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I think we have a case of a Connecticut general in King Reality's court.

In all seriousness, though, I'm always eager to hear actual proposals for cutting the military. People with no knowledge of it often advocate it, but can never seem to speak intelligently about what should and should not be cut - short of the pacifistic, "Cut everything! Give peace a chance!" approaches.

So if you have serious proposals, Peregrine, I'm all ears.

 d-usa wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

No, transport spec ops to the country and take out the controller of the nukes before they're finished. Simple.

First of all, what does this have to do with the usefulness of the navy?

Some dang fine special ops forces are launched from boats.

Unless they carry nuclear weapons they are useless.

 AustonT wrote:
Really? Because like 5 minutes ago you said the only useful ships were the ones with nuclear weapons. But now all of a sudden "crossing the ocean" means moving an invasion force. It's not nitpicking it's pointing out the utter stupidity of your statement and you bumbling around trying to make it work.

In a purely defensive role the only useful ships are the submarines carrying nuclear missiles to ensure MAD. Let's not forget that you ignored the first half of the sentence when you quoted it.


And yes, it's nitpicking, because which is a more likely interpretation of the statement about crossing the ocean:

1) No other navy has the ability to move its ships that far.

or

2) No other navy has the ability to project power across an ocean and accomplish any meaningful result against the US.

 AustonT wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

No, transport spec ops to the country and take out the controller of the nukes before they're finished. Simple.

First of all, what does this have to do with the usefulness of the navy?

Some dang fine special ops forces are launched from boats.

Unless they carry nuclear weapons they are useless.

Now we know what the extra money Romney wants to give the military is going to be used for...

 Seaward wrote:
So if you have serious proposals, Peregrine, I'm all ears.

Slash the military budget, let the experts figure out how to best spend their reduced amounts of money.

 Peregrine wrote:

 AustonT wrote:
Really? Because like 5 minutes ago you said the only useful ships were the ones with nuclear weapons. But now all of a sudden "crossing the ocean" means moving an invasion force. It's not nitpicking it's pointing out the utter stupidity of your statement and you bumbling around trying to make it work.

In a purely defensive role the only useful ships are the submarines carrying nuclear missiles to ensure MAD. Let's not forget that you ignored the first half of the sentence when you quoted it.


And yes, it's nitpicking, because which is a more likely interpretation of the statement about crossing the ocean:

1) No other navy has the ability to move its ships that far.

or

2) No other navy has the ability to project power across an ocean and accomplish any meaningful result against the US.

I'm just going to guess that there is a nuclear submarine that isn't on our side parked closer to our coast than we want to think about.

 d-usa wrote:
You didn't answer the question.

The acceptable failure rate doesn't matter because you have redundant missiles and the actual failure rate is effectively zero.

 Peregrine wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
You didn't answer the question.

The acceptable failure rate doesn't matter because you have redundant missiles and the actual failure rate is effectively zero.

Keep on not answering the question, effectively zero will make us feel warm and cozy when one gets through.

 Peregrine wrote:

 AustonT wrote:
Really? Because like 5 minutes ago you said the only useful ships were the ones with nuclear weapons. But now all of a sudden "crossing the ocean" means moving an invasion force. It's not nitpicking it's pointing out the utter stupidity of your statement and you bumbling around trying to make it work.

In a purely defensive role the only useful ships are the submarines carrying nuclear missiles to ensure MAD. Let's not forget that you ignored the first half of the sentence when you quoted it.


And yes, it's nitpicking, because which is a more likely interpretation of the statement about crossing the ocean:

1) No other navy has the ability to move its ships that far.

or

2) No other navy has the ability to project power across an ocean and accomplish any meaningful result against the US.

bumble bumble
1) false
bumble bumble
2)false

 d-usa wrote:
I'm just going to guess that there is a nuclear submarine that isn't on our side parked closer to our coast than we want to think about.

Of course there is, but it isn't going to accomplish any meaningful attack since using those nukes means our ground-based ICBMs turn the country that owns that sub into a radioactive wasteland. All it's going to do is sit there and hope WWIII doesn't start, and all our navy could do is sit there and watch it.

 d-usa wrote:

 AustonT wrote:

 d-usa wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

No, transport spec ops to the country and take out the controller of the nukes before they're finished. Simple.

First of all, what does this have to do with the usefulness of the navy?

Some dang fine special ops forces are launched from boats.

Unless they carry nuclear weapons they are useless.

Now we know what the extra money Romney wants to give the military is going to be used for...

Nuclear carl gustavs

 d-usa wrote:
Keep on not answering the question, effectively zero will make us feel warm and cozy when one gets through.

Except one WON'T get through because once the chance of getting a missile through drops that low a nuclear attack is just a quick way of committing suicide. You can't expect to inflict enough damage to win the war, and you certainly can't expect to survive the inevitable retaliation. Therefore you never launch the attack.

 Peregrine wrote:

 p_gray99 wrote:
But I have a reasonable amount of knowledge about how some space probes work, including those that are nuclear-powered, and were they to blow up at a height of 1000m then you'd be looking at the vast majority of america being covered.

No.

Sure, just deny it without any valid reasoning. There's no way you can ever be wrong!
Sure, I'll accept it seems unlikely. But there's tonnes of high explosives as good as next to very large quantities of unstable uranium (or similar) or unstable hydrogen, depending on what kind of nuke. Chances are, this kind of nuke would use uranium (or similar). Now, these explosives also happen to be stored below the nuclear fuel. When they explode, the nuclear fuel is launched (quite literally) miles into the air. Probably not high enough to catch the jet streams, but still, massive distances. It also breaks up into fragments of fuel, that handily fit easily into the lungs. They are tiny, so keep flying for hours due to air resistance holding them up at times, and because there's so many particals travelling so fast, they can quite easily travel hundreds of miles. And given that they're quite capable of fitting into the lungs, alpha radiation from these particles can very easily cause mutations. Whatever you do, you don't bomb nukes. It's just an insane idea.

No, transport spec ops to the country and take out the controller of the nukes before they're finished. Simple.

First of all, what does this have to do with the usefulness of the navy?

Second, this is the plot of a bad movie, not a realistic method of preventing another country from getting nuclear weapons.

You need to get the troops there somehow. And a country will take a while producing nukes, you can quite easily invade such a country in that time, so long as you have the transports needed. Which pretty much means ships.

 Peregrine wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
Keep on not answering the question, effectively zero will make us feel warm and cozy when one gets through.

Except one WON'T get through because once the chance of getting a missile through drops that low a nuclear attack is just a quick way of committing suicide. You can't expect to inflict enough damage to win the war, and you certainly can't expect to survive the inevitable retaliation. Therefore you never launch the attack.

Still not an answer, you are bad at this game.

With or without an ABM system, a full scale nuclear attack is suicide. They are going to fire everything they got and hope something goes through. That doesn't count rogue nations firing something and hoping it goes through.

But just how confident are you that the system will be 100% effective. What is your acceptable failure rate?

 d-usa wrote:


Still not an answer, you are bad at this game.

I feel like you knew that before we started.

 AustonT wrote:

 d-usa wrote:


Still not an answer, you are bad at this game.

I feel like you knew that before we started.

Hey, I live in Oklahoma City. We got a big AFB here, I would imagine one of them is aimed at us. I would want to know what failure rate the person designing this thing is comfortable with

 d-usa wrote:
Still not an answer, you are bad at this game.

I already answered it. The acceptable failure rate is zero, because the actual failure rate is so close to zero that you can just round it to zero. There's no point in nitpicking a 0.1% failure rate vs. a 0.2% failure rate because either one of them effectively means "nuclear missile attack isn't possible".

That doesn't count rogue nations firing something and hoping it goes through.

Ok, let's say you're a rogue nation. You have 10 ICBMs ready to launch. I have 500 ABM interceptors ready to launch. You have two choices:

1) Launch your missiles, ensure your country is reduced to a radioactive wasteland, and hope that you get lucky with the 0.1% chance that a single missile gets through to its target.

or

2) Loudly threaten to launch your shiny new missiles and use them as a bargaining tool.


Effective ABM changes the scenario from "take them down with us" to "die for no purpose" and ensures that nobody sane enough to GET nuclear weapons would ever use them against you.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 p_gray99 wrote:
unstable hydrogen

Yep, like I thought, you have no idea how nuclear weapons work. Feel free to rejoin the discussion once you do a little basic research.

What about when you've fired off all those ABMs and find that all the other countries want to join this country's side in the nuclear war? I'm pretty certain that China and Russia have more than 10 nukes between them.

So your plan is to use a system that cannot be guaranteed to be 100% successful based on all the testing we have done and the possibility of cyber warfare to disable our defenses while also counting on suicidal nations willing to use nuclear weapons to be reasonable?

And this is so totally foolproof that we don't have to worry about failure rates?

 Peregrine wrote:

 p_gray99 wrote:
unstable hydrogen

Yep, like I thought, you have no idea how nuclear weapons work. Feel free to rejoin the discussion once you do a little basic research.

You certain about that?

 Peregrine wrote:

Yep, like I thought, you have no idea how nuclear weapons work. Feel free to rejoin the discussion once you do a little basic research.

Can we say this to you with regards to the navy, out of curiosity? Because you've made some pretty hilarious claims about shore missiles and the like.

 p_gray99 wrote:
What about when you've fired off all those ABMs and find that all the other countries want to join this country's side in the nuclear war? I'm pretty certain that China and Russia have more than 10 nukes between them.

We're talking about rogue nations. You know, Iran, North Korea, etc, the countries that have a very low number of nuclear weapons but unstable leadership that might actually try to use them. China and Russia aren't a factor because they're run by relatively sane people who are properly deterred by MAD, and therefore won't launch an attack unless they are attacked first.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Seaward wrote:
Can we say this to you with regards to the navy, out of curiosity? Because you've made some pretty hilarious claims about shore missiles and the like.

Feel free to explain what those claims are and why they're wrong.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 d-usa wrote:
So your plan is to use a system that cannot be guaranteed to be 100% successful based on all the testing we have done and the possibility of cyber warfare to disable our defenses while also counting on suicidal nations willing to use nuclear weapons to be reasonable?

And again, you don't need 100% effectiveness when you have multiple redundant systems. If each missile is 90% effective and you launch a dozen interceptors at each incoming warhead the chances of failure are effectively zero.

And yes, suicidal nations will be reasonable at some point. Without ABM there's a chance that a suicidal religious fanatic might decide that the martyrdom of their entire country is worth it if it means destroying a few US cities. With ABM the entire situation changes, since it's no longer a case of "take them with us" with a reasonable chance of success. Even suicidal nations aren't going to commit suicide for nothing.

 Peregrine wrote:

 d-usa wrote:
So your plan is to use a system that cannot be guaranteed to be 100% successful based on all the testing we have done and the possibility of cyber warfare to disable our defenses while also counting on suicidal nations willing to use nuclear weapons to be reasonable?

And again, you don't need 100% effectiveness when you have multiple redundant systems. If each missile is 90% effective and you launch a dozen interceptors at each incoming warhead the chances of failure are effectively zero.

And yes, suicidal nations will be reasonable at some point. Without ABM there's a chance that a suicidal religious fanatic might decide that the martyrdom of their entire country is worth it if it means destroying a few US cities. With ABM the entire situation changes, since it's no longer a case of "take them with us" with a reasonable chance of success. Even suicidal nations aren't going to commit suicide for nothing.

I don't know much about these defense systems, but how many systems are they run on? Is there one master system? Because if so, it'd only take one hacker a few seconds to get in, if they knew what they were doing, and they could shut down the whole thing. While that isn't likely, prove that, say, Korea isn't training hundreds of hackers to take down all the systems at once.

 p_gray99 wrote:
I don't know much about these defense systems, but how many systems are they run on? Is there one master system? Because if so, it'd only take one hacker a few seconds to get in, if they knew what they were doing, and they could shut down the whole thing. While that isn't likely, prove that, say, Korea isn't training hundreds of hackers to take down all the systems at once.

Please stop getting your information from bad movies. Hacking isn't some magical button you press like in a video game, and the idea that one hacker could shut down an entire ABM system in "a few seconds" is just laughable.

 d-usa wrote:

 AustonT wrote:

 d-usa wrote:


Still not an answer, you are bad at this game.

I feel like you knew that before we started.

Hey, I live in Oklahoma City. We got a big AFB here, I would imagine one of them is aimed at us. I would want to know what failure rate the person designing this thing is comfortable with

I live in Colorado Springs, when WW3 comes I'll be dead in SECONDS. Five major military installations (well four, but the Airforce Academy's here too) with three major commands including U.S. Space Command and NORCOM? Good night gracie.

 Peregrine wrote:

 p_gray99 wrote:
I don't know much about these defense systems, but how many systems are they run on? Is there one master system? Because if so, it'd only take one hacker a few seconds to get in, if they knew what they were doing, and they could shut down the whole thing. While that isn't likely, prove that, say, Korea isn't training hundreds of hackers to take down all the systems at once.

Please stop getting your information from bad movies. Hacking isn't some magical button you press like in a video game, and the idea that one hacker could shut down an entire ABM system in "a few seconds" is just laughable.

I didn't know that they turned Stuxnet into a movie...

Alright, not a few seconds. But again, you accuse me of knowing nothing about hacking when I already know quite a bit of coding for computers (I'm currently learning Python). And yes, with that strong a defense system, I can see a team of a thousand trained hackers doing it in a day. And once you've done one, you know exactly how to do the rest. And once you've done that, it'll take at least an hour to take back enough systems for there to be more than a 10% chance of stopping all the missiles. Still certain you want to rely on this system?

 p_gray99 wrote:
But again, you accuse me of knowing nothing about hacking when I already know quite a bit of coding for computers (I'm currently learning Python).

Oh, you're currently learning a programming language. Good for you. I'm sure that makes you an expert in security.

And yes, with that strong a defense system, I can see a team of a thousand trained hackers doing it in a day.

Err, no. Even ignoring the tiny little problem of how to coordinate this team of "trained hackers", it's pretty hard to hack a system that you can't connect to from outside.

And once you've done that, it'll take at least an hour to take back enough systems for there to be more than a 10% chance of stopping all the missiles. Still certain you want to rely on this system?

WTF?

 Peregrine wrote:

 p_gray99 wrote:
But again, you accuse me of knowing nothing about hacking when I already know quite a bit of coding for computers (I'm currently learning Python).

Oh, you're currently learning a programming language. Good for you. I'm sure that makes you an expert in security

bwahahahahahaha. What's your Naval War College class number Lord Nelson?

Yeah, getting into the system is a little difficult. But once that's done, it's a simple case of getting through masses of firewalls etc. Again, I'm not an expert, and yes knowing a programming language means I'm not an expert on security but equally I don't know nothing. For example, you can simply use slave computers to overload the system, and keep trying at a password or whatever blocks the way until you get in. And co-ordination's really going to be a problem? If you're going to train them to hack a computer, you have the time to teach them a little co-ordination.

And my last comment was basically saying all the systems are likely to have the same defenses or at least similar. Hack one, you're not too far away from have multiple systems.
No, I'm not an expert, I'm simply saying that from what I know it wouldn't be unreasonable for a government with the resources that a country with nukes is likely to have to manage to get inside the security. And even if this is extremely unlikely, it's possible and a simple way of getting past the anti-nuke defenses. Which means you don't want to rely on them alone.