Missile Defense Research Articles

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.

Distributed Control Technology for Air and Missile Defence Operations

Distributed Control Technology for Air and Missile Defence Operations

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. 

Arms race in the 21st century: Consequences and mitigating measures

Historically, arms races generate a great deal of interest both in the academia and policy circles for a variety of reasons. They are widely believed to have significant consequences for states' security. In the debate over their consequences, one side holds that arms races increase the probability of war by undermining military stability and straining political relations. The opposing view holds that engaging in an arms race is often a state's best option for avoiding war when faced with an aggressive adversary. The 21st Century is witnessing the return of arms race amongst states. Coupling with the advancements in technology, the menace of arms race in the 21st Century, therefore, if not curtailed could lead to war more devastating than witnessed in the last century. Using basic content analysis the study revealed that the 21st Century arms races are mainly in the area of nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, missile defence, cyber-warfare, and space weaponisation. The arms races are prominently amongst the world‟s great powers such as the United States of America, Russia, and China as well as developing states like Iran and North Korea. This study discovered that nuclear weapons are still at the forefront of arms race in the 21st Century, despite efforts to reduce their role in global affairs and to negotiate further reductions in quantity. Also, states like the USA, China, and Russia are exploiting the advantage of speed and manoeuvrability to engage in arms race in hypersonic missiles. This has prompted nations to compete in the development of missile defences in order to counter the present missile threats. Furthermore, in anticipation for future warfare, nations such as the USA, China, and Russia are in arms race to weapon sise space by deploying space to space, earth to space and space to earth weapons, where appropriate. War in the 21st Century could in turn lead to more human, material, and environmental casualties due to the latest advancement in technologies and modernisation of existing weapons and associated equipments. Consequently, measures are needed to ensure that arms races in the 21st Century, if not eliminated, are reduced to the barest minimum in order to promote international peace and security. Renewed commitments on existing arms control measures, formulation of new arms control measures, and the complete elimination of nuclear weapons are the measures that could be considered.

Cooperative Smooth Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode Guidance with Tracking Differentiator for Active Aircraft Defense

Aimed at the poor performance of guidance algorithms designed based on a linearized model in active defense under large leading angle deviation, both-way and one-way cooperative sliding mode guidance algorithms based on the smooth nonsingular terminal sliding mode for the defense missile are proposed. The relative kinematics and linearized models of the target, the active defense missile, and the attacking missile are established. In the design process, two smooth nonsingular terminal sliding mode surfaces are constructed based on zero-effort miss distance and zero-effort velocity, as well as their integral values. A tracking differentiator is introduced for excessive initial command deviation to meet the overload constraints of the active missile and the target. The sensitivity of guidance law to the estimated time-to-go error is reduced, and the target is allowed to perform an independent evasive maneuver. The effectiveness of the proposed guidance strategy is verified by numerical simulation and compared to the existing guidance strategies, the high accuracy, anti-chattering, and strong robustness of the proposed guidance algorithm are verified.

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.

MISSILE POSITION ESTIMATION USING UNSCENTED KALMAN FILTER

Missiles are military rocket weapons having an automatic control system to locate its targets or adjust its direction. Indonesia itself, which is a country of archipelago, covers air area of its largest territory, followed by sea area and land area. Logically, the existence of missile defense equipment (the main weapon system) or precisely the type of long-range missile is acceptable to support the defense and security of the Republic of Indonesia, but its consequences to be operated in the territory of Indonesia itself, in case of an occufanct of an error in targeting the target, will fall on of harm to its own national territory. Therefore, trajectory estimation for guided missiles is the basic requirement for guided missiles to be aimed at the precise targets. The trajectory is used as a guide to direct that the missile reach the target by following the given path. To maintain the accuracy of the trajectory continuously, the missile trajectory estimation was made by using Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) Algorithm. This algorithm was used to estimate nonlinear dynamic models The simulation results showed that the UKF method was effective, showing the accuracy of 97% by the UKF method

Intruder detection and interdiction modeling: A bilevel programming approach for ballistic missile defense asset location

A relevant, applied problem in the location analysis literature is the effective location and allocation of resources to detect and interdict intruders traversing a defended region. For selected applications, defender resources are designed to detect and/or interdict intruders on specific parts (or stages) of the respective paths. Within this context, this research is motivated by the problem of effectively defending a set of population centers against attack by a limited number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (i.e., intruders). Herein, the defensive actions entail the location of ballistic missile defense resources to detect and interdict missiles over a range of possible launch-to-target missile paths and their respective, spatio-temporally defined stages of flight. Assumed is an adversary capability to observe the defensive asset locations and respond with an intercontinental ballistic missile targeting strategy that maximizes the expected damage of an attack. The research presents a bilevel programming model for the corresponding Stackelberg game and, via transformations and reformulations, identifies a single-objective mixed-integer nonlinear program that can be addressed with any of several commercially available solvers. Upon proving the convexity of the resulting formulation to assure reported solutions are globally optimal, comparative testing identifies the commercial solver ANTIGONE as preferred for solving instances of the underlying problem. Empirical testing via a designed experiment examines which scenario features of the underlying problem are most significant for predicting the required computational effort to solve problem instances, yielding insight into the practical nature of this research to address instances of increasing size.

Modeling and simulation of equipment support scheme based on Agent

The core of missile equipment support task is to improve the availability of equipment. Support scheme simulation is an economical, feasible and efficient method to evaluate the effect of equipment support. According to the characteristics of air defense missile equipment, the modeling framework of missile equipment support scheme based on Agent is proposed, and the state change warning modeling and equipment support scheme modeling are carried out. The simulation process and concrete implementation method are explained. Finally, a certain type of missile equipment is taken as an example to verify the simulation results. The simulation results show that the established model can reflect the actual health status of the equipment, and the availability of the equipment can be improved according to the maintenance support strategy given by the simulation.

Summaries

Summaries

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.

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.

How Can Missile Defences Affect Nuclear Deterrence? An Offence-Defence Theoretical Perspective

How will ballistic missile defences affect nuclear deterrence?This is a question as old as the nuclear revolution but hasattained significance in the current security environment whereinnuclear-armed states are increasingly pursuing development anddeployment of BMD and their doctrinal integration with strategicforces and postures. Yet, the advent of BMD is bereft of conceptualclarity as their effects on nuclear deterrence is yet to be aptlyunderstood. This article explores the utility of the offence-defencetheory to determine whether BMD will inherently remain defensiveor could provide a net deterrent value when postured and operatedalongside offensive forces.

The upcoming 2022 Missile Defense Review and the Biden administration missile defense policy

The U.S. Missile Defense Review (MDR) draws attention as a central document in this area. The two reviews published so far (2010 and 2019) within a year of the Nuclear Posture Review were an important addition to the National Defense Strategy. The latter is devoted to clarifying Washington's political-military course, and the Nuclear Posture Review, the MDR, and the Space Posture Review deal with the most important elements of the military policy of the United States. Taking into account the positions expressed by the Biden administration officials, conclusions are drawn about the content of the 2022 MDR. In addition, the prospects for the implementation of certain areas of the U.S. missile defense policy are assessed, taking into account the experience of 2002-2021. If the current document is made the same way as previous ones, then it covers five main topics – missile threats, homeland missile defense, regional missile defense, programs’ organization, and cooperation with allies. The Biden administration’s two budget requests for missile defense (FY2022 and FY2023) suggest a course of action. In general, the new approach to the development of missile defense being applied can provide tangible results in the face of a possible reduction in funding. The role of allies in regional missile defense architectures may increase as a result of the interpretation of experience of the use of missiles and air and missile defense systems.

Системы ПРО и концепции ограниченной ядерной войны

In the case of an intercepting massive nuclear missile attack, the technical capabilities of modern missile defense systems remain poor, nevertheless, the options for using the latest missile defense systems go beyond the “classic nuclear scenario”. First and foremost, missile defense systems have been used in conventional armed conflicts. This practice has already demonstrated their combat effectiveness which has become an impetus for the ongoing technical modernization of their main elements. In recent years, the conflict scenarios have been worked out in the United States and Russia where the limited use of low-yield nuclear weapons is allowed. The limited nuclear strike can be launched at the initial stages of a traditional conflict to consolidate the acquired military benefits and disrupt the enemy’s counteroffensive. Obviously, the limited use of nuclear weapons is fraught with an aggravation of the risk of a rapid and uncontrolled nuclear escalation. Unexpectedly, in this context, missile defense becomes a severe deterrent. Missile defense systems deployed at critical military facilities can remove the incentives for the limited nuclear strike as well as give considerable strategic and political advantages. Under these circumstances, missile defense systems become key players in the military balance. To reduce the risks of the limited use of nuclear weapons the author proposes “a roadmap” based on revitalization of the main arms control regimes and use of the capabilities of modern missile defense systems. It is hypothesized that “thin” missile defense removes the incentive to launch the first limited nuclear strike, thus enhancing strategic stability.

High-altitude sensor systems for targeting and missile defense

High-altitude sensor systems for targeting and missile defense

Research on operational effectiveness of air and missile defence in maritime stronghold based on queuing theory

Research on operational effectiveness of air and missile defence in maritime stronghold based on queuing theory

Research on Key Technologies of Hypersonic Vehicle

Hypersonic technology is an interdisciplinary research field, which has become the commanding point of new technology in the current aerospace field. Hypersonic vehicle is an important weapon to deal with future war and break through the missile defense system. It has great strategic deterrence significance in the military. This paper introduces the key technologies of hypersonic vehicle, such as integrated aerodynamic configuration, propulsion technology, thermal protection technology, navigation and control technology. The research status, main problems and development trends of various key technologies are summarized.