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How do you say "Look and cook" in Russian?

Every war changes the battlefield in small but very perceptible ways and once its changed, you cant go back and fight the way you did in previous war. You have to adapt to the realities presented, or surrender to them.

In the last few engagements with the forces of Jihad, weve seen how cheap, simple and decidedly ineffective missiles when fired 'en masse' can still have the desired effect of ruining the morale of the enemies of islamic jihadis.

The Hezbollah-Israeli war of last summer was a war fought under these exact terms. Hezbollah launched lots of little missiles into civilian populations and caused the israelis to react to them. The reaction was in my view clearly justified, and perhaps more than a bit too restrained, but there can be no doubt that the world didnt think the Israeli reation was justified and Israel suffered not from the missiles launched at them, but by their own reaction to Hezbollah, which was in the classic way of invading and clearing territory of a threat( which to my eyes is completely justified and understood but in the modern age is simply not tolerated even when it is clearly justified).

The result of the missile tactics used by hezbollah are twofold - first that Hezbollah accomplished its goals in southern Lebanon and second as a result of that success, we will see more of the same deployed in more places, perhaps even against US interests at home and abroad.

So the issue at hand for those of us in the west is now,"what are the defensive measures that can be deployed against waves of small dumb missiles?". When I say "dumb missiles",I am referring to the fact that the missile has no level of sophistiction in its targeting. The missile is simply aimed at an approximate location with little concern given if it the weapon hits what it is aimed at or not.

In the modern battlefield, the mere fact that the weapon is launched is enough to embolden those who fire it and to strengthen their cause. It cannot be overlooked that the jihadi war is a war fought not like a military campaign,but like a PR campaign. The goal in a PR campaign is not as much for territory but for headlines.

What I find most interesting when I look into this question of "battlefield missile defense" is just how sophisticated it seems to be.

The picture I've placed above this post is taken from an article on the Raytheon Vigilant Eagle System.

Here's a snip from that article:

"This system (Vigilent Eagle) uses laser and microwave energy to target and shoot down anti-aircraft missiles.

Replace the ordnance with a fiber-optic laser and you can destroy 60mm mortar rounds 500 yards away, as Raytheon demonstrated last June. Four engineers borrowed mortars from the Sandia Explosives Lab and blew them up with a borrowed 20-kilowatt off-the-shelf laser from the Air Force Research Laboratory just hours after 80-mile-an-hour desert winds whipped through. If a prototype due by December 2007 improves the laser beam director, it could get deployed alongside existing Phalanx systems within 12 months."

End snip...

So it seems that laser anti missile weapons are well underway with their development and it also seems that they are close to being deployed as well. This would have the effect of blunting the most recent development of the terrorists to continue their activities of extortion against the west.

Which brings us back to the Russian angle in this story. We may thing of ourselves as the "Arsenal of Democracy", but no one can argue that the Russian Government is not the "arsenal of Jihad".

Perhaps this is why Russia seems so dead set against the idea of missile defense on any scale, even when we wish to cooperate directly with them in its development and deployment?

If we develop successful,easy to deploy and cost effective battlefield countermeasures to exactly the sort of weapons that the Russians make and sell by the truckload, then that would make the Russian weapons market into a complete waste of time, now wouldnt it?

Perhaps that is why we see these sort of silly statements from the Russian government these days.

In the end, it seems it is all about trade, isnt it?

Posted @ April 28, 2007 10:57 AM | Current Affairs