PENTAGON: MISSILE DEFENSE EASY AS PLAYING BALL

Shooting down mis­siles only seems hard. But, really, it’s as easy as throw­ing a ball in the air at least, accord­ing to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.
“Imagine try­ing to hit a ball that has been thrown towards you with another ball in mid air,” the Agency says on its web­site. “Better yet, TRY IT!”

What you need:
Two, syn­thetic foam (or equiv­a­lent) soft-​​sided balls
At least one friend to help
Directions:
1. Decide which of you will be the tar­get mis­sile and which will be the inter­cep­tor.
2. The per­son who is the tar­get mis­sile throws her or his ball into the air in an arch (as if it is a mis­sile fol­low­ing the curve of the Earth) toward the other per­son with the inter­cep­tor ball.
3. The per­son with the inter­cep­tor ball then needs to try and hit the tar­get ball with the inter­cep­tor ball, knock­ing it away before the tar­get ball is able to hit him or her. 

A five-​​launch test of the game by Global Security Newswire “resulted in four misses and one mid­course hit that failed to sig­nif­i­cantly alter the path of the tar­get.“
But that may not be such an unre­al­is­tic ratio. After all, recent anti-​​missile tests have flopped spec­tac­u­larly. A for­mer Pentagon test­ing direc­tor recently said the cur­rent mis­sile defense plan was “sim­ply not up to the job.” And an American Physical Society report said that catch­ing a mis­sile as it was launch­ing would be an extremely dif­fi­cult task for America’s cur­rent and near-​​future anti-​​missile tech­nolo­gies.
MDA spokesman Chris Taylor told Global Security Newswire that the ball game just a way to enter­tain “a younger audi­ence and peo­ple that surf the Web.“
If that’s the case, con­sider John Pike, with GlobalSecurity​.org, a fuddy-​​duddy. He says, “They’ve got too much time on their hands. I mean, its not even a good game.“
THERE’S MORE: “Despite their attempt to make mis­sile defense a hands-​​on physics exper­i­ment, what the Missile Defense Agency really shows is that mis­sile defense is a los­ing game most of the time,” Philip Coyle, the for­mer Pentagon test­ing chief, writes.

It’s not impos­si­ble to win; once in a while you may get lucky with your Nerf ball… (But) unlike Nerf balls, inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­siles travel at thou­sands of miles per hour. Try the game by hurl­ing golf balls or steel ball bear­ings, instead of Nerf balls, and you’ll get the idea. And maybe a few bro­ken win­dows. too.
Recently the American Physical Society, a group of U.S. pro­fes­sional physi­cists, reported why mis­sile defense in the boost-​​phase is so dif­fi­cult. You have to be very close and very fast, or you’ll miss. Try it with Nerf balls and you’ll see that the physi­cists are cor­rect.
Also, unlike Nerf balls, ICBMs can dis­pense decoys and coun­ter­mea­sures in the mid­dle of flight that look just like real war­heads. Sort of like a Nerf ball cloning itself in mid flight. Try the game where the attacker throws a hand­ful of Nerf balls, not just one. You won’t be able to tell which one to go after.
In the ter­mi­nal phase, the game gets even more inter­est­ing. If the attacker throws a ball close to the defender, the defender has a chance, although not a good one. But if the attacker throws Nerf balls at tar­gets all over the back yard (think of the back yard as the United States), the poor defender can’t cover the back yard with enough Nerf balls to do the job. The size of the “defended area” is crit­i­cal in ter­mi­nal defense.
Finally, try the game where the attacker just hurls his Nerf ball straight at the defender, not upward in a long loop­ing arc. That’s like a cruise mis­sile. Cruise mis­siles fly at low alti­tude, skim­ming under the defender’s radar. Saddam Hussein proved that this works dur­ing the war in Iraq. His cruise mis­siles were not even detected by the U.S. Patriot anti-​​missile sys­tem, and so they were not shot down. Fortunately, Saddam’s cruise mis­siles didn’t hit any­one, the result of lousy tar­get­ing and guid­ance sys­tems on his cruise missiles. 

AND MORE: Oh, dear God. There’s not only a mis­sile defense nerf game. There’s a col­or­ing book, too.

October 7th, 2003 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.