Could the United States Send a Cruise Missile to Any Point on Earth? Then Deny it?

Factual Questions
1

Remember in the movie “Syriana”, when they decide to ‘neutralize’ the good prince?
Someone in Washington simply presses a button, and 2 seconds later the Prince’s car is struck by a missile. (While travelling on some highway outside of Dubai)

Is the military technology really this advanced?

Suppose the USA deemed me a threat to national security, could they theoretically send a cruise missle to Canada while I sleep in my warm bed at 4am, and then just deny it was them?

Does this kind of thing happen or is it only reserved in the movies?

Gus

2

For 1 thing radar could track it so it would be hard to deny a radar track from the US. Also how many countries have cruise missiles?

3

Well, if it were launched from a submarine, it would be tough to prove who had a sub in the area at the time of the launch. But the pool of countries possessing stealthy submarines with cruise missiles is pretty small, I’d bet.

And missiles leave debris, so it would be easy to tell what kind of missile it was, further narrowing down the potential launching country. Possibly to just one.

4

Hitting a fixed point anywhere on Earth is not that hard anymore.

Hitting something moving is tougher. Not because of the motion, but because of the trouble of finding it in the first place and then keeping track of it long enough to get a weapon to it.

So if we know you’re in bed at 123 Anystreet in Saskatoon, you’re toast. As is your house & your immediate neighbor’s houses.

Now the time of flight of the missile might be a few hours depending on where we launch from; cruise missiles are called that because they cruise; and slower than airliners do.

So if we’re being sneaky and launching from the Gulf of Mexico so the track is mostly over our territory where we can deny seeing anything, we’ll need to launch at bedtime to catch you in the wee hours. So no instant death at the press of the Presidential button.
Now as to denying it sucessfully, the others above have pointed out it leaves wreckage. With “Made in USA” stamped on lots of the parts. “Plausible deniability” would quickly become “epic fail”.
Now where we don’t care that everybody knows we did it, or where that’s really the main point we’re trying to make, things are different …

Over in Afghanistan & previously Iraq, USAF has been working on what they call persistent armed loiter along with persistent total surveillance. It 's still in it’s infancy, but USAF & the defense contractors are a determined and industrious bunch with a lot of brains and even more money …

Imagine a high altitude drone watching an entire county (not country (yet)) looking for Abdul al VeryBadGuy. Nearby is another drone loaded with a few bombs or missiles. Both are far enough up you can’t see them, hear them, and they’re stealthy enough to not be trackable with any practical radar.

Surveillance drone sees a cool-looking armed pickup truck pull out of a garage. Checks the plate & the intel; It thinks, “yep, I bet that’s him”. Asks the humans sitting in a building in Nevada “Can I haz kill it? Please, huh? please!!”. Bored human looks at screen, says “It looks like an armed pickup to me, what the heck, go for it.” Drone says “Cool, dude. kthanxbye.” And calls its pal, the drone with the missiles.

“Hey buddy. Abdul’s northbound on Hwy 3 just past An Whacked village. Do you see him?” “No, lemme turn around … OK there he is. White pickup with red sedan following?” “Yep. Waste Him.” Missile launch to impact time 10-30 seconds. Total time from when surveillance picked up the truck?. We’re working to make it 2 minutes, but 10 is more realistic.

Unfortunately it turns out the pickup was a wedding of Abdul’s neighbors & the attack killed a lot of kids. Or at least that’s what Abdul’s pals put out on the internet. Oops.

Sleep tight, World. Our tax dollars are hard at work making you safer every day®.

The only realy scary thing is the Chinese and Russians are hard at work too. Aways behind yet, but they’re smart, motivated, and even less fun to deal withthan we are. Sucks to be human in the 21st Century. Or at least it will in another 15-30 years.

5

:frowning:

6

IIRC, the assasination in Syriana was a missile launched from a drone. So different the a cruise missile.

7

Right.
So we make a big fuss on all the news shows about unidentified terrorists breaking into a US military storage facility, and stealing some of our cruise missiles. News stories for days of attempts to identify them, guesses at what their likely targets are, instructions to people on what to do if they attack (we could recycle some of the 1950’s air raid training filmstrips), etc. Republicans would blame it all on Obama.

A week later, one of those stolen cruise missiles hits Saskatoon.

No need to deny at all – we admit it was one built by us, and stolen by those anti-Saskatoon terrorists. We demand UN resolutions against such terrorists.

8

I guess it’s time to move. Just a couple blocks’ll do. But don’t tell Canada Post your new address; we have moles working there.

9

Moles? That’d explain the slow mail, I guess, what with the underground burrowing and all.

10

How about if the USA were to whip up some cruise missiles, and made them look like they were made by Iran (arabic markings, etc.)
We could then shoot tem off and balme everything on Iran!

11

That is, of course, unless the “stolen” cruise missile has a (ca)nucklear warhead…:wink: Then, I would suggest Swift Current. Regina is right out, because it will probably be in the fallout zone. Prince Albert ain’t too safe either, if the wind is from the southwest that night. My suggestion would be the town my mother is from, Shaunavon. Same direction as Swift Current, but farther away. But like LSLGuy said, don’t tell Canada Post. I would hate to have to nuke my cousins just to get you…

12

Doper nitpick mode: I imagine that won’t work very well, since Iranians speak Persian, not Arabic.

13

Practically every country that wants them. This article lists at least 40 countries that have them. They are cheaper to buy (and easier to learn to make) than things like strategic bombers or fighter jets. So countries that you don’t usually think of us major military powers – like Kenya, Chile, and Singapore – have them in their arsenals.

14

Cruise missiles date back to WW2 and the V1.

15

I was about to correct that, but a quick Google shows that the V1 and V2 were very different devices. The V2 is a ballistic missile, but it looks like the V1 was indeed a cruise missile.

It sounds, though, like the OP isn’t interested so much in the method of flight, but rather in the pinpoint guidance systems the US likes to brag about. The German WWII missiles were only “pinpoint” if your pin was about the size of a city.

16

Even earlier was the Sperry Aerial Torpedo dating back to 1918.

17

Radar track? Part of the point of cruise missiles is that they fly a very low trajectory to avoid radar detection:

18

Unless they had an armed recon drone (or attack jet, bomber or helicopter) keeping the Prince’s car under surveillance the answer is no. You wouldn’t use a cruise missile to take out a single car, in any case…they are usually used to attack large facilities, air fields, etc.

In any case, you couldn’t push a button in Washington and then have the car blow up 2 seconds later, regardless. There would be some comm lag involved, and then there is the flight time of the missile, not to mention there are checks on unmanned recon drones when they are engaging human targets that would have to be gone through. Couple of minutes would be my guess, and that would only be if you happened to have this Prince’s car being tailed either by jet fighters or said armed drone.

Could we, having set up assets in the area, launch missiles, drop bombs or even launch a CM from a sub on any target in the world? Sure…we’ve been able to do this for quite a while now. It’s getting the assets into the area that’s the trick. It could take days to move a sub into the proper area, or hours to fly a fighter or bomber and coordinate refueling and such. It would take even more set up to get an armed drone into some areas, depending on where we have support available. On a whim, if some dude in Washington decided to take you out, it would take some time to set it all up before you were shuffled off this mortal coil by a US missile or bomb, though.

Probably not, no. If you were deemed a threat to the US, they would probably send in a special forces team to take you out…or, more likely, they would contact the Canadian government and either work through them or get them to do it, if you were that dangerous. I can’t conceive of a scenario where the US would use a cruise missile on a target in Canada, especially without the Canadian’s knowing anything about it.

That said, I suppose if the US really wanted to launch a CM into Canada to take out your house they could set it up in a couple of hours (we’d probably use a bomber or attack air craft instead of a CM, btw). I doubt they would bother trying to deny it, just justify why we had done so without consulting the Canadian government or using other means.

The way you are describing things (especially the scenario where they attack your house in Canada then try and deny it) is pure fiction. However, taking out some AQ mucky muck with a missile launched from an armed drone? Yeah, that happens fairly often. Same with using attack jets, bombers and helicopters as the platform for launching the attack.

-XT

19

Last I looked, Farsi is typically written in Arabic script.

BTW, How difficult would it be to put an armed drone over a country without the powers that be noticing, particularly one of the Emirates?

Rob

20

My guess is the problem would be more one of logistics support and deployment than that they would notice the thing flying about. I think they are made with stealthy air frames and probably radar reflective materials as well, so they would be difficult radar targets to spot. What you might see is the mopes launching and supporting the thing, though the new ones can be deployed from fairly far away, and they are semi-autonomous, though a human has to be in the loop for an attack.

-XT