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War: What Can Technology Do For Us?
Both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, from Desert Storm to Kosovo, advanced the idea of conflict with little civilian loss and few casualties of our own. But thousands of American civilians are already dead in this conflict, greater civilian losses than in any war in U.S. history. Still, the military analysts, network pundits and Pentagon officials are going to great lengths to point out that Taliban and fundamentalist fighters are skilled and determined, that this conflict will be long and difficult, that our expectations should be kept realistic. And bin Laden is a surprisingly agile enemy. He not only grasps America's most vulnerable points, he understands "spinning," using video-imagery and satellite transmission to get his side of the story out. This is something Saddam never began to grasp.
But are our expectations realistic? Are we once again overrating our own technology, and underestimating less sophisticated cultures and populations? Most Americans have been prepared for years to place enormous faith in a range of new technologies that are supposed to make us the most powerful military force in world history. Sophisticated technologies devastated the Iraqi military in Desert Storm. While their results were more controversial in the Kosovo action, there remained little American loss of life. The bloody action in Somolia showed us yet again that technology is not effective if it can't be used for political or military reasons. And Panama and Grenada resembled police actions more than military conflicts.
In this new war, though, it seems clear that American forces will be involved in some sort of ground fighting on Afghanistan's murderous terrain, and that would mean a battle more reminiscent of Vietnam than Kuwait.
What can technology do for us? Can GPS targeting systems really place bombs that accurately? Can intelligence analysts in the U.S. instantly track raw data without leaving their offices? Can civilian populations really be protected? Can thermal imaging and satellite surveillance see into caves or track small units in mountainous terrains? Can government computers follow money around the world? Will our soldiers' tech-equipped vehicles, equipment and weapons give them an edge over the the Russians, who were chewed to bits in their conflict with Afghanistan guerrillas, but whose equipment was comparatively primitive? Have we actually developed a new mix of tech-supported human and machine warfare that is deadly, flexible and effective?
From reading the papers and watching the generals on TV, we see confidence from the military that the answers to most of these questions is yes. But the people reading this have a much better than average grasp of these tech issues. Do you agree? What can tech do for us -- or not do -- in this supposedly new era?
For $600,000 a pop we can rearrange the rocks in Afghanistan. Probably a good read would be Starship Troopers (skip the really dumb movie) Technology vs. experience + fighting on their home turf + emotional value of fighting for their way of life (however you want to define it) and the result is move very, very carefully. Also, the country is littered with mines from 10+ years of war, which are redistributed with each rockslide along mountain trails. Something to think about.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One of the things that tech should NOT do.. given that part of this is human failure.. is give the other side an advantage by letting him know our plans. Sometimes I wish I could just reach out and smack some reporter who, by quick use of Email and communications, trumpets his "scoop" about what we're doing, and where, before the operation is complete. Hey, goons, our side isn't the ONLY ones watching your reports!
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
I think that regardless of how remote we can get from killing things with our machines, we need to keep the perspective that we're still killing people.
I think a lot of people miss that point when you watch it on television or a computer screen.
Last night on CNN a military official said (paraphrase) "We're running out of targets to hit."
The war in Afganistan isn't our big concern. Our greatest threat comes from within and is directed at our fundamental freedoms.
Sure, war may drive technological change, but do we really want to be benefitting from death and distruction? Especially when we have a peaceful alternative that has resulted in faster internet connection speeds, the acceptance of DVDs, and the spread of the internet itself?
Yes, I'm talking about porn. Wanting free, anonymous porn everywhere has resulted in widespread internet access, even if its dialup to a local number at unlimited rates (in the US). Wanting high-quality pirated porn movies has resulted in the spread of broadband. And for viewing porn in the privacy of your own home, nothing beats DVDs, especially since they won't wear away the tape if you pause and keep viewing the same few minutes of certain "adult" videos.
Sure, you can talk about war all you want, but porn will drive further technological changes. Voice recognition software is perfect for hands-free browsing and other computer usage. Interactive movies will be another idea driven by porn. And don't even ask about what fully interactive virtual reality would be good for.
As the Dead Kennedy's sang "Kinky sex makes the world go round!"
Here are some interesting charts showing how war and technology are blood brothers. As technology advances, we increase our ability to kill more people, at a faster rate.
Indeed, this idea applies even to non-war machines and technology that is not directly tied to war. For example, with the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks, the killing was made possible using a regular old plane. However, the plane is a technology exemplar. The plane, in many ways, defines so much technology. The commercial planes were not meant for war or killing, yet they did kill many people.
As technology increases, we will see more death. However, the death will come from humans using and abusing technology. That is always the way it has been. Humans kill other humans. Technology just helps.
How to Download YouTube Videos
We should use nukes.
0 .h tml
There is an article at wirednews titled "Nuke 'Em From On High"
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,47319,0
A couple excerpts of note:
******
The most likely candidate is a tactical micro-nuke called the B61-11, an earth-penetrating nuclear device known as the "bunker buster."
******
The design directs the force of the B61-11's explosive energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters, according to a story in the March 2, 1997 issue of Defense News.
******
Any debate inside the corridors of power about using tactical nukes will be heightened by the intelligence buzz surrounding bin Laden's possible ownership of Russian nuclear "suitcase" bombs purchased from Chechen mafia.
Those weapons are said to be hidden in deep caves and fortified tunnels in remote regions of Afghanistan.
******
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
Upon encountering a snake in the Area of Operation (AO):
This war will be neither. I'll wage that small teams of highly trained commando's will be used instead of large forces like in 'nam. America can and will not be trapped in another situation like that.
Besides.. this time they are after a terrorist and it's hosts not an entire country. And of course... it will not be the US alone. Don't forget that allmost half the entire world is standing behind the US. Off course.. if it takes too long support will weaken with the day...
In the end nothing will have changed though. Bin Laden will just be replaced by someone smarter. Smarter because he knows what he can expect. More intelligent because he will probably use more sophisticated means, not nescesarily technologically sophisticated but sophisticated nonetheless.
All our technology in spite we will never be able to root out all terrorism. Whatever kind of goggles we use...
One point: The Russians were chewed to bits by the Afghan guerrillas because the Afgans had our support, first in the form of funding and Russian-made weapons to disguise or involvement, then we flat out gave them our tech-equipped weapons (the stinger missiles, which were deadly effective in neutralizing the Russian's helicopters).
Personally, I'm going to trust our military strategists and their technology and hope that they know what they're doing, because right now there's not much else I can do otherwise except for carry on with my life as best as I can.
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
As usual, Katz incisive and thought provoking (NOT) analysis of the situation leaves one breathless...
What are laser-guided bombs, satellite guided missiles, penetrating sensor systems, stealth planes, etc?
Force Multipliers.
But anything times zero is still zero.
The core of this, and every other conflict, is the soldier. The core of any operation involving taking ground and holding it, or in denying that ground to an enemy, is the infantry. Poor, thankless, cold, and tired infantry. Some poor shmuck (possibly quite well educated nowadays) a long way from home, in a nasty situation, with some people out to kill him and maybe some friends he's trying to keep alive. And hoping he'll get out in one piece and hoping he'll have dry socks.
This isn't a _new_ kind of war. It's a very _old_ kind of war - what is going on in Afghanistan today is a conventional war - suppression of air defenses prior to ground action. This war (like many others back many millenia) will be fought by conventional and unconventional means.
Will technology make a difference? It'll help. Being able to see at night is a big plus. Having comms and fire support and airborne mobility are pretty big assets. But ultimately, it'll be skirmishers, light infantry and special operations forces that will go toe to toe with the terrorists in the hilly backcountry of Afghanistan. All the technology in the world won't change that reality.
And will the allied forces get their asses kicked? Maybe they'll take some hits (probably some boys will be dying... this is always the cost of fighting an implacable enemy such as the terrorists are...). But the allied military forces have learned a lot from the Russian experiences and they've learned a lot in conflicts around the world in the last 10 years (Kosovo, Sarajevo, Bosnia, The Gulf, etc.) about how new conflicts are fought, their horrors, and their risks.
Ultimately, they will prevail against a government that does not enjoy unified support from its people because it is corrupt and because it abuses its populace. But don't ever think they have prevailed because of some wazoo technology.
They will have prevailed because some farm boy from Iowa was willing to bust his ass training to be a Green Beret and because he's willing to lay that same ass on the line for what he believes in and to do what it takes, wherever in the world that may be, to get the job done and make the world a safer place for his fellow citizens. That farm boy's guts and training and sacrifice will be what carries the day, as always.
God Bless America (and I'm not even 'Merican!)
Tomb Raider
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Microwaves! They will fry any electronics or living beings. If we have any idea bin laden is in a hill somewhere, just get a bunch of Microwave dishes and burn him to a crisp. Clean, cheap and no one will know any different because there is no crater. Sure, all the dead animals would be a sign *something* happened but there would be no crater!
There is no way we're going to be able to search every cave in Afghanistan, but we can use Microwaves to cook us some Taliban!
Our mighty technological superiority over Iraq was useful until we beat them down till we had no more targets large enough to justify using half million dollar missles on. At that point, you send in the ground troops, and incur casualties. Afghanistan is already at the point where ground troops are necessary, so our tech doesn't give that big of a percentage advantage. Look for 20 to 1 kill ratios (U.S. to Osama) when the fighting gets up close and personal, rather than the zero casualties we are used to.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
The use of technology in warfare means that the days of drop-and-pray bombing are over, precision GPS and laser guided missles mean that targets can be singled out and destroyed without needing to destroy the whole area so there are going to be fewer civillian casualties.
A lot of people died in the Sept. 11 attacks and the retaliation attacks will cause more deaths no matter how accurate the weapons are. The only reason we can sit here and debate these issues is because the bombs aren't targetting our buildings.
The only way to achieve the same level of technological advancement without the war-driven invention craze is for everyone to work together on a common goal, but given the track-record of human interaction that's not likely to happen anytime soon is it?
Think about it, we'd probably have clean-burning fuel and personal aircraft now if people worked together instead of fighting all the time.
Here is how technology can really help. If we combine current e-book technology with high density storage like C-3D we can create a device that can store lots of books in a small space.
Make millions of them. Get every text possible stored onto the media. Drop them all over the middle east, but most importantly Pakistan and Afghanistan. It would probably be useful to dump them all over the "stan's".
There are a few logistical problems (like how to power them consistently), but a small device can be easily hidden. Libraries are more difficult to hide. An e-book and its media could be stuffed under a brick, behind a stove, in the rafters easily.
Saturate them with knowledge. Send the good with the bad.
Hey, if we are clever, we can even make the e-books play video. Then we can send really subversive stuff, like episodes of "Friends!," "Soap," "All in the Family," "Days of Our Lives," "The OJ Trial."
Bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice is important, but educating the world is more important. In the long run, enabling education will help us more than destroying infrastructure.
TNT
Brad Tittle
God: "I don't leave footprints!"
I guess the point that I am making is that most of our communications tech (at least the civilian stuff) was not made with wartime in mind. Hell I can just imagine what kind of information could be garnered by a good hacker with a portable with boosted up wireless card on it. Hell even a van with jamming equipent driving through most major cities cutting off cell phone calls would create massive havoc. And these are just some ideas I had on the spur of the moment wihtout knowing the ins and outs of a lot of these system.
Pithy, yet ultimately meaningless, phrase expressed with gusto!
Eh? What are atom bombs good for outside of war? Nothing? So why is it good that war speeds up their development? You are begging the question.
Whether or not technology is going to be the deciding factor in this particular conflict is debatable. It does seem likely, though.
Consider the weapons which we have which (as far as we know) no other nation can even touch; The highly engineered fuel-air bombs with kiloton yield, stealth fighters, 2,000 mile range cruise missiles which can follow roads, flying low, and pop through your bedroom window... literally. When they get there (and I'm talking about tomahawks here) they can deliver a nuke, EMP, high explosive, antipersonnel, et cetera. How's that to really put the cap on your bad day?
Now, this is the technology that we know about. Some of it we know about because it became inconvenient to hide, and some of it we know about because the military wants to brag about how big its stones are. But think about how long some of this stuff was around before we really knew anything about it, or in some cases, anything. Think about what the military must have that they're not even telling us about.
On the other hand, Bin Laden lives a fairly low-tech life. Many of the methods we would ordinarily employ to locate someone will not work because of this. Ultimately, however, I think the pressure we're putting on the nation will lead us to him. Whether or not he's actually the one responsible for the attacks is a seperate issue. I personally don't care; He's a known (and admitted) terrorist, responsible for the deaths of [relative] innocents, and he should be killed. While I'm against the death penalty in most situations, sometimes someone is just too dangerous to be allowed to live. Better thee than me.
On top of all this; We trained most of these people, either directly or indirectly. We know how they operate, and we know just what level of technology they posess, and in most cases exactly what kind of gear they have, because they got it from us. We have both the technological and information edges on these people. You can further bet your ass that there's a significant number of "spy" satellites hanging out over these areas right now, just checking out anything that looks interesting. It might take us a while, but it is only a matter of time. Also, as a final point, consider that the US government, or at least influential pieces of it, is/are completely ruthless. This is merely something it has in common with almost every other government. While perhaps not a Good Thing (tm), it is occasionally useful.
Like the mounties...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One thing I really hope we learned first from Vietnam and second from the Russian attack on Afghanastan is that you cannot fight unconventional forces with conventional forces. The Afghans have a very well oiled guerilla force. The Soviets spent 6 years fruitlessly trying to fight an army that wasn't really there.
:).
It wasn't until 1986 when the soviets realized they needed to match their forces and began sending in Spetznatz (Special Forces) units instead of traditional forces. They were tremendously sucessful, and by some accounts pretty much had the war won. At that point Reagan stepped in and gave the Afghan forces American Technology, principally lots of Stinger missles. New weapons were enough to turn the tide of the war and the Soviets spent the next two years in a somewhat controlled retreat.
Be careful who you think your friends are, as our own Stinger missles are currently considered the biggest threat to the safety of American planes in Afghanastan.
Our targeted strikes are merely to knock out known defenses and to destabilize the infrastructure. The only way we can flush out their military will be with on the ground special forces.
The biggest thing that I fear is that the US will renig on their commitment to rebuild Afghanastan once we are done blowing it up. If we do not make the investment to rebuild Afghanastan to a stable and capable society, then we will merely be back where we began.
Remember that's how the Taliban came to power. Afghanastan was obliterated by the Soviets. It was an Anarchistic country dominated by local warlords, and ripe for a unifying force to take brutal control. Starving and desperate populations are the breeding ground for violent dictators: Witness numerous 20th Century european countries (names withheld to avoid invoking net flame degredation rules
Enjoy,
Chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
The media onslaught is just like the "number" movies '1984' or 'Fahrenheit 451'. The media brags about some high-tech onslaught against some evil external threat. You see very little diverse opinion in the media, and the people who have offered some have paid (e.g. Bill Maher). Ironically, Orwell and Bradbury predicted that a dictatorial state would be necessary to impose such a uniform view, whereas in the present case the "silo-vision" seems to be emerging from all levels- the viewers, the media providers and the government.
On the other hand, the beauty of the net is that I can see the analysis almost totally absent from US media by reading European and Asian web papers.
I may be picky but I think the Brits learned the same lesson before Soviet even existed...
When Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, we responded not by becoming independent from fossil fuels but by establishing a permanent military presence in Islamic holy lands. Even then we were warned by ibn Laden of the consequences of our actions. Even now he is saying that America will not be safe until we leave their holy lands. He has factually and impassionately stated both the problem and the only acceptable solution. He hasn't even the slightest fantasy of taking over America. He just wants us to leave them alone. Sounds simple to me. However, both Papa Bear Bush and Little Bear Bush are oilmen whose pockets are lined by the richest corporations. How many more Americans will these two gentlemen (a term I use loosely) sacrifice with their greed-driven ideologies?
I am disappointed in Little Bear Bush for lying to us once again. During his speech (9/11 or 9/12), he stated that we will use every tool at our disposal, including diplomacy. Time and again, the leaders of the Taleban have stated their desire to speak with us, which fits the dictionary definition of diplomacy. Time and again, Bush and company have rejected the Taleban's proposals. Bush's idea of diplomacy is apparently as screwy as his handle on compassion.
On a side note, we may be witnessing the beginning of an Anthrax outbreak. This is poetic, considering that most Americans are "following the flock" with meaningless flag-waving and spouting of rhetoric.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Hahahahaha! I love seeing the naive getting called on their bullshit. While the death of UN aid workers is a tragedy, there is no such thing as a war without civilian casualties.
a tw a.htm
Before you start criticizing individual acts within a war, look at the big picture first. What would cost more? Action or inaction?
And for those of you who believe that Osama is a reasonable man, please go over to FAS.org and read this:
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-f
...you just go ahead and try reasoning with this asshole. Those are his words, read them well. He is not a resonable man, and his ideals are not compatible with the existance of any other type of civilization.
Excuse me, but this whole thing, from beginning to every minute of every day that this continues makes me sick.
Goodbye karma, but what's the good of it anyway?
Tom.
Oh arse
While we may loose some lives, and I don't intend to downplay the seriousness of this, it is probably not going to be militarily significant. That is, it won't change the real outcome.
The plain simple fact is that not only do we have vastly more and better equipment, but we also have vastly more and better trained people. Some of them will be lost, the the outcome is not in doubt.
The only thing in doubt is our will to see this through. In the past we have not had the will. After the first few body bags, we run home with our tail between our legs. And that is partly why Sept 11 occured. There is no credible belief that we'll do really very much about it. We'll drop a few bombs, and then when the first few body bags arrive, we'll run home.
After the Sept 11 outrange, we may now have the will. And this, I believe, is Osama's miscalculation.
Another one is this. He may grasp how to use PR to spin his side. But it seems to me that each PR bit he has released has stired our side to even more anger. And we may be able to counter spin his own remarks in front of the Arab world. That remains to be seen.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
And which ones are the terrorists? The ones running around in tanks, hangingout shooting guns?? No, those are just the Taleban gov. officials. The terrorists are the ones that walk around in plain daylight, looking like everyone else around them. Then one day they show up with enough explosives around their chest to knock a few blocks off the map.
Now how are we going to find THOSE terrorists? Intellegence would be nice, but American's don't look like Afgans (sp.) And forget paying them, many of them are taught that the worse life is on this planet the better it is in the after life. Now what are you going to pay them off with? We could always try, "If you tell us where the terrorists are, we'll take away everything you (don't) have.
I believe we can win this war, but finding the objective is going to be much more difficult than people reaize.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
jet engine developed by the Germans
Ahem. Jet Engine. I think you'll find this was invented by Sir Frank Whittle in the early 30's. Just that the Air Ministry wouldn't back it. Had it been put into development sooner the Battle of Britain may have been a lot shorter, and the war...
We also invented RADAR, and used it to detect the incoming bombers so squadrons could be scrambled in time to get to the right height.
"Information wants to be paid"
I know, I know, it's just Katz rabble-rousing and I should lower my expectations, but what is the basis for this statement:
"Most Americans are convinced that technology -- GPS targeting systems, thermal imaging, new intelligence retrieval systems, pilotless drone reconnaisance aircraft, high-altitude bombers, special forces equipped with goggles than can see into caves -- will carry the day for us. Will it? What can technology really do for us in this new war?"
Everything I have read, viewed or heard in the media, every poll I have seen, and every live human I have spoken with in the weeks since September 11 supports precisely the opposite proposition - the general public DOES NOT BELIEVE that technology gives the US/Allies the advantage in this war; it will be won, if at all, by traditional human intelligence, gritty casualty-producing ground combat, determination, and patience. And I don't hear anyone underestimating the low-tech Afghan mujahedeen.
Where are the "most Americans" who believe this is a magic tech silver bullet war? I don't see or hear them anywhere.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
The most distinctive feature of American-style warfare in the recent past was our extreme aversion to casualties, which developed during Viet Nam. Our development of high-tech warfare was motivated at least in part by this. In the wake of 9-11 that fear has become irrelevant, and we're going to be applying miltech in new and interesting ways.
Tactically (thanks to the elusive nature of the enemy), the war we're in now is all about intelligence gathering, which we have developed to a high degree technologically while leaving more conventional man-on-the-scene methods behind. The question is whether technology alone can compensate. I suspect that it can to a much higher degree than people might suspect, especially in the mountains of Afghanistan, but in order for it to be really effective (especially in populated areas), we'll need the new capability to put a bug/bot-on-the-scene.
Of course I don't really know how effective our tech will be in this war, but one thing is for sure - we'll soon find out.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
If this technology does exist (perhaps via earth-mapping satellites), this could make a huge difference. Then all the US would have to do is systemattically destroy any cave entrences to remove the hiding spots and flush them out where they could be spied on with conventional observasion techniques.
science is a religion
Once you seal up the US as "secure" through surveillance and tracking, the "interfaces" to the US will also required to be secured, and those nations that do not engage in similar practices will simply be part of the "them". No one is going to risk lowering security through transitivity.
Note that I am not being cynical about this - in this instance, racial profiling and surveillance based on that profiling would have worked. We know its not the 70 year old granny from Boca Raton that is seeding the water supply with poisons. We should use that information to make better guesses about who is tracked.
Welcome to the Panopticon!
If you start reading the global press, you start to get the sense that perhaps a *lot* of the mid-East is not so happy with this attack on Afghanistan, and is, in fact, quite impressed with bin Laden's video monologue.
Nearest I can figure is that this "war" on the rubble of Afghanistan is going to just create an excuse for more terrorist attacks against US civilians.
Ol' Dubya has just initiated a tit-for-tat war of attrition. This is not going to be a good time to be an American citizen.
And, finally, an interesting bit of thought from Michael Moore:
"Orwell warned us about this one. Big Brother, in order to control the population, knew that it was necessary for the people to always believe they were in a state of siege, that the enemy was getting closer and closer, and that the war would take a very long time.
That is EXACTLY what George W. Bush said in his speech to Congress, and the reason he said it is because he and his buddies want us all in such a state of fear and panic that we would gladly give up the cherished freedoms that our fathers and those before them fought and died for. Who wouldn't submit to searches, restrictions of movement, and the rounding up of anyone who looks suspicious if it would prevent another September 11?
In order to get these laws passed that will strip us of our rights, they have been telling us that we are in a LONG and PROTRACTED war that has no end in sight."
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I dunno what news channel Katz watches, but what I see, over and over, is the government telling us how this war will be different. In Afghanistan, they tell us how few targets there are and how little the bombing can do besides take out some anti-aircraft weapons, some terrorist camps, some runways.
In polls and on-the-street interviews, people say they expect ground troops and special forces to be used. I think the American public definitely knows that this is not a video game war like Desert Storm.
On the news, over and over, we are told that the USA needs to get dirty and use spies and human intelligence to fight this "new cold war" (after a while this is what it will become, a cold war with occasional attacks). I think the government and the people fully understand that most of this war will not be fought with cutting-edge technology that we'll see on TV, but good old-fashioned dirty business and black ops. Sometimes tech will be used, sometimes not. Maybe we'll get a few pointers from the old KGB generals on how to play dirty and undetected?
High tech is definitely a sideline in this war.
Yeah, so we can drop a bomb down somebody's chimney, but does that make a fanatic (whos now lost his family) impressed? Does it alter his believes enough to lift the blinkers and see the pain his government is causing? No, it just makes him more determined to murder the infidel. And besides, it isnt as if theres a lot in Afghanistan to actually bomb.
In my opinion there is no way that the allied nations can win this war against terrorism. Just as hercules faced the hydra, cut off one head and (at least) another will form in its place.
Just look at northern ireland for an example. The english have been trying for years to deal with the terrorist organisations. A ceasefire is called with the IRA and another disgruntled group who disageree with the peace process entirely springs up.
The soldiers themselves, having been exposed to the troubles are now as bitter toward the terrorists as they are to them, essentially cerating 3 sides of bitterness that will never really move forward.
Until we start to apply a doctrine of politics to these people to capture the hearts and minds of the people under the regime, then fighting is pointless. And all the talk of "Reasoning is useless" or "we want payback", is clearly a knee-jerk reaction. Yes, people are hurting now, but does that justify the eye-for-an-eye mentality?
ChAoS
WARNING: May contain traces of nut
/.
When we built all these fancy weapons, I thought they'd be used in a reasonably fair fight - that is, we'd send the tomahawks against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when they delivered their promised global revolution.
I didn't write all that code so that we could use it to kick over some mud huts in a stone-age nation bent on recreating a 16th century theocracy.
Granted, our jingoistic, bloodthirsty, home-grown perpetrators of atrocities are going after people of similar moral virtue, so at least we aren't knocking off Lapps, Tuvans or Bushmen... but I'd still like to see a fair fight. Let Bush and all his hawk buddies go fight a ground war, like the one he dodged in Viet Nam. I'll be happier about funding that, especially if we can use all-volunteer armies and ban all weapons more sophisticated than a bow and arrow.
Why can't all these warmongering bastards sate their bloodlust without bringing my nice clean superweapons into their dirty little terrorist tit-for-tat?
--Charlie
I imagine a dung beetle thinking to himself, "Why would anyone go to so much trouble to move my favorite rock?"
If you have good technology, you can be really annoying to dung beetles.
ABC News article: "Abu Sayyaf
Bush's education improvements were
I think the experience of the last decade should give us a very clear answer to this question. Technology will not solve this problem, or its like, for us.
Our gadgets might be very useful in immobilizing an opponent that relies on sophisticated infrastructure, like we do. But when Rumsfeld and his generals speak of knocking out "command and control structures" in Afghanistan, the US Government's structural inability to even understand this kind of situation gets a nice bright underline. It's the same kind of mentality that insists the best road to security for the US is a multi-trillion dollar shield against ICBMs.
We've destroyed Afghanistan's meager air and air defense capabilities. All our cruise missiles and precision munitions can do for us now is make us look like cowards attacking what must rank as one of the most unfortunate countries on earth, with goals that are clear to no one.
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
The Sept 11 gang was in the US for a long time soaking up our vices, and one of them was even observed in a porn shop. Beer and tits didn't give them pause. In fact its likely that they had the same reaction most intolerant people do - they soaked up the porn, but later in the guilt phase it probably made them hate the US more for presenting them with the means to betray their faith.
I've read several comments, articles and opinions about this war, since 9-11. Unfortunately, I've got the same conclusion, always: this isn't a winnable war. No war tecnology, modern warfare can win this war, and it's very simple to explain it: this war is not a military one.
The US (and the western world, by extension) isn't fighting a opressing regime or an expanding, threatening militar force. We are fighting terror, and senseless attacks on civilians. These attacks do not come from Taliban troops. They come from organized fundamentalists, which are functioning as any american corporation. The difference is the goal: the fundamentalists do not want profit, but some kind of religious "justice".
The real war isn't on Afghanistan: it's in the minds of a big number of people who think of the US as their biggest enemy.
Bombing Taliban sites or capturing/killing Osama bin Laden will not end terror. The terrorists are well spread all over the world. To stop these people, we'll have to make them stop wanting to hurt us. The bombs or the modern tecnology will not achieve this.
One thing that seems to get glazed over an awful lot is that during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the rebel groups were being backed by the United States and others. In this war they are completely cut off from outside assistance. Nobody is dumb enough to do something like that right now and risk us making them an enemy.
Another thing to note is that the Soviets had very different goals when they went into Afghanistan. They wanted to take over the country. The US is interested in eliminating a threat, which means taking out terrorists and those who sponsored them. We want to get in and get out as fast as possible, and ideally want some other group to come to power in afghanistan who doesn't hate us quite so much. We are trying to play various internal afghanistan factions against eachother, and making a point of not being a common enemy for them to unite against.
To analyze this war against the backdrop of Soviet Afghanistan or Vietnam seems to belittle the truely different nature of this conflict. This doesn't mean it will be easy, and certainly with some policy mistakes we could turn it into such a conflict. But the goals here and the enviornment under which we are attempting to achieve them is very different from these historical precedents.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
ultimately all our "Smart Bombs" and "Stealth Planes" all do the same thing that "Not So Smart Bombs" and "Quite Visible Planes" did in the past. Soften up the enemy for ground troops.
It would be wonderful if we had weapons that could finish off the war but ultimately we'll have to have a lot of 18-40 yr olds die in the process. When it is all sadi and done Afghani rocks will have been moved about and we will have "bombed them back to the stone age" setting them back a good 45 minutes.
War requires humans to kill one another face to face. It is sad.
This
I hope you do realize that if US was as ruthless as these terrorist were in NYC, there would be nothing and no one left alive in places like Afghanistan.
along with the precision-bomb photos, and satellite shots
I guess the illusion of "surgical strikes" can now be put into the dustbin.
The US airforce just blew up the United Nations building, close to Kabul in afghanistan.
But strangely, I can't find a word about it on US websites ??
The closest is This article but it doesn't mention a word about that the people were in the UN building outside Kabul.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Without the Stinger the Afghans may very well have been wiped out - the Hind was the perfect weapon for the job - fast enough to find mujahudeen before they could clear the firing range, and controllable enough to allow incredibly focused firepower.
Once the Soviets were unable to control the skies, the forces were more or less equilized. Needing a 3-1 advantage as any attacker does, the odds were against the Soviets.
The Stinger has a 3-4 year lifespan on some parts - it is unlikely that Stingers from the 80s are a threat now - they probably do not function at this point.
I strongly recommend the book "Black Hawk Down" by Mark Bowden, http://blackhawkdown.philly.com/
In the longest running gunfight in recent US history, Task Force Ranger (including members of Delta Force) suffered heavy casualties. They thought they succeeded in their mission, if imperfectly. They inflicted much, much heavier casualties on the Somalis trying to overrun them, and held out long enough to be rescued by members of the 10th Mountain (who are right now in Uzbekistan, IIRC) (with Malaysian and Pakistani armor)
They DID complete the mission (capturing some important members of the ruling clan structure in a daring daytime raid) but after they suffered casualties, the mission was scrapped because the public couldn't deal with a relatively few lives lost. Note to enemies: Kill just a few of our men, and we don't have the resolve to keep fighting. I think maybe this has changed, since we've lost a lot of civilians.
A huge advantage of our forces is that we can afford to train them all the time, even when that gets expensive. We can afford truly awesome fire support. We have a truly huge military, largely because we're the only really huge country that isn't really poor. Militarily, we could close the borders to Afghanistan, occupy it, segregate it, and sweep across it forcing everyone to be inspected at a checkpoint. Would we be able to ID bin Laden at that checkpoint? I don't know. But that's a more subtle mission than one that's purely military.
We have at least two significant advantages over the Russians. The first is that the most useful of our technology, like the Night Optical Devices, are very useful even in urban on-the-ground situations. The second is that we were supplying and training the people fighting against them, and no one (AFAIK) is supplying or training them against us. That means they'll run out of midrange technology like SAMs if they use them...
Even in Vietnam, we won militarily. But we had no exit strategy. No amount of military success will make a corrupt puppet gov't legitimate. Defeating an enemy is much easier than nationbuilding, and I'm not at all sure how we're going to go about nationbuilding after we blow this stuff up. I suspect we can kill or try bin Laden and dismantle at least most of the structure of Al Queda - but as long as we leave festering countries bombed into the stone-age around, there are always going to be new problems.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
But thousands of American civilians are already dead in this conflict, greater civilian losses than in any war in U.S. history.
Seems to me more than 5000 civilians died in the US Civil War. And it was not from the side-effects of war. Civilians were legitamate targets back in those days and were fired on by both sides. I don't have a link, but Gettysburg seems to be a good place to start researching this.
Although this is a bit offtopic, I do find it irritating when you hear all the "This is the first time that..." crap in the media. We've been attacked on our soil before, had our territory occupied before, and yes, our civilians have been attacked and killed in large numbers in war before. This seems to be a tool that journalists use in order to make it look like the story they are reporting is some radically new type of event, when in reality it is just a slightly different spin on what has been happening for centuries.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
In practiced Pentagonese, Rumsfeld deftly avoided answering the question of whether the use of tactical nuclear weapons could be ruled out.
Though large "theater" thermonuclear devices -- doomsday bombs -- don't fit the Bush administration's war on terrorism, smaller tactical nukes do not seem out of the question in the current mindset of the Defense Department.
The most likely candidate is a tactical micro-nuke called the B61-11, an earth-penetrating nuclear device known as the "bunker buster." The B61-11 was designed to destroy underground military facilities such as command bunkers, ballistic missile silos and facilities for producing and storing weapons. However, it could be used against the warren of tunnels and caves carved under the Afghan mountains that are often cited as a potential refuge for the U.S. government's prime suspect, Osama bin Laden. The B61-11's unique earth-penetrating characteristics and wide range of yields allow it to threaten deeply situated and otherwise indestructible underground targets from the air.
The 1,200-pound B61-11 replaces the 8,900-pound, nine-megaton B53 device, a bomb initially designated as an earth-penetrating weapon. The B53 is deliverable only by enormous and vulnerable B-52 bombers. By contrast, the relatively diminutive B61-11 can be delivered by the stealthier B-2 bomber, or even by conventional fighters such as the F-16.
The B61-11 is designed to burrow through layers of concrete by way of a "shock-coupling effect." The design directs the force of the B61-11's explosive energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters, according to a story in the March 2, 1997 issue of Defense News.
The B53, on the other hand, with a force equal to 9 million tons of TNT, penetrates the earth simply by creating a massive crater, rather than the more precise downward blow of the B61-11.
The B61-11 is the most recent nuclear device added to the U.S. nuclear arsenal since 1989. It was developed and deployed secretly, according to a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The U.S. military sneaked it past test and development treaties, as well as public and congressional debate, by defining the B61-11 as an adaptation of a pre-treaty technology rather than a new development. Depending on the yield of the bomb, the B61-11 can produce explosions ranging from 300 tons of TNT to more than 300,000 tons. This is significantly less than the B53, but still far larger than even the greatest conventional non-nuclear device in U.S. stockpiles. And it is several times more powerful than the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in 1945.
Studies by the Natural Resource Defense Council estimate that more than 150 B61-11s are currently in the U.S. arsenals, scattered among NATO aircraft carriers and planes on bases in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Netherlands and Greece. Many B61-11s were withdrawn from Europe during the '90s and are now stored at Kirtland and Nellis Air Force bases in the United States.
According to a desk release from the U.S. Air Force's Public Affairs office, tests of the earth-penetrating capabilities of the B61-11 were completed on March 17, 1998, in frozen tundra at the Stuart Creek Impact Area, 35 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. Two unarmed B61-11s were dropped to test their ground-penetration capability. The tests were designed to measure the nuclear bomb casing's penetration into frozen soil and the survivability of the weapon's internal components.
A team excavated the two unexploded dummy bombs and took careful measurements of their angles and depth of penetration into the soil, which were 6 and 10 feet, according to the Air Force. The shells were sent back to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico for full analysis of how the simulated internal components fared in the impact. The B6-11's casing didn't rupture in any of the tests, including drops through concrete from 40,000 feet. All bomb casings were recovered 100 percent intact, according to the release.
Any debate inside the corridors of power about using tactical nukes will be heightened by the intelligence buzz surrounding bin Laden's possible ownership of Russian nuclear "suitcase" bombs purchased from Chechen mafia. Those weapons are said to be hidden in deep caves and fortified tunnels in remote regions of Afghanistan. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the discussion of ways to eradicate this potential nuclear threat -- while simultaneously destroying bin Laden and his teams --- may have led to talk about tactical weapons that can destroy even heavily fortified underground shelters.
It is obvious that the US and UK have already deployed special forces on the ground and soon will be sending a lot more.
Guerilla tactics are pretty much the only way to take out guerillas. The Soviets proved that controlling the cities and highways with a lot of heavy armor just makes you a static target.
So, don't expect this to be bloodless for the US/UK. All this government rhetoric about how this will be a hard effort means "we're gonna take casualties."
The US ground troops will have far more technological assistance than the Taliban: GPS, helicopters, night vision, personal radios, satellite imagery, powerful individual weapons, artillery and air strikes on call. But the Taliban are on their home turf, and they are ready to die for the cause.
That we would integrate a back door in our high-tech weapons that are sold abroad so that they misfire/explode/active a lojack-like device if they are used against us. The government is so back-door-encryption happy that I'm surprised they haven't done this. And, if they haven't done so because of fear that the keys would be compromised, then why would the FBI want to implement such system for civilian encryption?
What Can Technology Do For Us?
For $600,000, we can buy a Tomanhawk missile and...
Bush's education improvements were
What are atom bombs good for outside of war? Nothing?
The Atom Bomb itself is a tool of war, but consider the technology that depended on its development. In the US we don't use Nuclear Power much, but other countries, upto 80% of thier power comes from nuclear plants. The study of radiation in medicine has brought forth treatment for cancer and more advanced X-Ray type machines. This is what comes to mind, I am sure others can think of more.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
Technological superiority can be a hazard or a benefit depending upon how blindly we trust that superior technology means superior ability to kill.
Consider that when the F-4 Phantom was built, we relied so heavily on the technology of the radar guided missle that we thought there would never again be any dogfighting in the skies, and all kills would be done from a range of 25 miles away. And so, F-4 Phantoms were built without guns.
We got our butts kicked as a result with high losses as the MIG's tore the crap out of the Phantoms,
The next batch of F-4's had a gun built into a pod that would have been used to carry a missle. Suddenly the idea of building a manueverable fighter aircraft with guns was again, seen as a necessity. We learned that technology alone doesn't win a war.
The "Top Gun" school was started as a result of that embarassing mistake.
Let us hope that we still remember that painful lesson in this instance.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Probably the closest comparisons to prior conflicts can be made with the Indian Wars. During these conflicts between the US settlers and the Native Americans it is difficult to separate out the civilian casualties since much of the fighting was done by militias, etc. It should be possible to estimate civilians casualties for both sides in the Indian Wars by only counting women and children, and I would guess that the totals would be more than 6,000.
Of course the fact still remains that the number of civilian casualties that we've inflicted were much higher than those inflicted on us in the major wars of the 20th century. This is mostly a result of the fact that those wars weren't fought on American soil, but it bears consideration when trying to put the current conflict into historical context.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
You know, If I were US intelligence I'd be watching the Kabul Al Jazeera office, personel, and visitors with everything we've got. It seems to me the easiest way to find bin Laden is to wait for him to send a message and then follow the courier(s)/mail trail/evidence analysis straight back to him.
The thing no one seems to mention is that every system has strengths and weaknesses, including the shadowy al quaeda. They may go to great lengths to keep their actions secret, but by the same token their communications are slow, infrequent, physical in nature, and (most importantly) difficult to authenticate, and even more difficult to organize. An opening in the network, restrained tracking and mapping of the network, and a tightly coordinated disinformation campaign could tear it completely apart. And that's just for starters.
One thing I noticed from the bin Laden video - he's just like Saddam Hussein or any other would-be dictator, using war to expand and consolidate his influence with himself on top. He's doing a credible job, although I think the media is overly-surprised at his control of spin - this is a man whose main purpose is recruitment. But the bigger he gets, the harder he'll fall, and his inaccessibility will ultimately be his undoing because he'll have no way to defend himself. He can easily be trapped and caught and/or badly discredited, with no way to defend himself, and in the process all the followers he's developed can be humiliated and shamed.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
In particular, I'm interested in clean, sustainable energy sources and delivery systems that would give the energy-hungry USA the luxury of acting according to its democratic principles in the international arena, instead of its all-too-common current tendencies to do whatever it has to to keep cheap oil flowing in.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
As a former Apache Mechanic I can say that the airframe is fairly reliable when it is flown frequently the problems with this helicopter really start when you let them sit.
If you keep them flying the seals last longer and since they upgraded the Air conditioner from water based to freon based the electronics last much longer (the AC was piped to the computers first and the pilots got what was left over)
In a operational setting the AH-64 frequently achieves a 90% up time, in garison settings this drops to 65-70%
In short when needed the Apache is ready, reliable and when needed lethal.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
This is true.
From 1979-1985, the Soviets using airmobile tactics like the US 1st Air Cav used in Vietnam, ran over the Afghans. From 1985 on, with Stinger and Blowpipe Manpack SAMs, the Afghanis started to win back the war. By late 1987 the Russians started to lower thier helo loses, but by then the costs of the war and worsening economic conditions in the Soviet Union led to a pull-out.
If you look at a time-line of Afghanistan, it has about the same ups and downs as the War in Vietnam from 1965-1973.
PS - One interesting thing about the arming of the Afghanis and Iranians is...most of it takes place after the 1984 Presidental Elections. It's almost as if Reagan didn't really start fouling up until after he won a second term.
I hesitate to call this conflict a war since it is not between two states, but rather between a state and a group of individuals. The fact that Bush Jr has involved the Taliban doesn't change that for me.
That said, I think you will find that the tech involved in this conflict will be primarily oriented to command and control, recon and surveillence.
It appears that so far the "smart bombs" have done no discernable damage to the Al Queda network. Nor are such devices likely to work as they are designed to take out military assets, not individuals. Several experts believe that the US and its allies will rely heavily on special forces used on the ground. I tend to agree. The strengths of the Al Queda followers are the same as those of the muhjadeen - rapid strike ground forces that disappear after contact - hit and run tactics as explained by a former British SAS member who helped them refine their techniques. Those kinds of tactics cannot be fought by bombing an area into submission.
Wherer the tech does stand out however, is in tracking and locating friendly forces. GPS allows ground commanders and operational officers to know where their men are at any time. That is a great advantage for recon (When the enemy is spotted or engaged), evac (if troops are in danger). Enhanced communications and satellites will play further aid these processes.
Other less glamorous technologies such as night vision and short range heat trackers will lend a tactical advantage to ground forces (who will be more likely to attack their opponents at night), but again these aren't the high profile items that cost 5 and 6 figures each.
As for playing up the danger of conflict, that's been SOP for a long time. Remember the US government built up Iraq as the fourth largest military in the world (when it couldn't make a dent in Iran for 10 years). Technology's role in the military since WW2 has rarely created a paradigm shift, it merely increases the efficiency in which something can be done.
The fact that once again the most dangerous weapons US troops are likely to face are ones we sold our opponents doesn't help.
How about the many times that bin Laden has called for the destruction of Israel? Its clear the man has a broader objective that fits in with the established pattern of Islamic fundamentalist dogma.
Time and again, the leaders of the Taleban have stated their desire to speak with us
Please, you aren't interviewing on CNN. Don't insult our intelligence.
They were actually sleeping in their barracks.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
http://www.pushback.com/terror/DroppingPhones.html
...
This idea would show the terrorists a bit of the reality that they're working so hard against. It's the nature of people to want to be free and prosperous, and despots and dictators are working against that nature. The useful information we could get from anonymous "squealers" and the terror instilled in the terrorists' hearts would be two very potent weapons.
There's no need for the US to limit itself to expensive, marginally effective military technology. There are probably more solutions like this one that take advantage of the cheap technology our free market has produced.
----------- (Excerpt from the web site) -----------
Freedom Phones and PINs--How to Find Osama bin Laden and Other Terrorists with Methods that Guarantee Anonymity for Informants
Immediately after the WTC attack on September 11, many top scientists and Middle East experts in the U.S. suggested and recommended the anonymous reward scheme described below to encourage those with information on the identity and whereabouts of terrorists to provide this information to U.S authorities such as the FBI.
Dr. Bill Wattenburg gave the first public descripton of this clever scheme on his talk show over KGO Radio AM810, San Francisco, on September 25, 2001, from 7pm to 10pm. The response from listeners on the west coast was overwhelming understanding and approval.
Terrorists Leaders Will Know the Fear That They Can be Betrayed at Any Time by Captive Citizens Who Formally had no Secure Communication--or by Their Own Henchmen Who Can Safely Collect Large Rewards Here on Earth Instead of Only in Suicide Heaven.
But thousands of American civilians are already dead in this conflict, greater civilian losses than in any war in U.S. history.
First we'll assume you mean U.S. civilians, as millions were killed in WWII, which is certainly still in the recollection of most Americans. Going a bit further back, but again certainly within U.S. history, there was the civil war. Do you honestly believe that there were not more civilians killed in that war?
Now on to your question. There is no doubt that our technology will benifit us. Do our GPS targetting systems work, certainly. Are our satellites as good as we think they are for battlefield intelligence? You betcha. Have our soldiers been better prepared both mentally and physically? Absolutley. Can the Taliban win this war? No chance.
But it isn't technology that gives us the real advantage. We had technology on our side in Vietnam. We didn't win. Sure, it wasn't nearly at the level we have now, and we didn't have the experience using what we had in real situations, but we simply were more powerful. But we didn't win. Why didn't we win? During Vietnam we were a divided nation. We had defeated the Viet Cong in South Vietnam by 1968. But the north saw our division here in America, and counted on us to give in to internal pressures. To make a long story short, we did.
Today there's no such division. The overwhelming majority of people in this country believe this is something that needs to be done. Sure there are some people who disagree, but they certainly aren't the majority. Our nation is united. The other nations of the world are also standing behind us. If we continue to stand united, we will win this war, just as we've won all other wars that we've stood through united.
When all is said and done, some may say that technology won the war. But the real reasons will have had nothing to do with technology.
speaking of Bosnia, but from a different angle...
PBS had a show last night which talked about the US recent military actions on behalf of muslims in kosovo and bosnia. remember those? the whole 'genetic cleansing' crap which was sweeping the eastern bloc and literally translated to 'kill all the muslims'. the US and the UN fought at great expense to stop the genocides of milosevic, etc, toward muslims.
Yet in the middle east, muslims cheer 'death to america' while burning down buildings.
that's right, there is no point to this post, just rambling in fear of ww3.
-sam
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
errr... your last two paragraphs sound like excellent pro -taleban propaganda (swap Iowa for region in Afghanistan). I'd say that these paragraphs sum up well exactly why the Taleban forces have an excellent chance of giving the USA and all the other allied forces a really hard time . The USA doesn't want casualities in a far off land. The Afghan soldiers are fighting to protect their motherland, their way of life, their religion.
Personally I consider that both the governments of Afghanistan and the USA could be considered not to enjoy unified support from their peoples, are corrupt to some degree and abuse their populace.
I far prefer the latter to the former but I don't see purity and unsullied goodness on either side of the political fence. I just worry that yet more innocent people who would like peace and want to get on with their lives are going to die.
First of all I think that many of our soldiers are willing to die for our country. Those who might not have been a couple months ago are probably more likely to be willing to make that sacrifice given thousands dead in New York. Now, is it quite the level of sacrifice one might see from a religious zealot? Probably not, but is that a bad thing?
Self-sacrifice is all well and good, but if it isn't done it a well thought out manner it can be counterproductive. A dead guy with a weapon isn't of much use to you, so if he makes that sacrifice it had better be for a good reason. Zealotry can cloud ones judgement where as somebody genuninely afraid for his life will think twice about the sacrifices (and perhaps in the end provide strategic advantage in that).
One other thing to consider, I don't think all the Taliban are quite the religious zealots that we might otherwise think. Surely some of them are, and a large number of them are probably in the firm belief that they are right, but not everybody is the kind of person who can commit suicide for the cause. Only time will tell but I suspect that a large amount of resistance will cease to be if it's clear to the people of Afghanistan that we want them to be better off in the long run. People with food on their plates, and a roof over their head are much less prone to zealotry and if we help them get there, their loyalties aren't going to be to the Taliban.
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Leaking of secrets between "Military" or "Business" are VERY different issues.
Selling or leaking business secrets is unethical and rotten, but legal (short of insider trading or non-disclosure violations).
Selling/leaking MILITARY secrets is TREASON and will get you EXECUTED promptly in time of war. A little more serious than "starting trouble".
Unfortunately, morons reporting what is visible to a casual observer on the battlefield isn't considered "leaking" secrets, because the events have already happened (even though only moments ago). Pity.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I agree with you, but the guy said, "I believe that it would have been many years before the development of an atom bomb if it weren't for the war." Which is nutty, because if it weren't for wars, we wouldn't need atom bombs (not that they are such a good idea anyway...)
Why is the USA so against nuclear power anyway? It would reduce her (embarrassing) CO2 emissions, and her dependence on cheap (monetarily, if not politically) oil.
Still, we Brits are joint second with the Japanese, 28% nuclear to your 19%... The French are sorted with 75%.
Would you eat those funny packages they've pushing out of the planes? First, they are nothing like you've ever seen before. Second, how do you know if the enemy who just bombed you isn't trying to poison you?
Actually, I agree with you *in principle*. In the long term view, you're right. We've killed millions total, several hundred thousand in the Civil War alone.
However, I am not speaking of casualties and I'm not speaking in the long term, I'm speaking of cost. When someone baits us by saying "Way to go America, 4 more dead.." or some such blather, I have to point out that those 4, like soldiers, sailors, airmen, firemen, policemen and so on chose to risk their lives. The people in the World Trade Center did not and should rightly be considered victims.
When a cop pulls over a guy on the side of the road, he's taking his life in his own hands. He runs a very serious risk of getting shot or killed (I know, my cousin was killed in just such an incident). When a cop goes into a training exercise to learn how to deal with those situations, he also could get killed. If a cop gets killed in training, do we include him in the list of those killed by drive by shootings? No. Why not? After all, the only reason he was there in the first place was to deal with a potential shooting situation.
One thing that does tick me off is the term "Collateral Damage." It used to mean unintentional damage to physical assets as a result of actions against intended targets. Now it means innocent people killed by accident. A person is not "Collateral," a person who is killed or injured is a victim, friend or enemy, intentional or not.
"This comment posted as LDOPA1 because when I criticize, it's generally supported by fact. Occasionally I lose Karma, but more often I gain Karma. I'm willing to risk Karma for what I believe."
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
Yeah, and I've got this nice bridge in New York I'm interested in selling. (Better buy it quick, though, before it gets blowed up real good.)
If anybody reading this site knows what the advanced military nations of the world are actually capable of, and if they were to write about it here, it would mean their immediate dismissal from the secret services and subsequent vaporization.
My information is about a decade old, but according to it, back in the early nineties, we had the technology to see through mountains, pinpoint kill from huge distances, and with shoulder mounted arms put nuclear-scale non-nuclear devastation pretty much anywhere at any time. I'll repeat that; NON-nuclear explosives which have the range and effect of nuclear devices. Small warheads a single warrior can carry and deploy. And that's just the brute force crap.
This stupid, evil, fake production of a pre-fab war could be won in under a month with little or no loss on the side of the tech-advanced nations.
And that's using tech from nearly ten years ago. (And you wonder why ZPE is dead in the civilian realm. Use your damned brains!)
However. . . You are not going to see a quick resolution because the power brokers don't want that. They plan to put on a good show which will establish all of the right dramatic tensions thus preparing and programming the world for the further steps of their master plan, (which if the world survives long enough, I am sure we will get to watch unfolding with all the melodramatic glory of a bad Hollywood film, written, of course, for the average 14 year old intelligence, because anything less would appear confusing and thereby deflate its core audience.)
Pass the popcorn. Erg. And the Tumms. (Lame writing gives me gas.)
-Fantastic Lad
War, especially this kind of "feel good" unwinnable war, consumes Gross National Product without the benefit of raising the standard of living. That is, every effort put to the war is effort that could have been put to feed, salve or teach our own citizens or to aid other citizens.
Unwinnable? Yes. Just as in the Gulf War, America claims victory because we've hit all the known military objectives, while Saddam claims victory because we've not hit all the unknown military objectives and he remained in power. A war without losers is a war without winners. And that's exactly what we're facing with this newest "whack-a-mole" war in Afghanistan.
--"Emanuel Goldstein", 1984, by George Orwell
Endless war just stratifies the society into a more crisp and more maintainable hierarchy of the Power Elite, the Party sheep, and the proletariat masses.
[
Thanks for saying this. Half the time I watch the news, my roommate wonders why the hell I blurt out a "Shut the fuck UP!" every hour or so. (Side note - not all reporters are idiots; mad props to one reporter who, when questioned as to his whereabouts by his anchorman, replied with "Y'know, I think they said it was OK to tell you where I am, but I'm going to err on the side of caution for now. I'll tell you tomorrow.")
To Slashdotters reading this - you can help.
Do not post reports of military activity in your area. If you see lots of planes taking off from an airbase, or lots of planes landing, or lots of trucks moving about, or anything that might indicate our future plans, keep your mouth shut about it for a day or so before telling folks what you saw. Don't post names of people you know are on duty or being called up. Don't post unit numbers.
Exceptions can be made for breaking news, such as yesterday's intercept over Chicago, where our forces wouldn't be jeopardized. But I'm sure that anyone, with a moment's thought, can see the difference between "Holy shit, sonic booms over Chicago!" and "I wonder where all those planes and ships are going?"
Loose lips sink ships.
Not sure why you say that most people expect to do this with little to no losses, and no footwork by US soldiers. Where I work, 90% of the employees have no college education. About 25% have family either currently in the armed forces, or very recently out.
Overwhelmingly, they expect that their sons, daughters, brothers, will be put in danger. They have accepted what Bush and others have said: it's gonna take soldiers on foot.
Perhaps they are more savvy than the average citizen. But even those rather far removed from those in the military accept it. What they do seem to want is for us to use as many smart bombs and other technological means prior to putting troops on the ground.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Science, religion, domination, communication. GM, IBM, Newsweek, CNN, Universal, Siemens, Sony...
Recommended Listening: Laibach's cover of "War", whose lyrics contain the aformentioned list.
Album review found here: NATO.
Also recommended listening: Front 242, "Circling Overland", and Laibach's "Nato". (Same album as "War"). If you're into retrogaming, think "headphones", "lights out", and Microprose's classic "F-19 Stealth Fighter."
Here's a link that works:
Osama bin Laden: Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders
He is doing what he can to make violence seem reasonable. But it isn't.
Bush's education improvements were
airports, which were unlikely to be used in this
conflict, anyway, and which the US & UK will now
have to pay Afghanistan to rebuild, once the war
is over. See Sun Tzu's excellent paper on warfare
on why this is an incredibly stupid tactic.
The "minimal loss of life" has included UN
volunteer workers, when those carefully guided
missiles slammed into a UN-sponsored facility.
IIRC, this is not the first time "smart bombs"
have been fired by less-than-smart humans. The US
really should update its maps. I'm sure the
Chinese would help pay for some. Iraq and Libya
would probably chip in some cash, too, given the
number of civilians killed by "stray" missiles,
fired in anger by US pilots, in both countries.
The first problem is that the military are
unbelievably dumb. Giving them "smart" technology
doesn't make them any smarter. (Laptops and the
UK's MOD don't mix. Well, they do, and then they
seperate, with said laptops carrying information
MOD officials damn well aught to know better
should not be put on unsecure machines.)
The second problem is that even the "smart"
technology is far from "smart". The guidance
systems (camera-based, laser-guided, GPS, etc) are
all prone to error, and there seems to be very
little in the way of verification done. (If there
were, we wouldn't get stray missiles! The system
would be able to detect there was a problem, and
correct it.)
The third problem is that this kind of war
depersonalises it. Death and destruction at the
push of a button, with no understanding or
compassion. Reminds me a lot of Davros, from the
television series "Doctor Who", or the Cybermen.
In both cases, fictional descriptions of what
happens when you destroy the "human element", and
replace it with passionless machinary. How, then,
should we challange those things which -are- evil?
Again, the good Doctor answered this, in the story
"Evil of the Daleks" - cooperation, caring and
compassion are more powerful than brute-force and
power-plays.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Leaving aside Sep 11 casualties, and the Taliban military casualties ( no real why we should but how and ever), there were already confirmed civilian casualties when you posted this, the most notable being 4 UN mine-clearers who happened to be in the same village as a communications tower.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
The question of whether we can accomplish our goals in this conflict with a high-tech, sanitary, "surgical strike" like we did in the Gulf War is based on the false premise that we've ever acheived anything with this type of technology. In fact, the great majority of air sorties flown in the Gulf were thoroughly conventional, although we were never shown much of this type of action on CNN.
The Myth of Surgical Bombing in the Gulf War [deoxy.org]
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
There IS a way to kill this hydra, but it can be VERY VERY ugly, and I don't know if we have the will. If pushed to the wall (aka enough deaths inside the US), I think (fear) we will do it. It's called genocide. When it's life or death, things like the moral high ground tend to go way
And your right, it's probably NOT a good time to be an American
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Actually, TV is outlawed by the Taliban. Osama Bin Ladin's message wasn't to the Afghani people (who largely dislike him), but to his sympathetic supporters in the rest of the Arab world.
> We (Americans) has the best trained military the world has ever seen.
I think almost every country on earth is told that one. Quite often people believe it too. So, the British think their army is the best, as do the French, Germans, Chinese, Russians (spetchnez), Iraqis, etc etc. Of all the nations on earth, only the Italians spring to mind as *not* thinking they have the best trained military.
Tell me - where did you learn that America had the best trained army on earth ? Let me guess... it was in America right ?
America does have the most powerful army on the planet, which is not quite the same thing. Fat lot of good it'll do in this conflict though. Getting rid of terrorists with bombs is about as effective as trying to clean your windscreen with greasy hands. You might shift the original piece of dirt, but you make a much bigger mess in the process.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
That video wasn't faxed. And we can trace electronic communications - that's what we're good at.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I don't care what the US has done in the past, it has never targeted innocent people.
Not True. The most extreme counterexamples come from WW2, when US high command decided to start fire bombing residential neighborhoods in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In this regard, the use of nuclear weapons was only a change in scale, not in policy. Other examples come from Germany WW2, Vietnam and Korea.
That (publicly known) US military policy doesn't involve targetting civilans doesn't mean it hasn't happened in the past, or can't happen again. I like the US, and I'm glad that technological advances allow for more accurate munitions. I just hope the people in charge can identify legitimate targets with equal accuracy.
We've evidently got these nifty microwave zappers for crowd control. Could these be useful in taking a city? In establishing a defense perimeter? How far can they project in a tunnel? How far can they be turned up? Are they a practical alternative to tactical neutron devices?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Brainwashing is nothing new and can be really effective in the current war...
In fact, the US is already doing this in the name of "humanitarian aid" and "food dropping".
What I don't understand, is why they haven't dropped booklets in ARABICS as well.
Printing in English on the food packs is as stupid a move as you can make. With their literacy level how are they going to understand English?
This is because we're side to side in a map (I'm en Mexico), and because my work (computer-related) just can't be done other way.
First: I will not say that I dislike USA's way of life, to the extent that it does't get involved into other people's way of life. I don't like USA's standing in "our way of life it's the best, so we will impose it in every corner of the planet". USA must stop in doing so.
Second: Do you actually know what level of security is used to secure must Israel's airports, borders, even malls? you know that must of it came from USA? you think that USA is going to be more secure than Israel? (at every level, be it high-tech or militar), do you think that Israel, some day, some how, will be terrorist-free? do you think USA?
Third: USA has demostrated before, it's people is not prepared to deal with a long-standing war on terrorism on it's own soil. If the american people think that this war is going to be fighten in other place, they're mistaken. USA must realize that it is not going to benefit from this "new kind of war". Many countries are already wining it by means of not relating themselfes with middle-east. That's the way people. Stay off that area. Let Israel deal with Palestine.
I like USA the same way I like TCP/IP, it's there, is reliable, it sets a standard, you can use it, and certainly are better ways to do it, but if it begins to change into something that I don't like, It'll be years to have another standard to live on, and I don't know how could it be...
Carlos Niebla
Not really accurate.
Many weapons systems in the hands of NATO, US, and Russia are systems that our enemies can't get or don't have.
An example - Soviet fighters.
All the aircraft the Soviets and now Russians export are Export models with toned down sensors and weapons systems.
Same goes for the export versions of American fighters, missiles and sensor equipment.
American M-1 tanks, while in service with Egypt and Kuwait, have not ended up in the hands of the Taliban. Same goes for the F-16s and F-15s, Tornados in the hands of Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman or Indonesia.
Even "client" states like Iraq we unable to get the latest versions of Soviet T-72 or BMPs, instead having to buy knock-off T-84s from Yugoslavia and Chinese APCs. Not because of the price, but because the Soviets would not sell them the best gear. The T-62s and 72s Iraq had were the second or third best models the Soviets had, not the front-line models in East Germany.
Arms races are not new. The idea behind an arms race dates back to the first invention of weapons (other than a rock or stick) by man. The point is to inflict damage upon an enemy or the enemy society to the point that the enemy will no longer oppose your society in whatever venture you are currently at odds over. Where the "race" comes in, is to achive those goals with a lower cost in whatever your society holds dear, in this case it's material loses and life of your citizens.
Bin Laden has been (heard on radio) murdering prominent leaders of the Northern Alliance. If we help them into power, which is where it looks as though they may be headed, they have their own score to settle with the guy. And it won't be them "doing our dirty work for us", they have their own legitimate reasons for executing him. We will just be a happy beneficiary. I really think we are being kept in the dark as to how much better the Northern Alliance will be on the issue of Human Rights.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
One thing it looks like many people forget about is technology's role in the new world of Predictive Intelligence, something that only exists in it's infancy now, but has vast potential for this new kind of war.
A few years ago, I was working at a dot-com on some really fascinating "intelligent" software. It would pull out abstract information from unrelated data and form n-dimensional "clouds" where related entities would become grouped toegther. It would then proceede to "find faces" in the clouds. In other words, it would try to extrapolate out new information based on what information it was given, no matter how much or how little.
It was a simply amazing tool for data analysis, for pulling out the relevant information from a sea of data, for making educated guesses that actually give you results... But like all dot-coms, we frittered our money away and now I don't know if more than three people in the world even have copies of this once multi-million dollar software.
My point is, if we as a no-nothing dot-com can come up with a really fantastic data mining/information extrapolation engine (of course, we used it solely for short-sighted evil-marketing purposes, thus our demise), then the government could certianly be able to build a system fifty times as complex, and use it for vastly more important purposes than correlating CDs with clothing purchases.
The next step for military technology isn't going to be the next biggest bomb or the pair of night-vision goggles that will let you do macramé in a cave during a new moon. Instead the next advance will be predictive and learning software that can make "good guesses" as to when and where the enemy will strike next. It will be able to profile everyone in the world based on thier credit-card purchases corelated with thier taste in web-sites, thier shoe size, and how many hours of bowling they watch a year, and be able to spot the "sleeper" terrorists with a 99.982% degree of accuracy. It will be able to analyse battlefield data and predict troop movement, ambushes, and caculate the plan of action that would lead to the biggest victory with the smallest loss of life.
Don't get me wrong, though, high-tech gadgetry will play a role in the war, of course, but to delude ourselves into thinking that all we need is Rambo and night vision will just lead us straight back into Vietnam, or if you're a Russian, Afganistan...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
*I* am the original poster of the comment due to some misconfiguration I posted anonymous.
You are still anonymous.
Let me clarify please:
OK
I do not support and do not agree with the series of events which happened in New York.
That is good. However, it is kind of an empty statement. Few people support or agree with the WTC deaths.
Still I do think that this way of retaliating will not make your country (or mine) your family.
...safer?
Actually I think it will make it unsafer and more prone for such actions. Someone with enough determination will eventually be able to do the same thing again (eg flying a airplane in to a building).
If the people that want to kill you are dead, they cannot get you. The people with the determination are trying to kill us, right now.
What we are doing now is giving them a lot more determination:
We are not "giving" anyone determination. We are preventing terrorists from trying to kill us. As another Anonymous Coward put it, they can hate us, but they shouldn't kill us.
- A lot of suicide activists are doing it for the money, not for themselves but for their family. They know their family will be good taken care of!
They are still terrorists. Should we ignore them and let them kill us too? What is the point?
- When they get caught they probably get a death sentence anyway, so what is the difference?
The difference, again, is that if they are dead, they cannot kill us.
A reader asked don't I love my oil etc? Yes, but at what cost? A lot of the rulers in the middle east came to power because of us! The population of these countries knows that and they are not getting a fair share of the oil-money do they?
Fine. That doesn't mean they should kill us.
We don't allow importing grain for example from third world countries because that would harm our farmers (or we subsidise our farmers so much that it renders the effect the same), but yet we impose strong regulation on what those countries should import from us (nuclear waste?)
Really? Where is the data? I've heard this argument before, yet there is very little evidence that this is true.
The idea that we won't import grain seems silly. We are one of the world's largest exporters of grain. I think you have your facts wrong.
You talk about freedom? How can you feel free if 75% of the world population is not?
How is the U.S. preventing other countries from having freedom? Your comment makes no sense. We allow people into the U.S. so they can be free. We also try to help countries that want to have democratic governments. Sure, this is a blanket statement, but in general, the U.S. supports freedom.
Other countries are like alcoholics -- we can only help them if they want to be helped, and want to help themselves.
A lot of people are being hurt by American weapons (isreal --> palestina to name one) People dont forget that.
Good point. This is true, from what I have read.
A big part of the World economy thrives on selling weapons, so is the American economy.
As I said above, this is true, to my knowledge.
But wait, exactly what do this have to do with people killing Americans? Because we sell guns? Seems like a feeble argument.
Where somone gets rich someone else gets poor.
The economy is not a zero sum game. If you think otherwise, provide some evidence.
Now this happened in your backgarden and you are rightfully outragous about it, but please dont think your country's hands are any cleaner than theirs.
The other readers are making the point that you should not kill other people. If they are killing you, how should you react? Even if policies are changed, do you sincerely think they will stop trying to kill us? I thought the main question one Anonymous Coward wrote was spot on the mark:
"If these fsckers are willing and able to kill you, and they will not negotiate, how should we deal with them?"
How to Download YouTube Videos
...wars without real sacrifice.
Excuse me? There was sacrifice aplenty in Iraq, just not on our side of the battle. And there will be LOTS of people killed in this war, just most of them won't be Americans.
You're right to question the correctness of our reliance on technology for this, but for the wrong reasons.
Hmm, yeah, I guess it is a little harder than just blowing your fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere and hoping no-one will notice...
um, you'd *better* figure out how to make them play video, or at least sound. Afghanistan has one of the lowest literacy rates on the globe, and it's gotten even lower since the Taliban took over in 1996 and banned women from going to school.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
With this as a benchmark, 40,000 Taliban/Al Qaeda troops can be defeated by conventional direct ground troup assualt with approximately 4800 US troops lost. The goal of all the technology is to reduce that 4800 number. It will do this dramatically. The ways technology will help us are:
- Precision bombing of air defenses to establish complete airspace dominance enabling rapid strike helicopter based special operations
- Satelite, drone, and "webcam" style recon to identify tactical targets and track troop and operative movements
- Precision heavy munitions: large 5,000 "bunker buster" bombs
- Precision tactical light munitions: smaller payloads such as precision mortar used tactically against troops
- "Painting" targets for aerial bombing by ground based forces allows attack without giving up position
- Night vision gives a decisive tactical superiority in guerilla fighting
- Communication monitoring, jamming, and even psych ops style transmitting & disinformation
In the end, it WILL still come down to special forces breaking down doors suddenly and killing at close range. Techology will assure that this is done against weaker immobilized opponents, that it comes rapidly with less warning, and that it occurs under conditions highly favorable to our troops.I never assumed that there was not a distinction between the two. I was pointing out that leaking business information has become far too common in the internet era, and were it to spread to military operations, the results would be disasterous.
"As technology advances, every activity has the potential to be more efficient, whether it's killing people or mowing the lawn."
There! Saved you a few dozen words, too! Or, if you prefer reductio ad absurdum:
"When your method of doing something advances, you do more of it faster."
To answer JonKatz’s questions: Not necessarily. A lot. Maybe, different people have different expectations. Probably not, but see previous answer. As I said, a lot. Yes. Sometimes, it depends on the data. No, you can never guarantee perfect safety. Yes. Sometimes, it depends on how clever the launderers are. Yes. Yes, IF it is properly applied. Sometimes. As I said, a lot but it can’t do everything.
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Technology is one way to gain an advantage in conflict. But it is not the only way. We have a positive asymmetry of technology. In other words, we have better and more technology than Al-Qaeda. But, for example, we have a negative asymmetry of means. In other words, even if terrorists had skyscrapers and jet liners we would NOT fight them by slamming one into the other to kill thousands of non-combatants. At least I like to think we wouldn’t. We historically have had a negative asymmetry of will with these groups. The terrorists were willing to endure more hardship to achieve victory than we would. That has changed, as a result of poor intelligence (the military kind) on their part. They went too far, caused too many casualties; and now we are much more willing to endure hardship in order to eliminate them as a threat. At least I like to think we are. Technology gives us one type of advantage in this conflict, but just as Airpower alone won’t win this war, so to Technology alone is not enough of an advantage to guarantee victory.
I will address two specific areas of warfare that have been impacted by technology, psychological operations and the principle of mass.
War is usually a psychological phenomenon. It is possible to eliminate an enemy by killing every last one of them, but it is difficult. It is more efficient to either break their will or convince them to join your side, and so that is what is usually done. The terrorists know this. They stage their events for maximum media exposure and psychological effect. Or at least they try to. The technology that gives us mass media and instant communications thus becomes a tool to break the will of our society. But our side can use technology for it’s psychological operations, too. Not just in delivering the message* but in figuring out what message to send and when to send it. Psychological operations becomes married with the concepts of Civil Affairs and Grand Strategy. Technology is more than just machines with blinking lights. Technology includes things like advertising and marketing techniques (if you don’t think we have the best marketing technology in the world, watch commercials from other cultures) and even psychology, socionomy (I refuse to use the term psycho-history), and econometrics. Everyone focuses on the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment the NSA and NIMA have, but few people talk about the sophisticated social, economic, and psychological models that the CIA has. These models are supposedly just as advanced above their civilian counterparts as the spy satellites are from civilian imaging satellites. These models can allow us to understand which groups to target militarily, psychologically, or politically. This better understanding, both on an intuitive and an analytical level, of human nature and international politics means the difference between an overly lethal terrorist attack that unifies its victims and a slowly built, carefully targeted, well explained coalition attack that minimizes the number of supporters that are driven to the terrorist’s power base. It may be hard to think of an academic paper on Disaster Sociology as technology, but such “soft science” developments are just as much of a technological edge as their “hard science” counterparts.
Perhaps the biggest effect technology has had on how war is waged is by changing the principle of mass. Not mass as in Newton, mass as in a lot of troops in a small area. Robert Leonhard points out that in ancient times, when one man, on average, killed less than one opponent it was necessary to mass troops in order to maximize killing power. Troops needed their comrades help in dispatching the enemy and if alone would be vulnerable to massed troops from the other side. When one man can kill more than one opponent, then mass no longer becomes desirable**. A large tight group of troops just becomes a juicy target for one of those highly lethal enemy soldiers armed with high rate of fire, ranged weapons. Despite the obvious transition point at the 1=1 ratio, this is not a sudden switch. Some well equipped veteran troops in the War of Northern Aggression (the American Civil War for you Yankees and foreigners) probably moved into this “modern” region of the lethality curve. On the other hand, there are many units in modern armies that cannot achieve a lethality greater than 1. No one will dispute that well equipped (with high tech weapons) , well trained (with high tech training and simulation tools, some of which comes from the entertainment industry), disciplined (with modern indoctrination methods), Special Forces units supported by quality C4ISR*** (also driven by technology) can achieve a lethality of a dozen or more. Veteran Mujahideen fighting on well known terrain can probably also achieve high lethalities. It is likely, therefore, that small, self contained, dispersed units, supported by high tech logistics, intel, and ranged attack units will play a key role not only in this conflict, but in all future ones.
* Can anyone think of improvments we can make in the psy-op technology used to reach such people. Leaflets are the primary technology, but we also drop cheap radios tuned to Radio Liberty and the like. Could we combine the two into a thin leaflet/solar-powered radio? One of the advantages of a leaflet is an enemy soldier can hide it (sometimes we print stuff on the back side that allows the enemy to hide a leaflet more easily) and read it when alone, for a radio that would mean including an earphone, which would probably increase cost, mass, and bulk too much to be used on each leaflet. What about an e-paper leaflet with a small computer chip that would allow it to display more information (and even animation) than a conventional leaflet is limited to. What about using the e-paper to make a leaflet that could be reprogrammed by an encrypted wireless signal, so that it could be updated with new informtion. It could be sort of like a "closed captioned" radio. How soon could such a thing be made? Could it be powered by solar energy or otherwise freed from the constraints of battery life? Got any better ideas?
**Like some of Leonhard’s other conclusions, I feel that he has ALMOST got it but has somehow still missed the mark. The real equation describing the desire for mass must surely include not only your own troops lethality against the enemy, but also the enemy’s lethality against yours. Regardless, it is clear that technology has transformed warfare by greatly increasing the lethality of the individual, and therefore turning warfighting principles that were true for thousands of years on their heads within the last century.
*** Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. Formerly C4IS, formerly C4I, formerly, C3I.
References
Metz, Steven; Johnson, Douglas V., II., Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts , ARMY WAR COLL STRATEGIC STUDIES INST, 2001, ADA387381 [http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/fulcrum_main.pl?d
(remove excess spaces in urls)
Feder, Stanley A., “Factions and Policons: New Ways to Analyze Politics,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 31 no. 1, pp 41-57, 1987
Leonhard, Robert R., The Principles of War for the Information Age, Presidio Press, 1998, ISBN 0-89141-647-1
Look, I don't if Katz is asking a lot of rhetorical questions or what, but here's my own take on the current situation: I sleep better knowing we're using the "bunker busters" to penetrate twenty or so feet into the ground (from an altitude of 40,000 + feet and obliterate the caverns and bunkers of these people.
Here's a link from the International Herald Tribune. A commander talks about dropping a bunker buster on a terrorism camp, seeing the ground implode, and then seeing the hills light up with small arms fire (a bunch off pissed of al-qaeda fuckers):
International Herald Tribune Bunker Buster article
I'm not particularly moved by war and hope everything gets settled peacefully, but, cripes, these guys are stateless, asymentrical savages. There's no two ways about it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, let us all praise the bunker busters and hope they're contributing to our self-defense.
Not True. The most extreme counterexamples come from WW2, when US high command decided to start fire bombing residential neighborhoods in Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In this regard, the use of nuclear weapons was only a change in scale, not in policy. Other examples come from Germany WW2, Vietnam and Korea.
Actually in terms of casulties the firebombing of Tokyo was much more damaging than either of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan. There was about 650,000 people killed in Tokyo, each nuclear drop killed about 300,000.
Leonard Cohen, but hey, nevermind.
But the lyrics to that particular song are quite fitting: I've seen the future, baby, it is murder.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
~John Stewart Mill
----------
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
- Victor Hugo
Which means what? That they're valid targets? That their deaths are "unfortunate"? That they only have themselves to blame?
I don't think so. You aim those missiles, you fire, and you make damn sure they hit the intended target, not a school, a hospital, a nursery or four sleeping UN workers.
And if worst comes to worst, and you do miss the target and hit one of those, you step up, admit your fault, and face the consequences - a courtmartial.
One would have thought that you would have learned by now that friendly fire isn't.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
(I can argue just about any side of anything. Here I'll argue the opposite side, just because you seem to be unaware of its arguments.)
No, not "more," just "faster." In every major combat in which America has been involved, fewer people have been killed each time. Desert Storm and Kosovo weren't nearly as bloody as our civil war's Chippamauga (however the heck it's spelled).
Pick one of those wars, any one. How many people, combatants and civilians alike, died as a result of infected wounds? Notice how the numbers drop off as you move towards the present?
That's the whole point. We make the war shorter. We end it sooner, with fewer deaths and no diseases lingering amongst the innocent bystanders.
(That's why I have a love/hate feeling about these sorts of discussions. Both sides are right.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A Marine friend of mine suggests they're already on the ground. Their mission may be to simply identify targets, and to use the confusion of the attacks to discover exactly where Bin Laden and his buddies are hiding.
Once those mountains are blown to bits, they would probably follow to identify bodies and kill the survivors (if any).
That may be the initial hope, but my guess is that even if they do identify hidey-holes, they won't be able to blow 'em out from the sky, and we will have to go in with significant numbers of troops.
It's at that point that the sciences involved in insulation come into play. Any skier knows we've made great strides in that area in recent decades. I think the snow might actually turn into an advantage. But I'm an optimist.
Even assuming all goes well, Afghanistan is just one home to terrorism. There's still Iraq. There's still Syria. There's still Iran, and Iran is (in some ways) a democracy.
The key to all the rest of the propaganda war. And that's a war I fear we're not winning. We don't have to convince 90% of Americans we're right. We have to convince 95% of Muslims that their Fundamentalist preachers are wrong. Otherwise we're just raising a new batch of terrorists.
I can't help thinking that advanced technology is going to be a two-edged sword in this conflict. Yes, better communications and intelligence gathering will benefit us. And advanced weaponry will also help. But the real risk is at home, not abroad.
m atters-worse" sentiment to be heard.
For some reason, people have come to expect that you can carry on a military campaign with little or no casualties. No friendly troops killed. No allied pilots shot down. No MASH units over-run and slaughtered. And no "collateral dammage". No civilian deaths. Unfortunately, nice as this would be, it isn't realistic.
Military losses and civilian casualties are a corollary of war. No matter how accurate your laser-guided weapons, you still have to send in some people, and in this campaign, given the terrain, the emphasis is likely to be in the direction of troops. Some of these will be caught and/or killed. (If past experiences are anything to go by, it might be better to be killed than caught.) And no matter how carefully you aim your missile, you will inevitably kill or maim young mothers, some children, and a few wrinkled ancients. These days this regrettable consequence of war is looked on as unacceptable carnage.
We are not the only one who can utilize technological weaponry. I suspect that the enemy has every plan to use a very potent array of technological resources, that we will provide for them. In the past, they used our aircraft as weapons against us. In the future, they will use our communications networks, television, radio, print media, internet, and whatever, to bring the blood and guts right into our homes.
We will see photos of crippled kids, sobbing parents, dismembered innocents. And we will hear about our troops dying in the field, facing horrible torture upon capture, and so forth. We will be told about the atrocities our soldiers have performed, real or simulated. In the end, our own people will be clamouring for the "needless destruction" to stop, for our "poor boys" to be brought home safe, and for us to leave Afganistan to the Afganistanis. There is already a significant amount of "America-brought-it-on-herself-so-let's-not-make-
So advanced technology will not benefit us alone. Our enemies can also use advanced technology to their own ends. And as they have in the past they surely will again. Our technological advantage is in the physical tools of warfare, weapons and support infrastructure, that we make available to our troops. Their technological advantage will be in the use of our own civilian communications networks to weaken our resolve and undermine our morale at home to the point where political pressure at home causes us to withdraw. It remains to be seen who will benefit most.
That may not be as effective as it otherwise might, because books don't offer a lot to someone starving.
But if we could put how-to videos on there, and things that would benefit starving peasants (a tetris game to play when waiting for food (see how-to #294), etc.
Ideally these things would be able to tutor, as well as simply present existing media. At this point they could help teach children (or adults) to read and thus use the more advanced materials.
Neil Stephenson (author of the Cryptonomicon) wrote a book called Diamond Age about something much like this. The 'primer' mentioned in the story is much more complex than this would need to be, it doesn't need to present a K->Univ education, complete with philosophy courses and all. What it needs to do is teach basic language and math skills to people who would otherwise be denied this.
Chortle was fictional, thank god. Can you imagine having a Wheelie as your boss? (Hmmm. On second thoughts, that =WOULD= explain some things...)
Dr Who, himself, may be fictional, but he was a good deal more ethical in his fictionality than many people. Huh - maybe that's why he's not real.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have no affiliation with this group, but they do seem to have some old posters that are suddenly new again.
http://www.openstore.com/posters/shiplips.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/somebody.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/watching.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/sometalk.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/sake.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/stetson.jpg
Oh, and this too:
The Media and the Terrorist: A Dance of Death
By James E. Lukaszewski, APR
http://www.executive-speaker.com/spch0025.html
Sorry you are wrong in this regard the US was very good at targetting civilians since the very beginning.
Loylists during the Revolutionary War were targetted in a very guerilla style Souther campaign of the war. During the Civil War the folks in the South were targets (Sherman's march to the Sea). During the Indian wars women and children were killed. Also, in WWII, plenty of innocents were wasted as others have noted.
It is a very recent idea really that war should not equal civilian casualties.
ACK
It was on the topic -- war! Yes, a different type of war, but war nevertheless.
I guess the moderators have small brains and cannot understand that a word can mean different things in different contexts.
I better stop using words such as "bank" on Slashdot. The moderators might get confused by my complex use of the English language.
How to Download YouTube Videos
First of all, most of the Stingers in Afghanistan haven't been maintained properly, and probably don't work.
Even if they do, they have IFF transceivers, and can't be used against "friendly" (NATO) forces. The Taliban could remove the IFF transceivers, but that takes a fair amount of know-how, and is unlikely.
You forgot the best part of that whole story, you know where we "annex" Canada.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
What they have is called Institutional Memory. Those 77 year old vets show up to Ft Drum to talk to the current guys, and they get together out at Ft Carson. They have a fairly active Vets organization
Any time you have a unit with a "History" the unit KEEPS that history alive. It's part of what the guys fight and die for. It sounds silly, but that's the way it is. It's like firefighters and cops. Things run in families, and they try to get in the same precinct or firehouse
It's TRADITION that make "The Big Red One" what it is, the Marine Corps what it is, why sailors love "Their" ship etc
Want to study something interesting? Try to figure out what can cause a 18 year old young man to jump on a grenade, or get off the boat in Normandy
Think of the poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html
Why would the 600 go? Answer that question, and you'll understand Unit History, Institutional Memory, and why knowing how to fight in the mountains 60 years ago makes a difference
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
To paraphrase of my favorite quotes, I believe it was from a general in the Gulf War:
"Yes, the bombing being done by the B-52's is 100% accurate. The bombs hit the ground, every time."
~Philly
Here are the differences between then and now (read carefully, for they are subtle ones):
1991: Iraq invades Kuwait, on the other side of the globe, killing zero Americans in the process, depriving rich Kuwaitis of their gold and Rolls Royces, and making Americans pay a couple cents more per gallon while gassing up their SUVs and filling their heating oil tanks for a few months.
2001: Terrorist fucknuts slam planes into buildings on American soil, killing thousands of ordinary Americans in the process, wounding thousands more ordinary Americans, depriving still thousands more ordinary Americans of their parents, children, spouses, or livelihoods, and (probably) sending the U.S. economy, if not the global economy, down the crapper for a while.
In 1991, the American populace's support of our forces in the Gulf War began to waver, once the missions became more dangerous than dropping bombs from the security of planes aloft in coalition-controlled skies. Bush the First chose poorly in not having the coalition ground forces press on, take Baghad, and kick the balls off of Saddam Hussein in the town square. He went on to become a one-term president in part because of that choice, ironically the result he was fearing if he had instructed our forces to take Baghdad.
In 2001, the American populace will support significantly more dangerous missions, because we'll have a hard time feeling safe in our own cities until Osama bin Laden and as many of his ilk as possible are dead-- and if the military has to seal off the borders of Afghanistan and sweep through the whole country a square mile at a time until they find and kill as many of the terrorists as possible, the American people will likely be fine with that, for at least a while longer than they would have been with it happening in Iraq 10 years ago.
~Philly
Their mission is the delivery of the new Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM. The JDAM is a gravity bomb guided by an internal GPS sensor. As long as the BUFF releases the bomb fairly close to where it should, the guidance system does the rest. No need to "paint the target." Of course, this assumes perfect maps...
No one noticed Chernobyl? Most of the objection to nuclear fission is not just the waste and mess, but that the long term effects are really long term, measured in thousands of years. That, and the potency of a catastrophe is so high in proportion to the benefit recieved. Fission is a hell of an expensive way to boil water, and dangerous to boot. I don't care for fossil fuels myself, but I'm willing to tolerate them while true alternatives are found. Better solar cells, and a sustainable fusion reaction would help. Getting our society to spend money on these is a bitch, especially after "cold fusion," but I suspect that as fossil fuels become harder to dig out of the ground the incentives will get stronger and more immediate.
It's a simple and sad case of "preaching to the choir." If one does not believe the fundamental assertion that the US is an evil empire, one will not be able to follow the crazy chain of reasoning for long. I saw a lot of very disturbing and depressing things listed in these pages, but what depressed me most was the cyclical chain of thought I was seeing. This was the chain of thought typical in an obsessive-compulsive conspiracy theorist. Every act, no matter how trivial, was somehow part of the conspiracy, and cast in the most sinister light possible. Very few references were given, and the reader was invited to think cynically rather than skeptically. There is a fine line between the cynic, who questions the good in all that he sees, and the skeptic, who simply questions the reality of what he sees. Skepticism is healthy for a thinking mind. Cynicism is not.
It didn't help that every quote by a US or British official was essentially a straw man argument, and every rebuttal to it was unanswerable without having the original speakers present. It didn't help that the entire site is in this edgy blue bold font, which makes it look like a tabloid, and half the paragraphs are in bold italics for emphaisis. What finally broke the chain for me, however, was the page that claimed that, by opening it in a browser window, a file was automatically opened for me at the FBI offices. Now I have more than a passing familiarity with how the Web works, and I know that this statement would require that either the author himself be sending this message to the FBI from his weblog, or that aol was. Now if he knows that and it's that important to him, what the fuck is he doing hosting his "seditious" website on an AOL member page? He could put it in any country, or any server, anywhere, and not have to deal with the surveillance.
Not only that, but if he was living in the "police state" circumstances he clearly wants the reader to think he is, why would the F Boogeymen I allow him to have his website in the first place? The hilarity of his percieved self-importance (I'm a big political protestor, I have a file at the FBI) would have had me rolling on the floor if the subject matter of the last few weeks weren't so serious. I'm sorry, I just don't buy the book. It screams crank, crackpot, hysteria, conspiracy theorist. It was like reading a book written by the speaker on Tool's "Faiip de Oiad." It had the same urgent, terrified intensity and I just lost it. I finished reading the three chapters of that book and could not bring myself to believe any of it, certainly not the paranoid nonsense you post above. If the world really works that way, I have been deluding myself for 30 years and I'd rather not know about it.
You (and the Col) are right, it is the danger. Like I said, it seems (In my biased view) that the 10th has kept in touch with at least some of their "Old Timers". I think this might be because they have remained light infantry (aka, non Mech)
Why does it seem like so few of us have actually studied why and how men fight?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
>The idea behind an arms race dates back to the first invention of weapons (other than a rock or stick) by man.
I'd say including rock and stick. the armsrace was a heavier rock, or a bigger stick.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587