I just found your blog by reading your Olympia article in Proceedings. Great article, by the way, and I enjoy the site. Thanks!

Or maybe we’ll tell every ICBM-using power (to include Iran and North Korea) about the attack in advance, and they’ll pass a warning onto the target, giving them AT LEAST a 30-minute warning? Recall that Osama Bin Laden missed a Tomahawk-plastering by about 30 minutes in Sudan.

Of course, if the enemy has ICBMs, we can take them all out in a jiffy with PGS!… right? Wrong.
ICBMs can be MOBILE, like China’s DF-31; http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/china/df-31.htm
Recall that despite the use of U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes, and dozens of spy satellites, not a single kill against a Mobile Scud launcher was ever confirmed, and only one launch out of more than 100 was ever witnessed (and the vehicle that fired it was seen again!);
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj98/fal98/hammond.html

And how about the 300 bombs that cost $4 Billion, which we threw at Serbia in 1999, in an attempt to decimate their tanks and artillery pieces? We got 14 of 1300+, along with just 560 of Serbia’s 140000 troops, after FOUR MONTHS of bombing.

What the survival of 100 untouched-by-air Scud Launchers and 1300 untouched-by-air tanks and artillery pieces attests to is that continuously-mobile and/or well-camouflaged targets are untouchable by airpower, and a missile blindly launched from the other side of the planet CAN’T do any better. If a potential target has them, all a PGS strike will accomplish is a retaliation against the US.

There’s simply no point in PGS.

Lastly, if our target has Mobile ICBM Launchers, missing even ONE in our “prompt global strike” could mean a missile on our doorstep. Tor those of you who’ve been frothing at the mouth at the thought of having PGS — and thus have obviously forgotten what a Nuclear Warhead is — here’s a few hints of what the use of PGS invites to happen to us;
http://www.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-bomb.htm

http://www.gensuikin.org/english/photo.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr76hNngqts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYUSKWhb3sk

Sure, a 100-200 pound payload COULD be larger in terms of a more useful payload on target, but the key here is, FOR THIS PROJECT, it has to fit into a VLS cell. So, can you get a larger warhead, and still keep to ~ hypersonic flight, and still fit into a VLS cell?

No? What tradeoffs become acceptable? In this case, 100-200 lb payload @ Mach 9 flight over roughly 2,000 NM, fittable into VLS. That might be of some value…..

Alpha, VLS offensive punch? I know the TASM is in the process of being re-worked into a sort-of latter-day TLAM [guessing conventional; SALT had something to say about TLAM-N]. What else am I forgetting, Comrade? SLAM-ER? I, too, am curious to see where this leads, but from my viewpoint, it’s an option, and options are good things to have. Even expensive ones

Of course, it might be more difficult for other countries to trust that a missile launched from a VLS cell on a vessel they can’t verify, like a submarine, isn’t nuclear. But I imagine that using these weapons primarily from surface vessels would mitigate most of those concerns.

2,000 nm Covers just as much ground as the (larger payload) medium-range sub-launched missiles that a few folks have been tinkering with for PGS. Not as much as a Tactical Trident. Problem is that Congress won’t fund ‘em due to concerns over misinterpretation.

2,000 nm from the sea offers plenty of global coverage.

And 100-200 lb payload can do a lot–particularly to stationary installations. Then, you know, the payload doesn’t necessarily have to be kinetic!

So it will have the striking power of a single 8″ shell (or a 5″ EGRM)? At the cost of how much per round, exactly?

Color me “very skeptical”.