The Bang-Soak Theory of Missile Attack and Terminal Defense

Abstract : Analyses of the terminal defense of a set of targets by anti-ballistic missiles are generally conducted under the assumption that all attacking reentry vehicles are identical. This paper generalizes to the case where the attacking arsenal is mixed, the main motivation being that a mixed attacking arsenal can contain decoys that are harmless to targets, but which can still "soak up" defenders. All defenders are assumed to be perfect, and the main focus of the paper is on cases where the attack is comparatively weak. A kind of Prim-Read defense results. A simple method for deriving an upper bound on damage is described and illustrated.