Quantifying Counterforce and Active Defense in Countering Theater Ballistic Missiles
Abstract
This paper contains the formulation
and analysis of a model to measure, compare,
and contrast the effects of counterforce
(pre-launch attack) and active
defense (post-launch attack) against tactical
ballistic missiles (TBM's). It is shown
that without counterforce an active defense
system could require an impractical number
of weapons to counter incoming missiles
and/or their warheads. This number
is shown to decrease geometrically as effective
counterforce is used, so that the
expected number of warheads killed
increases dramatically with counterforce
that is only modestly effective. Actual
distributions of warheads reaching the target
area are shown to be complex mixtures
of binomial distributions. It is shown that
normal approximations to these distributions
based on the easily-calculated means
and variances often agree poorly with the
actual distributions. This is especially true
when using effective counterforce.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
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