Boost Phase Intercept - Technical Aspects

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Came across a very good, current three part article on BPI from the US Naval Institute blog, "Proceedings Today". It oulines the technical aspects of intercepting a missile just after it is launched rather than waiting for it at the other end - a subject discussed in another recent thread before some could not resist going political on it. Please don't do that again. Let's try to understand a very real, topical scientific issue rather than providing grandstanding opinion. It uses Florida as a stand-in for .... any small but dangerous adversary (which is kind of cool if concerning for untold numbers of retirees).

https://m.usni.org/magazines/proceedings...ter-north-korea

Scenario%20Detail%20Figure.png
 
Makes sense - hot flame = easy to track, you just need a faster missile with the defensive launch platform in the right area.
 
Boost phase intercept has always seemed easier to me than terminal phase intercept. The missile is a much larger, slow moving target then.
 
Larger, hotter, slower, and the thin, fragile booster is under maximum aerodynamic stress.

Great time to kill an ICBM.

We just need to be close enough to kill it before booster separation...
 
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
This stuff is unclassified? Productive to discuss openly in a U.S. military magazine? For Pete's Sake....


We're known for being loose with information but not this time I think.

I think what you're looking at in this case is "messaging". Message is: go ahead, let your people starve while you very expensively pursue this missile development. And it costs you continued ostracizm in the larger community. We will shoot it down before it leaves your airspace. Notice also that it's written by a very junior rank. Message: Imagine the things we have that a senior officer would know (and indeed there probably are). Side message to China: Are you going to help us here or do you want us to deploy BPI assets to your doorstep? They would work just as well against your assets too.... Side message to South Koren President: You say nothing can be done to the North without your OK. Well, we'll use Naval assets if you refuse to allow THAAD to deploy/defend your country. Overall message: We're in control here - your move.

That's my take.
 
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
This stuff is unclassified? Productive to discuss openly in a U.S. military magazine? For Pete's Sake....
hey look, an OPSEC hall monitor. There is always one. Hint: there isn't any junior G Man badge at the end of this train ride.
 
Originally Posted By: L_Sludger
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
This stuff is unclassified? Productive to discuss openly in a U.S. military magazine? For Pete's Sake....
hey look, an OPSEC hall monitor. There is always one. Hint: there isn't any junior G Man badge at the end of this train ride.

Yer funny, in a naive sort of way!
I guess discussing certain things is OK. Maybe the military has given up on keeping some secrets. Could be part of an actual overall strategy.
The main point is "no methods or performance details" can be discussed to help the enemy.

When I worked on highly secret projects, they always threatened to jail us for any leaks. In the name of "diversity" I worked right next to an ex-national Iranian, and an ex-Chinese too, showing they were more serious about affirmative action than actually keeping vital defense secrets. Sad, but true. You can bet all the stuff I worked on is likely in Iran/China etc. now.
 
Originally Posted By: L_Sludger
I wanna know what they have in mind for post boost interception of a MaRV payload.


There really is not much of a plan for that. After the bus kicks the warhead(s) and penaids off the defensive problem becomes immense and, of course, if the RV's are maneuvering, it can be even harder (the upside is they don't look like penaids anymore which is good for the defense). But the accuracy problem gets tougher for the offense.

The last time we had a plan for that was the point defense Sprint missile system adjunct to the Spartan system back in the '70's. The theory was, that after all the maneuvering was done, the missile was still coming to a target so kill it there if it got through your exoatmospheric defenses. Sprint came out of its hole and was doing MACH 10 within five seconds or so but very short range of about 25-30 miles. It was only operational briefly until we killed it. It did contribute in its own way to arms control negotiations. There are always the same two sides of this argument. One side wants to build the "perfect" defense and the other side wants to stick with the balance of terror so as not to be destabilizing (in their minds).

The Brits first tested a MARV, don't remember the date - proably late 60's-early 70's, under a program called Chevaline if memory serves. There is precious little open-source info on that. Do a search and see what turns up. Also search Ballistic Missile Defense for the charts showing the various levels of engagement and the programs to address those. It's all out there. As we talked about before in the earlier thread, if you have a choice, BPI is the right answer especially if it can be done from mobile assets like naval/air platforms. It is a fiendishly difficult branch of mathematics, materials, communications, surveillance,processing and decsion making and we've been spending $2-5B a year on it since forever and, detractors to the contrary, all that is not wasted and the best parts are likely not visible.
 
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
L_Sludger said:
oil_film_movies said:
Could be part of an actual overall strategy.
The main point is "no methods or performance details" can be discussed to help the enemy.

When I worked on highly secret projects, they always threatened to jail us for any leaks.


Same here. And I couldn't agree with you more about secrets. There is dumb and there is stupid and we too often work urgently on the latter.

One benefit of being a sieve though is that the bad guys have a harder time discerning between what's real and what we make up in disinformation. The story goes that many moons ago we "allowed" the Soviets to steal a very complicated control system for oil pipeline transportation control. They installed it somewhere in Siberia at the nexus of many pipelines. I've read that you could see the explosion from space......I

Turns out we're not totally stupid.
 
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
Originally Posted By: L_Sludger
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
This stuff is unclassified? Productive to discuss openly in a U.S. military magazine? For Pete's Sake....
hey look, an OPSEC hall monitor. There is always one. Hint: there isn't any junior G Man badge at the end of this train ride.

Yer funny, in a naive sort of way!
I guess discussing certain things is OK. Maybe the military has given up on keeping some secrets. Could be part of an actual overall strategy.
The main point is "no methods or performance details" can be discussed to help the enemy.

When I worked on highly secret projects, they always threatened to jail us for any leaks. In the name of "diversity" I worked right next to an ex-national Iranian, and an ex-Chinese too, showing they were more serious about affirmative action than actually keeping vital defense secrets. Sad, but true. You can bet all the stuff I worked on is likely in Iran/China etc. now.




They didn't classify this rather informative ABM tech video - and this was at the height of the Cold War.

How about this rather more detailed technical, also unclassified, also approved for general release article on radar signal propagation over the horizon? Do you think that the State Prize-winning, highly renowned technical experts of the Democratic people's Republic of Maximum Korea would take this information to build a doomsday device? http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2012/1210690.pdf

post script: I worked on sensitive, do-not-export jet engine stuff and have kept my lips sealed tightly about what I did. Not because any of the stuff was groundbreaking - it wasn't - I'm just scared to death of getting hauled away in a black van on account of ITAR's onerous regs. But among the things I worked on was the CFMi LEAP-1C which is going to China, for their COMAC C919 jet engines. The information relating to that engine was also marked for non-export. But the engine itself is being exported to them. Kind of cognitive dissonance there.
The Chinese used the CFM-56 engines that they were able to get their hands on in the 80s and tore them apart to discover their secrets. Then they used the core design of that engine to be the heart of their military jet engine design that will be used in aircraft hostile to American interests. I wonder why we gave them those engines in the first place? And now they are getting bleeding-edge technology in the CFMi LEAP engine - great!
There isn't a shortage of design information that is available to our enemies. What our enemies lack are advanced metallurgy for things like single crystal nickel engine blades, or the extremely high precision machining needed to make those parts. And that's what has held the Chinese and even the Indians behind. The Chinese still can't build a reliable long-lived high performance jet turbofan engine for their fighters because they haven't mastered the materials and manufacturing aspect.
 
Relating to the Chinese jet engines reverse engineered from CFM56 design knowledge:
Shenyang WS-20 to power their C-17 equivalent transport [the WS-20 is being tested on IL-76 testbeds but will make it to the Y-20 airlifter very soon]


Shenyang WS-10 to power their Chengdu J-20 'F22-appearing' 'stealth' fighter
 
Originally Posted By: DeepFriar
Originally Posted By: L_Sludger
I wanna know what they have in mind for post boost interception of a MaRV payload.


There really is not much of a plan for that. After the bus kicks the warhead(s) and penaids off the defensive problem becomes immense and, of course, if the RV's are maneuvering, it can be even harder (the upside is they don't look like penaids anymore which is good for the defense). But the accuracy problem gets tougher for the offense.

The last time we had a plan for that was the point defense Sprint missile system adjunct to the Spartan system back in the '70's. The theory was, that after all the maneuvering was done, the missile was still coming to a target so kill it there if it got through your exoatmospheric defenses. Sprint came out of its hole and was doing MACH 10 within five seconds or so but very short range of about 25-30 miles. It was only operational briefly until we killed it. It did contribute in its own way to arms control negotiations. There are always the same two sides of this argument. One side wants to build the "perfect" defense and the other side wants to stick with the balance of terror so as not to be destabilizing (in their minds).

The Brits first tested a MARV, don't remember the date - proably late 60's-early 70's, under a program called Chevaline if memory serves. There is precious little open-source info on that. Do a search and see what turns up. Also search Ballistic Missile Defense for the charts showing the various levels of engagement and the programs to address those. It's all out there. As we talked about before in the earlier thread, if you have a choice, BPI is the right answer especially if it can be done from mobile assets like naval/air platforms. It is a fiendishly difficult branch of mathematics, materials, communications, surveillance,processing and decsion making and we've been spending $2-5B a year on it since forever and, detractors to the contrary, all that is not wasted and the best parts are likely not visible.
Thanks for the post. I'm familiar with everything you posted but you reminded me to refresh my memory on Chevaline, it was an interesting project. I think if we want to try to catch a nuke we'd have to go back to using kill vehicles armed with nukes. The Soviet Galosh ABM meant to defend Moskva had a huge multi megaton warhead. Talk about some collateral damage there! Oh and make sure to take an hour to watch the Bell Labs documentary video (two posts up) on the Spartan and Sprint system, you might already know everything in the video but the music is freaking great
lol.gif
 
Originally Posted By: Mr Nice
L_Sludger,

How many years have you been working on jet engines ?
4 years, manufacturing engineering and then design
 
The Chinese are such good reverse engineering technology cloners when it comes to manufacturing. Not the best at innovation, and that's not a reflection of being an oppressive police state. Look at all the innovations from Germany under their Nazi regime.

It's interesting how their military contractors don't appear to have the same philosophy as civilian manufacturing with their shift to a more free enterprise system. Perhaps the penaties for shortcutting on quality are harsher for Chinese defense contractors than for manufacturers of consumer goods like infant formula.
 
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President Xi is in the process of decoupling the major defense businesses and associated industries from People's Liberation Army military control. It's been a piggy bank for army graft since forever even extending into hotels and other development. I think the leadership has had some close calls with control of the military and that is well and truly frightening. One example may have been the satellite shootdown a few years ago that caused many thousands of pieces of space junk that the leadership took a lot of international heat for. There were reports at time the test was conducted by the PLA without prior approval from the party. True? Who knows but there was a wave of reassignments after that.

But back to strategic weapons. The Chinese have been particularly effective at stealing our stuff. Press reports (I know), espionage trials and researchers have noted the theft of the B61 bomb plans, the plans for the neutron bomb (never deployed by us) and much else including the permissive action links methods/technology for securing weapons (we probably gave them and the Russians that - makes for a safer world donchaknow....). Hughes Aircraft engineers gave away the MIRV/MARV/PENAID bus technology during one of our misbegotten thawing periods with the Chinese while we were helping them with launching multiple satellites at once (same tech as MIRV/MARV). Take a look around. There ain't no more Hughes Aircraft Company. Toshiba gave the Russians the CNC machining technology needed to make quiet nuclear sub propellers thereby making us less safe. And on and on. The only defense we seem to have is to continue to invest and stay ahead faster than they can steal it.

To the other point about interception, nuke warheads are a bad idea for defense. You don't want those going off in your hemisphere. Hit to kill is where it's at on your end. If you were truly going to make a decision to use defensive nukes then do it over THEIR heads.
 
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