States continues depending on large private military contractors it will never be able to compete militarily against the growing and accelerating high-tech industrial power of Russia and China. The Russians and Chinese build their weapons at minimal cost, unlike what happens in the West, where the contractors have no incentive to limit costs and a great incentive to increase their profits. This is a structural problem that the West has to address if it believes it must be able to engage directly against China and Russia as they continue to grow as military powers. Just a few of the numerous examples of this problem the West has with private military industry are the Switchblade FPV drone and the javelin antitank missile. The Switchblade was costing $58,000 per unit when it was first sent by the United States to Ukraine and it was eventually replaced with equally or more efficient drones made using commercial manufacturing techniques that cost less than $1000 each. The story with the Javelin antitank missile, is also similar and similarly outrageous. I am not optimistic that the United States can ever solve this problem, since the lobbying power of giant military contractors has taken over the Congress and nobody who appears to be in a position of authority is free from the big-money cudgel wielding from these contractors. It appears to me that we are basically stuck in a stable state of inefficiency that will limit our military potential for the foreseeable future. This outrageous and potentially disastrous situation is also supported by the University and academic communities. During my work on the catastrophic failure of the Patriot missile system in the Gulf War of 1991, I was brought under direct attack by the then president of MIT, Charles M. Vest. Once MIT got rid of Vest, they brought in Susan Hockfield, who was equally vicious and quite a bit less charming. She was aided by her Provost Robert Brown, who directly threatened financial reprisals against the MIT Security Studies Program. The former president of Harvard and Tufts, Robert Bacow, was directly involved in covering up administrative misconduct at MIT when he was conducting investigations for the MIT administration. Bacow became president of Tufts and then Harvard in spite of his publicly known record of praising an MIT faculty member for his involvement in lying to the Congress. Vest went on to be president of the National Academy of Engineering in spite of his public record of misconduct in trying to repress information critical to the national security about problems with US missile defense technologies. Brown went on to be president of Boston University. My faculty colleagues in the MIT Security Studies Program, had a secret meeting without me or any members of my research group being involved, to unanimously vote that I be kicked out of that program if I did not abide by the demands of the Provost, Robert Brown. When I refused to stop my research into the missile-defense issues I was working on, they kicked me out of the program and widely spread rumors that I had somehow engaged in misconduct. At Stanford University, Scott Sagan, a political scientist in the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) took it on himself to go uninvited to a departmental meeting to claim that the department would suffer major disruptions if they did not withdraw their invitation for me to be a visiting professor during my sabbatical at Stanford. The department, without conducting any investigation or putting any thought into the matter, immediately withdrew their invitation to host me as a visiting professor. These are examples of the kind of “independence” and "courage" that can be expected from the academic community on important matters of national security. The problem of profound moral and ethical decay in the United States is very serious, and it is a mistake to assume that only the US government is the problem. I bring this up because this is another matter related to the problem of getting sound technical decision-making on national security matters by the ruling elites in the United States. With warmest regards to my colleagues, Ted Postol