Never underestimate the importance of surprise

On January 20, 2025January 20, 2025 By gyonas2 Comments

The importance of surprise has dominated the thinking of military strategists since beginning of conflict. For instance, the famous Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote in 500 BC, “Those who are skilled in producing surprise will win. Such tacticians are as versatile as the changes in heaven and earth.” In 1520, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “Nothing makes a leader greater than the capacity to guess the designs of the enemy.” In 1832, Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “Surprise is therefore not only the means to the attainment of numerical superiority, but it is also to be regarded as a substantive principle in itself.”

Modern military strategists take the issue of surprise very seriously when managing investments in technology and preparing for possible future conflicts. Over the years I participated as a contributor in several Defense Science Board studies and often found myself as a member of the red team. My job was to imagine what might be the counter to any of our advances in future technology. It was never a good way to make friends since my role as a red team member was to invent how and why the best ideas of the blue team would be thwarted. The goal of the science and technology red team was to imagine and analyze a possible future threat evolution based on analysis of the past and evaluation of present capabilities. Then the blue team was faced with planning to deal with this imagined future.

In 1988, the Pentagon published a document that described the status of Soviet technology and projected what might happen in the future. One future space weapon threat was the use of ground-based lasers and a distribution of space-based relay mirrors to provide lethal blows to space assets and missile launches in their early boost phase.

The Pentagon analysts projected that the space weapon threat shown in the illustration below might be deployed “after the year 2000,” but, as I explained in my last post, at the time neither the Soviets nor the Americans had the needed high power laser technology nor the space launch capabilities for any realistic space-based weapons. Over the past four decades, however, that technology has advanced to the point where the red team needs to reimagine what might be the new space-based threats as well as our new approaches to offense and defense. In today’s world of Russian attempts to return its empire to greatness, the defense planners are actively attempting to figure out what surprises they may face.

Pentagon illustration of possible Soviet technology, 1988.

It really should not come as a surprise that Russia is now threatening its NATO neighbors with an intermediate range missile called Oreshnik and has demonstrated its operation against a Ukrainian city. This missile is a version of its ICBM capability to deliver multiple hypersonic independently target warheads or MIRV’s to a target. The attacking MIRV’s could be accompanied by multiple light weight decoys so that an effective interception in space would be extremely difficult. So, no surprise there. We have known about this sort of threat for a very long time. Our red teams should have been imagining the threat and persuading our blue teams to figure out how to defend against it.

The fact is that in 1983 when we put together a plan for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or popularly known as Reagan’s “Star Wars” program, we thought about these threats and concluded that we needed a means for intercepting the threat during the early part of its launch, namely its boost phase, and this required that we had to develop and deploy interceptor platforms in space.

The red team was ready for this hypothetical defense and reported that the defense platforms would be “sitting ducks” that would be easily destroyed by ground launched missiles. The blue team responded with hypothetical offensive and defensive moves. That meant that the result would become a full out space war, which could result in escalating exchanges leading to all out nuclear conflict.

No matter how effective the defense, the realistic outcome would likely be nuclear exchanges and total destruction for both sides. Many long term and experienced strategic thinkers explained that any notion of a victorious last move in an escalation exchange was a fallacy. They suggested that a more positive approach would be arms control agreements. Many people never really understood that both Reagan and Gorbachev were arms control advocates and were anxious to get rid of all nukes.

When I got the job as the chief scientist for the SDI program, I concluded that Reagan’s idea to share defenses and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons was probably the only way out of this mess, and was unlikely, but was worth a try. When Reagan and Gorbachev met at Reykjavik in 1986, they almost agreed to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but at the last minute, although Gorbachev had no problem with SDI laboratory research, he demanded that the SDI stopped all testing in space.

Reagan’s advisors were surprised at Gorbachev’s emphatic and often repeated insistence that “it is the laboratory or goodbye.” I have concluded that he was afraid that his own military industrial complex would launch its giant Energia booster that was ready and waiting to launch a space laser research platform. Such a deployment, even if of marginal utility, would be a “Sputnik event.” Cold War historians have missed the point that he was more worried about his own technical experts that were prepared to initiate a space weapons race that would further contribute to the final implosion of the Soviet economy.

As it turned out, the Soviet Union collapsed because of its own weaknesses and without any real help from us and the threat went away. But now the threat seems to be back, as demonstrated by Russia’s advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles, its nuclear capable intermediate range missiles, and advanced war fighting methods such as information weapons to wage war. To add to this dilemma, China is not sitting idle but is rapidly advancing its strategic war fighting capabilities. The old ideas of two-party agreements seems to be obsolete.

So, as the famous arms control expert Herb York explained…. there really is no winning last move in an arms race. Instead, I believe that we need to consider a new approach—the road not taken. This imagined road will be an unfamiliar path filled with debris and pot holes that may never lead anywhere, but maybe there is a small chance that it might lead to agreements to avoid a global nuclear war. The problem of deterrence in this increasing complex world is so wicked, any success would be unexpected. In today’s world of technology advances coupled with confusion, chaos, and conflict, such an outcome could be the ultimate surprise.

Time flies, but technology has its own schedule.

On December 9, 2024March 29, 2025 By gyonas5 Comments

The Zenith Star mockup was marketed in 1987 to Ronald Reagan as a near term deployable space based laser.

The purpose of this blog post is to consider the evolution of military technology and explore what has happened in the last 80 years, and what might the future hold. Before World War II, technology was rather primitive by today’s standards, but it was on the verge of dramatic changes driven by the necessities of the war. Nuclear weapons, long distance rockets, and computers were about to appear, and global conflict was the catalyst to create dramatic advances. But then the deployment of new weapons followed a slower schedule with decreased military requirements and with funding competition from non-military investments. Even though technology budgets were somewhat restrained, Eisenhower still warned against “the establishment of a ‘military industrial complex,’” and he worried about the size of the defense industry that had grown in the 1950s,

Within a few decades, however, new technologies began to appear driven by the threats emerging from the Cold War and with the emergence of new weapon concepts, new aircraft, advanced materials, directed energy weapons, and ever-increasing speed and memory storage of computers. By the 1980s, there were lots of new weapons investments: deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying multiple warheads, a reuseable space shuttle, directed nuclear weapons, particle beam weapons, high power chemical lasers, and space-based sensors. Many enthusiastic aerospace engineers in the United States and the Soviet Union prowled the halls of their military organizations marketing new missiles as well as space and laser weapons to no avail. In the United States, budgets were tight, and national debt was feared more than the Soviet Union. But then, the announcement by Reagan in 1983 of his goal to eliminate the threat from nuclear weapons rapidly accelerated a new nationwide technology development program that started to receive slowly increasing funding in 1985.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced the plan to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Technology advocates soon had some political and technical setbacks. Congress passed the 1985 Balanced Budget Act, and the Pentagon faced many competing investments. Even though the Pentagon had been investing in many new concepts such as space-based lasers, Congress was not enthusiastic about giant programs. Even with the likely suspects, such as Edward Teller, who was selling his nuclear pumped x-ray lasers, the majority of the scientific community was skeptical. Then the Shuttle Challenger that the SDI program planned to use for early deployment of space weapons exploded shortly after liftoff. Nevertheless, many new programs were getting started slowly and Reagan was reelected with support for continuing emphasis on increasing defense budgets, The U.S. technology advances were just getting started but with very slow advances in high power lasers, but with real progress, primarily in the evolution of ground launched defensive missile systems, when the Soviet Union began to fall apart.

One year later, they signed an arms control agreement to ban intermediate range nuclear missiles that represented a serious strategic stability problem because of the short flight times of such missiles to and from Europe. The treaty remained in force for 10 years until Russia violated the treaty. Recently, the technology competition heated up again when Russia attacked Ukraine with such a missile carrying six non-nuclear warheads, each carrying six submunitions and fully capable of delivering nuclear weapons and attacking Europe in minutes. Now the need for missile defense has been made obvious to even the most dedicated advocates of arms control. And even more troublesome is the fact that the Russians have a well-developed capability to deploy methods, called penetration aids, to defeat any ground-based missile defense.

In April, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded contaminating Europe with radioactive material. That event was bad enough, but for the Soviet Union, the bad news just got worse and then even worse. They were already in a rather bad mood with their crumbling economy and had to deal with our active secret programs to blow up their pipelines and mess with their computers and software. At the same time, Gorbachev feared that with the United States increasing funding for our missile defense research, a space arms race would be the final blow in his attempts to save the Soviet economy. Then one of their ballistic missiles carrying submarines sank, and a Russian cruise ship carrying dignitaries collided in clear weather with a freighter in the Black Sea.

Gorbachev’s military experts convinced him that the United States would deploy space weapons in only a few years. Meanwhile, his own military industrial complex was preparing their own giant space laser for initial deployment the next year. As it turned out, there were many feverish aerospace engineers in both countries ready to be rewarded with unlimited funds. They were disappointed when not only was the technology not ready, but Reagan and Gorbachev decided to get along.

I believe that strategic political environment and technology have evolved to the point that we need to reconsider one of our old ideas for defense against nuclear tipped ballistic missiles based on lasers in space. The most advanced laser weapon system at that time was called Zenith Star and Reagan thought we were only a few years from a real defense. In reality, the technology fixes involved were not even close. The laser was one problem, but our computers for battle management were inadequate and the shuttle was much too expensive for a giant space deployment. Today times have changed, and so has technology.

Twenty years ago, practical high-power lasers were just concepts on viewgraphs, but DARPA formulated an ambitious program to create multiple combined fiber lasers with “tens of kilowatts and capable to be scaled to hundreds of kilowatts. A 500 kilowatt laser will exist soon and we are on the way to 1000 kilowatts. Not only are electrically pumped fiber lasers real today, but they have been moved from the research labs and are being used in manufacturing operations. They are also being deployed on ground and sea vehicles to intercept slow missiles and swarms of drones. Those are only some of the advances that indicate we need to take another look at missile defense using high power lasers.

Back in the 1980s, in spite of Reagan’s enthusiasm, the technology for large scale deployment of weapons into space was not a realistic possibility. Even if we had not suffered the loss of the Shuttle, we had no way to afford deployment with the cost of lift close to tens of thousands of dollars per pound. But now Space X is realistically offering lift at thousands of dollars per pound, and predicting 100 times less if everything but the rocket fuel is reuseable. In addition, Space X has launched thousands of Starlink satellites and changed the way people work and play. Elon Musk has certainly revolutionized access to space, and the entire missile defense system concept needs to be rethought without restrictions on deployment cost.

But what about the problem I thought would be the real show stopper, and that was the trusted computer hardware and software needed to allow the decision maker to instantly respond to a warning? When I worked at Sandia National Labs, our fastest computer had a computational speed of one trillion operations per second. Today the fastest computers are one million times faster, and the practical applications of modern computers and the decision support software is so real that modern industry is investing in technology that has driven the leading supplier to become more than a 3 trillion-dollar capitalization corporation.

So now what? With many extremely impressive advances in technology, I believe now is the time to ask again if Ronald Reagan’s dream of March 23, 1983 can become a reality. And as usual, even if the technology is enormously successful, there will be unintended strategic consequences that should be carefully explored.