The 99% Fallacy
Evans, David
THE 99% FALLACY by David Evans Will the Star Wars defense against Russian ballistic missiles work? Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has announced the goal of deploying a "99 percent...
...Even if many miss their targets by miles, and some fail to explode, there would be an unimaginable level of destruction and tens of millions of casualties...
...Recall the high hopes placed in the strategic bombing camrraign of World War II, the Star Wars of its day...
...Today's simpler systems, which supposedly reflect mature technology, don't work this well...
...The Star Wars effort is quite unlike the A-bomb Manhattan Project with which it is often compared...
...The constructive path out of the shadow of nuclear confrontation is marked by mutually advantageous political agreements—verifiable treaties that limit deployment and testing...
...The same pattern of thinking prevails with regard to Star Wars...
...But in their honest moments, off the official record, many naval officers concede that their mathematical figuring does not translate into invincible ships...
...And even these results were obtained only under benign, near-laboratory firing conditions...
...A target of 2,400 Russian submarine and silolaunched missiles, multiplied by a calculated number of orbiting battle stations leads ineluctably to a tidy measure of 99 percent effectiveness...
...The Soviets today have about 7,500 nuclear warheads mounted atop 1,400 land-based and 1,000 submarine-based missiles...
...Not one of our fleets of high-performance tactical jets meets its stated "full missioncapable" goal, that is, the percentage of aircraft with all systems "full up" and ready to fly...
...Not 40 or 50 percent, the supremely confident General Eaker predicted, 43 percent, exactly...
...In various practice shoots, the TOW missile has hit its targets anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of the time—stationary targets, not tanks maneuvering at 20 miles per hour...
...These meager experiments do not vindicate the program...
...To borrow a phrase from Thomas Edison, "We don't know one-millionth of one percent" about the effects of lasers and particle beam weapons on ballistic missiles in flight...
...Reduced to a technical problem, war is amenable to an engineering solution...
...And on what grounds were these precise judgments made...
...On 12 previous raids and some post-attack photographs...
...General Ira Eaker's brief to the Joint Chiefs in April 1943 sold the program with its 1,000-foot circles drawn around 76 "precision targets" that represented key sections of German industry...
...Under test conditions, not during simulated combat, the Army successfully intercepted and destroyed one Minuteman missile warhead last June...
...Flying 100 bombers over each, he announced, would cause the "desired destruction...
...If such agreements are reached, both sides may be willing to acknowledge that continuing reductions in force would increase trust and, ultimately, security...
...The results are a familiar paradox of the war: in the face of the American air assault, German military production increased until the final few months of the fighting...
...The Air Force, meanwhile, succeeded after an initial failure to bounce a laser beam off a small mirror attached to the NASA space shuttle...
...The Navy relies on a combination of three defensive "layers" — F-14 fighters, AEGIS missile cruisers, and close-in rapid-fire cannon—each of which is thought to provide an 80 percent effective shield against air or sea attack...
...Yet we are expecting the space defense system to work perfectly the first time out—better than our antitank missiles, better than our pampered jet fighters, better than the multi-layered defenses of our carrier battle groups...
...If just one percent get through, that amounts to 125 hydrogen bombs penetrating the defense...
...Moreover, this is all military hardware with a "man in the loop," enjoying almost daily maintenance and frequent field exercises to validate its performance...
...The Pentagon seems to have forgotten the time-honored axiom of military development: "Great advances rarely come from systems intended to produce great advances...
...These officers have commented to me that in battle the individual defensive layers would be ineffective, especially if subjected to saturation attack...
...Defending our Navy carrier battle groups is a much less challenging task than fending off waves of Soviet ballistic missiles...
...By 1990 they will possess about 12,500 warheads...
...After spending anywhere from $100 billion to more than $1 trillion to research, develop, and deploy a Star Wars defensive system, we will not have moved one inch away from the vise-like dilemma of mutual assured destruction...
...His personal opinions are not necessarily shared by the Department of Defense...
...A ballistic missile defense can never be tested in any meaningful way...
...After massive infusions of spare parts, and the careful ministerings of hundreds of flight technicians, our jets have higher "mission capable" rates than they did four years ago...
...Consider a few examples, going up the scale from relatively simple to extremely high technology: • None of the Army's existing inventory of anti-tank missiles is 99 percent effective...
...The A-bomb could and was tested before use...
...Hundreds of massed bomber attacks were launched on the basis of this absurdly small and incomplete data base, a huge effort that consumed 40,000 lives and nearly half the dollars spent fighting World War II...
...To borrow a phrase from Thomas Edison, 'We don't know one-millionth of one percent' about the effects of lasers and particle beam weapons on ballistic missiles in flight...
...Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger has announced the goal of deploying a "99 percent effective" system by the mid-1990s...
...Despite all this, assume, for argument's sake, that a 99 percent effective defense is achieved...
...Almost all of the technical arguments in favor of Star Wars are based on computer studies, each loaded with unprovable assumptions, and a few low-powered laboratory devices...
...It is necessary to recognize there is no technical solution to this depressing reality...
...But this laudable hope is unrealistic, for the simple reason that none of our existing complex military systems come anywhere close to this standard for reliability and lethality...
...David Evans, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, is a trained nuclear weapons targeting officer and is currently the operations officer of the Third Marine Division...
...If the defensive layers of Star Wars are 50 percent effective, the consequences are potentially disastrous—scores of Soviet warheads would get through...
...That single-minded effort focused on the development of one weapon, not a family of weapons...
...On the drawing boards at the Pentagon, the Navy calculates that the carrier group defenses achieve an overall theoretical effectiveness of 99 percent...
...But they still don't meet the Pentagon's reliablity goals, which are not nearly as demanding as 99 percent...
...Only now, the real-world data base is even smaller than General Eaker's...
...So many 1,000-foot circles, multiplied ny 100 bombers, multiplied again by the number of raids per month and, voila: an 89 percent reduction in U-boat construction, 76 percent in ball bearings, 43 percent in fighter output...
...If the A-bomb exploded with only half the predicted force, it nevertheless would have been a great success...
...Yet we have never achieved a 99 percent effective defense for our patrolling ships...
...We have a reverse situation with Star Wars, which would consist of highly complex, unmanned armed satellites, floating for years in outer space, with little or no maintenance...
Vol. 17 • October 1985 • No. 9
