(George William Herbert) writes:

John Schilling wrote:
[...]
Invoking the Asymmetric Warfare buzzword does nothing to counter those
capabilities. It isn't clear that they even *can* be countered, save
in kind, but if it is possible it will involve a whole slew of very
hard problems in its own right, and that the amateurish solutions
posited here are not going to cut it.

Pushback. While you are generally correct... I think that some of
the enthusiasts here are not paying enough attention either to
details or to the big picture... I believe that there are some
unconventional and asymmetrical things which could be done which
would severely hamper western style warfare.

One of the things which could be done looks a lot like one of the
things under discussion here. There are many others, and the
overall strategy of defense by and only by massive cheap cruise
missiles is a grand scale loser, but as part of doing a lot of
other things it might well be a viable strategy component.


Yes, but even there it's important not to get caught up in the
game of winning the last war, designing the optimal force package
and tactical doctrine to defeat the US Military of 2003.

Because, e.g., cruise missile swarms are not going to be effectively
fielded without an extensive period of R&D, testing, procurement,
training, and deployment, which will be noticed and which will mean
you only get to use the cruise missile swarms against a US Military
that has accomodated itself to the idea of being hit by cruise missile
swarms.

So it's not enough to have a cheap guidance package that can distinguish
a tank from a rock, you now have to distinguish a tank from an inflatable
tank decoy. The United States Army of 2003 doesn't use inflatable decoys
because nobody has a precision deep strike capability against it, but if
an adversary changes the latter, the former is going to change as well.

Likewise, if your idea is that it doesn't matter how easy an individual
missile is to find and kill because you are going to saturate US/NATO
style air defenses with numbers, you don't match it against the present
standard of an F-15 with four each AMRAAMs and Sidewinders but against
an F-22 packed to the limit with air-to-air Stingers; fourty-five stowed
kills at 0.8 Pk per shot, if my math is correct.


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