I would expect to see stories in the near future about the dangers of falling space debris caused by the U.S.'s unilateral attack on foreign satellites.

It seems unlikely that any weapon we invent won't eventually fall into other nations' hands, seeing how Russia got the bomb and Iran is on its way to getting it. It wouldn't surprise me if the details are spread, accidentally or intentionally, by our own government when someone comes into power who firmly believes in "internationalism" and thinks it would show trust to hand over the blueprints to it.

Not a problem, John, so long as we have the will.
First guys in orbit with weapons(better be us!) can use the weapons to shoot any undesired orbiting objects. That's what OJ is talking about. You can have all the knowledge the traitors can leak you, but you can't get the infrastructure in place.

As Robert Mitchell Jr. says, as Lou Gots has written in previous posts, the problem for nations or societies that desire to contest with America for control of the planet is that the weapons of war are moving beyond the ability of pre-WW II tech to produce.

While some advanced weapons can be purchased by those with more money than brains, sometimes the countermeasures are not for sale.

Many low-tech nations, (including some with a facade of technical ability, such as Iran and Pakistan), possess advanced missiles theoretically capable of shooting down advanced aircraft.
However, stealth technology largely neutralizes those missiles.

Among nations with the current ability to manufacture 21st century weapons, none have any desire to go to war with the U.S.

I finally got the referene, oj ... Wen Ho-lee/Goldfinger ...

Yes, let's get back to Executing or Prosecuting spies and traitors ...

Two punishments to be known as the Amazing Dissuaders.

Closed loop adaptive wavefront correction for atmospheric turbulence has already been pushed pretty far by the people building big telescopes, like Keck in Hawaii and the Subaru telescope. The technology is becoming fairly robust and it isn't a state secret.

Shooting a laser beam up to a satellite is pretty much the same problem. The high beam energy might cause self-focusing effects, but we're all in the same boat there. If we can do it now, I think it's something China could do within a year. Quite likely both sides have been spraying laser beams into spy satellties for awhile now (not the same as blowing them up).

'Rods from the Gods' etc isn't something anyone has done (to my obviously limited knowledge). So we might get an advantage there, if it really is feasible.

You're still missing what is basically Mr. Gots' point – these weapons are no big deal in small quantities. Only truly wealthy societies can afford them in numbers that matter. Not only are they expensive, but they are far more expensive when you don't have the infrastructure to make them and have to build the support stuff one off (the problem the USSR had). If the USA can afford more satellites than you can afford anti-satellite weapons, who wins? It's the iron triangle of tech, infrastructure, and money, and having just the tech doesn't win the war.

And finally, truly wealthy societies will have interests that mesh with the USA's so we need not concern ourselves with defending against them.

Good points above.

Try this one. Weapons systems have capabilities and limitations. The latter include the counter-measures to which the system is susceptable as well as the weapons systems to which is vulnerable.

By way of illustration, artillery has certain capabilities, but these may be degraded by counter-measures against observation and communications. Artillery is itself vulnerable to precision-guided counter-battery fires and to tac air.

Anti-satillite systems likewise are checked by the high-tech systems at which we excel, and are extremely vulnerable to air and missle attacks.

As correctly mentioned above, the military threshhold, the level which must be attained to just be in the game, continues to advance, faster and faster, beyond the reach of almost everyone. It is Omdurman, and all the World are the Fuzzie-Wuzzies.

These are the realities which redefine sovereignity, as the range of coastal defense artillery once defined freedom of the seas.

Visualize world domination.

In the meantime back here on earth, in real time, Iran is putting together a nuke program and buying long range rockets from starving N.Korea, as we watch, and the Russians are currently flying military jets with engines that can vector thrust up, down and sideways while the best we have in limited production can only vector thrust up and down, described by our experts as admittedly inferior design. A belief in American exceptionalism doesn't make it so and may be dangerous to our health.

Gene:

No, this is their reality:

en.rian.ru/world/20060503/47178591.html

No aircraft in production today, nor any in current development that are likely to ever see production, can defeat the F/A-22.

None.
Zero.

The American F/A-18 is currently the world's premier fighter, undefeated in actual, live, death-dealing combat - but one F/A-22 can defeat EIGHT F/A-18s flown by experienced, well-trained pilots.

While one overwhelmingly superior weapons platform does not "exceptionalism" make, America has dozens of examples of military tech, tactics, or training where we're #1 or #2 in the world, or even #0 - we're developing stuff that nobody else is even attempting.
Our working and deployed SDI Ballistic Missile Defense Shield comes to mind.

Some other examples include the M1A2 Abrams tank; the B-2; the F-117; the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, Hummer); the Patriot anti-missile system; the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, which Orrin posted about a few days back; the fact that every American squad leader is trained, empowered, and expected to take command and carry out the assigned mission should every higher-ranking person fall; the body armor with ceramic plates that let troops survive point-blank, multiple rifle hits to the chest and torso without serious injury; the fact that forward air controllers can e-mail pilots already en route with the co-ordinates of a target, then paint it with a laser from miles away, which means that pilots are flying sorties without advance notice of their targets, leading to unheard of turn-around times; the JDAM "smart bomb"; the Predator UAV; and so forth.

In the late stages of development, slated to roll out in '08 - a HMMWV-mounted laser that will track and destroy incoming artillery and mortar rounds in mid-air.

Add 'em all up, and we can confidently state that America is indeed exceptional, and clearly dominant.

Further, the basic point of many of the above comments is that the pace of development is ever more rapid, and the number of nations that have BOTH the technical ability to design and build AND the willingness to pay the astoundingly large tab, for advanced military capabilities, is very small.

Perhaps seven, and one might argue three.

Iran's getting nukes about twenty years too late, and twenty years from now they'll be a relative hundred years behind the U.S.

Any nation that can't build millions of robots, and more importantly, the software to run them, is already out of the running for global power in the 21st century.

All a few dozen nukes let a nation do is commit suicide.

Noam, Not to be disrespectful, but your examples are ludicrous.

Genecis, why do you think that? When we lose more men in training then we do in war, I believe it's safe to say we have TOV.

OJ, would you believe your example has happened to us, I'd guess more than once. Noam, the Japanese shot down an f-22 with another f-22 during training. Otherwise where were f22's ever engaged against a credible world class fighter and pilot. And let's not forget the vaunted invisible Nighthawk F-117 that was shot down by the 3rd world Serbs a few years back. And how are the Humvees holding up to IED's, and we learned the indestructible Abrams could be taken down by infantry level antitank weapons.

I'll make my point: When the military wants increased budgets to keep our technological edge. We'd better support it because the fact is that's all we have and it's not that overwhelming.

I've read some of you grousing about increasing the military budget on this blog not too long ago. I'd remind you who did so that the edge we have is fragile and must be maintained, American exceptionalism or not.

Thank your for your thoughts, Genecis. We want a smaller military budget because our edge is huge, and we want it to get bigger. Our edge is our economy. When we need a military, we can build to taste. The only trick is making sure that the money went to the military, not the CC people.
We do take hits on the battlefield. If you want perfection, die and go to Heaven. But we are losing less people at war then we have in peacetime. Clue.

Thank you for your thoughts Robert. Small Chinese in cotton batten coats and canvas sneakers during the dead of winter and then through three more years fought us to a draw. I was there Robert and took a hit besides. It was a damn good thing we controlled the air space. My weapon was designed before WW1 and three of them served as the squads automatic fire base. We had the technological edge because in the beginning half of the Chinese had no weapons, just grenades. We did some budget cutting after ww2 also.

Thank you for your service, Genecis. The Korean war looked like a failure of civilian leadership to me. The money when to the CC people, not the economy. We had a much larger technological edge, but didn't us it because that would have been an act of war. The size of the military budget won't help, if the civilians choke.