Missile Defense Vs. China, Russia: Decentralize, Disperse, & Hide

 By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. on January 25, 2018 at 4:00 AM 53 Comments 65 SHARES

 WASHINGTON: China or Russia could all too easily detect and destroy US Army missile defenses, exposing American forces to devastating attack, a forthcoming study finds. Patriot and THAAD units are big groups of big objects — launchers, radars, command posts — that emit lots of heat and radio/radar waves, are hard to camouflage, and can’t relocate quickly. To ensure our missile defenses can survive against near-peer threats, argues study lead author Tom Karako, the Army needs to decentralize its missile defense batteries, disperse the radars and launchers, and hide them in the terrain — a concept he calls “distributed defense.” CSIS photo Tom Karako Making this concept a reality will require the Army to make new investments, Karako said. In particular, the service needs to finish its IBCS network to can connect these scattered components: A Patriot missile might fire at a target spotted by a faraway THAAD radar, for example. The Army needs to invest in better defenses against cruise missiles, drones (UAVs), and other threats that don’t fly the predictable ballistic arcs that Scuds and ICBMs do. And it needs to replace its current single-purpose launchers with ones that can load different types of missiles side by side, not only defensive but also defensive: The idea is similar to the Multi-Mission Launcher (MML) now in development for short-range missiles, but on a larger scale. Scale is the big difference between the near-peer challenge and the threat against which most US missile defenses have been built, a rogue state firing crude Scuds or a small number of ICBMs. It’s great that the Pentagon’s independent tester has officially declared the nation’s Ground-Based Interceptors (GBI) can now “defend the U.S. homeland from a small number (of ICBMs) with simple countermeasures.” But Russia and China each have thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles, many highly sophisticated, and they’re working on hypersonic ones. Missile Defense Agency photo THAAD missile launch “This isn’t about how to do the North Korean ICBM thing differently. (It’s) Russia and China,” Karako told me in an interview on the study, which comes out today. “If we’re going to take seriously the National Defense Strategy (released last week), which is that great power conflict is our no. 1 priority… this is how one might think about transforming what we’ve been doing on air and missile defense to this new reality.” The danger is not just the number of Chinese and Russian missiles but their variety, Karako said. “It’s the mixed threat problem, (aka) complex integrated attack — not just ballistic missiles or cruise missiles or UAVs but all at once,” he said, “using cruise missiles to target your ballistic missile defenses and vice versa.” Ballistic missiles fly a fast but predictable ballistic arc above the atmosphere. Cruise missiles and drones fly slower, in the atmosphere, but that means they can fly under radar and approach from unpredictable directions, like an aircraft. For the near future, both China and Russia are working on hypersonic boost-glide weapons, which are both fast and unpredictable. US Army missile defenses optimized against Scuds and crude North Korean ICBMs can’t necessarily handle these other threats — especially not all at once.