[stalker]

... that Russia has 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads spread across a full triad, thousands more in reserve, and as many as 20,000 tactical nukes.

Furthermore, while the Soviet biological weapons program was massively downsized after the end of the Cold War, it was never comprehensively dismantled, and in all likelihood continues to this day.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well, mainly because some forumers harbor fantasies rolling back Russia to its Muscovite core (e.g. Rei, Akuma), taking away Kaliningrad (e.g. that new German poster), or destroying it entirely (e.g. Rugoz). They claim Russia is a gas station of a country with no military to speak of, that they are all alcoholic troglodytes who will run in terror before the martial valor of the Japanese Navy and the Chinese hordes in the Far East, and of a Europe newly invigorated by neoliberalism and Conchita.


Truly a map to warm their hearts.

So assume all that is true. Russia is Nigeria with snow, and will never stand before the Aryans and the Samurai.

Even so, we still have a problem!

1) Say Germany tries to take back Kaliningrad, Japan - Sakhalin, and China - the Russian Far East. But no matter how big and sophisticated their armies, even a few tactical nukes can comprehensively solve any number of tank fist problems. And Russia has thousands of them. Why would Russia not use them?

2) So they push on, losing millions and tens of millions of troops in the process. Historical justices are incorrected. Kamchatka returns to its rightful Yamato owners, while the Germans happily settle in Tavridia to build a multicultural, LGBT-friendly community with the Crimean Tatars and the Ukrainian Ukrainians(TM). Why will Russia, at this post, not engage in total nuclear war, turning most of their cities and factories into glass and utterly wrecking their economies and the war effort they support?

3) So let's assume their power of the will triumphs nonetheless, and the Chinese armies (under Japanese command, naturally) and the European Union armies continue deeper into Russia, killing off everyone in their path and looting all local resources to keep the whole thing going in the absence of resupply from their destroyed home bases. Faced with the extinction of the Russian nation, why exactly would it not then release all those biological goodies with mortality rates of up to 99%, and make said extinction pretty much universal? It doesn't even have to convey those bioweapons to the aggressor countries, just releasing them on the spot would still ensure it eventually spreads there as troops fly to and fro.

This all sounds rather fantastical, and guess what, it is! But it is realistic in the context of fantastical scenarios and dreams that are consistently put forwards by certain forumers. The difference is that they rarely if ever get called out on it, presumably because rational people are too flabbergasted by the sheer irrationality of such scenarios to challenge or even notice them.

[Rei Murasame]

Oh look, playing the nuke card. Is that like how Pakistan totally plays the nuke card all the time and then never uses it despite having lost Bangladesh to a unilateral secession carried out by the national bourgeoisie in that zone?

I am simply not afraid of any threats of nuclear holocaust. Especially since the time of the ballistic missile being an automatic trump card is coming to an end very soon. Frustrating the ballistic missile fanatics is easy:

Using NCADE will look kind of like how it was to use ASAT, except for the fact that ASAT was designed for shooting satellites down, and NCADE is designed for shooting ballistic missiles down.

• Produce the AMRAAM + NCADE (which is an AIM-120 compatible in all ways) and buy that from Raytheon.
  
  
• Put it on a conveniently available platform like say:
  
  • Boeing F-15K Slam Eagle (South Korea), or
  • Mitsubishi F-15J Kai (Japan), or
  • Any other F-15 variant (United States, Poland, whoever), or
  • Any unmanned drone that can plug-and-play with AMRAAM!
  
  
• Have a shared battlespace between land based radar, Aegis on ships, and pretty much anything else that has eyes, and have the platforms and the NCADE missile cued with that, for the most detailed picture of the situation possible.
  
  
• Move the platforms near to North Korea when Kim Jong-Un starts throwing a tantrum. Or move it near to Russia when Russians start throwing a tantrum. Or whoever. Wait for them to launch the ballistic missile from wherever they are launching it from.
  
  
• Since the platforms are already in the air and near them, feel free to go right up in there and launch your AMRAAM + NCADE. It goes straight up with solemn determination, and the second stage of NCADE gets it into the lower exo-atmosphere, it finds the enemy ballistic missile is there, collides with it full-body and destroys it before it can separate.
  
  
• Go home as fast as possible.
  
  
• Fist-bump.

Congratulations to them, they'll have just shot down a ballistic missile while it's still in boost-phase. The debris will probably fall back onto the place of origin for added hilarity.

Does anyone think this sounds far-fetched? No, it is not far-fetched, it is coming to a reality near you within a time frame of three years from now. The cost? Having an AMRAAM with NCADE, costs about 50% more than buying a normal AIM-120 AMRAAM. Which is incredibly cheap, given the incredible capability of such a weapon, and the fact that it requires no changes to be made to any existing aircraft. It just becomes instantly possible to load them up and go and use them.

You want to have this war in like what, 2040? 2050? And you think ballistic missiles will be a trump card by that time? Get real. Nuclear warheads on a ballistic missile was a game changer in 1970. NCADE is a game changer now. It's almost surreal that Raytheon executives and spokespersons have been gloating about NCADE's existence since like 2008, and you are here acting like no one can do anything against a ballistic missile. NCADE will be an off-the-shelf deterrent against that problem, which will not cost much to have. It will form part of a layered approach to ballistic missile defence.

The era of 'push a button, yawn, and watch your missile do horrible things to people', is soon going to be over.

What is a layered approach to ballistic missile defence? It's when defenders have the ability to respond to a would-be attacker in the following ways:

• 1. Try to hit it before it launches with a JDAM to their face carried by mutirole platforms.
• 2. Try to hit it during boost-phase with NCADE carried by interceptors with drop-tanks.
• 3. Try to hit it during mid-course with BM/SM-3 from Japanese ships, or with THAAD.
• 4. Try to hit during terminal phase with PAC-3, or with NCADE again.

The Russians would need to try to prevent anyone from doing #1, #2, or #3 (they can do nothing about #4) and that would mean engaging all of those people in air and sea battles to effectively 'clear the way' for the ballistic missile to go through unchallenged. You might as well be escorting it in all but name.

And before you talk about costs, let me do the bean counting too:

I'll use USD as the currency:

• Average cost of fancypants ballistic missile manly phalluses: 50 million USD each.
  
  
• Average cost of AMRAAM + NCADE air-to-air missiles: 1 million USD each.

Let's play this out. You can buy 100 ballistic missiles with various bells and whistles on them for 5 billion dollars in 2025, and I'll buy 100 NCADE missiles for 100 million dollars and attach them to already-existing F-15 variants in 2025.

Bean counters will say that you are vastly outspending me in that area in FY 2025, by a multiplier of... 50 times more! Sure, you are spending 50 million dollars to build a missile that I can shoot down with a 1 million dollar missile and planes from the 1980s that I already have.

I can play that game all day, and be sure that you will go bankrupt first.

[JRS1]

20,000 * 5% = 1000.

I thought you were an engineer Rei?

[Rei Murasame]

I don't think I used the number '20000' anywhere in my post. What precisely are you saying I've done wrong here?

[JRS1]

20,000 missiles was the figure in the OP.

Assume 95% success with these NCADE things, and that leaves 1000.

I dont like the risk assesment.

[Rei Murasame]

20,000 missiles was the figure in the OP.

Well, multiply it out yourself then. If I tell you how much 100 of them cost, you surely can find out how much 20000 (really 4000 if you are counting only the ballistic missiles) of them cost without me having to handhold people all the way there, right?

Assume 95% success with these NCADE things, and that leaves 1000.

Even if you assume that the success rate is 95%, it's 95% and you get four chances to shoot at it with different weapons systems, two of those chances being with NCADE.

Also, why are we assuming that Russia would have a chance to make 20000 (4000) launches at all anyway?

I dont like the risk assesment.

There is a certain stage where you become so risk averse that you can never get anything done. If Russia says, "if you touch my interests at all, strategic nuclear weapons will be used", our response should not be "oh okay, we'll never touch you then", it ought to instead be, "okay, you just wait right there, while we find a way to get around that problem". Hence, NCADE, THAAD, PAC-3, etc.

[roxunreal]

The 500-600 nukes that only France and the UK have are enough to put a hole through Russia to the center of the Earth, in some stupid fictional scenario in which anyone would even dare use a nuke in the first place. Hence why the "Russia has 3632785612378 nukes so beware" argument is just ridiculous.

That's not even mentioning the US arsenal, to which a Russian response would be even harder as Russian submarines are best known for being in the business of drowning and irradiating their crews.

[JRS1]

600*5%= 30

[Typhoon]

I don't see NCADE materializing anytime soon, I think the last we heard of it was a few million in concept development in 2008, much like the rest of the boost phase segment it has been quietly dropped. The US National Research Council released a pretty damning report in 2011 as follows...

“Boost-phase missile defense is not practical or cost-effective under real-world conditions for the foreseeable future,” the report says. “All boost-phase intercept (BPI) systems suffer from severe reach-versus-time-available constraints..."

Ballistic missiles and especially Russian solid propellant designs are far too fast to intercept even if a favorable distance from the launcher could ever be achieved and maintained.

I can play that game all day, and be sure that you will go bankrupt first.

You forgot to buy your aircraft to put NCADE on so the missile never left the box it was delivered in.

[Rei Murasame]

The 500-600 nukes that only France and the UK have are enough to put a hole through Russia to the center of the Earth, in some stupid fictional scenario in which anyone would even dare use a nuke in the first place. Hence why the "Russia has 3632785612378 nukes so beware" argument is just ridiculous.

That too. My response didn't factor in the idea that after their attempt is intercepted, someone might use a nuclear weapon against Russian targets as well.

Also, I should add, before anyone decides to question whether my description of NCADE is true and correct, here's this:

The Network Centric Airborne Defense Element (NCADE) is an anti-ballistic missile system being developed by Raytheon for the Missile Defense Agency. On Sept. 18, 2008 Raytheon announced it had been awarded a $10 million contract to continue NCADE research and development.[1] The NCADE system is a boost phase interceptor based heavily on the AIM-120 AMRAAM, with the AMRAAM fragmentation warhead replaced by a hit-to-kill vehicle powered by a hydroxylammonium nitrate monopropellant rocket motor from Aerojet.[2][3]

The launch vehicle will be a Boeing F-15C Golden Eagle with an AESA radar.[4]

NCADE Test Intercept (03 Dec 2007)
[youtube]S8J_G0Mj5As[/youtube]

True to its name, NCADE’s 3rd party cueing capabilities make it most valuable when the missile and/or its launching platform can receive targeting data from a wide variety of sources: Naval vessels with Cooperative Engagement Capability. Large X-band ABM radars. Land-based air & missile defense systems. Aerial platforms like E-8 JSTARs aircraft or NATO’s forthcoming AGS. JLENS aerostats, or powered HAA airships with ISIS radars. Etc.

If the missile concept works, an AMRRAM + NCADE equipped aircraft plugged into this network could be deployed in theater or within the United States, becoming a useful defensive player against either incoming cruise missiles or ballistic missiles.

[...]

NCADE could be employed from various platforms against stealthy cruise missiles, homing in on their jet engine exhaust with cueing from advanced infrared scanners and radars mounted on high-altitude aerostats or airships like JLENS or HAA/IRIS. At just 330 pounds, its low weight makes it liftable by long-endurance aerial platforms like the MQ-9 Reaper, among others, offering a persistent cruise missile defense option that cannot be matched by manned fighters alone.

___________

You forgot to buy your aircraft to put NCADE on so the missile never left the box it was delivered in.

The aircraft already exists because it's an ageing 1980s model or a drone.

Ballistic missiles and especially Russian solid propellant designs are far too fast to intercept even if a favorable distance from the launcher could ever be achieved and maintained.

In Stalker's scenario there is a war going on inside Russia, so it would be very odd indeed if allied aircraft inside Russian territory find themselves unable to get within a favourable distance of launchers inside Russia.

It would also be very odd indeed if those which are not intercepted at boost-phase, then end up failing to be intercepted by anything at mid-course, and are met by failures again at the end-phase.

[Typhoon]

The aircraft already exists because it's an ageing 1980s model or a drone.

Russian ICBM's already exist but even if we ignore that you still need fuel etc. to fly your aircraft, what are the costs associated with that?

We can keep going along this line, simply the costs of providing constant coverage over even a passive Russia are going to be massive and impossible to achieve.

In Stalker's scenario there is a war going on inside Russia, so it would be very odd indeed if allied aircraft inside Russian territory find themselves unable to get within a favorable distance of launchers inside Russia.

Stalker describes his scenario as fantastical, in reality Russia has sufficient military capability to prevent point 1. without worrying about the need to employ tactical nuclear weapons or be concerned that their employment might be complicated. The 1980's era aircraft you describe would never get past Russian interceptor aircraft or missiles in sufficient quantity to threaten the effectiveness of a nuclear strike.

[Rei Murasame]

Russian ICBM's already exist but even if we ignore that you still need fuel etc. to fly your aircraft, what are the costs associated with that?

Why does this matter? I'm pretty sure that fuel is already accounted for.

We can keep going along this line, simply the costs of providing constant coverage over even a passive Russia are going to be massive and impossible to achieve.

You don't need to have constant coverage, you just need to start using it when you are actually doing crisis initiation. There's no point being up there all the time, if you know they aren't doing anything.

Stalker describes his scenario as fantastical, in reality Russia has sufficient military capability to prevent point 1. without worrying about the need to employ tactical nuclear weapons or be concerned that their employment might be complicated. The 1980's era aircraft you describe would never get past Russian interceptor aircraft or missiles in sufficient quantity to threaten the effectiveness of a nuclear strike.

Obviously in Stalker's fantastical scenario, something has already cleared the path by either partially or wholly disintegrating Russia's C4ISR, which realistically is the only way that anything belonging to the allies would ever be flying inside Russia with impunity in the first place. So the 'NCADE jalopy package' (for lack of a better way of expressing it ) would have to have flown in behind something else considerably more formidable.

[Fasces]

Oh look, playing the nuke card. Is that like how Pakistan totally plays the nuke card all the time and then never uses it despite having lost Bangladesh to a unilateral secession carried out by the national bourgeoisie in that zone?

C'mon Rei.

Bangladeshi liberation war: 1971

Kirana-I: 1983

Chagai-I: 1998

[jessupjonesjnr87]

The threat of a nuclear strike is far more effective than the actual affects of one. No matter how strong a nation claims it's defences are this his will not diminish until the next nuclear missile is fired in anger.
Modern ICBM's can now also be fitted with multiple dummy warheads and counter measures.

[Rei Murasame]

C'mon Rei.

Bangladeshi liberation war: 1971

Kirana-I: 1983

Chagai-I: 1998

Exactly, I don't see them re-annexing Bangladesh yet, do you?

Modern ICBM's can now also be fitted with multiple dummy warheads and counter measures.

That's why it's good to hit them before they start MIRVing, and before they start using counter-measures. Also, there's a thing they are developing now to defeat the course-adjustment dodging technique that some missiles use.

[Fasces]

Exactly, I don't them re-annexing Bangladesh yet, do you?

Why would they want to?

[Typhoon]

Why does this matter? I'm pretty sure that fuel is already accounted for.

NCADE would be a pretty remarkable missile if for 1 million dollars you also got infinite fuel. You need to factor in operating costs for your aircraft to provide NCADE coverage.

You don't need to have constant coverage, you just need to start using it when you are actually doing crisis initiation.

Coverage of Russian airspace (or at least Russian missile sites - if they can be found or reached) for the duration and post-crisis is still going to be impossible.

, which realistically is the only way that anything belonging to the allies would ever be flying inside Russia with impunity in the first place

Looking at the F-35 I don't think Japan or Germany are going to get anything like this anytime soon.

[Rei Murasame]

Why would they want to?

Because, if you appreciate the humour, "Bangladesh remains an integral part of Pakistan".

It almost sounds Putin-esque, doesn't it?

_______

NCADE would be a pretty remarkable missile if for 1 million dollars you also got infinite fuel. You need to factor in operating costs for your aircraft to provide NCADE coverage.

Yes, I'm sure that someone will do that, and I'm sure that any sensible nation state is not going to be unable to pay for the fuel to carry out an operation. The Iraq war cost like eleventy gagillion dollars, and George W. Bush just was like, "hee hee let's have tax cuts at the same time as doing it".

If he can do that, then this thing is certainly possible.

Coverage of Russian airspace (or at least Russian missile sites - if they can be found or reached) for the duration and post-crisis is still going to be impossible.

Throw money at it. Stop being so down about this, can you just be optimistic? A little bit?

Looking at the F-35 I don't think Japan or Germany are going to get anything like this anytime soon.

What do you mean by this? Also, America can do that part themselves if they are in play.

[Bridgeburner]

Setting aside the implausibilities of such a scenario, even assuming that NCADE equipped fighters manage to penetrate deep into Russian airspace and achieve air superiority and a 100% success rate (lol) against Russian land ICBMs, the Slavophobe alliance has no way of stopping the modern day incarnation of Biopreparat, which can and will take the entire global economy down with it, and can neither account for the entirety (and they have to take care of every last single one) of Russias SSBN fleet.

The USN is good, but they only have so many CVBGs and Aegis cruisers

I don't see why NCADE is such a supposed gamechanger. Nuclear targeteers/planners have been doing this for decades with counterforce. The US still maintains orders for nuclear targeteers that emphasize a counterforce first strike against Russian nuclear weapons.

http://www.fas.org/pubs/_docs/occasionalpaper7.pdf

Most Americans would be surprised to discover that the instructions to our nuclear targeteers still include a requirement for a surprise first strike against Russian nuclear forces to destroy them on the ground. It is time to shift the focus from reducing numbers of nuclear weapons to reducing the missions of nuclear weapons.

Highlighted on page 11 in the FAS report

"Constrain an adversarys WMD employment through US counterforce strikes aimed at destroying adversay escalatory options"

If the Slavophobe Alliance is worried about a Russian first strike, they(The U.S) will strike first rather than resort to ham-fisted, and ultimately unreliable attempts at trying to contain the destruction that Russia can unleash and drag down the world with it. Nuclear counterforce first strikes >>> NCADE in terms of "success ratio" and neither has the chance of being particularly successful.

NCADEs uses are probably intended for a nation with a small ballistic missile arsenal and nowhere the near the conventional parity approaching the United States (i.e North Korea, Tehran and possibly Pakistan rather than anywhere near approaching Russia levels). Russia has enough conventional weaponry to make the most optimistic NCADE success rate a bleak prospect.

There is little contingency for stopping a Russian sub (and only a handful have to sneak through) parking itself off the East/West Coast, or Europe, and irradiating and/or biologically contaminating the biosphere via Biopreparat 2.0. The fact is, even if ABM technology (aegis cruisers and ABM "missile shields) reach 99% success rate levels, no country on this planet is prepared adequately to deal with bioengineered WMDs or a "biological" first strike.

[Typhoon]

Throw money at it. Stop being so down about this, can you just be optimistic? A little bit?

Sorry Rei but I can think of better ways to spend the money.