Recall NRO’s donation to NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA

Note especially this paragraph: “While NRO considers them to be obsolete, the telescopes are nevertheless new and unused. All CCDs and electronics have been removed, however, and NASA must add them at its own expense. When the telescopes’ specifications were presented to scientists, large portions were censored due to national security. An unnamed space analyst stated that the instruments may be a part of the KH-11 Kennen line of satellites which have been launched since 1976, but which have now been largely superseded by newer telescopes with wider fields of view than the KH-11. The analyst stated, however, that the telescopes have “state-of-the art optics” despite their obsolescence for reconnaissance purposes.”

When considering the technological capabilities of clandestine organizations, in general it’s probably a good idea to extrapolate two or three decades from what you think is state of the art.

There are some exceptions, of course. Robots, AI, and such are probably not much more advanced than what’s visible.

2. Fractional Orbital Bombardment System [FOBS] too. No American analog to the Soviet model. American decision makers would have a grand total of five minutes to know a nuclear attack was occurring and take appropriate measures.

3. During the Carter administration it was reported Soviet lasers HAD blinded American early-warning satellites. Carter had warned the Soviets if they did that again it would be considered as an act of WAR!

Not so damn fast. Lasers are not very efficient and photons have little mass. It takes a whopping shit load of photons, laser power, to down missiles. Being so inefficient how the hell are they going to dump the 50% lost heat of a 10 megawatt laser???????? Think of the size of the radiators. Massive. BIG TARGET! Think of what it would cost to launch these massive things and what it would cost to throw a bucket of 10 cent bolts at them to destroy them. Now if you could have a highly efficient laser system, maybe so, but we don’t have that.

Here’s a great article on laser weapons and their limitations. I’m not as skeptical as him about them but he lays out a lot of good facts on them.

http://www.g2mil.com/Laser_Scams.htm

IIRC, since he was writing with the Napoleonic wars in mind, his idea that you had to break the enemy’s ability to wage war quickly and decisively had more to do with the idea of the decisive, calamitous battle that could strip away the military capacity, leadership, and will of an enemy for years, or a generation, in a day or two. Never quite managed in those wars, but when empires like Austria or Prussia could be knocked out for a few years at least by battles that took a day, killed only soldiers, and did no harm to their homelands or populations, much, one could see what Clausewitz was getting at.

Many in the 20th century assumed by this that Clausewitz was a prophet of total war as they learned it, and that had its logic at a time when grinding down the homeland and slaughtering huge swaths of manpower were the only way to achieve the same goal, the elimination of warmaking capacity.

My profs circa the 90s were interested in, while understanding that connection, reminding the students that this was a function of circumstance and conditions, not the only possible conclusion of Clausewitz’s idea. Absolute War was, Clausewitz being who he was and in the time he was, yet another German abstraction capable of being played out multiple ways. The decisive battle he imagined, the total war of industrial Europe, the overblown but in retrospect fascinating “Shock and Awe” concept [whatever else may be said of it as a pre-occupation strategy, it certainly disarmed the Iraqi state, twice...], an EMP attack that knocked out a modern technological state, or, oddly, this variant Pournelle offers.

They all require a certain political decision by the loser not to get ornery, or a loser with a mental framework that just accepts defeat and doesn’t change the game or can’t imagine how to change the game [can the Habsburgs go to the mattresses in 1805 or 1809 with guerrillas? probably not], or a US that doesn’t want to fire the “shot from the grave” as the last round of armageddon. But if you have understood the mindset of the enemy, you get as close to absolute war as possible.

Apropos of nothing, really. But that passage from Pournelle really put the whole issue back in my head, suddenly, as though by shock and awe.

I’m not so sure that ‘hold cities hostage for the surrender of the submarine force’ gambit would have worked, even against the United States. If they’d tried that, that might have proved to be the Russians’ equivalent of Japan’s “let’s schmuck the US fleet by surprise and then they’ll lose the will to fight” plan. Admittedly, since US national survival of any kind would be on the table, the Russian scheme would be a little better founded. And many Americans at the time probably would have reasonably wanted their president to take that view. But that’s gambling a lot on the willingness of the US to not gamble.