Tag: news

Surprise

Never underestimate the importance of surprise

On 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.

The Russian Nuclear Space Weapon

On By gyonas7 Comments

After Mike Turner, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, warned the public about what he called a “serious national security threat,” and the White House confirmed that the Russians are developing a “troubling anti satellite weapon,” I was motivated to add some historical perspective based on my study of directed energy weapons. 

Garin Death Ray

HG Wells was the first to invent the concept of directed energy weapons also known as death rays in his 1898 sci-fi novel “The War of the Worlds.” He was far ahead of his time. The Soviets were next to join the death ray fiction world. In the 1920s, Alexsey Tolstoy published a sci-fi novel, “Garin’s Death Ray,” that focused not just on the weapon, but also the psychology of the inventor. The novel attracted the attention of the Russian military, but the non-technical issues were prophetic. The hero of the book, Garin, described his invention of a beam weapon that was incredibly destructive, but it also had many detractors that claimed, “This invention smells of higher politics.” 

After the recent revelations, CNN published their “exclusive account” that, “Russia is attempting to develop a nuclear space weapon to destroy satellites with a massive energy wave when detonated potentially crippling a vast swath of the commercial and government satellites that would cross a dangerous Rubicon in the history of nuclear weapons, disruptions to everyday life.” The story was picked up in the European “Pravda” that reported, “The weapon has the potential to destroy entire groups of small satellites such as Space X’s Starlink used by Ukraine in the war with Russia……and Moscow perceives the U.S. statements as attempt to persuade Republicans in Congress to approve assistance for Ukraine.”

This revelation had similarities to my 2023 science fiction techno thriller “The Dragon’s CLAW” that describes a test of a secret low energy nuclear (cold fusion) weapon initially discovered at Los Alamos and stolen by the Chinese and tested for the first time on a remote island in the Pacific with surprising results. I wrote: “The results of the first trial of the Dragon’s CLAW had exceeded all of the researchers’ expectations, but not in a good way. The energy output was 10 times higher than anticipated, and it had created a giant electromagnetic pulse…revealed the existence of a new, tremendously energetic and very dangerous device…. could destroy any nation’s electric grid infrastructure and all space-based communication, along with GPS”.

I wondered if not just Tolstoy, but both CNN as well as my fiction invention were examples of imagination. Then I remembered something about the Soviet secret program I had learned from Sidney Drell, Stanford physics professor and arms control expert, when I was researching the impact of Reagan’s Star Wars program on the end of the Cold War. I documented this in my autobiographical SDI story, “Death Rays and Delusions.”  I learned from the information published in 2007 by Drell and George Shultz, former secretary of state, who was directly involved in the Reykjavik Reagan/Gorbachev summit in 1986, that the Russians were very aware and concerned about the development of nuclear driven electromagnetic weapons.  

Gorbachev was told that that the United States was developing nuclear driven directed energy weapons. He was informed that the “design concept for directed nuclear weapons, work on which began in the U.S. in the 1970s…. weapons consist in transforming part of the energy from a nuclear explosion into powerful streams of directed x-rays or electromagnetic radiation or a stream of high energy particles. No less than three tests were conducted towards the creation of directed electromagnetic radiation weapons.”

He was also told, “Full scale development of these weapons is expected to occur in the second half of the 1990s.” Gorbachev was encouraged to negotiate a “ban on nuclear testing to prevent full scale development of directed energy weapons,” and prevent “military technical superiority of the U.S. in the development of munitions of the new generation for strategic weapons is concerned.” The Soviets’ concern about the possible development of nuclear directed energy weapons continued in the 1990s as evidenced by the writings of the head of the nuclear weapon program who in 1996 called for the end of development of such weapons that he called “an evil Jinn.” 

In my novel, “The Dragon’s CLAW,” the fictional Los Alamos lab director successfully argued, “This is the ideal moment to admit that the competition over space weapons would ultimately be mutually destructive for both countries… We must draft an agreement to end all space weapons development and cooperate with energy research. The future of humanity depends on us.”

I was surprised when my fiction seemed to match some of the recent CNN revelations, but I admit that my creativity can hardly keep up with the thinking of energy weapon advocates that continue to be intrigued by new ideas related to powerful laser death rays and microwave weapons. Some claim that such energy beams are the cause of the Havana Syndrome that messes up the minds of “2000 U.S.  officials in diplomatic posts worldwide … .and a CIA panel of experts concluded some of these have as a plausible explanation a directed pulsed radio frequency energy.” A microwave expert, James Benford, stated the syndrome, “certainly fits with a microwave beam as the attacking element,” but he nor the CIA suggested who might be the supposed foreign adversary. 

I will leave it to the reader of my series of books (see projectzbooks.com), to find out what happens in the world of fictional electromagnetic brain weapons, but the technology development and its consequences continues in my next book “The Dragon’s Brain” to be published in September. My novel describes how electromagnetic energy weapons can attack not just space satellites, but also the minds of diplomats and even the entire population of the world. Who knows, where fiction ends and reality emerges, but the work of HG Wells told us to be prepared for inventions we can hardly imagine.