By All Means, Let's Talk About Your Networked Force

Hindsight is a funny thing; it can make a genius look like an idiot, the masses blind, conventional wisdom ossified, a minor character a kingmaker, and obscure players in a side game look like the only ones that knew what was to come.

Hindsight’s handmaiden History is kind for those who pay her enough attention, and their courtier the Future is not as coy as she seems at first glance. She gives hints, sly glances, a little bite of the lip or a flick of the tongue to let you know where she’d like to go. You just need to look for the tells and signs. They are all there. The Future is not opaque or unknown; she is just very good at her game.

If you’d read one article or book, you’ve read a thousand; celestial networks, offsets, leaping technology generations, total domain awareness, unmanned systems – you know the money sponge phylum.

It all rides on just a few brittle but exquisite assumptions; the electromagnetic spectrum can be owned, our satellites are there and have infinite low error rate bandwidth, we cannot be spoofed – we are the smartest player in the room.

Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. As the British learned the hard way when they moved from decades of fighting colonial wars against primitives barely out of the bronze age in the 19th Century to modern opponents – you can get complacent with your dominance. They had plenty of warnings and started to figure things out with their taste of the change in the Boer War.

We haven’t had our Boer War, yet – but History is trying to nudge us a bit to look at what Future may hold.

China has released footage of its first interception test of a mid-air ballistic missile, destroying a target miles above Earth .

Video shows the land-based rocket blast off into the sky in a blinding white light, before hurtling towards what looks like a small white dot above the planet's atmosphere.

Upon impact, the missile explodes into a huge fireball .

Footage of the experiment, which took place in 2010, has never been made public until now.

The video is over a six years old. What, if anything, have they advanced from then? Who knows, but there is not much of a reach from an ABM system to an ASAT system - if you want to take that step.

Usual Chinese caveats apply: better than even odds that most of this was faked and standard issue propaganda – indeed much of the video is post-production – but intentions are important. We also have our tricks, but you cannot ignore messages and aspirations of a growing power.



On a not totally unrelated note at the end of the article there was this;

In May, China announced it would send submarines armed with nuclear missiles into the Atlantic Ocean, arguing it had little choice if America continued to advance its weapons systems.

Snort. Readiness points for ALL my friends!