Strategic Defense Initiative Research Articles

Endoscopy Lifetime Systems Architecture: Scoping Out the Past to Diagnose the Future Technology.

Systems engineering captures the desires and needs of the customer to conceptualize a system from the overall goal down to the small details prior to any physical development. While many systems projects tend to be large and complicated (i.e., cloud-based infrastructure, long-term space travel shuttles, missile defense systems), systems engineering can also be applied to smaller, complex systems. Here, the system of interest is the endoscope, a standard biomedical screening device used in laparoscopic surgery, screening of upper and lower gastrointestinal tracts, and inspection of the upper airway. Often, endoscopic inspection is used to identify pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues, and hence, a requirement for endoscopic systems is the ability to provide images with high contrast between areas of normal tissue and neoplasia (early-stage abnormal tissue growth). For this manuscript, the endoscope was reviewed for all the technological advancements thus far to theorize what the next version of the system could be in order to provide improved detection capabilities. Endoscopic technology was decomposed into categories, using systems architecture and systems thinking, to visualize the improvements throughout the system's lifetime from the original to current state-of-the-art. Results from this review were used to identify trends in subsystems and components to estimate the theoretical performance maxima for different subsystems as well as areas for further development. The subsystem analysis indicated that future endoscope systems will focus on more complex imaging and higher computational requirements that will provide improved contrast in order to have higher accuracy in optical diagnoses of early, abnormal tissue growth.

A Weighted Decision-Level Fusion Architecture for Ballistic Target Classification in Midcourse Phase.

The recognition of warheads in the target cloud of the ballistic midcourse phase remains a challenging issue for missile defense systems. Considering factors such as the differing dimensions of the features between sensors and the different recognition credibility of each sensor, this paper proposes a weighted decision-level fusion architecture to take advantage of data from multiple radar sensors, and an online feature reliability evaluation method is also used to comprehensively generate sensor weight coefficients. The weighted decision-level fusion method can overcome the deficiency of a single sensor and enhance the recognition rate for warheads in the midcourse phase by considering the changes in the reliability of the sensor’s performance caused by the influence of the environment, location, and other factors during observation. Based on the simulation dataset, the experiment was carried out with multiple sensors and multiple bandwidths, and the results showed that the proposed model could work well with various classifiers involving traditional learning algorithms and ensemble learning algorithms.

The Influence of NATO Regional Missile Defense on European Security

The problem of missile defense is considered by Russian researchers, first of all, as part of the strategic stability problem in relations between Russia and the United States. At the same time, the impact of regional missile defense (theater missile defense) on regional security remains largely unexplored. The US and NATO leadership continue to claim that Russia has deployed intermediate-range missiles in the European part of the country. As a response to this step, in addition to other measures of regional deterrence towards Russia, it is planned to strengthen NATO’s regional missile defense system. The purpose of this article is to determine the potential impact of enhancing NATO’s theater missile defense on regional security. The answer to this question is important for understanding the prospects for European security. This article provides a critical analysis of Western experts’ scenarios of actions of Russia and NATO around the Baltic countries the place and role of theater missile defense in these scenarios and compares the doctrinal guidelines of the United States and Russia regarding regional nonnuclear deterrence. There are situations in which NATO’s enhanced regional missile defense could strengthen regional deterrence, and there are situations where this is less likely. Taking into account the doctrinal guidelines of both sides, conclusions are drawn about the destabilizing potential of NATO’s regional missile defense enhancement and that, in strengthening regional stability, there is no alternative to arms control and transparency regimes.

SWOT 분석을 통한 북핵미사일 위협에 대한 대응 전략

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the security environment in Northeast Asia and North Korea's nuclear missile threats amid the U.S.-China hegemony competition and to present response strategies. This study aims to prepare a response strategy by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of North Korea's response strategy for nuclear missiles and opportunities and threats of the security environment around the Korean Peninsula through SWOT analysis. The subject and scope of the study were limited to military response strategies for strengthening the Korea-U.S. alliance and developing Korea's 3-axis system. The Korea-U.S. alliance recognized the need for a Korean missile defense system that can play a role as a comprehensive strategic alliance that guarantees war suppression and peace on the Korean Peninsula and contributes to stability in Northeast Asia. In conclusion, in order to maintain a strong peace, it was confirmed that the peace system on the Korean Peninsula was maintained only when the strong Korea-U.S. alliance system was further strengthened and North Korea's nuclear missile response system was e stab lished early

The role of Russian air and missile defense systems

Russia’s nuclear and missile defense capabilities ensure its status on the global stage. In addition to protecting the homeland, contemporary Russia’s air and missile defense systems (AMDS) are harnessed as tools to undermine the West and contribute to the Kremlin’s global ties. Since the Cold War, Russia has sought to establish a global footprint; AMDS has served the Russian state as a reliable agent to expand its influence while simultaneously constraining that of the West, and in particular, the United States. Understanding how Russia employs AMDS will prove crucial to comprehending Russia’s global objectives and interests.

History of military laser technology development in military applications

The aim of this research is to study the development as well as the known cases of military applications of laser technologies – from the first lasers employed in auxiliary systems to modern complex independent laser systems. For better understanding and systematization of knowledge about development of historical applications in the military field, an analysis of publicly known knowledge about their historical applications in the leading world countries was conducted. The study focuses on development that was carried out by the superpowers of the Cold War and the present era, namely the United States, the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, and were built in metal. Multiple avenues of various applications of laser technology in military applications were studied, namely: military laser rangefinders; ground and aviation target designators; precision ammunition guidance systems; non-lethal anti-personnel systems; systems, designed to disable optoelectronics of military vehicles; as well as strategic and tactical anti-air and missile defense systems. To summarize and compare the results, an analysis of a number of previous works was considered, which considered the historical development, prospects and problems of the laser weaponry development. The issues of ethical use of laser weapons and the risks of their use in armed conflicts, which led to an international consensus in the form of conventions of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, were also considered. As a result of the analysis, a systematic approach to the classification of applications of laser technology in military products by three main areas of development was proposed: ancillary applications, non-lethal direct action on the human body and optical devices of military equipment, and anti-aircraft and anti-missile defensive systems. Due to the constant comprehensive modernization of laser technology systems in use, it was decided not to use the periodic classification model, but to indicate important and key events that indicated the main directions of further developmental work. However, it is important to note that the main focus of historical development of laser weapons depended not only on the technological limitations of the time, but also on the military-geopolitical situation in the world.

PREFACE

PREFACE

Debates on the Role of the U.S. Theater Missile Defense in the Regional Deterrence of North Korea and Iran

North Korea and Iran have been featured in all official U.S. missile defense policy documents since the late 1990s. The threat posed by two countries to the United States and their allies’ armed forces deployed in various regions has been the main incentive for the development of regional missile defense (theater missile defense) programs for more than 20 years. All this time, there has been an ongoing debate among American politicians, strategists, and academic experts on the prospects and specifics of the regional missile defense architectures, levels of U.S. allies’ participation in their development, as well as the very need to deploy these systems in North-East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The paper attempts to summarize and analyze the arguments of both the proponents and opponents of the idea to use the regional missile defense systems in the regional deterrence of North Korea and Iran.The first section examines approaches of different U.S. administrations to this issue. The author emphasizes that the Biden administration officials have already confirmed most of the basic postulates formulated by the Trump administration on the matter. According to them, the high efficiency of regional missile defense facilitates regional deterrence of the DPRK and Iran.The second section examines debates in the U.S. expert community. The author identifies two main approaches. The first basically repeats the arguments of the U.S. administration on the benefits of regional missile defense for regional stability. According to the second approach, the regional missile defense may destabilize the situation in the region without enhancing the protection of the U.S. and their allies’ armed forces.The third section provides a critical analysis of the debate. The author concludes that the arguments and assessments of both the opponents and proponents of the deterrence of the DPRK and Iran by means of regional missile defense are theoretically ill-founded and often one-sided. Subsequently, many crucial issues related to the use of missile defense systems and their potential impact on the regional security remain understudied. All this suggests that there is a need for a more detailed study of this issue, particularly given increasing regional tensions.

Constructing a realistic explanation of Turkish – US relations

ABSTRACT U.S. support for the Syrian-Kurdish forces aligned with the PKK; U.S. declining to extradite Fethullah Gülen; Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system; and Turkey’s aggressive interference with natural gas exploration in the Mediterranean are four issues that have roiled U.S.-Turkish relations. This paper examines neorealist and constructivist explanations for these issues and determines that they provide a less than complete understanding of this troubled relationship. The paper then turns to middle level alliance theory and domestic factors favored by neoclassical realism to fill in the explanatory gaps.

A strange sky: Security atmospheres and the technological management of geopolitical conflict in the case of Israel's Iron Dome

AbstractThis paper uses Israel's technologically advanced Iron Dome short‐range missile defence system as a deep empirical case study to examine how affective atmospheres mediate the relationship between state power and the agency of technological objects deployed to govern (in)security. Drawing theoretically from productive tensions between more‐than‐human theories of object‐oriented ontology, actor‐network theory and affect theory, it evaluates Iron Dome as a scintillating ‘bright object’ with variable capacities and limitations that exceed the sum of its components. Iron Dome both overreaches and contradicts the intentions and governance logics of state elites within a spatio‐temporally distributed array of architectures, infrastructures and practices. Within this milieu, its affective power is ambivalent and capricious, and can both enhance and undermine the atmospheric production of security in ways that exceed both instrumental functionality and human intentions. These findings indicate how a geography of security that attends to the affective dimension of object politics can account for the complex and non‐causal ways in which technologies can either reinforce or inhibit security as an anthropocentric endeavour.

The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World‐Making

ABSTRACTWhile I was reading Joseph Masco's disturbing book The Future of Fallout, news media reported that China had successfully tested a hypersonic missile, a military technology so advanced it could bypass the US missile defense system. This, many nervous commentators noted, put China ahead of the US in the global arms race, justifying further urgent military investments to catch‐ up. Masco's book is a damning appraisal of such mobilizations of existential threat from the outside and the ways they conceptually underpin the US industrial‐military complex. After World War II fantasies of imminent threat have taken different forms—from the scenarios of nuclear war in the Cold War to those mobilized since 2001 in the so‐called War on Terror. The Future of Fallout examines how these forms of endangerment have seamlessly worked together to colonize American everyday life at the psycho‐social and affective level, while diverting attention from actual forms of planetary violence that the petrochemical industry and the military complex commit.

Missile Race in South Asia: Security Challenges for Pakistan in the 21st Century

The article assesses the nature of missile competition between India and Pakistan and how it impacts deterrence and strategic stability in South Asia. It also analyses how their respective ballistic and cruise missile programmes developed. Taking the action-reaction model of arms racing, it concludes that there is indeed such a dynamic at play between the two countries. The missiles competition is very much linked to the nuclear competition as well. India’s Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system also factors into the competitions, whereby Pakistan was forced to develop missiles that could saturate and defeat it. The missile and nuclear competition has an overall negative impact on deterrence and strategic stability in South Asia. Pakistan’s biggest security challenge is to achieve security and deterrence against a hostile India without falling into the trap of an economically ruinous arms race. 

Consumer nationalism in digital space: A case study of the 2017 anti-lotte boycott in China

This study advances the understanding of consumer nationalism through an analysis of a Chinese boycott of South Korean goods. In early 2017, Chinese internet users expressed their strong aversion to the South Korean conglomerate Lotte and coordinated a folk boycott against it on the grounds that Lotte supported South Korea’s deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system, which China considered a threat. We explored the increasing convergence of consumer activities in the form of consumer nationalism with commercial entities’ marketing strategies and also with the state’s interests with respect to security and promoting national pride. The internet and new technologies have facilitated grassroots nationalist activities in terms of the ready circulation of information and mobilization of collective actions. We investigated a digital discursive space in the communicative interactions among stakeholders through which digital media not only amplify the scale and intensity of the mundane and everyday practice of nationalism but also blur the boundaries among the participating actors. Our research documented the multilateral relationships among stakeholders – individual consumers/media users, commercial entities, and the state – in practicing nationalism and reproducing the nation through (non)consumption.

Keeping the Technological Edge: The Space Arms Race and Anglo-American Relations in the 1980s

ABSTRACT In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan established the Strategic Defence Initiative [SDI], a research effort to develop the technologies for land- and space-based missile defence. This programme quickly unleashed anxieties about an arms race in space. Superpower military space activities were of significant concern to Britain because they had direct bearing on two key areas of its national security: space-based intelligence collection and the credibility of its nuclear deterrent. This analysis argues that the uses of space for military and intelligence purposes was an essential, though often invisible, aspect of the Anglo-American relationship during the Cold War. Despite the opposition of her senior advisors to SDI, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher maintained that the programme was necessary to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in an intensifying high-technology competition. Rather than opposing the expanded militarisation of space, she believed it required careful management to further British national security interests.

A Two-Stage Mass-to-drag Ratio Estimation Algorithm for Reentry Vehicles

Abstract Ballistic target tracking and identification is a key task for missile defense systems. A vital problem in ballistic target identification is how to estimate the target mass-to-drag ratio fast and accurately. The reentry phase of a ballistic missile is the last stage of its flight, and the reentry trajectory is significantly affected by the atmospheric drag. Based on the constraints of space flight dynamics, this paper proposes a two-stage algorithm to estimate the mass-to-drag ratio. This algorithm first estimates the position and velocity of the target in the free flight stage by using the least-squares method, and then estimates the mass-to-drag ratio of the target by using the radial range measurements from the reentry stage. Several trajectories of a ballistic target under different mass-to-drag ratios are simulated, and the proposed algorithm is verified using these simulated trajectories.

Summaries

Summaries

Wargaming with Quadratic Forms and Brauer Configuration Algebras

Recently, Postnikov introduced Bert Kostant’s game to build the maximal positive root associated with the quadratic form of a simple graph. This result, and some other games based on Cartan matrices, give a new version of Gabriel’s theorem regarding algebras classification. In this paper, as a variation of Bert Kostant’s game, we introduce a wargame based on a missile defense system (MDS). In this case, missile trajectories are interpreted as suitable paths of a quiver (directed graph). The MDS protects a region of the Euclidean plane by firing missiles from a ground-based interceptor (GBI) located at the point (0,0). In this case, a missile success interception occurs if a suitable positive number associated with the launches of the enemy army can be written as a mixed sum of triangular and square numbers.

Defending the United States: Revisiting National Missile Defense against North Korea

Abstract North Korea has made significant strides in its attempt to acquire a strategic nuclear deterrent. In 2017, it tested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and completed a series of nuclear test explosions. These may provide North Korea with the technical foundation to deploy a nuclear-armed ICBM capable of striking the United States. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile defense system is intended to deter North Korean nuclear coercion and, if deterrence fails, to defeat a limited North Korean attack. Despite two decades of dedicated and costly efforts, however, the GMD system remains unproven and unreliable. It has not demonstrated an ability to defeat the relatively simple and inexpensive countermeasures that North Korea can field. The GMD system has suffered persistent delays, substantial cost increases, and repeated program failures because of the politically motivated rush to deploy in the 1990s. But GMD and other U.S. missile defense efforts have provoked serious concerns in Russia and China, who fear it may threaten their nuclear deterrents. Diplomacy and deterrence may reassure Russia and China while constraining North Korea's nuclear program. An alternate airborne boost-phase intercept system may offer meaningful defense against North Korean missiles without threatening the Russian or Chinese deterrents.

Mutually assured surveillance at risk: Anti-satellite weapons and cold war arms control

ABSTRACT In the early 1970s, Moscow and Washington had established a satellite verification regime to monitor arms control treaty compliance. Satellites had become a primary source of transparency and stability in superpower relations. Yet by the end of the 1970s, both the United States and the USSR were developing anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons that could destroy observation satellites. This article uses recently declassified archival documents to show that Jimmy Carter pushed for ASAT limits due to his broader arms control agenda, whereas Ronald Reagan rejected ASAT arms control primarily because of its potential impact on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

China’s 2021 orbital-weapon tests

In mid-2021, China launched two unprecedented test weapons that travelled long distances in low-Earth orbit before releasing hypersonic gliders into the atmosphere, which hit targets on Chinese territory. Much is unknown about these tests, but this ‘orbital glider-release system’ is a new technology that could substantially increase China’s nuclear second-strike capabilities against the United States and serve as a hedge against the deployment by the US of new missile-defence systems.