Pulsers in the Pentagon

I'm starting to worry that former Bush administration officials still in the Pentagon are infecting people with the idea that EMP is a threat to military operations. Unless they're counting on being in a nuclear war, I just don't see it happening. But I see this in the Joint Operating Environment 2010:

A current example of the kind of technological surprise that could prove deadly would be an adversary’s deployment and use of disruptive technology, such as electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) weapons against a force without properly hardened equipment. The potential effects of an electromagnetic pulse resulting from a nuclear detonation have been known for decades. The appearance of non-nuclear EMP weapons could change operational and technological equations. They are being developed, but are joint forces being adequately prepared to handle such a threat? The impact of such weapons would carry with it the most serious potential consequences for the communications, reconnaissance, and computer systems on which the Joint Force depends at every level. 

This paragraph was in the 2008 JOE as well. The worrying about impact on joint forces is ridiculous. I can't see any interest by any adversarial country who's thinking, hey, I'm going to make EMP weapons so that insurgents and small armed forces can run out and immobilize the MRAPs. Then we'll have those Americans just where we want them... Seriously, it's pretty easy to harden electronics. We used to do it all the time. All we have to do, if the DOD is serious about this, is add a few dollars to those mission-critical systems. Done and done. And yet we also have DepSecDef William Lynn voicing his concerns about hybrid missile threats:

Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn talked about a “new and more complex era of hybrid threats” in which potential U.S. adversaries might combine high-tech and low-tech tools to mount a surprise attack. And to make his point, he drew on a history lesson: German plans during World War II to develop a longer-range version of the A4 ballistic missile, better known as the V-2 rocket (pictured here in postwar testing).

“Had the war lasted longer,” Lynn said, “The Wehrmacht may have been able to hit New York.”

Lynn then made an intriguing reference to another secret Nazi rocket program. “In a desperate attempt to attack targets in the U.S. with existing capabilities, they launched Project Laffarenz,” Lynn said. “What the Germans lacked in range they tried to make up for in inventiveness.”

In the deputy secretary’s telling, Project Laffarenz involved using U-boats to tow a battery of V-2s across the Atlantic on submersible barges. “Once within striking distance of the East Coast, the V-2 carrying containers would be flooded with water, righting launch tubes,” he said. “The Germans got as far as building a carrying container at the Baltic port at Elbing before the allied assault stopped any deployment.”

You know, the way the Heritage Foundation thinks that Iran's going to sell a nuclear-armed Scud missile to al Qaeda, who's going to put it on a freighter and bring it to the United States to turn our civilization back to the Renaissance era... Strangely enough, the DOD website link on the Danger Room post no longer leads to Lynn's speech. Lynn (and Gen. Cartwright) were at a missile defense conference in Washington DC, telling industry heads how this administration valued the program. In fact, the Obama administration wants missile defense to the point that it's going to spend nearly a billion dollars more than the Bush administration in FY11 ($9.9 billion), despite mounting technical challenges and failures by its contractors (again we see - difference between a liberal hawk and a conservative hawk - nothing, really). I do think that the US government should be concerned about hardening electronics in military and commercial satellites and at critical points of the electronic infrastructure. China or Russia, real nuclear powers, could do something serious if they wanted to. But it won't require a national missile defense system to defeat terrorist EMP weapons or a "rogue nation" missile launch.

In other news, the Heritage Foundation is proposing "EMP Recognition Day." Yeah, really. They want Congress to pretend that the Heritage Foundation's worst fantasies about terrorist nuclear attacks will occur. Because that's what serious, responsible think tanks do - they fear-monger and mislead politicians in attempts to justify huge weapon procurement systems that we can't afford and don't need. But if terrorists do cause an EMP attack that wipes out American civilization, I look forward to Jessica Alba bringing messages to my company.

Comments

[Belphagor1527]

hybrid missile...I was kinda hoping that was an electric version of the regular missile.

[Thomas]

Why can the Pentagon not get away from WWII era thinking?

We've not faced a state-aligned, technologically equivalent, regular force in half a century but they still think in terms of terror weapons, technological superiority and literal battlefields.

When is this mode of thinking going to change?

[George Smith]

When is this mode of thinking going to change?

I think there is a crippling delusion that's embedded here. And the patient can never operate on himself to get it out.

Page down through what I had to say on this earlier in the week here.

At the bottom you'll see an air force paper I've had laying around for awhile. It was written in 2005 and it's thesis was predicting the electromagnetic pulse weapon threat in 2010. And people who think about future terror weapons always just cast around for stuff which superficially looks like a coming thing or which is cast as futuristic and plausible in a variety of popular entertainments.

One assumes the people reviewing this in 2005 thought it seemed sensible. In reality, there was never anything sensible about it. In a real university graduate science course, as opposed to an 'air university', the person delivering it would been roasted during seminar.

I guess one could write a book, or at least a long chapter, on why this kind of groupthink on myths becomes so dug in to the point that it spawns continuing discussion that it's very real. But it's like coming across Ghost Hunters or a show on the Loch Ness monster on SyFy. They're popular and ineradicable because a certain low common denominator, a large one, believes in them no matter what evidence to the contrary exists.

The fact is that while the pulsers are used to push missile defense -- that's Heritage's thing -- there has also been a hard core illogical component to them.

[ry]

Sigh.

ABMD is a necessity. Maybe not in terms that people have been pushing, but it is. The ASBM that the PLA is developing is not tidlywinks.

You look at what someone else is doing to counter you and you find a counter to it. That's the whole cycle. Some nations are toying with entry denial strategy/tactics/weapons. EMP is one. Unfortunately its become the 'cancer' of NIH/NSF funding(where you need to find a way of linking it to cancer research so as to not get 'circular filed' in the first round of cuts with grant proposals).

Would an EMP play hob with a CBG? Some. Not sure how much, but it won't do it any good and we'd be better off if the DDG and CG escorts were capable of knocking 'vampires' out. Would play far more with the non-hardened civilian infrastructure(which PLA and DPRK can only hit the West Coast given the capabilities of the No-Dong and DF series, so, who cares, it's just the West Coast.) Nah. Assymetry isn't something an enemy could seek to exploit to make up for their weaknesses.

And, no, it's not GHost Hunters group think. It's more like NCW adherents, BH Liddel-HArt and Guderian armor devotees vs. non-mechanized forces guys in the 20's and 30s, or the continual fights over whether the Army should've kept the M-14 instead of the M-16. People have a reason to hold to what they believe and take it to extremes. When they're right they're seen as genuises(like Watson and Crick over the double helix of DNA) and those who are wrong are derided as mouth breathers instead of meerely being wrong (Linus Pauling who thought and pushed for a triple helix(and he pushed hella hard on that) who was shat upon despite already holding 2, count them 2!, Noble Prizes).

Yeah, EMP threat is majorly overblown, but not to the point that it's a religion like 'the population bomb' or 'scarcity' adherents.

[George Smith]

Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons have been promised, predicted and everything else for close to twenty years. There's so much rubbish literature on them many people actually think they're here. We have them, they have them, next year we'll have them, next year a foreign military will, we have something but it's still a prototype or needs fine tuning and testing, contract have been granted to developers for well over a decade, pick your flavor. Naturally, some of the people who believe in this are also in the militaries of foreign countries because they assiduously read what is published in the US. So they emit noises that they too will investigate the use of electromagnetic pulse weapons.