No, the protests were mostly genuine. That's what happens when your country is so up it's own ass with religious totalitarianism that you set yourself up to not have water at all in the next few decades. Average citizens generally get really pissy when you take away the "At least I'm not literally dying" excuse.
The US could not participate in that because we had moved assets to south america to fuck with Venezuela. The war in Iran wasn't started until the USS Ford had been re-positioned back to the middle east.
If you're claiming they've been duped, at least provide an argument to say why they're wrong. Preferably with links to credible research (sigh, what's "credible" anyway?)
The CIA, as its tradition demands, never meddles when the conditions are ripe to promote American interests. They just let nature take its course from afar.
We had Israel friendly politicians for at least 50 years, all of which who eagerly wanted to fuck up Iran ("Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" anyone?) and we didn't because they were at least sober enough to understand that it was moronic and would obviously be some sort of strategic defeat or decades long boondoggle.
In what world would a specialized, niche, high precision, high readiness rocket meant to loft a very advanced interceptor munition into an extremely high velocity interception ever be cheap?
These things are closing at like mach 20. Physics says that's hard to do. That means it's expensive.
For reference, $75 million is in the realm of a Falcon 9 launch, which is a very cost optimized platform that doesn't have to place a very very precision instrument payload in a very very specific point in space to prepare it for a high energy, extremely difficult interception.
The cost primarily comes from the work needed to be done to make sure it works, not the raw materials. But there probably are some pretty expensive materials in it too.
This is what we had to build in the 60s to allow a missile to know where it physically existed precisely enough to allow it to 50% of the time hit within a circle of ~50 meters.
When you get to certain points in physics, certain energy regimes, you no longer are building machines or tools or something mass market. You are building artisan scientific instruments, and then sometimes gluing explosives to them.
Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner table with the precision and accuracy of the above singular component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was a long time ago.
"Tech" and some of the developments of the past few decades have really confused people. The miniaturization of the transistor, and building billions of transistors on a small slice of silicon is an aberration, an anomaly. Most things don't get "Better and better and cheaper and cheaper" like that because shit just doesn't scale infinitely and in general materials science isn't that precise.
For these ground based midcourse interceptors, they have to precisely loft the interceptor package at an incoming projectile. They have to shoot a bullet with a bullet, except the target bullet might even be moving around a bit, and your ability to precisely quantify the exact parameters of it's position and velocity is already limited. Is your position and velocity measurement an inch off? Two inches? Is that too much?
How well have you quantified the thrust of your rocket engine? THIS specific rocket engine, not a random one from the batch. Will you be off in a direction by a few meters per second? That might be enough to scuttle your interception.
IIRC this is the interception payload, a kinetic kill vehicle:
Then, are any of those nozzles slightly less smooth than they should be? That's a miss. Did propellant slosh in an unexpected way? That's a miss, Chicago is now a smoldering crater. Incoming round bounce your rader signal in just a slightly different way than you had the data to know about? Miss, San Fransisco now has significantly cheaper real estate. Chaotic properties of hot expanding gas slightly different than your simulation in the unluckiest way? Miss.
You have to exhaustively inspect, reinspect, quality control, test, simulate, retest, catalogue, document, every single component. You have to be able to predict, almost perfectly, how every single component will act and perform in a situation you will never get a test for.
High energy physics is always going to be hard, never cheap, because high concentrations of energy are literally what the universe itself is trying to reduce. The rules of reality itself are against you.
A creator on youtube named Alexander the Ok has done wonderful videos on a lot of the technology that goes into these systems, especially older, less classified systems.
Wow...just wow. Not a GNC engineer, but that drift spec strikes me as exceptionally good today, let alone the 60s.
EDIT:
> Even modern laser ring gyros do not even share a dinner table with the precision and accuracy of the above singular component of the Peacekeeper ICBMs, and that was a long time ago.
No kidding; full transparency, that was my basis of comparison.
Israel seems to be using Arrow 3s for this exact effect. If we are to believe the news, the Arrow 3s hit bomblet arme missiles attacking Dimona ( after the one that got through)
Ballistic missiles do not cost only 100k USD to build. They are very unlikely to ever be that cheap. Rocketry requires enough precision to not explode on the launcher. Ballistic missiles with conventional munitions are only useful for point targets. Cluster munitions like Iran uses are an admission that they aren't targeting specific systems, aren't expecting to penetrate defenses, or other reasons why they would waste a ballistic missile on the modern equivalent of the Paris Gun.
Harassment weapons don't do much. None of the harassment campaigns done by the Nazis for example really amounted to anything.
Modern Shaheds can be possibly built at a scale to affect that, but we really haven't seen it happen yet. That would be something like thousands launched in a single wave against a single city or installation. But they still lack the precision and warhead to be targeted meaningfully.
You need WW2 industrial scale manufacturing lines worth of Shaheds to get beyond harassment. You need to be producing hundreds a day or more. That kind of industry is nearly impossible to protect from your adversary so unlikely to take shape.
> None of the harassment campaigns done by the Nazis for example really amounted to anything.
I hate to say it, but the aerial bombing campaign against Germany in WW2 was not terribly effective. The Germans were quick to decentralize the factories, and burning down houses did not impair the war effort much.
What did work was bombing the oil infrastructure. Germany ran out of gas.
What also worked was using the B-17 fleet as bait for the Luftwaffe. The Luftwaffe could not help but rise to defend the country, and then they were shot down by P-51s and P-47s and Spits. The goal was to erase the Luftwaffe, and it worked. (Even though German warplane production increased, the pilots were dead and irreplaceable.)
To deny the US the use of any nearby airfields (Okinawa, several others in Japan an Philippines). This will limit US airpower to carriers, which are few and sinkable.
Of course, China wants to be able to fight those F35s in the air - to mitigate the damage they can do to them (while the F35s still have airfield/carriers to land on) - also in order to make it easier to sink those carriers.
Still, you can bet that all US nearby airfields would be peppered very early in the conflict.
Says the person that gets rocketed in the next civil war.
The more unstable our country becomes the more meaningful weapons like this will develop.
Hell, if I were a nation that controlled my internet and other information, I'd start injecting effective versions into the internet of 'free' countries so they could take themselves out.
Compared to an actual stinger missile and its usual application, yes. Deployed against soft targets like trucks, cars, or homes, it has the potential to be very effective.
Dunno where the parent comment was referring to, but different countries have different standards. In Colombia the bus transit stations all have breathalyzer stations and the drivers have to pass the breathalyzer before starting their shifts. It was pretty wild to see as an outsider but completely unremarkable to everyone else.
The US could not participate in that because we had moved assets to south america to fuck with Venezuela. The war in Iran wasn't started until the USS Ford had been re-positioned back to the middle east.
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