Re: What's the matter with Dan Simmons?

Wayne Throop said:

No. I would prefer to ride in a ship I was fairly confident wasn't going to be attacked. <

Indeed, so would I. But that wasn't the issue -- there is no way to
ensure that any particular ship won't be attacked.

Is there some relevance to your question?
Since the issue was, "is an escorted ship reasonably safe, in general",

not "is an escorted ship safer than an unescorted ship". <

The relevance to your question is exactly the same as the relevance of
your point that you'd rather ride in a ship you knew wouldn't be
attacked -- your statement says nothing about the probability of an
escorted ship being hit or sunk, it merely expresses an emotional
feeling of trepdiation and a connotation of sarcasm.

Further, my sarcasm aside, the issue wasn't "is it safe to ride in", but rather "is the *waterway* safe from being eventually blocked by a sunk tanker". Especially given how many per year go through. <

The waterway's reasonably safe because (1) few tankers would be hit,
(2) few (possibly none) of those hit would be sunk, (3) few (probably
none) of those sunk would be sunk in a position to block the main
shipping channel (*), and (4) under the circumstances (**), the Navy
would clear any wreckage in such a position by explosive destruction,
environmental considerations be damned.

What are the intercept percentages of surface to air missiles against missiles. Cannon against same? I doubt they are anywhere near 100 percent.<

Actually, they _are_ fairly near 100 percent. The Silkworm is a
middle-sized subsonic missile (mach 0.8), and against that sort of
target modern American SAM's can expect about a 75-90 percent hit
chance _per SAM shot_. I emphasize "per SAM shot" because it is
important to recognize that, unless faced by a very large or
well-coordinated strike, the defenders are going to get more than one
shot on each incoming missiles.

The way you handle the probabilities of this sort of thing is to
multiply _miss_ chances. If my Standard has an 80 percent chance of
hitting a Silkworm on one shot, then its chance of _missing_ is 20
percent or 0.2. If I am able to launch two Standards against that
Silkworm, then my chance of missing becomes 20 percent of 20 percent,
or 4 percent, which means that my chance of scoring at least one hit
with the two missiles fires is 96 percent. If I fire three, then it's
0.008 miss chance, or 99.2 percent hit chance, and so on.

This is why coordinating a strike, even _below_ the saturation level of
the defense, yields paybacks to an attacker. Say that I (an attacker)
face a defender who can take a total of 4 shots at my incoming strike,
with an 80 percent hit chance on each of my missiles. If I launch 5
missiles, obviously the defense is saturated and 1 missile gets a
chance to try to hit without any risk of intercept. But even if I
launch 4, each of my missiles has only an 80 percent chance of being
intercepted and the chance of the defender shooting _all_ 4 down is
only around 41 percent. By contrast, if I launch 2 missiles, each
missile has a 96 percent chance of being intercepted and the chance of
the defender shooting all 2 down is 92 percent (***).

I hope this has convinced you of the importance of strike coordination
in penetrating a missile defense. These basic principles also apply,
by the way, to _any_ kind of attack, including air attacks and even
(though this starts to get much more complex owing to terrain) ground
warfare.

Similar principles, of course, apply to the defense. In particular, it
is very important for the defender to set up layered defenses based on
perimeters to force the enemy to launch from the maximum possible
distance (if possible, to destroy enemy platforms BEFORE they can
launch), and to position his own platforms so that they can get as many
shots as efficient (****) for the longest amount of time efficient on
each incoming missile.

Computer-guided autocannon, such as Phalanx, may be even _more_
accurate than SAM's such as Standard (*****), but they are very
short-ranged and only useful against a target almost or on a direct
intercept course. That's why they're called "point defense weapons."

Light (shoulder-fired) SAM's are considerably less accurate than
either. They are also point defense weapons; their main virtue is that
it is very easy to add a SAM team or two to just about any ship,
military or commercial. They too are "point defense weapons" at naval
warfare ranges.

At how many points around the tanker would defenders need to be stationed <

1-2 per tanker, but that's not how you do it.

and is that many escorts *per* *tanker* really workable, economically, logistically, and whateverotherically? <]

No. That's why you have the tankers steam in convoy; then 3-4 escorts
can sufficiently protect up to several times their number of tankers.
This is the solution that was found to work best in the World Wars,
against both air and submarine attack.

By the way, I've been researching the Silkworm, and the Terrorists
would have a couple of problems you're not considering. First of all,
while it's "truck" launchable, the missile alone weighs about a ton;
with the associated targetting gear you're not talking about a pickup
truck, you're talking about a reasonably heavy truck (though I don't
think you'd need a tractor-trailer). Seconly, the missile's maximum
range is only about 50 miles; when you consider that the supertanker is
normally steaming at some distance from the coast and so the Silkworm
must travel some miles over water, this limits the possible places that
the enemy can position their missiles (and they are limited in terms of
how much they can physically concentrate their launchers by the fear of
patrols and airstrikes, since they don't have an army protecting their
launch sites). Finally, the Silkworm is basically an uprated Styx and
has inferior electronics: it would be very vulnerable to just about
any modern ECM (jamming and decoying); it would probably fail to strike
the intended targets unless the launch site knew _exactly_ where those
targets were when they launched, and even then might be successfully
ECM'd.

Oh, and I think that if the Terrorists used cellphones as you
suggested, the American forces would probably figure out how to get
onto their channel and send false targetting data, in which case most
of the missiles fired would have _no_ chance of hitting anything their
firers wanted them to.

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan

(*) because this possibility would occur to the convoy planners, and
they would (a) have standing orders that the captain of a sinking
tanker run aground to clear the channel, and (b) keep naval tugs handy
at likely chokepoints to help this occur. The vast majority of large
tankers sunk by a Silkworm would not do so by means of catastrophic
explosion.

(**) an attempt to starve the West of oil.

(***) Actually the defender's chance may be better than this in both
few-SSM vs. many-SAM scenarios if there is more than one SAM launch and
later ones can target only the _surviving_ SSM's.

(****) "Efficient" based primarily on ammunition limits -- if you
already have a 99.8 percent chance of shooting down a missile with 4
shots, it would probably not make sense to launch a 5th missile to
bring the chance up that much higher, unless the enemy missiles are
very, very numerous indeed.

(*****) Not per round, of course -- the reason why the Phalanx is so
lethal is because it shoots hundreds to thousands of rounds at a target
during an engagement.

.

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