Quantifying Counterforce and Active Defense in Countering Theater Ballistic Missiles

摘要

This paper contains the formulationand analysis of a model to measure, compare,and contrast the effects of counterforce(pre-launch attack) and activedefense (post-launch attack) against tacticalballistic missiles (TBM's). It is shownthat without counterforce an active defensesystem could require an impractical numberof weapons to counter incoming missilesand/or their warheads. This numberis shown to decrease geometrically as effectivecounterforce is used, so that theexpected number of warheads killedincreases dramatically with counterforcethat is only modestly effective. Actualdistributions of warheads reaching the targetarea are shown to be complex mixturesof binomial distributions. It is shown thatnormal approximations to these distributionsbased on the easily-calculated meansand variances often agree poorly with theactual distributions. This is especially truewhen using effective counterforce.