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Missile defense systems have always had a very basic and fundamentally insurmountable weakness that people just willfully ignore. It costs almost nothing to ma

Missile defense systems have always had a very basic and fundamentally insurmountable weakness that people just willfully ignore. It costs almost nothing to make more decoys, and it costs an astronomical amount to upgrade your system to track and handle more targets. Building any missile defense system is a nearly guaranteed way to destroy yourself. The enemy just builds more decoys for almost nothing, and then you go broke.

deleted 7y ago
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HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
Well, you do have to launch those decoys,which takes fuel. If they're aircraft-carried, now the airplane has to carry decoys instead of/in addition to live missiles, so it's now less effective. Once the missiles are launched, you need to navigate them actively towards the target at roughly the same flight profile as a real missle, otherwise why would the enemy bother engaging them? So they need guidance, which adds more cost and weight. In the end, you'll end up with a "decoy" that has everything the real missile has except for a warhead, so why not just put a warhead on it? At that point we're talking about just building more missiles, period.
- asdff 7y ago
  So you are on to something. Why build big one missile that the laser will zap? Do it like your body does with sperm. Send a whole swarm of tiny missiles, overwhelm this huge engineering project, and one might get through.
- otakucode 7y ago
  Usually, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, more missiles aren't used but more warheads, with the vast majority being decoys. The way the missiles work is that they break apart once they reach a certain point in the trajectory, making tracking far more difficult. It's the fundamental difference between adding more target tracking and handling capability to an anti-missile system (expensive) to just throwing out more cheap decoys. This has been an opposition to missile defense systems since the early 1980s when they were first introduced and I haven't read about any system that overcomes this weakness.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    I understand what MIRV is. However, as another poster pointed out, the problems are apples & oranges and have different solutions. We aren't talking about shooting down re-entering nuclear warheads here.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago

Well, you do have to launch those decoys,which takes fuel. If they're aircraft-carried, now the airplane has to carry decoys instead of/in addition to live missiles, so it's now less effective. Once the missiles are launched, you need to navigate them actively towards the target at roughly the same flight profile as a real missle, otherwise why would the enemy bother engaging them? So they need guidance, which adds more cost and weight. In the end, you'll end up with a "decoy" that has everything the real missile has except for a warhead, so why not just put a warhead on it? At that point we're talking about just building more missiles, period.

asdff 7y ago
So you are on to something. Why build big one missile that the laser will zap? Do it like your body does with sperm. Send a whole swarm of tiny missiles, overwhelm this huge engineering project, and one might get through.
otakucode 7y ago
Usually, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, more missiles aren't used but more warheads, with the vast majority being decoys. The way the missiles work is that they break apart once they reach a certain point in the trajectory, making tracking far more difficult. It's the fundamental difference between adding more target tracking and handling capability to an anti-missile system (expensive) to just throwing out more cheap decoys. This has been an opposition to missile defense systems since the early 1980s when they were first introduced and I haven't read about any system that overcomes this weakness.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  I understand what MIRV is. However, as another poster pointed out, the problems are apples & oranges and have different solutions. We aren't talking about shooting down re-entering nuclear warheads here.