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Originally Posted by IC3
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It's kinda of a lose lose situation for Canada, We said no for the missile defense system and that screws up the relations with america as far as defense goes and maybe even more. If we agreed with it, we would become a target having to rely on america's military to help defend canada..Which isn't a bad thing, But the whole point is..Canada doesn't want to be a target.
I will admit after reading this it opened my eyes more to the whole situation.
Daswig also made a good point which didn't even cross my mind, at first..I didn't know that missile launchers would be placed on Canadian soil..I thought the whole argument was about america shooting thier missile's into Canadian airspace..When in fact if they were placed on Canadian soil as daswig stated, enemy missile's would be intercepted over the ocean and not canada. Which makes more sense to me than shooting them down over Canada if one were to be over Canada.
What about alaska, America is going to place some of these missile defense systems there aren't they? Especially if enemy missile's will be coming from the west..That's kind of a gimme.
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The problem is that the further away the missile bases are, the longer the flight time. The longer the flight time, the greater the chances of missing. The greater chances of missing, the higher the chances of leakers, and with the extended flight time, that means you don't have an opportunity to re-engage the target. Also, your coverage will be much more pourous. You also have to remember that these things are generally not volleyed off en masse. it's far better to have a series of "picket" style bases, one every so often, rather than have ye olde "One big base" that's expected to cover a huge geographic area. The defense costs are higher, but the odds of the enemy taking out a great amount of your defensive capability with a single strike goes down drastically too. Ideally, you'd have bases located so that the first line would have at a minimum double coverage (every flight path could be hit by at least two bases) with higher concentrations along the most likely ICBM pathways which would be expected to get the highest number of inbounds in a real attack. Then you'd have a second line with similar coverage a couple of hundred k back, to take out the ones that got through. The thing to remember is that it only takes one leaker to create a huge tragedy, so you provide defense in depth. If any given missile has a 25% chance of taking out the inbound, you'd want to have the ability to target it with AT LEAST 6 missiles, originating from multiple well-defended bases.
I read somewhere that something like 65% of Canada's population lives within a very short distance (a few miles) of the US border. That fact ALONE puts Canada in the crosshairs. A country launching a full-scale nuclear strike isn't going to give a shit about the fallout from a strike on the US poisoning citizens of another country that just happen to live close to the US. And they'd target Canadian assets as a matter of course, lest those Canadian assets be used by elements of hte US military. Example: They'd target airfields to keep those US aircraft that were not destroyed from using Canadian air bases, and they'd target Canadian ports to prevent their use by US Navy elements.
I'm wondering if you ever studied the Maginot line. At the time of it's building, it was the cat's ass. We're talking state of the art. Pop-up arty, heavily fortified, could be resupplied completely underground, yadda yadda yadda. The only problem with it was that it only ran along France's border with Germany, not France's borders with the Low Countries, since France was on good terms with them. Consequently, the Germans ran through the Low Countries and rendered the French's entire defense strategy obsolete. By leaving a weak spot, France caused their friends and allies who lived in the weak spot to be invaded and overrun, simply because they didn't want to offend them. If the French had built the Maginot line along the projected and well known path of the Schlieffen (sp?) Plan (simplified, it's that the folks on the right flank of the thrust should have their cuffs in the channel) that the Germans dusted off after it ALMOST worked in WWI, the Low Countries would most likely not have been invaded in the manner that they were, and France might not have fallen.
If you present an enemy with a weak zone in your defense, THAT's where they're going to attack, since one of the bedrock principles of military strategery (I love that Bushism) is that you try to match your strength to the enemy's weakness, rather than his strength (Remember Kursk?). Canada seems hell-bent on making their entire nation into that weak spot. And given the reality of the kind of situation that this system is designed to deal with, which city do you think the US is going to use it's ABMs to defend? An American city, or a Canadian city? With the bases on the northern borders of Canada, the US has no choice but to engage EVERY missile, since it's not definite where each missile is targeted. But projecting coverage into Canada when the US is itself under attack? Any commander who tried to do that would be relieved on the spot, because he'd be wasting assets for a non-mission purpose.