The famous SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) program, as you know, focused on the deployment of numerous anti-missile systems are very expensive and difficult to manufacture.

It is now known that “the game was worth the candle” and the money spent paid off in full - the Soviet Union could not stand the next “arms race”, however, the United States also spent a lot of money. So how much did the SDI program cost?

Americans have never been stupid people, and any "cut" of the budget was carefully planned without total consequences for the state.

After R. Reagan announced the deployment of SDI, only a few months passed and at the beginning of 1984 the Army Strategic Defense Command (USASDC - U.S. Army Strategic Defense Command) was organized, whose specialists drew up a detailed plan for the phased deployment of systems, both ground and and space based.

In particular, the program approved in 1987 included the following systems:

Boost Surveillance and Tracking System (BSTS) - improved surveillance and tracking systems,
Space-Based Interceptors (SBI) - space interceptors,
Space-Based Surveillance and Tracking System (SSTS) - space surveillance and tracking systems,
Ground-based Surveillance and Tracking System (GSTS) - ground-based surveillance and tracking systems,
Exoatmospheric Reentry Vehicle Interceptor System (ERIS) - extra-atmospheric interception systems,
Battle Management / Command, Control, and Communication (BM / C3) - combat command and communications.

The first phase (Phase I) of SDI involved the deployment of BSTS and some SBI components, which was a completely non-trivial task, given the huge coverage area. And the money poured in…

In 1989, when the collapse of the USSR became inevitable, America was still discussing possible ways to “optimize” the missile defense program. George Bush Sr., who replaced Reagan as president, continued the work of his predecessor and instructed the Department of Defense to develop a four-year plan for the further development of SDI.

At that time, the focus shifted to the space anti-missile program codenamed “Brilliant Pebbles” (until 1988 it was designated as “Smart Rocks”), according to which it was planned to deploy 4000 (!) satellites and orbital stations in orbit.

The cost of the first thousand satellites was estimated at $11 billion, which was a fairly optimistic estimate. However, "Brilliant Pebbles" was cheaper than the previous project, which cost $69.1 billion. Now they intended to spend 55.3 billion, which, however, was also a lot.

At this time, the United States entered into a real euphoria, anticipating the imminent fall of the "Evil Empire". The Americans were not going to stop there, on the contrary, the priority of “Brilliant Pebbles” was so high that in 1990 Secretary of Security Dick Cheney declared it “program number one”.

Thus, despite the obvious victory, the budget continued to be mastered at the same pace, and significant progress was still not foreseen. The main "developers" were the firms TRW-Hughes and Martin Marietta, who were entrusted with the implementation of a government order, but apart from prototypes and models, they failed to do anything for three years of "hard" work.

They did not manage to fully “master” the allocated funds - in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the need for a powerful missile defense system disappeared. The new administration of President Clinton immediately cut the budget allocations, and in 1993 it was announced that all work on SDI was being curtailed.

In total, between fiscal years 1985 and 1991, SDI spent $20.9 billion of which:

6.3 billion - sensor systems,
4.9 billion - directed energy weapons (DEW),
4.8 billion - kinetic energy weapons,
2.7 billion - combat control and communications systems,
2.2 billion - other scientific research.

In addition, another $1.6 billion was received by the Department of Energy for its own research work.

By today's standards, this seems a little, but we should not forget that the Cold War world of the last decade did not know economic crises, and the expansion of the United States was so great that there was no doubt about its future role as the “world policeman”. All this was not felt then, but it is felt now - as of the end of 2011, the US public debt exceeded $15 trillion. And the SDI program has made a significant contribution to this.

So what is left of the entire Star Wars program? Perhaps the only “fragment” of SDI worthy of mention was the Deep Space Program Science Experiment, conducted in 1994. The purpose of the experiment was to test the operation of new sensors and some components spaceships new type. A single probe, called Clementine, flew to and from the Moon from January 25 to May 7 before it was lost due to malfunctioning onboard equipment. This program cost another 80 million, which, compared with SDI, can be considered a drop in the ocean.

March 23, 1983 President R. Reagan delivered a televised address to the country from his office in the White House, in which he outlined a breathtakingly fantastic plan for the space defense of the US territory from nuclear attacks from the enemy - at that time the Soviet Union. The next day, the New York Post published Reagan's words in an article headlined: "Star Wars Will Destroy Red Missiles," and since then the announced Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program has become known to the world also as "Star Wars"- by the name of the popular film, the 3rd film of which was released in May 1983.

The essence of Reagan's speech boiled down to the need to abandon mutual assured destruction and move on to a new format for ensuring national and world security - deploying defense systems in space.

Reagan's speech came as a surprise to everyone- for the Americans, for the American allies, for Moscow, and in general for the whole world. What's more, it came as a surprise even to Reagan's own cabinet, including Secretary of State Shultz and Defense Department officials. Previously, this whole topic of space defense was not worked out in the US government and its departments. It was not the military and diplomats who imposed this topic on Reagan, but on the contrary, he imposed it on them.

According to his closest associates, Reagan for many years, even before becoming president, saw the threat national security USA in stock nuclear weapons and looked for options to reduce dependence on it and even eliminate it completely. He was greatly impressed, in particular, by a visit in 1979 as part of the election campaign to the Center for the Joint Aerospace Defense Command. North America NORAD in Colorado Springs. During the tour, Reagan asked what would happen to Cheyenne Mountain, where the Center was located, if it was hit by heavy weapons. Soviet rocket, to which the general accompanying him replied: "He will blow it to hell." Reagan was then struck by the inconsistency in the scale and level of sophistication of military technology with the level of protection of the country from nuclear annihilation - it was not protected, everything was based on the alleged agreement of both sides - the United States and the USSR - that they both refrained from nuclear strike for fear of retaliatory destruction. But it was only a concept, nothing more - not formally approved by anyone and never discussed at any negotiations.

Already President, Reagan from January 1982 began to stimulate the discussion of previously disparate military-technical ideas and options with his questions and his interest. He began to discuss with military and scientific and technical experts the ideas of hitting ballistic missiles after they were launched from launch positions in almost any part of their flight path. Reagan asked the question: if a rocket launch can be detected from a satellite, then is it really impossible to destroy it in a short time after this launch? The answer was to place anti-missile systems in space and supplement them with ground and air systems. Many of these systems were based on the use of fundamentally new technical solutions such as electromagnetic and laser guns. It was also planned to place many new satellites, optical reflectors, and interceptors in space.

Autumn 1982 the leaders of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (analogous to the Soviet General Staff) submitted to the president an overview report on space defense, which brought together the previously expressed ideas and proposals. But the Committee could not even imagine that the president would soon publicly declare space defense a military-political priority of his administration.

The emergence of such weapons systems broke the logic of the concept of mutually assured destruction, on which the post-war world was based. Reagan himself viewed SDI as a defensive program in nature and, moreover, was ready later to involve the Soviet Union in it, thereby forcing it to eliminate its nuclear potential.

However, theoretically, it was possible to strike at the enemy and then repel his retaliatory strike, which violated the security system that had developed in the world. By the way, this is precisely why, having started negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms in 1971, the USA and the USSR (SALT) simultaneously limited the anti-missile defense systems - ABM - that could repel or mitigate a retaliatory nuclear strike.

To work on the program within the framework of the US Department of Defense, the Organization of the Strategic Defense Initiative was created.

Despite all the authority of Reagan, his the SDI program met with strong resistance from the very beginning in Washington itself, which, in the end, buried this program. Progressive Democrats (in particular, Senators T. Kennedy and J. Kerry, who became Secretary of State under Obama) pointed to the danger of undermining the concept of mutually assured destruction, which, according to them, only increased the threat of nuclear conflict. The US Department of State and Department of Defense believed that this program was technically unrealizable, and besides, it violated the ABM Treaty with the USSR and the Treaty on open space. US allies feared that, if implemented, SDI would "separate" the joint defense system of the US and Western Europe.

The Soviet Union immediately accused Washington in an attempt to unilaterally create a strategic advantage for themselves and achieve military superiority over the USSR. Initially, Moscow's reaction was mainly propagandistic in nature - in general, everything that came from Washington was condemned. Moscow considered that the SDI program was designed to intimidate the Soviet Union and put pressure on it in the disarmament negotiations, which by that time had stalled. It is also important that Reagan made the announcement of the start of the SDI program just 2 weeks after he called the USSR in a conversation with American evangelical preachers "evil empire".

However, after some time, as the Americans began to work methodically on SDI, Soviet assessments of the prospects for this program became more and more alarmist - in the USSR they understood that America had the scientific, technical, industrial and financial potential in order to carry out everything what was stated. In the same way, the USSR understood that they would not be able to oppose the United States with anything similar, although they themselves carried out certain developments on the deployment of weapons in space. In Moscow, SDI has generally begun to be presented in an even more fantastic form than its authors themselves - they say that the Americans plan to deploy combat stations in space similar to those depicted in Star Wars to strike at the USSR.

The total cost of deploying SDI was estimated at about $150 billion ($400 billion in 2017 prices).

With the departure of Reagan from the presidency in early 1989, the SDI program gradually came to naught., and in May 1993 B. Clinton actually closed it, although some promising scientific and technical work continued. The United States spent about $40 billion on it from 1984 to 1993 ($100 billion in 2017).

It is rather difficult to state the SDI program as complete system in military-technical terms

The influence of this program on Soviet-American relations should neither be underestimated nor, at the same time, overestimated. SDI convinced the Soviet military-political leadership of the futility of the arms race - the USSR (even before Gorbachev) returned to the table of disarmament negotiations interrupted by Andropov, began to discuss the option of a real reduction, and not limitation, as before, of nuclear weapons. Upon coming to power in March 1985, Gorbachev made no secret of his disbelief in the realism of SDI and urged the Soviet military not to intimidate themselves with this program. He considered it necessary to normalize Soviet-American relations and reduce armaments even without SDI. However, in subsequent negotiations, he linked the cuts to the US withdrawal from SDI.

Agency for missile defense The US is "not against" the development of space-based ballistic missile interceptors, previously proposed by US lawmakers.

“We are working on options in case the state decides that such funds are needed,” General Samuel Greaves, director of the agency, said recently, noting that now legal grounds to conduct such work created by Congress.

Indeed, the 2018 and 2019 military budget bills included an article that the agency was “permitted” (depending on internal system priorities and needs in missile defense tasks) to launch the development of a space-based interception system that acts on ballistic missiles in the active part of the trajectory. Presumably, by 2022, the first prototype of such a system can be demonstrated in practice, if there are no problems with scientific and technical groundwork or financial constraints.

The system, as noted, should be “regional” in nature, which, together with the discussions that took place in political and expert circles in the United States in 2016-2017, first of all indicates the problem of outstanding progress, which in Lately demonstrate North Korean missilemen. However, the creation of missile defense systems of a fundamentally new type of basing also creates global problems.

Pebbles in orbit

The missile defense space strike echelon immediately evokes memories of Ronald Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" - ​​SDI. At that time, the United States, at least on paper, set the task of creating a multi-layered system of dense defense against an equal opponent. This caused a rather nervous reaction in the USSR and forced many billions to be spent on symmetrical (creation of its own missile defense system) and asymmetric (development of countermeasures) steps.

By the way, the rocket-building industry has held out well on this scientific and technical reserve since the 1990s: modern missile systems bear the stamp of that time, and their technical specifications took into account "promising missile defense systems of a potential adversary."

In addition to fantastic designs such as orbital X-ray lasers pumped from nuclear explosion(that is, a direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty), in the late 1980s, the United States began to seriously consider the concept of mass deployment of orbital platforms with small homing interceptors that were supposed to attack Soviet ballistic missiles emerging from under the atmosphere shield. The project was named Brilliant Pebbles (“Brilliant pebbles”).

It was criticized, defended, the architecture was reworked, the feasibility study was recalculated. As a result, he entered the year 1991, when SDI as a dense missile defense system from a massive missile attack completely lost its relevance. In its place came the GPALS project (Global Limited Strike Protection), whose effective buffer capacity was calculated based on about 200 warheads attacking the US continental territory. Brilliant Pebbles were to be a key element of GPALS.

But he also remained on paper. By 1999, the United States moved to the deployment of a "national missile defense" project, which to this day provides only extremely limited protection of US territory from single launches. The European (third) position area was supposed to be a copy of the two American ones, but Barack Obama canceled the plans by installing SM-3 anti-missiles there, the current (deployed and undergoing tests) modifications of which are not yet capable of resisting at all intercontinental missiles, but only missiles medium range. There was no place for space strike weapons in these plans.

However, the ideas of the space interception echelon remained on the agenda and periodically (whenever Iran or the DPRK demonstrated another rocket-building success) surfaced in the press and reports on initiative projects. This applied both to orbital interceptors and more recently to talk about space laser systems.

Are your opponents ready?

Many American experts have criticized and continue to criticize the idea of ​​a space echelon of missile defense weapons, and different points vision. The economic utopianism of the project, the immaturity of technologies, and the clearly destabilizing nature of the system are also noted.

The latter should be especially noted. The space echelon deployed to confidently destroy Iranian and North Korean missiles, as experts note, will also cover large areas of Eurasia, including China. This immediately creates tension in relations with Beijing. Recall that one of the areas of combat patrols of Russian submarine missile carriers on Far East, according to the US military, is located in the Sea of ​​Okhotsk, in which case space assets could potentially threaten it as well.

As we have already written, space strike missile defense systems as an idea are not at all new in solutions for domestic missile systems fifth generation ("Topol-M", "Bulava", "Yars", "Sarmat"), the possibility of deploying such systems by the enemy is provided. In particular, we are talking about adaptive acceleration modes with maneuvering and flat trajectories, in which the rocket does not leave the atmosphere for as long as possible in comparison with the optimal flight profiles. This increases the requirements for the energy of the rocket, reduces the payload, but increases the likelihood of its delivery.

But not so long ago, we were also shown a means that fundamentally (based on current and future technologies) excludes the impact of the missile defense space attack echelon. These are rocket-gliding systems with hypersonic gliders - for example, the Russian Avangard.

The glider after acceleration does not move along a ballistic trajectory in airless space (as is the case with ballistic missiles, whose load at apogee can reach up to 1200–1500 km altitude), but dives back and glides in the atmosphere at an altitude of only 50–60 km. This precludes the use of orbital interceptor missiles as they were conceived to counter ballistic targets.

For a "pebble" type system, another platform is already needed, including a "return part" with thermal protection and other requirements for mechanical strength. This increases and complicates the final product (of which a lot is needed) and increases the cost of the entire orbital defense complex by an order of magnitude. Difficulties also arise when orbital-based lasers are used against atmospheric targets (power requirements increase, defocusing increases).

The system is being built

Nevertheless, if the strike echelon of missile defense systems still looks hypothetical (as in previous visits), then the decision to fundamentally upgrade the space echelon of missile defense information assets in the United States has been made irrevocably.

The US military points out that the architecture of the current orbital surveillance systems was basically formed several decades ago and in modern conditions already looks archaic, especially with the likely deployment of hypersonic weapons.

Recall that the classic scheme for warning about a missile attack looks like fixing by space means the launch of missiles from enemy territory with the clarification of the situation using the ground echelon of radar stations at the moment when the missiles rise above the radio horizon by great height, that is, 10-15 minutes before hitting the target.

However, as we showed above, this algorithm does not work in the case of hypersonic gliders: it is possible for satellites to detect the start of the booster of the rocket-planning system, but the radars currently available will not see anything until the glider approaches the flying distance of 3-5 minutes. At the same time, the glider has the ability to sweep along the course, unlike ballistic weapons, which completely confuses the definition of not only its ultimate goal on the territory of the defender, but also the very fact of an attack on him.

Therefore, space detection tools are becoming a key element in the defense system against an enemy armed with gliders. The situation looks similar with the detection of purely atmospheric cruise missiles With hypersonic speed: the space echelon is also extremely important here, since such products are already quite noticeable (unlike modern "stealth objects", low-altitude and subsonic).

This creates confusion not only with the hypothetical missile defense strike echelon, but also with countermeasures. IN last years many countries (in particular, Russia and China) are actively developing anti-satellite systems, the effectiveness of which in countering space missile defense systems (it does not matter, informational or strike) is difficult to overestimate. At the same time, this, in turn, further destabilizes the situation: the party that received a blow to critical components of the satellite infrastructure must make a difficult choice about further escalation of the conflict (in this case, it is possible that already in a nuclear form).

The context of organizational events

It should be noted that all this is happening in the conditions of frontal punching by Donald Trump of the decision to create in the United States separate species armed forces - space troops. Met at first with friendly resistance from the military and congressmen, the idea is gradually being integrated into the working process of the Washington bureaucracy.

So, on August 7, one of Trump's main opponents in the past on this line, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, radically changed his position. "Mad Dog", who had previously commented skeptically on the topic of space forces, suddenly came out in support of their creation.

"We must continue to consider space as one of the theaters of operations, and the creation of a combat command is one of the steps in this direction that can now be taken. We fully agree with the President's concerns about the protection of our space infrastructure, and we are engaged in this issue at a time when other countries are creating combat means to attack her,” he said.

At the same time, Mattis deftly evaded the question of whether he was talking about creating a new type of armed forces (following the president) or about strengthening existing organizational structures.

Thus, it is very likely that the 11th (Space) Combat Command in the military structure will be transformed into the sixth branch of the force, along with the US Army ( ground forces), Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. Fortunately, as we can see, the scope of work for him is already serious.

Konstantin Bogdanov, columnist for RIA Novosti.

Thirty years ago, US President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the "Strategic defense initiative" (SDI), also known as the "Star Wars program". The project turned out to be largely inflated, the claimed results were never achieved.

The United States has not created a multilayer anti-missile umbrella. However, this makes it easier Soviet Union was gone: the burden of military spending and structural disproportions in industry were confidently leading the country to a crisis.

The Soviet "defense industry" lived widely: the country's leadership gave practically everything that it asked for in those areas that seriously worried the higher spheres of the Central Committee. By 1988, up to 75% of all R&D spending in the USSR was carried out within the framework of defense topics.

Let us refer to the opinion of Anatoly Basistov, designer of the Moscow A-135 missile defense system. In the late 1970s, the Central Committee asked him if it was possible to create a reliable system for repelling a massive nuclear missile attack. And then, according to Basistov's memoirs, he realized one thing: if the designer now answers the party "yes, you can" - any requested resources will be placed directly on the table for experiments to solve this problem.

At that time, Basistov said "no, you can't." But the sectoral mechanism could no longer be altered; it worked according to its own laws. Especially since there, the Americans say - you can ...

And, most importantly, the ivory tower, inside which at least ten million people constantly worked in the late 1980s (not counting episodically fed from military programs under contracts) - the most ordinary, but very well paid people - formed a sense of stability. That this is how it should continue to be.

And the reasons for this became more and more elusive.

Goldsmiths of a poor country

The last head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Leonid Shebarshin, recalled how, at the end of perestroika, they, the top leadership of the KGB, were driven to meetings with workers from large factories. Shebarshin arrived at the Znamya Truda Moscow aircraft building plant, the leading enterprise in the MiG cooperation.

"And how much do you get, comrade general?" - Poisonously asked from the audience after the performance. "1300 rubles," Shebarshin honestly admitted. After some revival, a voice was heard from the gallery: “Yes, our locksmith can earn so much” ...

Yuri Yaremenko, director of the Institute for National Economic Forecasting since the late 1980s, describing this situation, noted that the main "damage" from the Soviet "defense industry" of the 1980s was not even in the money that went into it. The military-industrial complex drew upon itself all the best that was in a poor country. First of all, qualified personnel, but he also claimed high-quality materials, demanded the most advanced equipment and technologies.

In second place in the system of priorities were the needs of raw materials and energy producers. Civil engineering and the consumer goods industry got leftovers: from people - who the military did not take, from equipment - what they managed to knock out, materials - well, take what you have ... This did not slow down the quality of products, as well as the aggravating lag behind the technological level of industry from West and Japan.

To ensure the transfer of high technologies of Soviet defense engineering to the civilian sector was not allowed not only by the rooted feudal logic of the directorate, accustomed under the pretext of solving problems national importance"cut down" for themselves isolated domains of cooperation and sit on them as sovereign barons, responsible only to the heads of the relevant ministries and the party. The fact is that the central offices and the party also did not want to hear anything.

The same Yaremenko recalled that holistic programs to reduce military spending with the simultaneous well-thought-out conversion of high-tech defense capacities and trained personnel for the mass production of civilian durable goods (high-quality household appliances, to put it simply) have been going up since the first half of the 1980s. There they pointedly did not notice ... and then allocated more and more resources to the military-industrial complex.

Defense directors took programs for the production of civilian products for their enterprises "as a load", but did not see them as a priority and worked with them on a residual basis. Military programs paid better and interested them more.

The icon of the national defense industry, Yuri Dmitrievich Maslyukov, a man who did a lot of good for the industry of the USSR and for the Russian economy, and he, in 1987, according to Yaremenko, said that talk about the excessive allocation of resources to military production was empty, because the Soviet "defense industry" lagged behind and, conversely, requires additional injections.

This was said by the head of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers - the chief of staff of the "nine" defense ministries, the main industry coordinator and responsible for determining areas of work on defense topics. IN next year, without leaving this position, Maslyukov will become the head of the entire Soviet State Planning Committee ...

"In general, he burst" ...

What is the SOI? The effect of wastefulness from countering far-fetched SDI threats is a mosquito bite against the background of a resource-consuming flywheel, dispersed back in the second half of the 1970s by the solidarity efforts of the defense complex and another icon of the military-industrial complex, former Secretary of the Central Committee for Defense Affairs, Minister of War Dmitry Fedorovich Ustinov.

So Reagan did not know the Soviet directorate and the leadership of the "nine" well. Even if the SDI program had not been proclaimed, it would have been invented in one way or another.

The essence of the economic catastrophe of the USSR lay not in oil, not in SDI, and not in the Americans. Not in "traitors to the motherland", "young reformers", "Judas Gorbachev and Yeltsin", etc. The problem was that a huge self-contained sector had formed in the economy, accustomed to pulling the blanket over itself and demanding more, more, more ...

It had to be carefully opened, to smoothly transfer a significant part of its huge capabilities to meet the daily needs of the entire country. But those who understand big picture- the leaders of the military-industrial complex from factories through ministries to the Council of Ministers and the Central Committee - were silent. For everything suited them, and they did not want to break through the interdepartmental squabble during the structural restructuring of the economy. And was there such a possibility?

And no one wanted to make decisions in the system of collective irresponsibility that developed in the late USSR. And everyone was afraid of a new round cold war, therefore, they maneuvered between the tough pressure of "blood-smelling" Washington at the disarmament talks and the solidarity request of their own directorate - they yielded, dodged, shelved.

As a result, if we use military analogies, instead of the accurate demining of the "defense industry", we got the liquidation by the method of undermining, from which not only the military-industrial complex, but the entire Soviet economy in general, along with the country, was blown apart.

Reagan could record a victory for himself. And who cares if it's completely undeserved?