Is The S-37 Fighter Up There With The F-22 ?!?!

The findings of the Task Force as discussed throughout the preceding chapters
can be summarized as follows:
a) The nuclear threat is evolving, and in troublesome ways that should lead DoD
leadership to expect that the military will be forced to operate in a nuclear
environment at some point in the foreseeable future.
b) With respect to vulnerabilities, have we created the elements of the “perfect
storm”? The lax attitude to hardening requirements, the increasing reliance on
COTS components, the move to net centric operations, and other contributing
factors should raise concerns.
c) Weapon output calculations can and should be higher fidelity based on advances
in DOE codes.
d) Survivability requirements for all but a part of the nuclear strategic force have
been routinely waived or ignored.
e) Expertise for assessing survivability has atrophied considerably in the DoD, but
remains robust at the DOE laboratories.17 Simulator capabilities have largely
been maintained although large scale EMP facilities are no longer available and
the remaining fast neutron sources are in danger of disappearing.
f) The MDA system presents new and unique challenges because of its
evolutionary acquisition strategy and the need to harden or protect the optical
components of the interceptor.
g) The belief that hardening adds considerable cost is not uniformly true if
hardening is addressed early in design. Design practices are well understood
and supported by easy-to-use design tools

www.acq.osd.mil...

In 1997 Congress held what was apparently its first public hearing on high-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). This topic had "riveted the attention of the military nuclear tactical community for three and a half decades since the first comparatively modest one very unexpectedly turned off the lights over a few million square miles in the mid-Pacific," testified Dr. Lowell Wood, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist who has worked for the past three decades in both the offensive and defensive aspects of EMP. "The entire topic of EMP was highly classified," said Dr. Wood.

The Blackout Bomb is simply a high-yield nuclear weapon, or a smaller nuclear weapon designed to maximize gamma-ray emissions. The EMP "laydown" of a thermonuclear burst moves at the speed of light, striking the Earth to the horizon at line-of-sight from the detonation. Gamma rays actually radiate spherically from the blast point, creating space EMP which, Dr. Wood explained in written hearing testimony, would damage satellite electronics even at great distances from the explosion. "The basic point," he said, "is that essentially all of our conventional military capability and all of our civilian infrastructure is highly vulnerable to EMP damage. The dollar numbers in the civilian infrastructure alone can be conservatively estimated at several trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure which is at risk potentially even from a single pulse--several trillion dollars."

Dr. Wood noted that hardening systems to withstand EMP is a small part of the cost, if done as part of the initial design. Yet no civilian and few military systems have been hardened to resist EMP. However, I respectfully disagree with Dr. Wood's recommendation that any civilian hardening to protect us from EMP be done. After a flirtation with civil defense and bomb shelters, Americans realize that nuclear attack against the United States is not something they are willing to prepare for because there is no rational way to prepare for it.

The Russians have done much more EMP hardening and military/civilian preparedness training than has the United States, testified Dr. Wood. "We Americans, in contrast, collectively saw EMP as a major nuisance which could be rather precisely understood, defended against 'good enough' and thereafter largely ignored." Satellites are especially vulnerable to the x-rays and gamma rays from a high-altitude nuclear explosion, which is different from atmospheric EMP but radiated spherically around the explosion. No United States satellites, he added, can be considered reliably protected from space EMP, because EMP testing of protective systems is erratic.

www.sonic.net...

For example, 95 percent of our military communications go through commercial channels. Are we confident that EMP will not disable or disrupt these commercial communications systems? How confident are we that the military could continue to communicate effectively if commercial systems were disrupted or completely disabled by EMP? How thoroughly do we protect our weapons systems from EMP? Are we confident they will continue to function?

Regrettably, these defensive efforts directed towards strategic military capabilities were not perfectly fruitful. To be sure, there were some outstanding success stories. However, a number of important military systems were quite incompletely defended and some were defended only on paper.

Even more regrettable was the fact that most major military hardware and systems, especially those not considered vital to the conduct of strategic nuclear war, were not hardened against EMP much at all. As a result, at the present time our national profile of vulnerability to EMP attack is highly uneven, with large parts of our military machine and virtually all of the equipment undergirding modern American civilization being utterly EMP vulnerable.

Through the end of the cold war, this posture, though unfortunate, arguably could be tolerated. Only one nation, the Soviet Union, could mount EMP attacks on the United States, and likely only as the first punch of a fight to the death conducted with EMP hardened means.

commdocs.house.gov...