Iraqi ASAT ability

During the second gulf war, Iraq uses modified scud missiles, filled with ball bearings, and fitted with better guidance systems, to destroy a U.S. IMINT satellite…..
What effects does this have?
 
That single event will remove all doubt about the legitimacy of invading Iraq, it would be a flagrant violation of the terms of the 1991 `surrender` where Iraq has no missiles with range greater than 150km or something equally small.
 
That single event will remove all doubt about the legitimacy of invading Iraq, it would be a flagrant violation of the terms of the 1991 `surrender` where Iraq has no missiles with range greater than 150km or something equally small.
Other than that?
How is space warfare affected?
 
I think in 1991, there was the concern the "supergun" would be used to fire sand into orbit to blind satellites.

Maybe work on the supergun is finished earlier (no Gerald Bull assassination?) and the supergun is used for this purpose at least once before being destroyed in an air raid?

Without the satellites, Coalition ability to manuever in the trackless desert is sharply limited and that will affect the ground campaign. The Coalition will probably win, but I don't think the "hail Mary" manuever is going to be as easy.

Or, to stick to the OP better, Saddam manages to secretly rebuild the supergun and uses it in 2003?
 
That single event will remove all doubt about the legitimacy of invading Iraq, it would be a flagrant violation of the terms of the 1991 `surrender` where Iraq has no missiles with range greater than 150km or something equally small.

I think OTL the inspectors did find some missiles banned by the treaty just before the war began and that didn't neuter the antiwar movement.

Heck, I'm no fan of Saddam and I wondered if something that small was worth a war.

And how far up are military satellites? If they're less than 150 km, a missile capable fo killing them wouldn't violate the cease-fire agreement.
 
Or, to stick to the OP better, Saddam manages to secretly rebuild the supergun and uses it in 2003?

If he's lucky he'll be able to use it once. Its the size of the Statue of Liberty and it'll be picked up by every military satilite in orbit and be put out of commission immediately.
 
I think OTL the inspectors did find some missiles banned by the treaty just before the war began and that didn't neuter the antiwar movement.

That was actually a questionable assertion. The argument was that the missiles exceeded allowed range by 10 or 15 kilometers. The counter-argument was that these ranges were only possible if the missiles were launched without warheads. The additional weight of warheads on the missile reduced the range to permissible parameters.

Since you'd have to wonder why anyone would launch a missile without a warhead or instrument package of some sort... I'm inclined to dismiss the issue.

Anyway, so much for the trip down memory lane.

And how far up are military satellites? If they're less than 150 km, a missile capable fo killing them wouldn't violate the cease-fire agreement.

Frankly, I thin its ASB. There's a big difference between a missile on a low parabolic reaching targets 150 km away, and a missile reaching orbit. I don't believe the SCUDS even came close to being able to reach that high.
 
Frankly, I thin its ASB. There's a big difference between a missile on a low parabolic reaching targets 150 km away, and a missile reaching orbit. I don't believe the SCUDS even came close to being able to reach that high.

They don't, and they don't have the targeting systems needed for ASAT work to boot.

Space is BIG, and just throwing some chaff into space and expecting it to hit a military satellite is like dropping a single mine into the middle of the Pacific and expecting it to hit an aircraft carrier.
 
I think OTL the inspectors did find some missiles banned by the treaty just before the war began and that didn't neuter the antiwar movement.

Heck, I'm no fan of Saddam and I wondered if something that small was worth a war.

And how far up are military satellites? If they're less than 150 km, a missile capable fo killing them wouldn't violate the cease-fire agreement.

Actually, if I recall correctly, they used them during the war targeting airfields near Riyadh.
 
get a rudimentary guidance system, fill the nose with ball bearings, and you have a basic antisatellite missile, able to target spy satellites, if you can reach high enough. ASAT warfare isn't about getting to orbit, it's about getting to the altitude.....which can be accomplished with a ballistic suborbital trajectory
 
They don't, and they don't have the targeting systems needed for ASAT work to boot.

Space is BIG, and just throwing some chaff into space and expecting it to hit a military satellite is like dropping a single mine into the middle of the Pacific and expecting it to hit an aircraft carrier.

It's more complicated than that because said military satellite is forced to take a certain path due to celestial mechanics and is therefore very predictable after a few weeks of watching (and they can always watch before the war). It's true that satellites have maneuvering propellant onboard, but the supply is quite limited (in fact, running out is basically what kills satellites), so it wouldn't be used unless they had adequate warning that it was needed, and even then it might not be able to get the satellite out of the way of a properly designed system (even a dumb one).

It's as if that aircraft carrier always passed through a particular channel, and in a very particular way, so you dropped a couple of mines in just a few hours before it did--you'd have a pretty good chance of hitting it. Sure, if they learned about it they might just sail around, but that's why you drop the mines in only a very little before it passes through, so they don't have the time to do that.
 
And how far up are military satellites? If they're less than 150 km, a missile capable fo killing them wouldn't violate the cease-fire agreement.

I don't think they're that low. In fact, I don't think it's physically possible to sustain an orbit that low. The Space Station is what, 350 km up? Even Sputnik got no lower than 200 km in its few months of flight before reentry. Anything at 150 km is going to reenter too soon to be useful.

Navigation satellites for GPS are at a high orbit 20,000 or so km above the earth's surface.

So unless Saddam built a satellite-launcher between 1991 and 2003, anything in Low Earth Orbit or higher is safe.

According to The Space Review (here), Saddam did have an orbital launch vehicle program in the 1980s based on clustering smaller missiles together. But given that the second and third stages constituted a nuclear missile delivery system, I have a hard time seeing this program come to fruition.
 
I don't think they're that low. In fact, I don't think it's physically possible to sustain an orbit that low. The Space Station is what, 350 km up? Even Sputnik got no lower than 200 km in its few months of flight before reentry. Anything at 150 km is going to reenter too soon to be useful.

Navigation satellites for GPS are at a high orbit 20,000 or so km above the earth's surface.

So unless Saddam built a satellite-launcher between 1991 and 2003, anything in Low Earth Orbit or higher is safe.

According to The Space Review (here), Saddam did have an orbital launch vehicle program in the 1980s based on clustering smaller missiles together. But given that the second and third stages constituted a nuclear missile delivery system, I have a hard time seeing this program come to fruition.

spy satellites have orbits that are sometimes quite low, in order to get a better view....and you don't need to go orbital velocity to hit a satellite in orbit, just very high.....look up the china ASAT test....the kill vehicle was nowhere near orbital velocity
 

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The Planet stops rotating due to the massive ASB assault.

If ASAT was that simple, the ICBM would never have been fielded.
 
The Planet stops rotating due to the massive ASB assault.

If ASAT was that simple, the ICBM would never have been fielded.

I think the reason that ASAT fell out was that the ICBM got MIRVed, and decoyed, and for every ASAT kill vehicle, you needed one rocket....
thus multiplying the defensive needs until they were massive
 
Low earth orbit is around 200-2000 km, so the scuds couldn't have reached a satellite. Saddam needed to have, before hand, a longer type of missile. And, even with that, they still need to hit the satellite.
 
IIRC there have been 3 types of ASAT; the Soviet co-orbital using a friggin massive ICBM, the F15 ASAT which used an F15 based in the Falklands and other places to fire a missile and the current TABM missiles. None of these are slap-ups, they are all quite deliberate and linked to extensive infrastructure backup. A scud would have to have extra stages to get it high enough and this would be noticed by resident missile inspectors not to mention a trigger-happy US.
 
The Planet stops rotating due to the massive ASB assault.

If ASAT was that simple, the ICBM would never have been fielded.

This is something a lot of people do, well, a lot, mistaking ASAT for ABM. They're really almost nothing alike. The difference is basically temporal and spatial horizons--ABM systems have to put up with both, while ASAT weapons sort of don't (while limited by spatial horizons, they are much, much less so than ABM weaponry). Temporally, ASAT weapons and sensors have all the time in the world to observe their target, figure out how to attack it, and set up the systems to do so, while ABM weapons obviously have only a few minutes to detect, identify, and attack their targets. Effectively, ASAT weapons can get by with a much larger OODA loop than ABM weapons can, which obviously makes them much easier to field.

This problem is exasperated by the fact that ABM systems are much more affected by physical horizons than ASAT systems are. With ASAT weapons, due to the huge OODA loop, you can integrate sensor data over long periods of time; combined with the inherent predictability of orbital mechanics, you can then figure out exactly what the target is doing at any given point (on-board fuel reserves notwithstanding). With ABM weapons, until the missile comes over the horizon, you can't do anything to it or about it (if you have space-based sensors, that just moves the horizon). Combine that with the use of decoys, MIRVs, etc., and the ABM system faces a far more challenging and difficult task than the ASAT system (you can't really MIRV satellites or put up decoys, after all).

The real trouble for an ASAT system is altitude, that is getting the weapon up to an altitude where it can actually do anything. A lot of the more important stuff is at very high altitude, MEO or even GEO, and is therefore impossible to reach with the sorts of missiles Saddam had access to. Still, as lookupshootup notes, spy satellites often have quite elliptical orbits which go very, very low over the area of interest to allow higher resolution images, so you might be able to knock one out there even with Scuds.

That's not even getting into the possibility of other types of ASAT weaponry--blinding lasers, for instance, which would probably be much easier for Saddam to get a hold of at some point. Sure, it won't kill the satellite, necessarily, but it might be able to temporarily disable it, which can be useful enough.

This is all aside from the fact that when ICBMs were being fielded in the 1950s and 1960s, there weren't any ASAT or ABM weapons anyways...
 
get a rudimentary guidance system, fill the nose with ball bearings, and you have a basic antisatellite missile, able to target spy satellites, if you can reach high enough. ASAT warfare isn't about getting to orbit, it's about getting to the altitude.....which can be accomplished with a ballistic suborbital trajectory

No. Short answer: your ball bearings don't have any delta-V.

It's more complicated than that because (snip)

You're right. It is MUCH more complicated. You're actually trying to hit a SSN that may be at various depths, and your mine isn't buoyant. Did I mention that the SSN will know within seconds of you releasing the mine that you have done so, and long before it could hit the mine will know the mine's EXACT course as it slowly sinks to the ocean floor?

BTW, try 'orbital' mechanics, not 'celestial' mechanics if you want to be taken seriously in this discussion.

I think the reason that ASAT fell out was that the ICBM got MIRVed, and decoyed, and for every ASAT kill vehicle, you needed one rocket....
thus multiplying the defensive needs until they were massive

ASAT =/= ABM. True, there's some overlap.

Just to point out one difference, the ICBM/MIRV is coming AT you. The satellite is going PAST you. Any maneuvers the MIRV/ICBM makes also thrown it off target. Any maneuvers the satellite makes just change its orbit.

The way you deal with MIRVs, BTW, is to kill the booster. This has the added advantage of dropping more of the junk on the attacker and less on you. Boosters, conveniently, are full of substances that go 'boom' easily. Satellites... not so much.
 
This is the big difference between ASAT and ABM, eventually the missile warhead will come down to an engageable altitude if it is within the evelope of an ABM system. An ASAT will have to get to orbital altitude no matter what, so even high-end TABMs will struggle with ASAT duties and the SM3 which engages missiles out to almost orbital altitudes can be used for ASAT.

But I`ll stand by my earlier comment that you don`t just whip up an ASAT, they are a big task.
 
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