Slashdot Mirror
Space War 2017: US v. China
A reader writes "The Air Force recently performed a war game set in the year 2017 featuring space warfare, according to this article in the Washington Post. Between hypothetical 'red' and 'blue' countries, which the article conjectures to be China and US, "...the game assumed that the heavens will be full of weapons by 2017. Both Red and Blue possessed microsatellites that can maneuver against other satellites, blocking their view, jamming their transmissions or even frying their electronics with radiation. Both also had ground-based lasers that could temporarily dazzle or permanently blind the optics of satellites.""
Even without satellites intentionally blowing up, debris is already a problem. One good space battle, and the Earth will have a junk layer too thick to navigate. Then you can kiss all space travel good-bye until they figure out a way to clean it up. Maybe somebody will figure out a way to deorbit massive ammounts of junk all at once. The first idea that comes to mind is releasing enough gas in orbit to slow down the junk, but maybe that isn't practical. At any rate, if they factor debris into this I bet they will determine that it isn't worth destroying this particular battlefield.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
where Bart and Lisa go to military school. The commandant's closing address is:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
fnord
Some thoughts that no one else seems to have mentioned:
.5 seconds. Even the military knows that war is a bad thing. On many of the air force hangers I've seen there are signs saying "Peace is our Profession". The military doesn't want to go to war. It wants to make sure that if YOUR ELECTED LEADERSHIP DECLARES WAR then we will win. Don't be pissed at the military about war or spending, be pissed at all the people who didn't vote in the last election and thus gave us W for a president.
No one in the game said "Red attacks Blue!" they said "Red attacks BROWN, who asks for help"
Who is brown? Taiwan? Kuwait? India? Japan? I would say any of those countries and many others would be deserving of help if they had to ask for it.
This BULLSHIT about war games being a waste of money is amazing. After humanitarian efforts, war games are the most important thing the peace-time military can do! If the military doesn't think, "what if?" how do you expect the military to plan a defense? Or are you the guys the ones who play CounterStike like it was DukeNukem, die immediately and leave me to try and get the job done while hopelessly outnumbered?
AND ANOTHER THING! The military leadership doesn't give a fuck what the slashdot community thinks of their games any more they the community cares what military leaders thing of C++ vs C. The military leadership isn't qualified to comment on that any more that most of us are qualified to comment on intelligent use of military funds. If you want to post a contrary comment, excellent, but don't just bitch "That's Stupid" when you've thought about your response for less than
ALSO, if they don't care about you knowing why did they invite the press? So any potential enemies know we're studying space based combat and (hopefully) decide not to persue the idea with as much vigor as they might have if they thought we were completely unprepared. That's why you put big naval ships by a potential target. Just to remind a potential enemy that it's a lot less painful to be friends.
Ok, that's enought venting for me. Sorry to all of you who think my comments are obvious.
Oh come on now! This has to be a pseudonym.
Not A Sig
Anybody here remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre? A government that will kill its own citizens (many of them students--like most Slashdotters) is a government to be feared. Brown is obviously Taiwan. China has rattled its sabre at Taiwan a number of times already, so this scenario is entirely realistic. In case you think it wouldn't be worth interfering, consider that the Chinese military has publically discussed plans to neutron bomb Taiwan. How's that for fucking horrific? Do you want another holocaust?
Some people here claim that a National Missile Defense (NMD) is technically infeasible. I agree that there are problems with the idea of kinetic-kill interceptors--it's very hard to hit a target moving at several times the speed of sound. What would be much more realistic is to use an interceptor with a very small, clean nuclear warhead. If you only have to get within 200 metres, things get a lot easier. I think that was the original plan back in the days of Star Wars, but it got killed (most likely for political reasons).
As for space war, that's entirely realistic. Just consider how reliant on GPS, spy satellites, and sat-communication the US is, and how much of an advantage those capabilities give the US. Throughout history, wars have often been decided by intelligence and communication. Back in the earlier half of last millenium, battles were usually decided by the vanguards of the respective army. If your vanguard lost, you wouldn't know where the enemy was, and you would have no recon screen. The same principle applies even more strongly now.
Hacker war? Definitely. The targets don't have to be military installations to cause severe damage. For instance, the US Army uses FedEx to transport spare parts a lot of the time. Messing with banks and financial institutions could also seriously affect the will and ability of the US to fight a war. Tom Clancy has already thought of a lot of this, although he usually blows the details when it comes to hi-tech.
The warriors in the "hacker war" won't be your average script kiddies, and they won't be limited to the usual attacks. Lots of software development is done in foreign countries or by foreign immigrants, and, while the vast majority of these people are honest, it only takes a few to plant backdoors in dangerous places. These "enemy hackers" also don't have to be attacking from somewhere within country X--they could be within your own borders. It's worth noting that China uses a lot of open source software--maybe they're concerned about these kinds of vulnerabilities.
Of course, even script kiddies can do serious damage, as Microsoft recently found out. Imagine what a few thousand script kiddies could do if given a year and co-ordinated planning... Biggest DDoS you've ever seen, coming from everywhere all at once... While that attack was causing general chaos, the true 1337 h4X0rs would do the real damage.
It's nice to see that the Armed Forces have started thinking about all this.
1) To explore a new paradigm of potential conflict which may or may not actually manifest itself at some point in the future. The USAF simulation of satellite warfare is an example of such a simulation. We don't really know if there will ever be satellite combat, but the technology is moving in a direction that might make such combat possible in the future.
2) To prepare for combat or other operations in a known conflict paradigm. The USMC conducting war games in San Francisco recently is a good example of this. Urban warfare happens all the time - Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, you name it. We know we'll at some point get involved in a fight in built up terrain somewhere, so we prepare for it.
Now let's look at the role of the military. The US military's primary role is to defend US interests (the physical safety of the citizens of the United States, its economic interests, etc, depending on your political views, one could go on in many directions). The military does not decide when and where it fights. The government does.
But when the government calls on the military to fight, it had better be ready to fight, or there will be calls of "damn, we pay them all that money, and they were caught by surprise!"
Cases where simulation of type 1 followed by type 2 might have been helpful:
1: Pearl Harbor ("nobody would ever try to attack Pearl, it's armed to the teeth!")
2: The Nazis Invade Russia ("Comrade, those Germans are preoccupied with France and England. They won't be turning east for at least another couple of years!")
3: The Nazis Invade France ("We have more heavy tanks than the Germans, and we have this fantastic Maginot Line!")
There's nothing worse than saying, "Damn, we never thought that might happen!" as you bury your dead.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
And since US doctrine (since the Gulf War and on to the present) appears to be based on the use of technology as a force multiplier, the way to kill lots of Americans is to blow up their toys in the sky.
When your mobile artillery piece relies on one technology to pick up the flashes of fire from your opponent's gun, and GPS to say "I know I'm here. I know the enemy's gun is there. If I point my gun in this direction and fire now, the enemy's gun goes bye-bye before he gets a second shot at me", you can win the war with a fraction of the manpower (and firepower) you used to need.
But you only get to win if your opponent can't blind your spysat/UAV, or your GPS satellite. Once your space network goes down, you're as blind as a bat, and outgunned two-to-one.
Control of space is vital to warfighting today. Ask any Iraqi artilleryman... if any survived.
All those itanium satellites have found a new role as the suicide bombers of the 21st century. We'll just start changing their orbits to collide with enemy sats (or de-orbiting them into the enemey's nation...)
(that's not supposed to be serious. I'm sure the future will prove it otherwise)
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Despite the occasional whining, I think Canada generally still likes the US. Granted, it would have been nice if you could have spared us the month of crap about your election, but that's water under the bridge...
If you really want us to like you, invade Quebec. Please. And take Celine Dion. Oh, and could you bring some Cherry Coke with you? It's impossible to get up here, and that Wild Cherry Pepsi is shit. Also, would you mind getting California to pay us for all the electricity we gave them? Now that I think about it, I could use some good Mexican food... Maybe California can pay us back in tamales...