| Saturday,
December 15, 2001
If you haven't already seen this article, you might
find it interesting. It has some interesting points about how we can end
up with billion dollar bombers that can't fly in the rain.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0112.umansky.html
Joel Upchurch
That isn't my major complaint, although the lack
of adult supervision in the design and testing is apparent -- but then
look at JPL which sent a craft to Mars that, if everything worked just as
it was supposed to, would have the landing gear drop and the engines cut
of after landing gear drop -- and set that to happen at 50,000 feet. Mind
you that's if it all worked as planned. And no one saw it.
My major complaint is that there is no strategy
driving force structure any longer, not in USAF anyway.
Greetings,
With respect to the wisdom of employing the B-1B as
part of the Enduring Freedom air campaign, I personally doubt Gen Franks
views aircrew career paths as a primary consideration when deciding which
weapons systems will be brought to bear against which potential targets.
Consider that there may be specific target sets for which the B-1B is best
suited, for instance, Tora Bora's canyons, gorges, and other assorted
nooks and crannies. As noted, the B-1B is clearly the lowest and fastest
of the available "heavy-lift" ordnance platforms. More
importantly, however, the B-1B's internal conventional weapons
suspension-release system can provide bomb release intervals much shorter
than can the B-52's Korean War-era system. I submit, therefore, that if
the mission calls for a massive strike on an area target severely confined
by natural topography, then the B-1B just might be the ticket. Let the
B-52's take care of the ridge tops.
Regards,
J. Mitchell
I don't know what you've read into what I was
saying. I have no objection to using what we have; it's planning what we
will have that concerns me. We use the B1 bacause These United States of
America, the only superpower, have no more than 100 heavy bombers of any
kind whatever in the inventory, and we don't fly close support missions
out of Afghanistan because the force isn't structured to allow the Army
and Marines to take and hold a base from which USAF can sent in tactical
aircraft.
And we certainly used to have that capability: of
building combat airfields near the battle lines, and using them. But
you have to want to be able to do that, and have airplanes useful at
that...
Dear Jerry:
I've always liked the A-10; it reminded me of an
updated version of the most effective close-support birds of WWII, the
IL-2 and the Beaufighter. Traditionally, the only way to give really
effective close air support was to get in _close_, low and slow. For that
you needed a nimble flying tank, with lots of armor and guns.
However, events in Afghanistan have shaken my faith.
From what I've been able to gather, the JDAMS has enabled heavy bombers
and high-flying fast movers to give _really accurate_ close ground
support, as accurate as something right overhead eyeballing the target.
Apparently, it goes like this (correct me if I'm
wrong): a GPS-equipped pair of 'binoculars' is trained on the target the
guy on the ground wants to hit. A laser rangefinder gives the position
relative to the GPS unit in the binoculars, which then automatically
calculate the precise coordinates of the target and display it.
The ground guy then relays it to the aircraft
loitering overhead.
The aircraft enters the data in the bomb, which is
an old-fashioned iron bomb with a cheap strap-on GPS guidance unit costing
about $15K which controls tailfins. If the aircraft is in the right
general area, the bomb will go to the place it has been told.
The bomb is released and the GPS unit guides it to
the coordinates with an error radius (except for the inevitable screwups)
of about 4 meters. With a 2000-lb bomb, 4 meters is close enough to
"dead on" for government work.
Plus, of course, there's laser-guided stuff for
moving targets.
Judging by the results, as soon as US special-ops
types were on the ground with the Northern Alliance, this system just
ripped the guts out of any Taliban force that tried to stand and fight. I
don't see how anyone who couldn't prevent it from working could stand up
to it, not when they're trying to hold ground and fixed positions.
As soon as the enemy were visible -- and the UAV's
and other technical intelligence seem to have gotten better, and the speed
with which data got passed around was impressive too -- the Green Berets
or UAV's pointed their magic wand, and anything they pointed at blew up in
a spectacular (and spectacularly demoralizing) fashion.
I don't see how ground support could be done much
better than this, always assuming that (a) we have air supremacy, and (b)
the people on the receiving end can't turn off our GPS. On the other hand,
we're supposed to be good at air supremacy and electronics...
Yours, Steve Stirling
Several points here. First, it is not ALWAYS best
to have in close low lying aircraft for close support. Some missions need
that. Many do not.
Second, if you have air supremacy, you don't need
really expensive aircraft as the delivery system for smart missiles. You
can use flying trucks. Yes, that has to be done with intelligence so that
you don't lose the trucks too often, but once you have air supremacy --
and that may well need B1B and B2 bombers, and in the opening phase almost
certainly will -- once you have air supremacy. you just need to get the
missiles in range. The smarts are in the missile.
There were also those gunships in Viet Nam, not
the ones you see now, but the ones with a 105 cannon and smarts such that
the first shot had a CEP of about 5 feet at a slant range of 10,000 yards.
You need air supremacy to use those, but if you can use them they can be
devastating. But you have to have the weapons systems before you can
use them, and as I understand it we don't have any more of them. It worked
extremely well, but it's not a good career path for a flyboy.
Take the support mission away from USAF and
you'll see new close support designs, some operating from airfields near
the battle area, some from longer ranges. Or organize a career path within
USAF for pilots and support officers who choose to work with the army.
Since that isn't likely, and the blue suits will fight it all the way, you
can abolish USAF or you can hand off some of those missions to brown
suits...
As to doing it "better", this needs
more explication than I have time for, but cheaper is often better because
simpler; and on call means quick, and on station from a long way away
means small payload or aerial refueling, and -- but that gets us into a
much more complex discussion. I agree it has been done well: given the
tools at hand the job was done. (Continued below.)
Dear Dr Pournelle,
MS01-058.asp .... New Security Hole. This
will tell you where to go to get a fix. It is NOT on Microsoft Update yet.
Eric found this also. Thanks.
I get regular updates from AusCERT (
www.auscert.org.au ) on security vulnerabilities and patches (849 in my
mailbox this year). In particular, I get updates through them from
Microsoft. It's quicker.
My notification for this patch, complete with web
link, came Friday 14th. at 7:39pm NZST, ie. 7:39am GMT. Clearly a prompt
service. AusCERT is a member of the Forum of Incident Response and
Security Teams (FIRST, at www.first.org
). I really can't recommend such teams highly enough.
In the US however, the equivalent (CERT at
www.cert.org) is federally funded and so far as I can tell you can
subscribe to their CERT® Advisory Mailing List at majordomo@cert.org .
(In the body of the message, type subscribe cert-advisory ).
"Linux sucks
for starting up fast. When I shut down the satellite and start up the
Netwinder and Linux, it can take FIVE MINUTES before I can ping
192.168.1.1 which is to say attempts to do that time out, and I can't
telnet to it, and nothing moves through it. Eventually it manages, but it
takes forever."
I suppose I ought to set up a faster machine.
Eventually it gets its act together and all works, but what in the world
can take that long? It's probably the little Strongarm chip in the
Netwinder."
Just a wild shot, but is it doing a file system
integrity check every time it starts up? Linux being a server-class OS
it's not normally configured for rapid start - though it can be - but for
safe start.
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) (tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz)
System Administrator, Dept. of Maths. & Stats., Otago Uni.
Well I got the alerts from Roland and Eric
earlier but they came when I was off writing. I don't always see
everything as it comes in here, and I don't have anyone who can watch the
screen and do much about that kind of alert anyway. There's only me...
Regarding Linux, you are undoubtedly correct, and
I prefer it that way. Just a bit of grousing. The startup time still
sucks.
I can't wait until Ricochet comes back, or I get
DSL, and I can run a Linux box for communications full time and leave the
satellite for emergencies.
I hope I'm not the nth person to
bother you with this note today but... David Siebert's rather involved
comment (Mail, Dec 14 2001) contained this comment:
"... just wrong. 1. MSDN is not cheap. I know
that it costs money to make those cds.dvds but the information could be on
the web for all to see."
I'm not sure if the _entire_ MSDN is available, but
surely _most_ of it can be found @ http://msdn.microsoft.com
, The amount of material available there is simply staggering. If only the
organization/navigation made a little more sense.
GL Mike
Indeed, and that's important. Thanks
NASA should emphasize that space operations are at
least as dangerous as flight test operations: we'll take every reasonable
precaution to prevent harm, but with people sitting on tons of volatile
chemicals, traveling 10 times faster than rifle bullets, into an
environment that will kill you in seconds or injure you for life, there
will be casualties and heroes.
Wolfe said it in The Right Stuff: we should be using
test pilots for space flights not HEROES. We expect casulties among test
pilots; when they happen, we fix whatever went wrong and go on. J. Random
Citizen won't accept having HEROES die; they demand and get investigations
and delay. Instead of pandering to this, NASA should make it plain that
deaths and injuries are an expected part of any exploration and continue
with business as usual. The hysteria after the Challanger accident wasted
several years; we can't afford repeats. We can't, by definition, prevent
all accidents, but we can prevent them from bringing everything to a
grinding halt.
Joe Zeff
Back when there was a chance they would let me
put together some X projects, I told Gingrich and Walker that the one
thing I would NOT need was Astronauts. I needed Test Pilots, because
Astronauts were national treasures, whose loss was irreparable: I needed
professional test pilots who knew the risks.
That part was all agreed. Alas, my X program
ended up as the X33 shitepoke, but that's another and longer story.
And a long story of High Speed Access from Dr.
Huth:
Jerry,
Thought you or your readers might enjoy a brief
overview of our efforts to set up a small wide area network.
I live in southern Oregon, which has spotty coverage
for any sort of high speed connectivity. Neither Qwest nor Charter Cable
seem to be able to install coverage to my home or those of most of my
co-workers. Those who have DSL have fairly low speed access to our office
and to the net. As you know, I am a cardiologist and would like to have
secure access to our office electronic records. Thus began the quest for
broadband.
About 8 weeks ago we set forth to see if we could
configure and implement an 802.11b wide area network. We wanted to use off
the shelf hardware to keep the cost down.
I'm fortunate that my office has a full T1 available
and it isn't used at all at night and fairly lightly used during the
daytime.
The idea was to connect to our office network and
from there to the internet via our T1. We'd hoped to do this at reasonable
cost and without having to involve hordes of high end geeks. I'm lucky, in
that I've got a very high end geek who works for us, a fella named Ted
Weldon. In a previous life, he worked for Litton Industries as a network
manager and is a Cisco router wizard. He's also strong in Unix (AIX), and
does Windows. He made life much easier, but this could be done without
such a wizard.
802.11b needs line of sight...so my first step was
to climb onto the roof and see if I could see the top of our office
building. Turns out I'm 1.9 miles as the crow flies (or the GPS
calculates) from the roof of our office. The other potential users can all
see my roof, with the most distant about 6.8 miles away. My wizard points
out that if I put a 50 foot tower on my roof, I'd extend my coverage area
nicely, but my wife is reluctant.
Next step was to figure out what equipment to
purchase. We spent a fair amount of time looking at specs for wireless
components on a number of sites. These included: http://www.seattlewireless.net/
; http://www.dslreports.com/forum/dslalt
; http://www.practicallynetworked.com/networking/alternative_net_wireless.htm
; www.cisco.com
We used a fair number of other sites, but most can
be easily found starting with the listed sites. Much reading and research
by Ted.
We decided to purchase the Cisco Aironet 350 series
products. We did this in part because of the security provided by the
Ciscos, in part because of our wizards comfort with Cisco, and in part
because when we tested throughput on three wireless bridges we had
available locally, we found that with encryption enabled we averaged 7.8
Mbps using the Cisco's and less than 4 Mbps using several other bridges.
Reviews in magazines seemed to substantiate this throughput difference.
Note that this is half-duplex, still much faster than a T1.
We used a GPS device to get the latitude and
longitude of our sites, and then calculated a bearing and tilt angle. This
gave us a rough idea of how to point the antennas.
Ted calculated which antenna's we needed, based on
information available on the Seattle Wireless site noted above and we
purchased antennas from www.pacwireless.com
. Very, very helpful folks.
Lots of pole climbing and cursing later and we have
a working wireless network!!
When I hold my head correctly and when there isn't a
lot of noise, I'm getting 1.3 megabits/sec. Whew.
Thanks. I might have gone through that -- I may
yet have to -- but they keep promising me DSL and Cable Modem both by
February. If that doesn't happen, I may be back in the 802.11 business.
Which might be fun.
And From Trent Telenko
Any _creditable_ pretention that US foreign policy
was 'multilateralist' died with the ABM Treaty.
The the end paragraph from the current Charles
Krauthammer op-ed:
"The essence of unilateralism is that we do not
allow others, no matter how well-meaning, to deter us from pursuing the
fundamental security interests of the United States and the free world. It
is the driving motif of the Bush foreign policy. And that is the reason it
has been so successful."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41292-2001Dec13?language=printer
- Unilateral? Yes, Indeed
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 14, 2001; Page A45
Last month's Putin-Bush summit at Crawford was
deemed an arms control failure because the rumored deal -- Russia agrees
to let us partially test, but not deploy, defenses that violate the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- never came off.
< snip >
Indeed. Trent Telenko
also sends this link:
This is an extremely interesting evaluation of the
relative military power of the USA versus everyone else on the planet.
--------------- http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/
on superpowers in the modern world. Worth
reading. We have gone beyond superpower to hyperpower; what is next?
All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts
absolutely. quis custodiet ipsos custodes... We live in interesting
times.
Dear Jerry:
You're quite right; when
the smarts are in the bomb and the air environment is low-threat, all you
need is something that will shovel it out, not a B-2.
I think there are some other long-term implications
of both increasing precision and the increasing ability to get information
from various sensors (the Mark One Eyeball and up) and, equally important,
share it around quickly.
Eg., take the operation which took out al-Qaeda's
military chief and about 250 of his colleagues, guards and assistants.
He was spotted at night by an armed Predator drone,
the target was identified and the 'go' given, the building he was in was
'painted', a 2000-lb bomb arrived, two truckloads of survivors trying to
escape were destroyed by Hellfire missiles from the Predator, and then an
hour later more al-Qaeda digging in the smoldering rubble were killed by
another 2000-lb bomb guided in by the Predator... and all this took place
without the bad guys ever seeing or hearing anything but the explosions
that killed them. Apart from the F-18 pilot tooling around at 30,000 ft.,
the humans involved were all in Florida; and there's no reason that some
sort of high-level bomb-truck couldn't be automated and/or handled by
satellite uplink too.
Apart from "UAV's are Very Good and we should
have had them earlier and in greater numbers", I think the moral of
this story is that the combination of sensing and data linkage has
achieved (at least potentially) a breakthrough stage.
And the effects look like increasing exponentially
over the next decade or two, to the point where people who can't field
comparable systems will be at a disadvantage comparable to spears-vs.-machine-guns.
The systems strip away all the fallbacks of the guerilla -- darkness,
distance, terrain, dispersal; and they're chipping away at the things that
make stuff like urban combat so difficult. For example, the
see-around-corners sensors and insect-sized minidrones now in experimental
deployment.
If the Land Warrior system works as advertised, or
even approaching that level, our soldiers will become the next best thing
to invulnerable avenging demigods when faced by low-tech opponents.
(Which raises the interesting question of what
countermeasures will be thought up, of course.)
This also has long-term socio-political
implications. If very expensive technology makes limited numbers of
extremely highly-trained soldiers very effective even at guerilla or urban
warfare, it gives a tremendous advantage to the governments which can
afford such soldiers. It also makes populations, even restive, armed
populations experienced at irregular warfare, easier to control.
Yours, Steve Stirling
Indeed. We do live in interesting times. And I
continue to worry a bit: quis custodiet...
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