Daily Socotra

20 June 2006

SPY-1

I have never seen the newspapers in Seoul in such a dither. They are concerned with the way the US and the Japanese are reacting to the Taepodong-2 rocket that is on the pad in North Korea. The Southern Koreans appear to be in a deeply delusional state. The press is saying that they think their plucky Communists cousins are only interested in launching a satellite, maybe for digital TV service.

They imply that the launch might be intended to start a 24X7 Channel dedicated to the Great Leader and the Great Leader Junior, who have done so much to advance the doctrine of self-reliance.

The papers question whether the missile has actually been fueled, a fact that gives a certain inevitability to the launch, and suggest the whole evolution is just a big misunderstanding. It is not a declaration of the capability to drop a nuclear weapon on Los Angeles or Tokyo.

I don't have any particular insight into that, but I know about some things. A wise old Spook taught me a long time ago that if you didn't understand why something was happening, you might want to check the local weather before leaping to conclusions. I did this morning. It is raining today at the launch complex at Tae Po Dong, and forecast to clear up tomorrow. If I intended to take video and still imagery of an important scientific event, I would do it in sunlight.

I think we can relax today, and most days when the clouds and rain are in the forecast.

Seoul would like us all to relax and not agitate the Communists, but of course, agitation is precisely what this is about. The Northerners have been very successful with their passive-aggressive foreign policy. When they act out like this, the US responds by hurling every intelligence collection platform at the area to see if it can spy out what is really going on.

Lat night there were alarmed reports that American aircraft were flying strange orbits over the Sea of Japan, or the East Sea as it is more delicately called in the Koreas. There might be US Navy ships steaming purposefully in international waters, without reporting to the United Nations Command in Seoul.

The South is nervous that the Americans might do something unilateral.

I think that is unlikely, though given recent history, not implausible. There are certainly a lot of senior people thinking of many things. The Navy has had more admirals than ships for a long time now. There is a perfectly rational explanation. Things are much more complex than they were when ships were simple machines of steel, managed by brute force and the expertise of the men from the Bosun's Locker.

I was in that navy, or at least the part of it that lingered down through the years. My first ship was properly a WWII aircraft carrier. The USS Midway's keel was laid down in 1943, in the dark days, and she was commissioned a few months before the mushroom cloud rose over Japan and it was finally over.

The creature comforts were Spartan, and that was the way things were intended to be.

Midway lingered on, since she was big and expensive, and was extensively modified through her last days of active service, nearly a half century after they began to build her. In that time, the smaller and less expensive escort ships all passed away, every one of them. The navy used them for targets, or sold them off. We used to see them, dragged out of mothballs to be towed across the Pacific for deliver to our allies in the Philippines and the Republic of Vietnam. They were little gray things, bristling with dual-40mm mounts and machine guns.

All they had, back in the day, was sheer firepower to throw into the sky to keep the kamikaze suicide-bombers at bay. There really is nothing new under the sun, not the weapons of mass destruction, or the ability to young men to convince themselves of the nobility of their personal sacrifice.

The threat fro the air grew more sophisticated over the years, and guns were abandoned to the technology of rockets. That is why there are so many admirals. They don't direct ships any more, they direct programs, and the development of technology.

A colleague and I were driving back from New Jersey a few weeks ago, through the piney barrens in the southern part of the Garden State, and above the scruffy trees I saw the unmistakable flat square panel of an Aegis phased-array radar. My associate had been the sort of Naval Officer who had to work for a living, which I suspect is why he got out and decided to try capitalism.

He had served on an Aegis cruiser, which is navy-speak for a lightly armored destroyer with a powerful rocket system. He told me SPY-1 radar which was the heart of the Aegis system had been developed here in this land-locked area by RCA, before that part of the venerable company was gobbled up by the defense conglomerate that is now Lockheed-Martin.

The hundreds of Admirals in Washington were looking for a multi-function, flat-panel, phased-array radar capable of search, automatic detection, transition to track, tracking and engagement of multiple air and surface targets with missiles.

I could ramble on about why those are all good and desirable qualities to have in a shipboard sensor, but for the purposes of this discussion, lets just accept them as a given. The radar geeks did their job well. The SPY-1 not only could see and track multiple air targets, but with the right software, it could look up in to space, all the way to near earth orbit.

That was something that startled everyone, and attracted the interest and funding of the Missile Defense Agency. There was talk a few years ago of placing a ring of Aegis ships off the east and west coast of the United States, providing an impenetrable missile shield.

That concept scared everyone, particularly the hundreds of Admirals. What with most of the defense budget going to the ground forces for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ship-building program is in disarray. Such a commitment to ballistic missile defense would eat the service alive, and eliminate any flexibility in operating the diminishing number of ships at its disposal.

So while the clamor to use the Navy for homeland security has died down, there is still the question of where homeland security begins. Maybe it is not off the coast. Maybe it is off someone else's coast.

If you had a ship in position to shoot down a ballistic missile, would it be acceptable to do it? There has never been such a capability before. What is the intent of the missile? Peaceful or threatening?

If you did shoot it down, where would the wreckage go? Is this all politics and presence, with a dash of paranoia?

I am going to wait for the clouds to clear over North Korea, and see what happens. I'll make up my mind after I can spy out the situation.