Sunday, January 02, 2011

Awww!

Like watching a three-year-old pretend to construct a bridge with a plastic toy tool box, the editors of the New York Times pretend to offer military procurement and strategy advice!

But they start off handing me the equivalent of two plastic "boards" connected by a big plastic "nail" they hammered into them, proudly calling it the Golden Gate Bridge:

The Pentagon has a long history of hyping the Chinese threat to justify expensive weapons purchases, and sinking well-defended ships with ballistic missiles is notoriously hard.

I'll ignore the first half. It's a fair cop, although no less true than the Times' long history of minimizing any threat from any place to justify canceling any expensive weapons purchases (or their global warming crusade, I suppose).

No, let's just dwell on the last part about how the DF-21 could sink carrier task forces, but that it is "notoriously hard" to sink "well-defended ships" with them.

To clarify, it is notoriously hard to sink a cruise ship with a ballistic missile. The fact that a carrier is well defended against aircraft, surface ships, anti-ship cruise missiles, and submarines is irrelevant to its ability to defend against a ballistic missile. It is the finding and tracking of the target that is the hard part.

So the reason that a working DF-21 system is so dangerous to our carriers is that the missiles scream in at speeds too high for any defenses beyond circular error probable to do any good. As I said, a cruise ship--if it got the same launch warning our carrier got--would have chances no better or worse than a carrier in avoiding a DF-21.

So I stopped reading before I could get to the actual procurement recommendations the editors were touting to compete with the Chinese. If they don't undertand the basic concept of anti-ship ballistic missiles, what hope do they have of delving into strategery, eh?

It's just so cute when their editors pretend to understand military matters!