Author: gyonas

author of Death Rays and Delusions, The Dragon’s CLAW, the Dragon’s Brain, and the Dragon’s Blood.

It’s not a lie if you believe it

On By gyonas2 Comments

One of the most famous lines from the TV show “Seinfeld” was, “It’s not a lie…if you It's not a lie if you believe itbelieve it.” This concept also applies to intersection between science and politics. My last post discussed a commonly believed fallacy in the world of military technology development. The engineers and scientists who believe their latest invention will lead to certain victory and when they market that idea with the certainty of their faith, they are not lying.

One of the strongly marketed ideas currently for missile defense is the concept called “Brilliant Pebbles.” This idea has a long history going back to the 1958 Bambi

Brilliant Pebbles
This image shows a Brilliant Pebble anti-ballistic missile interceptor emerging from its protective “life jacket”, the white shell. It shows an earlier model of the interceptor design with three fuel tanks, later designs had four much larger tanks wrapped around the missile body. A second Pebble remains inside its life jacket in the background. Several Soviet missiles are shown in the lower right, but these would be too close for the Pebbles to intercept.

concept of hundreds of space based missiles that would detect the launch of attacking missiles and destroy them early in their flight. The technology of the time was far from adequate, and the concept reappeared in 1979 as the High Frontier concept, advocated by General Daniel Graham who claimed the technology was off the shelf. The advocates believed they had the certain path to an effective missile defense, but the dream of the ultimate space based defense weapon in the form of giant spaced based lasers captured the imagination and funding of the Pentagon. The laser weapon funding grew rapidly after Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983, and the laser advocates believed they finally had the answer, but again technology was wanting and the funding drifted down after a few years.

The enthusiasm for small space based missiles was reborn as “smart rocks.” This

Pebbles presentation
In March 1988, Teller and Wood (on the left) present the original Pebbles concept to Reagan, Bush, Abrahamson and members of the SDIO. The model of the pebble was theatrically draped in black cloth to hide it from the reporters.

approach achieved enhanced support when Lowell Wood’s LLNL concept became “brilliant pebbles” that would be so small and inexpensive that they could be permanently deployed in space and do the job of boost phase intercept. That idea gained support for a while and then it died in the early 90s, but the true believers never lost faith, and the idea is back again, and is being touted, by Henry Cooper of the new High Frontier organization as a possible component of Donald Trump’s Space Force proposal.

The technology has advanced to the point that the new system concepts are focusing on cost effective approaches to actual deployment using the industrial adaptations of the new ideas for small satellites. With enough space based missile interceptors, there could be a multilayer defense all the way from boost phase, to midcourse, to early re-entry. So this is the new last move that will finally and certainly solve the problem of missile defense, and the Pentagon is showing interest. And the advocates believe it … so it is not a lie.deception

I believe that this “last move” is one more fallacy, and there are certain to be reactions to this latest “last move.” These reactions, called counter measures, can come in the form of physical attacks on the space based hardware including jamming of the communications, dazzling and blinding of the sensors and hacking of the software. The reaction to these countermeasures will be “hardening” to achieve a robust and resilient system to counter the countermeasures, and the advocates will claim they have the final answer this time, as modifications and enhancements will lead to program extensions and cost growth that were not anticipated, but everybody involved will honestly claim that nobody was lying when they provided the initial cost estimates.

Is there any way out of what will become a new escalating space race? Is there no way out? How will this new space arms race end? There could be negotiated agreements that we used to call “arms control,” but today’s global strategic environment is more complex than it used to be. Today Russia and the U.S. are facing space competitors from China and before too long India. But what about Europe, Japan and Israel? Here we go again with the warning of President Eisenhower to beware of the growing power of the military industrial complex. It is too late for agreements – so fasten your seat belts and get ready for a fast and very expensive ride toward an unknown outcome.

 

 

Herbert_York

“The Fallacy of the Last Move”

On By gyonas7 Comments

One of the military technology as well as arms control leaders at the end of the last century was Herb York. He always argued for weapons technology development based on good physics, and at the same time emphasized arms control based on mutual understanding between the U.S. and our adversaries. He made it clear in his 1995 book, “Arms and the Physicist,” that arms control agreements were hampered by the “fallacy of the last move.” He wrote, “We are confronted by the dilemma of steadily decreasing national security … this dilemma has no technology solution.”

I had reached a similar conclusion ten years before that.  After Reagan called for the initiation of the missile defense “Star Wars” program, the Fletcher panel was organized in the summer of 1983 to create and document a plan of action. I was asked to put together a sub panel on directed energy weapons that were thought to be the source of the next “technology miracle,” and after we completed our effort, I was asked by Fletcher to write a conclusion of the study. I wrote: “We concluded that a robust BMD system can be made to work eventually. The ultimate effectiveness, complexity, and degree of technical risk in this system will depend not only on the technology itself, but also on the extent to which the Soviet Union either agrees to mutual defense arrangements and offense limitations, or embarks on new and more desirable strategic directions in response to our initiatives. Since the outcome of the initiation of an evolutionary shift in our strategic direction will hinge on as yet unresolved policy as well as technical issues…no definitive predictions of the outcome can be made.” The end of the last sentence was not published. Instead, what was advertised was that “a robust BMD system can be made to work eventually.” The notion that the outcome was not only uncertain, but depended on the next move of our adversary did not see the light of day.

The history of military technology has taught us that the development of weapons is always followed by the development of counter weapons. We can learn from the history of the army’s battlefields that the infantry changes, from the machine gun to barbed wire and trenches, to tanks, to anti-tank weapons, to hardened armor, to defensive shields… and on and on. Space weapons will be no different, and will be dominated by sensors and anti-sensor weapons, be they blinding lasers or command and control hackers, and hyper-sonic missiles. The game will go on and on, but the predictability of the outcome will be obscured by the complexity of the actions and the reactions.

The technology marketers will improve their methods to persuade the poorly informed decisions makers that their latest inventions will provide certain victory. The end game, however, will be elusive and will be dependent on not just technical, but social, political, economic and psychological factors.

Will our future consist of an endless arms race or are there more beneficial ways to invest our nation’s increasingly limited financial resources? I believe we should take our guidance from history. Some of the scholars of the end of the Soviet Union argue that the SDI technology advances allowed us to win the arms race with the Soviet Union; however, as I wrote in my book, “Death Rays and Delusions,” the collapse of the Soviet empire was caused by its “moral decay and mismanaged political institutions rather than economic collapse or even scientific and technology competition.” We should learn from history to warn of us of our own social/political and impending cash flow problems as our population ages demanding more and more of available funds, compounded by the return to normal interest rates. I call this the “geezer threat,” and I believe we urgently need to figure out how to deal with the inevitability of “global aging.”

 

Voltaire

Are you smoking something?

On By gyonas7 Comments

One of the readers of my latest couple of blog posts asked me if I was smoking funny cigarettes. I don’t think he appreciated my satire. I really did not know I was in the satire business, until one of the readers of my book, “Death Rays and Delusions,” commented that I was trying to be another Voltaire. Being an engineer, I thought that was an automobile model, (perhaps a Chevy), so I looked it up and found Voltaire was a 16th century philosopher who poked fun at political leaders using a style characterized by wild exaggeration, irony and subtle humor. In my recent blog posts, I poked fun at the obviously silly idea of a new branch of the military, the space force. I knew enough about the subject that I figured the Air Force already had the job well in hand so I opined that one financial benefit would be the use of the surplus uniforms left over from the Star Trek TV series. My other post dealt with the concept that we could dominate space control through investing in new and revolutionary technologies.

In my book, I described the outrageous notions that we could defend ourselves against the threat of nuclear tipped ballistic missiles if we only had to deploy hundreds of giant space-based lasers, or thousands of tiny missiles, or maybe just a few orbiting nuclear weapons to create beams of x rays. When I was the chief scientist of the SDI program, I enjoyed the satirical humor in the “Bloom County “cartoons where I was described as a plump penguin who argued, “Why fer crying out loud…. research physicists need Porches too.”

Maybe the message of my book was lost in the satire, but my point was that decisions were being driven by the tech sales forces of the military industrial complex. They were extremely successful in extracting large sums for unlikely programs, that turned out to be the heart of an elaborate mind game with the Soviets.

The policy decision makers on both sides had no clue about the reality of the technology, but they were mostly motivated by their own philosophical, strategic and economic concepts. Gorbachev hated nukes, the arms race and the impending financial collapse of the Soviet empire. Reagan hated nukes, believed the Soviet Union was on the edge of financial extinction and was willing to make a deal that even shared our technology with the Soviets.

As it turns out, scientists and engineers were involved, but were only along for the ride. Many of them believed that their next miracle would give us the winning move.

Remembering the legacy of George H.W. Bush

On By gyonas8 Comments

“It would not be prudent at this juncture.”

On “Saturday Night Live,” comedian Dana Carvey, impersonated President George Herbert Walker Bush with the memorable line, “it would not be prudent at this juncture.” It was not only humorous, but an accurate description of the thoughtful approach, as well as the personality and character of the man who I had interacted with when I was the Chief Scientist of the SDI.

Reflecting on the man after his recent death, I recall the way he acted with prudence after the implosion of the Soviet Union. On Sept. 28, 1991, Bush announced his strategic nuclear weapons plans. He wanted to curtail further deployment of all nuclear tipped nuclear weapons. He wanted to limit all of our ICBMs to single warheads in order to avoid any perceived benefit from a first strike and to negotiate a posture of convincing deterrence. Part of this strategy was that there not be any sort of global missile defense as proposed by Ronald Reagan. He did recognize the growing proliferation of short-range ballistic missiles, and he called for developing and deploying limited defenses that would still be effective against the growing threat from rogue states.

His approach in 1991 was to maintain deterrence based on threat of mutual assured destruction while assuring the Russians that we had no intention of defending ourselves against their ability to retaliate. He had not changed his point of view from that when I met with him six years earlier. He had been asked by President Reagan to visit our allies and negotiate agreements with them to join us in a giant R&D program. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger offered the allies prospects of lucrative contracts and technology sharing if they would sign on to supporting our SDI program.

I was asked to go along on the trip and provide low key technical back up to the negotiations. Bush invited me to visit him in his office and give him a one-on-one briefing on the program. He was cordial, informal and a good listener, but he obviously was not interested in details. We sat in overstuffed leather chairs next to a coffee table that had a signed picture of his previous vice-presidential opponent Gerry Ferraro. I noticed his plaid watch band that struck me as what would be expected of a prep school high school student and we chatted back and forth as if we were old friends.

After we talked, he asked me to come on over for dinner and continue the discussion with some of his friends. The old friends were all distinguished members of the political strategic weapons community and after dinner we went around the table and shared thoughts with the vice president.  All of the comments about SDI ranged from mild disagreement to outright opposition.

Harold Brown, former secretary of defense under Jimmy Carter, said “SDI is not a very good idea…it is a mistaken commitment to a real gamble.” Other comments basically argued that this program would mess up our relations with the allies that Bush would face on the trip. After listening to all of the opinions without comment, he closed the discussion by saying, ‘This is a listening trip…. not an SDI trip…this is a prudent step.”

I still thought the trip was on and even bought a new suit for the trip, rather than the threadbare one I had worn to dinner, but I soon learned that Reagan had decided to focus the trip on counter terrorism, not SDI, and my services were no longer needed. I should have realized that Bush believed that the trip was “not prudent at this juncture.”

With his calm, careful and thoughtful approach, Bush never sought nor received much attention in the Reagan administration, so it was not obvious at that the time that he was destined for greatness. When he was elected as President, he provided honest and clear-thinking leadership that served our nation well. He will be recognized as one of our greatest Presidents and we sure could benefit from a George Herbert Walker Bush in the White House today.