Disarmament Poses Difficulties
Marx wrote that history repeats as farce rather than as drama (he had Louis Napoleon, who became Napoleon III, in mind, with Napoleon himself as the subject ot the original historical drama). A historian might be excused for seeing a parallel between the aftermath of World War I and that of the Gulf War.
At the end of World War I, the victorious allies tried to ensure that war would not return by forcing Germany to disarm. After a few years, the allies' resolve clearly weakened. The Germans shrewdly observed that rearmament was possible, as long as it was clandestine. The only real barrier to rearmament would be resumption of war, and, by the late 1920s, it was clear that no one in Britain or France had any real stomach for a rerun of World War I. Indeed, recent histories show that the British public came to blame the French, not the Germans, for World War I losses, on the theory that the French had dragged them into the war to save France. The real test came in 1935-1936, when Hitler announced rearmament and then reoccupied the demilitarized Rhineland. When Britain and France failed to act, Hitler became convinced that he could operate freely in Europe as soon as he had built the necessary force. World War II became inevitable, partly because the British and French governments were not quite as supine as Hitler thought they were.
To the British and the French, World War I demonstrated that further war was pointless; surely it was much better to negotiate than to fight. At the time, they saw the compromises of the 1920s and 1930s not as cowardice, but as an idealistic approach to preventing further war by taking real account of what some saw as real German grievances. We now know, of course, that the Germans saw such idealism as weakness.
What of the past decade and the attempts to disarm Iraq? At the time, the common wisdom was that any sort of negotiated settlement was better than outright war. In theory, as after 1918, the victorious coalition always could have resumed the war, if Sadaam broke the disarmament agreement under which a ceasefire had been negotiated. Like his German predecessors, however, Sadaam understood that the victorious coalition had only limited staying power. In his case, the key experience probably was the limited air attack that greeted him after he ejected U.N. arms inspectors—who had enjoyed only limited effectiveness.
Similarly, the North Koreans discovered that agreeing to stop their nuclear program was enough; for eight years after the 1994 agreement they were never forced to admit inspectors to verify it. Finally, a senior North Korean told U.S. negotiators that, of course, his country had never abandoned its nuclear program. Later, it seemed that U.S. intelligence had made much the same deduction, but that the administration preferred to deal with North Korea after dealing with Iraq.
In both cases, the lesson seems to be that nothing is as effective as direct military action pressed far enough home to accomplish its objectives—not least because it often is difficult or impossible to resume military action decades after a partial victory.
And now? We have had our decade of idealism (or naiveté) facing a cynical enemy. We would much prefer that Sadaam play the part of disastrous clown than find ourselves the target of his nuclear or chemical weapons. Perhaps the North Koreans were encouraged in their own efforts by our unwillingness to press Sadaam. If that is so, perhaps dealing with Sadaam also will encourage the North Koreans to become more reasonable.
Radars Are Big in Paris
Late in October, many of the major naval arms producers displayed their wares at the Euronaval show in Paris. New developments included the Heracles radar developed by Thales, formerly Thomson-CSF. Heracles is notable as a clever new application of the developing technology of active phased arrays. Most existing phased arrays, such as the SPY1 of the Aegis system, are passive. A radar signal generated elsewhere is passed through an array of computer-controlled phase shifters, which form and point a beam. Because there is only one signal generator, the radar produces a single beam. The effect of electronic beam formation is that the beam can switch very quickly from one position to another. For example, SPY-1 can track multiple targets almost simultaneously, flicking its beam from one to another to measure each target's movement. A conventional mechanically scanned radar would have to wait a full revolution before seeing any one target again. The single beam, however, does have limitations. For example, it can operate in volume mode, at long range, or in antisea-skimmer mode, at the horizon. The beam can switch between the two modes, but in that case it will devote only part of its time to either role. It cannot scan nearly as thoroughly as would be desirable. Because a ship has only one ideal radar location (as high as possible above water), it is difficult to devise a truly multifunction radar that can perform several functions at once.
Enter the active array. Each element of the active array is, in effect, a separate radar. The computer controlling the set forms beams by adjusting the outputs of the elements of the array. Because each element is separate, the array can form several independent beams simultaneously. It also can shape its beams to null out jammers, to an extent a passive array cannot. The U.S. Navy is financing development of several active arrays, including a SPY-1 successor. Other active arrays are being placed on board fighters.
The great problem of any active array is that a large number of small radars have to be packed into a very small space on the face of the radar. The larger the elementary radars (receiver/transmitter modules), the fewer can be packed together, and the broader the resulting beam. Yet shrinking the elements can be difficult, since each must generate considerable power. At the least, the face of the array becomes hot, and cooling may be a problem.
Heracles is an elegant approach to a solution. The face of the radar is a passive beam-forming lens. It focuses beams produced by a retina behind the lens. The retina, in turn, is a small, 16-element active array that creates up to four beams. This configuration makes it possible to achieve many of the advantages of a full active array without extreme shrinkage of the transmitter/receiver elements. It is not clear to what extent the Heracles solution is applicable to a fixed-face radar such as SPY-- 1, because there must be considerable distance between retina and lens for focusing. Heracles, therefore, uses a single rotating face.
The Russians displayed another interesting radar, the Monolit. This is the system that resides inside the radome NATO codenames Band Stand, on board Sovremmennyy-class destroyers such as those sold to China. These ships have missiles (SS-N-- 22 Moskit) with ranges of about 200 kilometers. The question always has been what onboard sensor they use for targeting. In 1996, the Russians published a book celebrating the technical advances achieved by the Soviet Navy. One article explained that, as such missiles were developed, the Russians became interested in over-the-horizon radars. Initially, they experimented with tropospheric scatter. An L-band radar, such as the SPS-49, will send some of its energy up toward the troposphere, which will reflect that energy toward an area about 200 kilometers away. The U.S. Army uses this phenonomenon for reliable medium-range radio communication. For naval users of radars such as SPS-- 49, this sort of transmission is a source of spurious targets. What was not known until 1996, at least publicly, was that the Soviets took the opposite view. A high-gain antenna could find real targets at tropospheric-scatter ranges.
At the Paris show, the Russians distributed and explained a data sheet describing the system on board the Sovremmennyys. The antenna inside Band Stand has two back-to-back elements. One is a troposcatter radar and the other is a high-gain X-band dish that exploits ducting, another known over-the-horizon phenomenon. Under certain conditions, a surface duct, equivalent to a microwave waveguide, forms over the sea. It can carry signals far beyond the horizon. This phenomenon has been known since the end of World War II, but mainly as a nuisance, since the targets detected at great ranges may appear to be much closer. Again, it is possible to design a radar waveform specially adapted to longer-range detection. Ducting is particularly common in the eastern Baltic, the eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the South China Sea. It is not difficult to imagine why the Soviets embraced it.
The moral of the story is that radar technology offers a much wider range of possibilities than those we normally exploit or consider—and some of those possibilities might be used against us in future. In particular, when we operate off a coast, we assume tacitly that the horizon at which we can be detected (and attacked) is the conventional radar horizon, perhaps 25 nautical miles offshore. What happens when the effective horizon is two or three times as far offshore? In return for access to Soviet technology, the Indians provided the Soviets with their own improvements to Soviet systems. Presumably their discoveries were circulated to other Soviet clients. How many of them adopted ducting as a major radar mode?