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October 2, 2006

Slow Motion Arms Race

Because of the long lead times and enormous budgets necessary for much technological development of new weapons systems, advances can often be slow, and easily overlooked. The same is true of advances by possible adversaries.

But a tiny glimpse into the competitive dynamic of US and Chinese systems is revealed in these two articles:

The first is at Strategypage, noting the effects that the development of the JDAM is having, both within the US military and in other governments as well:

Even American war planners are not completely sure what the overall impact of JDAM is going to be. That's because the army has introduced GPS guided rockets and artillery shells as well. Sorting out all the impacts on military operations is complicated by what the enemy will do. So far, JDAM has only been used against tribal warriors and urban guerillas. These foes have been resourceful, but have not been able to do much to degrade the impact of JDAM. Against professional troops, that might be different, but no one is sure yet. And that has generals in places like China, Iran and North Korea worried. The U.S. is currently producing 3,000 JDAM a month, and is planning to build an inventory of about 200,000. China, Russia and the European Union are building their own GPS systems which, among other things, will enable them to build JDAM type bombs that the U.S. cannot shut down.
But there's more than just an alternate GPS system in the works. Last week an article in the Telegraph reported that the Chinese have developed a method of blinding US satellites with lasers:
China has secretly fired powerful laser weapons designed to disable American spy satellites by "blinding" their sensitive surveillance devices, it was reported yesterday.
. Read the whole things.

Posted by Chester at October 2, 2006 12:12 AM

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