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Space Wars
There have been lots of interesting stories recently about the US's growing reliance on satellites to control gee-whiz weaponry and provide detailed real-time images to battlefield commanders. MSNBC has a story on the military's growing bandwidth crunch. The AP has a story about how many other nations are putting up their own spy and communications satellites, suggesting that the US edge in space imagery might disappear (unless we start shooting other satellites down, of course). And Bruce Sterling has a fun story in Wired (fun in writing style, not in its implications) suggesting that we're entering an age of Pax Americana, where the US military is so dominant that competitors exist only at our sufferance (though that might not stop people from trying).
WTF?
Didn't they used to call Reagan's space-based anti-nuke program "Star Wars"?
Oh, I get it, only one Star Wars story a day.
The reason that the program won't be done for a long time is that as far as publicly released information goes, we have only had one successful attempt to shoot down a fake ICBM and this was with a missle that was sending out a HOMING SIGNAL. I doubt the enemy will be so courteous. Also, modern ICBMs, unlike the dummy ICBMs, have many countermeasures to prevent missles from shooting them down. We are not currently prepared to deal with these countermeasures including :
Today it's other countries, tommrow it is ourselves.
_
WINDOWS USERS CLICK HERE!
Without the soviets to compete against, NASA's budget has been shrinking to pathetic levels, leaving little funding for research and exploration these days. Perhaps the threat of military satellites orbiting the Earth, and the need to defend against them could be just the thing the government needs to start funneling some more much deserved money into NASA again. Think of all the benefits that would result from the US getting into another space race with China.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
This is some information on a treaty from 1983 which prohibits use of force against satellites and also prohibits using satellites to shoot at the earth.
0xB
The US might be the big kid on the block for now, but wait about 10 years. The European Union has talked about creating a European military. If this happens, the EU might give the US a run for its money.
What I'm NOT saying is that a Cold War will start between the EU and US. (Although relations have chilled recently between theUS and EU.)
I believe that the US push for 'defensive' weapons in space is a farce; they're going to primarily be offensive weapons, 'defensive' only in their 'deterrence' to nations (particularly Third-World) that do not possess such weapons....
Dr. Bob Bowman http://rmbowman.com/ssn/ has asserted this for years - his website is an excellent resource for alternative analysis of the SDI programs that you won't find in the major media outlets.
PA
Our enemeies are not nations, with navys to sink, armies to slaughter and cities to destroy. Having all the cards doesn't amount to much when your the only on left in the game. These new schemes are deisgined to protect us agains threats that are all but non-existant, while leaving us open to the next terrorist with a scheme that no one else thought of before.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
that wired article was originally in the magazine two months ago, and, at the time, certainly did offer some piece of mind.
unfortunately, there was an article in wired news this week (also covered in the la times -- can't find wired's) talking about america's losing ground to other nations such as china and india in the satellite advantage rate.
well, that pax americana sure was fun, eh?
go get it
What will happen in the future when there's all kinds of ancient satellites and spacecrafts and junk in space? Will there be weekly warnings of old stuff re-entering the atmosphere and possibly crashing to earth if it doesn't break up?
This is kind of scary stuff really. When I was in the military there were several times when we were using Satellite Communications Uplinks and we had to sit around on our asses waiting for the right time so we could get an allotted frequency. There is so much demand for the few frequencies that the military satellites possess that you can end up waiting quite a while. The bad thing was sometimes you REALLY needed it. And you could get it...in 30 minutes.
For what its worth...
le sigh
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"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I could really care less if they shot down some military spy satellites, but can you imagine if a foreign country went after our other satellites? Boom, no more cell phone, no more tv, no more satellite internet. You could seriously harm a nation's communications by targeting their satellites. Also, it is not just consumer end stuff, but much of the backbone of the communications go through satellites. I wonder if there are any internation war laws about this. I am sure the government has already mapped out this senario, at our cost of course...
Whether or not there is a treaty preventing the willful destruction of foreign satellites during peacetime does not mean that we don't have/aren't developing this capability in the event of hostilities. Also, who's to say that, with all that space debris out there, "accidents" won't happen from time to time?
Remember, all the really great stuff we know about was developed during the seventies and eighties (GPS, stealth, various surveillance platforms). Certainly you don't think that the military would have developed nothing new in that time? The countries that are in so-called competition with us are trying to build capabilities that we've had for decades now. It's probably only because the military has way better stuff now that they even declassified most of the stuff we know about today. If other countries try to field satellites that could operate against us, you can be sure the military has some sort of stealthy hunter-killer or ground based system that can knock out their stuff super quick.
Yeah, the US is all about respecting treaties. (-1, Flamebait)
Sometime around 2008-2016 the machinations of supra-national trade organizations will have finally hammer-locked the bulk of humanity into a cycle of miserable economic and cultural servitiude as well as political impotence. At that point we'll experience protest like those of Seattle and Genoa but played out on an enormous, international scale.
/you/ - American, Canadian, French, Pakistani -- it doesn't matter. This is a jackboot in your face and the joke is you're paying for all of it and Bruce Sterling thinks it's cute. Have a nice day!
That is the moment you and/or your children will find out first-hand what it feels like to be attacked by space-based weaponry.
All of this stuff is ultimately meant to exert power over
Night
This article is a great sound and fury which signifies nothing. People have been commenting upon the video-game wars since '91. The obvious advantage of satellite intel was figured out with the Chronos missions of the 50's, and is the reason we've got a half dozen hubble space telescopes pointing down at us.
If you're going to write a report on modern military technology deployment, you might want to do a better job of explaining the variated threat we face today from both traditional military-industrial threats like China, to fluidic asymetric threats like rogue states which have the conventional ability to cause great damage, but not defeat, and support terrorist insurgents which can cause defeat without great damage.
One of the biggest roadblocks to military bandwidth is the number of TDRS satellites in orbit. These guys (Tracking Data Relay Satellites) are the backbone of modern space communications and have been in orbit since the early 80s.
The TDRS network was originally put in place to support the Space Shuttle and provide 24x7 communications access to ground control. Before TDRS, there had to be tracking stations around the world and in expensive ships crewed by hundreds. Before TDRS, re-entering spacecraft would experience a communications blackout because the ionized gases of the reentry blocked line of sight transmissions from the ground.
With TDRS, there is almost always a relay satellite around to link a spacecraft (or military satellite) to ground. Re-entering space shuttles now have contact with ground control through the entire entry sequence because the antennas can 'see' the TDRS network above them, unblocked by the plasma around the nose.
The problem? The TDRS network (which is continuosly refreshed with new satellites as older ones go out of service) is based on protocols from the 1970s that were supposed to provide voice and telemetry. Now, they're being tasked to channel still images and even video in some circumstances, and not just by the shuttle fleet and NASA. The military uses TDRS on occasion to get spy satellite data too, further sapping the infrastructure.
It's time to start upping a new network of satellites with K band or better transmitters and receivers (which use more power) and so on.
Just how much was the US paying to buy back stinger missiles it gave to Muslim fundamentalists in Afganistan?
Israel has massively more arms than Palestine but it doesn't look to secure for me.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
This is a little geo-centric, but if you live in Seattle (and I'm sure there are a bunch of Redmond folk reading this, right? :) then you should check out a freee, open lecture tomorrow night. Here are the details:
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Regime. (Part of the lecture series "Open Classroom on International Law and Arms Control). 5:30-6:20pm in Kane Hall 220. Speaker: Ambassador Thomas Graham, Jr., Executive Director of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security. Sponsor: Institute for Global and Regional Security Studies.
I went to the first in the series last week, it was a brief history of nonproliferation treaties in the world. It was extremely interesting, and extremely pertinent to this article.
Ha! When I read that I couldn't help but chuckle... here in Canada it is a FACT that the US basically tells us whether we are allowed to launch a new satelitte or not.
For example, when Canada wanted to launch the RADARSAT 3, which would give the Canadian military a resolution about 5 times LESS than the current estimated US imagery resolution, they had to bargain with the US gvt before launching.
By the way, I am pretty confident that the US WOULD start "shooting other satellites down" if the need be.
So in other words, Americans need not fear, as long as their mighty guns are near!
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
The Army should just use the font colors wired used in that article mentioned above as weapons, just about burned my eyes out reading it.
The article says that each Global Hawk requires 500Mbits/s. That is a huge amount of data. Yo think that it must be relaying a lot of recon information (probably at least three cameras, and I should imagine they have radio scanner as well), on top of the data required to fly it in both directions.
They must have some major processing power on board - I should imagine that trying to fly something over a relatively high latency satellite link would be hard otherwise/ But they still have a lot of human intervention - it's probably more guidance than actual flying. I remember seeing an experiment where they introduce a random delay between 0 and 0.5 seconds to what the pilot sees (not feels, as this was in the back of a large jet used for remote flying experiments) and it made control of the aircraft very hard - the pilot overcompensating, and almost unable to land the thing.
There could also be a level of redundancy in the 500Mbits/s - possibly two or more links, because clouds and other conditions can stop them working, and I should imagine that would be a bad thing to happen.
Anyway, I'm off to do some research on these planes... but if anyone else finds anything interesting, why not post it.
PS. Yes, I am glossing over the real issues behind these articles. But hey, it's better than the "What about the treaties" or the serious "US kick ass, no one can touch us posts". Wake up. The world isn't like that anymore. Flying planes into building, killing lots of civilians goes against a lot of international laws and treaties.
Face it - these treaties are to stop developed, civilised, large military forces from wiping out small countries and commiting war crimes. The smaller countries do not give a shit.
Like the US listen anyway:http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/12/13/r ec.bush.abm/
How about a ruthlessly efficient surrender?
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Why go through so much trouble? Just get the other nations to run their satellites on Windows CE and use IIS. Those satellites will go down faster than a shashdotted err... umm... really really small server? Hey... Why even go through that much trouble, just post a link to the satellites on /.!
I stole this Sig
The US has already developed an anti-satelite missile, launched by an F-15 in a steep climb. Not sure if it's still part of the ready arsenal, but I'm sure it could be if necessary.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
and also prohibits using satellites to shoot at the earth.
Dose this also count against using them to guide bombs?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Folks, this is not good military analysis, this is just Bruce selling an article.
It is true that the satellites provide massive reconaissance and communications force multipliers to the military. It is also true that we are very dependent on them not just for military functions but also for tele-economic industries (making them juicy targets). And it is true that America's constant investment in various technologies mean a uni-polar world re: conventional military power.
What Bruce fails to realize is that these tools are just that- tools that can be broken, circumvented or worse copied and used better by others.
For instance, if we follow through with heavy DEWAD use (Directed Energy Weapon Air Defense), yes we can knock down missiles and rule the skies- for a while. Then our enemies will eventually duplicate the technology, and knock down our cruise missiles, UAVs and bombers. Then all the satellites in the world won't help our inability to affect events on the ground with airpower.
Even if we have a Rumsfeldian dream US Space Force, that doesn't stop the VW driving in from Mexico City with the nuke in the trunk.
Our enemies will move around our military power. Take a looksee at this translation of two Chinese colonels writing about our Desert War dominance, and how to circumvent and defeat the US in spite of military superiority. Somehow in his rush to sell his article, he did not deal with assymetric warfare.
Pax Americana needs these toys to happen, but the toys by themselves can be beaten. What we really need is plenty of mutual interest (read money and self-determination) for most of the world to participate in Pax Americana, the will to crush in Cold or Hot War those who will take away self-determination and money from others in the name of an ism (even if they are American), and the spread of fair legal and financial system to the average world citizen.
We will win with satellite TV moreso then satellite lasers.
I don't know what happened to Bruce- way too many blue hawaiians on Austin's Sixth Street I imagine.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
I'm just damn glad that it wasn't any of our competitors. New Zealander hegemony wouldn't be that offensive to me, but they were relatively inactive.
it is undoubtedly a good thing that the current situation came about through political change and revolution, not war.
Sure about that? Let's add up the body counts from Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan (the Soviet invasion specifically) and the various regional wars that ended up being almost all surrogates (Latin America and Africa were thick with these)
But a paradox exists, why then are so many countries dramatically _increasing_ defence budgets? America is by a _significant_ amount, down here in Australia we are again by a big amount again, at least by our standards.
You have neighbors. Some of them may or may not be very nice. China and India both have combinations of nuclear weapons and population pressure, for instance. And while India may be civilized about such things, the PRC makes me nervous.
All of this in such an age of optimism?
Who said optimism? Last year there was a mass fatality incident in New York, on a scale previously only caused by natural disasters or nation-states. I'm supposed to be on the "Front Lines" (if you believe the Fraternal Order of Police junkmail, even though I'm mostly on the front lines of vandalism, underage drinking, and spousal abuse enforcement lately). And I'm not sleeping a whole hell of a lot better. Neither are our fire/EMS department.
Australia hasn't really done much to piss anyone off lately, and especially not the deranged folks who think themselves divinely ordained to kill people. Here on the other side of the Pacific, we're considered by some to be stooges of the International Zionist Conspiracy because we haven't actually nuked Israel off of the map yet. And that "some" has had a disturbing habit of killing Americans (and people who look vaguely like Americans). And that's very much on our map here.
To empahasis my previous post now (the subject), think about it all you westerners (like me), could you even stomach a world war? What _possible_ reason could that be tolerated by the people of the world? Lets assume for a moment democracy works. (which i think it does)
I'm having a hard time visualizing one in the next decade. If there's a major nation-state threat, it's mainland China, but they know what'll happen if they step too far over the edge, and it'll be worse than our not selling them Boeing aircraft anymore.
It really makes you wonder.. Perhaps we are un-learning some things, important things, like how to contain regional conflicts, (think middle east), perhaps some things we never learnt..
Can it be done? In the Middle East, you have several problems. One problem won't be settled until either every Jew or most of the Muslims are dead, unless there's some breakthrough that I'm not seeing. (Well, I do have the answer. Yassir Arafat and Ariel Sharon need to quit being shitheads, but I'm not holding my breath). One problem would require that certain heads of state give up on expansionism. (Or cease breathing, which might be more helpful altogether). And then there's the issue of very-traditional societies having conflicts with the modern world. That's not limited to the ME, and we don't really have an answer to the conflict it causes here in the US either.
ps. Yes i know money is needed to fight new forms of terrorism, and as this topic is about space war, etc, but with 10 gazzilion dollars worth of space weapons, does the US really need a 400,000 (or whatever) man army??
Ever read Heinlein's Starship Troopers? (Yes, the book. Not the movie. The movie sucked ass and Paul Verhoeven should be deported and penetrated to death by feral donkeys for making that crap). Anyway, one character made an interesting point: Anybody can nuke a target. But all you've done is kill a lot of people and made a mess. You don't control it until you can stand a 19-year-old kid with a rifle on it. If you can't control it, you can't pacify it. And if you can't pacify it, then you'll have another one of those conflicts that stretches out for decades and kills a lot of people (like Yugoslavia) and that even an absolute dictator with a powerful secret police (like Tito) can only control for a few years. Those peacemaking missions need a lot of manpower.
Also, consider: There are more deer hunters in the state of Pennsylvania than there are infantrymen in the US Army. Most of those hundreds of thousands are support personnel rather than line soldiers.
The Chinese have already announced the development of very small mini-satellites that attach themselves to our satellites and can be blown up on demand. The idea is that they would launch these long before any war and have them in place just in case they needed them. They were small enough that many could be launched at once.
The concept is so simple and cheap and seemingly effective as to make it mind boggling that we would ever depend on satellites in a real war. If China wanted to retake Taiwan, all they'd have to do is put one of these on every military and civilian satellite and then push the button a few hours before their attack. We'd be so lost when all of the beepers, cell phones, TV networks, GPS units and other satellite based technologies stopped working all at once that it would probably take a couple of weeks before the majority of US citizens even knew what happened.
War is immoral, but the hardware is cool. How to decide?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
These articles are all indicative of the problem the USA faces today. Unfortunately whilst the USA continues to have no respect for the sovreignty of other nations it will continue to find that other nations and terrorist organisations will have no respect for the USA.
Before you write me of as another mis-informed mad terrorist let me make a few things plain:
I am a citizen of a country that is an ally of the USA, yet the USA was instrumental in bringing down our democratically (Westminster System) elected Government.
I've lived in the USA and seen the general paranoia of its' citizens - I know of no other country in the world that is so convinced that all other countries are out to get them, so they must be crushed.
I'm not so naive as to believe the world is a nice friendly place, but I am sure that as long as the USA remains dedicated to massive military force and the continual de-stabilisation of other nations the world will remain much more dangerous than it need be. As long as American Ideology is far removed from reality this will continue.
The fact is that most countries and people do not want to be like America, we don't want to own America, we don't want to destroy America. The USA is a great example of how not to run a democracy - your last Presidential Election demonstrated that you don't have a democratic system as is generally understood in civilised countries.
As long as the USA continues to believe that it is the de-facto "leader of the Free World" (tm) and engages in aggressive "Police Actions" to further the agendas of the real powers in the military-industrial complex there will continue to be terror attacks against it. I myself know that as a foreign national in the USA I could buy dynamite with no problems, I could buy firearms with no problems.
And for my final piece of hyperbole, many Christians outside the USA consider GW Bush to be the Anti-Christ. God help us all.
Economically, the US doesn't have that much power either. Sure, the US government moves a lot of money around. But there are very view US corporations left--corporations and capital have become global, and they are associated with the US only to the degree that it furthers their economic interests.
While globalization has its problems, globalization and economic interdependencies have delivered on one big promise: they have eliminated all superpowers and forced all wealthy nations to cooperate, and that's a good thing. Whether Americans realize it or not pretty much doesn't matter. The only nations that are not subject to the imperatives and constraints of globalization are those nations that feel they don't have anything to lose; and the best way to fix that is to make them wealthy enough that they, too, feel that it is to their advantage to play by the rules. In different words, if you turn Iraqis and Palestinians into well-off, happy consumers, they'll kick out any leader that endangers a steady supply of PlayStations or BigMacs. Depressing perhaps, but it beats the alternatives.
You don't compress your imagery when you're trying to read the rank insignia on the shoulder-boards of a military officer from orbit.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
One of the most important space assets is a global positioning system. So far, the US has allowed free use of our DoD-sponsored GPS, but everybody knows that policy could change at some time in the future. The Europeans felt that without their own system, their soverignty was threatened, so they proposed their own system, called Galileo [must have been some Europoean guy.]
Anyway, the US is all in a sweat about this, and has put quite a bit if pressure on the Europeans to get them to forego this system. The US says that it's not needed, that it would interfere with our system, that it would destabilize the planet -- basically the entire bag of boogeymen. To it's credit, Europe has recently reversed course and decided that they would create this system on their own. Germany had been leaning toward the US position, but just changed their mind.
Galileo is not very well defined yet (even basic things like how many satellites, and which orbit configuration), but most people expect that it will be somewhat better than the current GPS system -- although the US insists that it's super-duper GPSII system will be better than Galileo, whatever Galileo ends up being.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
"What about space-based lasers? And again, all you'd get is a very small impact. You'd do much more damage with a cruise missle."
Just how small is small? Spy satelites can read a license plate from orbit. That technology combined with a high powered laser could be a nifty assasination device. I bet Rumsfeld would get a big chubby out of watching Saddam on TV and pushing the special red button.
I know, I know it's far fetched but that certainly hasn't stopped us before.
Listen, Noam Chomsky has been talking about this for years. The contemporary view that most people in power (in America) is that American culture is the end of history. Fukiyama aside, the powers that be are acutally acting this way. Decisions are made regarding foreign policy not with a mind to the future but toward the redemption of history. This is not a peace in any sense of the word. It is a subjugation by economic might. Think of it this way, kids. Microsoft is only a small piece of the puzzle when you start talking trillions of US dollars. The Military Industrial Complex (y'know the guys who really invented the Internet) is the largest corporate entity on the planet. It operates secretly (well, its actions are well known by the people who die from them) and it uses the ruse of peace to feed itself.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Ahh yes, that looks familiar. Was this or a treaty like this ever ratified?
Thanks for the answer though.
The moron who moderated me down obviously couldn't see this subtle question in my original post. I earned my +2, damnit, whether or not some jerk thinks my post is overrated. Grrr.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Death to America
It ain't gonna be easy, says Bruce Sterling, but that won't stop enemies from trying. Thirteen strategies they might use to knock the eagle out of the sky.
1. BUILD YOUR OWN
Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation, telecom, the works.
Upside: Legal. Can be accomplished largely using commercial products and services. American contractors might even build a lot of it for you.
Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke. Looks suspicious. Takes years. Yankees in good position to blow your assets to smithereens.
Already pursued by many other nations, India, China, Russia, Japan and the EU to name but a few.
All of these countries have far cheaper launch costs. They can replace a satellite for far less than it costs the US (currently) to replace its own satellites. A huge military advantage. Also, due to the location of US lauch sites, not that hard to shoot down sats launched from the US.
It's also possible to combine launching your own satellites with leasing/buying satellites from
other nations.
2. DECAPITATION
Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a truck nuke.
Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale. Can be repeated in other cities.
Downside: Nukes hard to build. Sets dangerous precedent that puts your own cities at risk. US space assets still up there, available to US allies even if US no longer exists. Loss of Congress and Washington bureaucrats might be dangerous tonic to US military.
Not a likely strategy. Any nation that does this is asking for nuclear war. The safest way to implement this strategy is to give nukes to a terrorist group (NNAQ - short for NNAQ Not's AL Qaida ). Let them take the heat.
Bruce omitted chemical/biological warfare. Especially with biological, great built in denial.
Your heroes die carrying the disease to the US. No trail to lead back to you. Chemical also has great potential. Imagine the release of sarin in a football stadium.
3. ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling spacecraft circuitry.
Upside: Inexpensive, quick, ruthless. Disables civilian assets, including pagers and TV, by stripping circuits on ground. To evade detection, bomb can be disguised as something benign, like a commercial satellite.
Downside: Some military sats hardened against radiation. Might destroy your own space hardware, if you have any. Unlikely to destroy distant sats; might destroy very little, in which case you've gone nuclear against a superpower.
This would be a very valuable tactic. Combined with the other tactics 4-11, it makes it possible to annihilate US forces.
4. SPACE PARASITES
Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on signal.
Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable.
Downside: Hard to test. Americans likely to build fleet of nanosats teensier and sneakier than yours.
Very easy to test. Take out an American satellite or one of your own. The countermeasure is very
weak. Considering the Americans will build nanosats anyway, this is no deterrent.
5. SANDBAGGING
Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them into Swiss cheese.
Upside: Ultracheap. Slowly suffocates space power. Might be done persistently in tiny quantities by some unorthodox launch method, say electromagnetic rail-gun launch or Jules Verne space cannon.
Downside: Space too big to pollute. Armor countermeasures possible. Retaliation by all space users likely. Sand sifts down into atmosphere after a while.
If you're careful about targetting, potentially useful. A nuisance tactic at best. High risk
of making every space faring nation come after you.
6. SPOOFING
Method: Mimic American datastream. Hack satellites, own them.
Upside: Bloodless, sexy, wired. Gains huge military advantage.
Downside: Requires vulnerable ground stations plus better hacking, crypto, and dongle skills than NSA and Air Force. Still can't launch, repair, or replace space assets.
That's not hard. Many of the US potential adversaries posess all three. And the US ground
stations are very vulnerable. There are many unmanned and poorly guarded ground stations
for US satellites here in Australia and NZ begging for just such a tactic. One man who was a demo/sniper could easily take them out.
All it needs is one weak link. If the encryption is weak, all the other skills do not matter.
If the admins securing machines lack the necessary skills, it is also easy to compromise hardware.
It's also not necessary to have vulnerable ground stations. If you can crack encryption, you
can spoof a ground station easily, without ever having been near it.
7. JAMMING
Method: Deploy huge electromagnetic noisemakers that thwart US communications.
Upside: Disables guided missiles, turns smart bombs into dumb bombs. Good for locals who communicate via fiber optics.
Downside: Ineffective beyond theater. Noisemakers make obvious targets.
A tactic that will be used by almost all opponents. Not enough by itself, but in combination very deadly. Only terrorist groups will possibly lack the ability to use this.
8. ATTACK GROUND STATIONS
Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground stations.
Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment. Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified.
Downside: Secret mobile backup facilities likely to exist. US has large techie population, can train more space geeks.
Can they train them instantly? The crucial element is time. If you can open a window of vulnerability
where the US has no space assets, you can decimate the US forces by the time they recover.
9. DENIAL AND DECEPTION
Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage everything.
Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive munitions.
Downside: Windowless cave quarters bad for soldier morale. Constant, consistent deception hard to maintain. Avoiding surveillance increases cost of all operations.
This tactic will be used by everyone, including the US.
10. ESPIONAGE
Method: Bribe or coopt Yankee sat personnel, obtain manuals, secrets.
Upside: Cheap, traditional. Proven success with Pollard, Walker, Falcon and Snowman.
Downside: Satellites return to US control once mole is discovered.
If used to create a window of weakness, where the US has no functioning sats for a short
period of time, means mega death for US soldiers.
By the time the US recovers, there might be no
army/air force/carrier group left in the region.
11. DEATH RAY
Method: Build laser or particle beam. Blind or cook satellites from ground.
Upside: Unexpected, shocking, repeatable. Appealing to Aum Shinrikyo-style tech-literate madmen.
Downside: Ambitious, expensive, hard to conceal. Requires huge power source. Works only in clear weather. Invites swift conventional retaliation.
Much easier/cheaper to use ballistic missile for the same job. The laser beam tactic will only be used by advanced nations, US allies and India, China, Russia.
12. WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Method: Abandon conventional warfare. Go nuclear, descend into terrorism, or both.
Upside: Everybody's doing it.
Downside: Going nuclear is expensive, destabilizing, dangerous. Terrorists lack secure bases, logistics, traditions, esprit de corps; "masterminds" hard to distinguish from deranged amateurs. American social, economic, cultural pressures irresistible. Your war may devolve into reading Noam Chomsky while sipping Coke.
By far the best tactic for every opponent of the US. Is already used, and has proved very successful. So far, no terrorist has yet started to read Chomsky. Has already beaten the US in Somalia. Will be used extensively by China when the war over Taiwan begins.
13. WAIT IT OUT
Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, and/or collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial capitalism.
Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.
Downside: Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to you on DVD.
This is hardly a tactic. US culture helps to create enemies as well as allies.
I wasn't trying to imply that we wouldn't do it. :)
:)
:)
We just wouldn't do it publicly.
I was in the military for a time, and I can attest that we have "better stuff" though I can't tell you exactly what kind of better stuff we have now.
But, I saw the AC-130U (and directed some fire missions with it) long before any civilians did
That's just a small piece.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I couldn't have amde it more clear and concise than that.
It really seems silly that we'd entered a treaty where we are not allowed to defend ourselves in a particular way.
"No sir, you aren't allowed to wear a bullet-proof vest."
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
sure you do, you just do it losslessly.
but the biggest gain comes from taking hires
only in areas of interest. think of a geoserv
running on an LEO.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Quite possibly. There are still quite a few governments that rely on indoctrination and an utterly inflexible worldview of the rest of civillization as enemies -- in particular, the Arab theocracies have education systems and medias known for extreme bias and intolerance. For the most part, they even refuse to acknowledge that Palestinians blowing up random Israel civillians might be committing a wrong...
It's an interesting system that produces an educated, wealthy terrorist leader that was so extreme that he could proclaim that Afghanistan under the Taliban was the only true Islamic state.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Stolen from some one here at slashdot:
"Your superior intelect is no match for our puny weapons."
It's a shame really.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
about usual US self-congratulatory propaganda? Have I missed some sarcasm? And why american propagansa STILL insists that duplication of American space-based military technology driven Russians "broke" while it's obvious that USSR neither had any program to put any offensive weapons in space, nor had to spend enormous amounts of money or effort on its space program, and was dissolved entirely for political reasons?
Americans feel the need to morally support their morally bankrupt army and government (well known to be cowards in uniform and crooks in suits)? They need to sell themselves the idea that they are the smartest people in the world? Or they expect to scare everyone else with this? They believe that China, Russia or a bunch of other countries can't turn their precious government into a hole in the ground if it will piss them off sufficiently?
I am not a diplomat, so my answer to this would be "They can kiss my ass".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Our enemies will move around our military power. Take a looksee at this translation [die.net] of two Chinese colonels writing about our Desert War dominance, and how to circumvent and defeat the US in spite of military superiority.
I believe that you think that some of these weapons are useless or easily circumvented, and most of the rest of the world sees our army as full of "toys."
Toys indeed, if you definition includes things that burrow in ground and blow you up inside rock, track you with your cell phone, passive radar that just listens and never transmits, and all sorts of other nefarious things like that. They are not toys. IF OTHER NATIONS THINK THAT A SMARTBOMB IS A TOY, THEN THEY ARE OUT OF THEIR MINDS. They are up for a rude awakening.
Why is it a small, voluntary service US force always seems to run over a full blown, military controlled, conscripted nation in days? Its got to be the toys! Yeah right.
That is a childish justification for the fact that there are people that have put in billions (yes, freaking billions!) into not only developing these weapons, but coming up with the concepts and designing systems for their best implementation.
IN OTHER WORDS, IT IS ALL ABOUT THE RESEARCH EDGE. Go ahead, thwart it, Version 2.0 just shipped last week. See if you can crack it now.
Good example-
the trusty M-16 and its variants. Reliable. Cheap. Useful. All other modern nations have gone to guns with bullpup designs (clip is behind the trigger for more streamlined, futuristic look), because they say they are better balanced, shorter designs for guns. Sounds like a great idea. I thought so. They look cool in movies.
Until you learn that you have to not only take the 'dangerous end' of the weapon away from the enemy, but you have to take your trigger hand off of the grip and trigger to reload it. It takes two hands and more time. Also its nearly impossible to reload easily while laying down to fire, and soldiers do that A LOT. Also a bullpup exposes more head and shoulders around a corner when firing.
That idea has brought you such guns as the British SA 80. It looked and fired like it was made by Kenner. It had plastic parts. IT WAS EASILY OUTMATCHED BY A GOOD OL KALASHNIKOV.
Every arms manufacturer wants the M-16 contract, for obvious financial reasons. They hold competitions constantly and try every possible idea. The US military has tight, important standards FOR EVERYTHING. To think that there is a nation that can just up and exploit the weakness of the US tools in five minutes, is well, ridiculous and full of speculation. The difference? The US has not been speculating, they have been testing these things for decades even after they implement them. They know their holes.
If they research the M-16 so deeply and periodically, then what do they do with bleeding edge stuff?
I just don't see those Chinese Colonels reaching any new conclusions that we probably haven't a generation ago, and are actively trying to fix.
imagine if a foreign country went after our other satellites? Boom, no more cell phone, no more tv, no more satellite internet. You could seriously harm a nation's communications by targeting their satellites. Also, it is not just consumer end stuff, but much of the backbone of the communications go through satellites.
...And through ground-based fiber, and through microwave relays (all those metal towers in the middle of nowhere that you drive past).
Satellites are very useful for sending _small_ amounts of information over long distances to destinations that are relatively isolated. High-bandwidth communications to/from densely populated and well-connected areas don't go through satellites.
Knocking out microwave relay communications would require either a host of *insanely* powerful jammers orbiting overhead, or far more sticks of dynamite than is likely to be practical.
Knocking out fiber communications would involve taking out all of the fiber routing nodes on the continent, or cutting an insanely large number of backbone cables.
Taking out satellites isn't a cakewalk either (it only takes a box of nails, but the box has to be very high up and positioned to within a few metres).
In summary, I think the lower levels of the US's communications network are robust enough to survive virtually all practical attacks (if an enemy can wipe out the communications infrastructure, we have bigger problems than just losing communications).
While the article mentioned is interesting this idea is nothing new.
Paul Kennedy, the man who wrote "The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers" has a much more interesting & Thought pervoking article then the article supplied.
The article can be found here.
A quote:
"But that conclusion is almost beside the point. The larger lesson - and one stupifying to the Russian and Chinese military, worrying to the Indians, and disturbing to proponents of a common European defence policy - is that in military terms there is only one [America] player on the field that counts."
"....Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing. I have returned to all of the comparative defence spending and military personnel statistics over the past five hundred years that I compiled in The RISE AND FALL OF The GREAT POWERS, and no other nation comes close."
I *highly* recommend people read it even if you dont agree its an interesting read.
For all our power and influence, we don't have the aggressive expansionist policy the Romans, Greek, or Baybalonian empires did. And no, it's not because you're stopping us ^__^
You do. And this claim, that OUR empire is better than all previous ones, is just about as old as empires themselves.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I have a thought based primarily on ignorance.
But our satellites in orbit are controlled remotely, right? Like by radio signals or something.
How difficult would it be for another entity of some kind to take control of these satellites? Do they use some sort of public key encryption?
More importantly, this article fails to mention that while those ingenius bombs were hitting tanks and military buildings, they were also missing and hitting civilians, women and children. Furthermore, this whole concept of a "Pax Americana" only really exists for people who live in America, Canada, and Western Europe. America only gets involved in foreign wars if they are in the interest of Americans. Many wars are being fought today: civil wars, fighting between tribes, etc. Of course, these are the wars we are blind to because Americans would rather see what Brittany Spears is wearing than what is happening in foreign countries because of the greediness of the west.
Domestically, a "Pax Americana" may exist for threats from other countries, but what about the welfare of people in your own country. Considering the racism African Americans face as a daily reality, massive poverty faced by Native Americans and immigrants, and many other atrocities that happen within American soil, a "Pax Americana" is hardly an acceptable phrase, but instead a proclamation of the contemptuous and ignorant.
- "On the other hand, Washington's war wonks don't seem actively oppressive, bloody-handed, or evil. Old Glory hangs all over town in its riveted incarnation as the 9/11 battle flag, but there are no jackboot parades or martyr cults. Let's face it, the world might do much worse."
Leave that mod button alone for a sec--I'm trying to present an honest viewpoint, not troll. I don't hate the US. But this smug, presumtuous attitude is a problem. I agree that there must be measures in place to stop factions like the Taleban from damaging our own society. But I believe this should be something that is done through international cooperation. A single country cannot assign itself as judge, jury and executioner simply because its the most powerful. When people do that, they're called bullies.The article seems to take the attitude that the "Usian way" is the "right way"; that it's just fine for the US to target whomever they please in order to ensure their own safety. You can't build a "New World Order" by simply crushing anyone who disagrees with you. And if you're on the side that would benefit from such a New World Order, you should probably be concerned about how your way of life is built, and who will be the next target after all the opposition is gone (hint: the population of this New World Order).
Once again, please don't misunderstand. I don't mean to bash the US; I would like to question the article itself for assuming that the world must go along with the US or be beaten into submission, because to me that's what it seems to say. The problem is primarily with the leaders, who are people apparently intoxicated with their own power and completely without the wisdom or responsibility to use it with restraint; and also with the population, who are apathetic to the attitude their leaders hold as long as their easy way of life continues.
Now, I'm not saying that the US is without cause for its actions. I don't want to make any judgements on who is in the right in specific instances. But the reckless attitude of "Global Cop" put forward in the article, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world, is something that is heavily, heavily resented, and not just by radical Middle-Eastern parties. I don't feel I speak for myself alone. As a New Zealander and former South African I know that what I'm saying is a fairly prevalent viewpoint in both those countries. One only need watch TV to hear Bush commenting on the Israeli activities of the last few days: words to the effect of "I am not going to put up with this." Perhaps to people in the US these sound like strong words, but to people in other countries they sound like the words of a spoiled man with no real understanding of what he's talking about, assuming that the power he has gives him some right to dictate the actions of other countries. Of course I'm not saying that Sharon is right or that Bush is wrong--I agree with Bush's intent, but not his conviction that whatever he wants another country to do must happen, however true that is.
This attitude is what I see in the article. I imagine I'll be heavily downmodded for this post, since this is a Usiacentric forum, but I'm hoping open minds entertain differing ideas, on the supposition that most Slashdot readers are fairly open-minded and will realise that I'm trying to state an honest viewpoint as inoffensively as I can.
Well, here in the UK we had a similar set up for a couple of hundred years, called the British Empire. You know the one - 'the sun never sets on the empire' so called because we had land right around the globe.
I think the USA is in a similar position to where the UK was at the turn of the 19th-20th century. We were the number one empire. It didn't matter what anybody else thought, we could do it anyway, other people would just have to follow. We had the mightiest army and navy in the world. We were so powerful the expression Splendid Isolation was used - and we could travel the world and pretty well demand the locals spoke in English and did things our way.
Not just military power either - hey, multinationals eat your heart out, a UK company ran a whole *subcontinent* as its own property (the East India Company).
But times change and we're still picking up the pieces, dealing with the consequences. Actually I think the British dealt with the passing of the Empire a lot better than some other countries, but oh boy we committed some evil in its name.
Guess times will always change so it scares me a bit when people get really excited about the latest military technology and spout forth about it, like it will keep their country top dog and ruler of the world for ever, a bit like how people used to talk about the Dreadnought battleships in Britain when they first appeared.
Everything will change so might as well be good to your grandchildren by assuring that your country is looked on with more positive feelings than negative at that time, use the power wisely, eh?
At some point in the future it will be a Pax China, or a Pax Andorra, or something else....
Air Force Captain Elissa Beddow, that is. Having trained with the military, found herself flying remote controlled spy missions to find escaping al Queda fighers and lead a fighter jet to their location she, and I quote:"almost wanted to scream, 'Run! Get out of the way! You're going to be killed!' "
For god's sake, of course they're going to be killed, trollop. And don't forget you did your part to kill them from your cozy chair in Pakistan.
Seriously, perhaps we should go back to men with big sticks. At least the moral issues would be crystal clear to all involved.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Excellent essay you should read:
"The American Army and the M-16" by John Fallows, pp382 - 393 in "The Social Shaping of Technology" by Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman. Published Open University, 1999. ISBN 0335 19914 3
"By the middle of 1967...a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their pathetically unreliable equipment [M16s], and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen, to attract the attention of a congressional investigating committee [Special Subcommittee on the M-16 rifle Program]"
Recent edition of Space News has a cover story about how, after DoD bought exclusive rights to high res commercial imagery of Afghanistan, for a while, Pentagon folks had drive across DC (lame summary only), burn the data to CD's and then fly the CD's out the theater for regional use. Kudos for getting the job done, but ouch!
From the above link...
This game was the first graphic, animated computer game. In 1961 DEC shipped their first computer, the PDP-1, to MIT. There, a small group of friends at MIT decided to write some demoware for the machine that would use the supplied vector monitor. The game was released as Spacewar in 1962, becoming an instant hit. It was later distributed by DEC with all PDP-1's and found itself installed at universities around the world. The result was a huge number of modified versions, many of these modifications can be found as user options in the Cinematronics version. Nutting's Computer Space and Atari's Orbit were based on the same concept, but these games were raster implementations instead of vector.
The Vectorbeam version of this game is called Space War, not Space Wars.
Technical
Cinematronics used a custom vector monitor. The monitor had a parallel interface and had digital to analog converters in the monitor cage.
Trivia
This game has the honor of being the first Black and White Vector arcade game. The designer of the game saw Space Wars in a research lab running on a minicomputer and felt that he had to have one of his own. So over the period of a few years he built the prototype of the game out of easily available parts. He did not use a microprocessor because he could not afford it, so he built his own. He eventually teamed up with others to form Cinematronics, and the basic design of Space Wars was used in about a dozen other games including Solar Quest, Tail Gunner and Star Castle.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Yeah, we espicallly like breaking treaties ..... WE DIDN'T EVEN RATIFY.
Nasa has never lost a billion dolar spy satellite, the department of defense (except for the shuttle stints in the 80's and early 90's, and no Challenger was not carrying a spy sat. it was carrying a nasa com-sat (TDRS)) launches and looses it's own spy satellite's.
TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken
Driven by al Qaeda's atrocities, the US charged into the classic quagmire of Afghanistan, legendary death trap of military ambition. With the customary roll of thunder, out came the full routine of the modern American expeditionary force. First, a cautious, methodical, widely televised suppression of local air defenses. Then, once CNN became accustomed to the violence, some leisurely and terrible precision targeting throughout the theater, around the clock. In Serbia in 1999, US aircraft smashed stationary targets, like buildings and bridges. In Afghanistan, thanks to much faster satellite relays, they demolished rapidly moving tanks, fleeing Toyota trucks, and amazed guerrillas. It took only two weeks to chase Taliban and al Qaeda forces into Pakistan, Iran, and beyond.
"Driven by al Qaeda's atrocities", they decided to go create a few atrocities of their own. Seen any estimates of civilian casualties on your TV news lately? A few dozen? Hundreds even? No, thousands. Professor Marc Herold has put together the only methodical public attempt to date on casualty estimates, and his figure is between 3,000 and 3,400.
"Terrible precision targeting"? Yes, the precision was pretty terrible alright. But the carnage isn't over yet, and won't be for decades: the UN estimates that around 14,000 unexploded cluster bomblets are still on the ground in Afghanistan. They're bright yellow, the same color as the food parcels the US very kindly dropped, while all the aid agencies pleaded with them to stop. So thousands more will die, long after you've had all your parades and pinned on all your medals.
Slow, careful police work was far too unglamourous. Much more sexually satisfying to bomb the shit out of the country harboring the prime suspect. Do you really think that the strikes against the US will stop, simply because the Taliban have been chased into retreat? How many more young suicide bombers are being created daily, thanks to these atrocities and all the others supported and funded around the world by the US? Will they all just give up and go home, awed by superior US satellite technology? Use your brain, for God's sake. You will reap what you sow.
It seems like the author of the Wired article is another example of a pseudointellectual thinking he can play armchair general. Let's review:
In the early 1990's an air campaign against the Iraqis was very successful. The Iraqis did have a rather state-of-the-art air defense radar system but had no idea how to use it. The result was that they left their radar lit up all the time instead of keeping it off until there was nothing US planes could do to defend against them (like how the Serbians did in 1999). And this is only one example of the numerous mistakes the Iraqis made. The Iraqi's own ineptitude and lack of forethoughtdefeated them, not satellites.
In 1999 and Serbia, NATO was dropping so many munitions that we were running out of cruise missiles. But Belgrade still didn't budge. The campaign was beginning to resemble B-52 raids on North Vietnam. What stopped that conflict was a popular pro-democratic uprising. Not satellites.
Just last year we have a campaign to drive the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. We had all the pretty gun camera footage on CNN. But once again the big contributing factor to our "victory" wasn't our technological gap so much as a popular uprising. We didn't bomb the Taliban back to the Stone Age, just enough to give the Northern Alliance the upper hand. The Afghani people won that battle, not satellites.
And shooting down foreign satellites was mentioned. Anybody who actually thinks for three seconds about that idea realizes that that is a decided BAD idea. If we shoot down their satellites, they are within their rights to shoot down ours. And the US as a whole is far more dependant on satellite technology than any possible future belligerant.
Of course, we're talking about Wired magazine, so what else should I expect other than some half-wit who thinks he knows everything about everything because he made a little money off the internet?
The SLI program is already confused because there is no end goal to it
I think you pointed out the actual problem when you said:
Congress has approved $5 billion for the Space Launch Initiative
Congress should be responsible for making sure the project is feasible, has reasonable goals and is in the hands of an agency that has the organization to accomplish said goals. Otherwise, they could be throwing the money out the window.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
From the article:
"Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation, telecom, the works."
...
"Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke."
Silly me. I thought it was a combination of the abject failure of the command economy model as a whole coupled with the military getting 1/3 of the Soviet budget. I guess I've been watching Commanding Heights too much lately.
"Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a truck nuke."
...
"Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale."
You know what happened to the last country who thought a single decisive blow would knock out civillian morale and their will to fight? They got two atomic bombs dropped on them.
Rule #1: Never piss off the American citizenry. Angry Americans are known for bloodthirstiness and holding grudges.
"Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling spacecraft circuitry."
Popping off a nuke like that would piss off the American citizenry (see previous Rule #1). Besides, we have a communications medium that barely relies on electromagnetic broadcasts. It's called the internet.
Besides, for some reason I believe the Van Allen belt is well below most orbits. Once the noise in the belt dies down after a few hours, the satellites are still up there and the ground stations are still down here.
Oh, wait, that's right... I'm going by what has been historically documented about such an electromagnetic pulse and the author of the article is going by the pop culture definition of electromagnetic pulse...
"Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on signal."
...
"Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable."
Undetectable? How small are you intending to make these nanosatellites? NORAD can track objects smaller than an inch.
"Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them into Swiss cheese."
...
"Upside: Ultracheap."
Sand is cheap. Launching heavy sand into orbit is expensive. Or were you planning on using Star Trek-style transporters to get the sand up there?
"Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground stations."
...
"Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment. Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified."
What the fuck have you been smoking? "Not well fortified?" The vast majority of our groundstations were built in back when we were preparing for a nuclear war with the Soviets. Information assets like that were built in very hardened complexes, much like the Minuteman silos themselves. Take a look at NORAD.
"Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage everything."
...
"Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive munitions."
Three words: Ground-penetrating radar. Been in use since Vietnam. Has already trickled down into the civillian market.
Just because Wired writes an article or two about something doesn't mean they know a damned thing about what they're writing about.
At what point do the ends justify the means? It is very easy for us to sit in judgement of them, with 2000 years of hindsight on our side. The world as we know it today was affected in an untold number of ways by Roman rule, both good and bad. If they had not operated the way they did, the world would be different -- how different no one can say, but most certainly it would be different. Perhaps the world would've been a better place, but it also might've been a more barbarous place. You must accept these tenets because you cannot prove one thing or another with any degree of certainty.
One thing is certain, however. The Roman culture, for all its hedonism and brutality, was the pinnacle of "civilized" society at that time. And I did not say they invented democracy, I said they invented the Republic, which (contrary to popular notion) is the real form of government in the U.S., not democracy. Rome invented the concept of roads to secure an empire, created a system of trade that spanned the known globe, pioneered philosophy, spawned countless objects d'art...they had an immense impact on the future world. Could they have done all this without the crushing heel of a conqueror? Who knows? You and I certainly don't, and we are in no position to judge them since we now live and breath in a world that (for better or worse) they helped to create.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Or practically any other goverments, including Japan. Which IIRC is WERE KYOTO IS fer cripes sake.
But who gets an earful, USA.
Did it occur to you that perhaps that earful is justified, whether or not some guy signed some piece of paper? You still pollute more than most of the remaining western world put together, and you are still damned arrogant about it, as the two parent posts testify quite clearly. The rest of the world will, inevitably, pay at least as high a price as you will for the damage you are doing, and yet you get surprised when we complain?
Ten to one says this post gets modded down as Flamebait by 15-year-olds from the US, modded up as Insightful by non-US adults. I wonder which will be first...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Likewise. My apologies.
I'm afraid I'm particularly bitter about mod points at present, since in spite of having been karma-capped since my 125th post, and in spite of always getting the metamod option, I have never had mod points. (Clearly that excludes me from the $rtbl issue, since I can't have moderated on the thread concerned...) Ah, but I digress.
I assume the figures you posted represent GDPs or some similar measure. In that case, please bear in mind that they are inevitably somewhat artificial measures; economics is a world of its own that does not always reflect actual goods produced (cf. Enron, yada yada).
In return, I offer the simple fact that at or around the time of the UN conference on climate change, also in 2000, the US was blasted by several countries' leaders in rapid succession for both its current level of emissions (Jacques Chirac claiming that you alone produce 1/4 of the whole world's total) and its attitude towards curbing them (rather than reducing your own physical problems, you would buy your way out, avoiding the politically unpleasant consequences of forcing reduced emissions in the US but doing nothing for the environment).
I certainly would not argue with your claim that the US is the world's biggest economic power, though I would ask that we keep it in perspective and bear in mind what the indicators actually mean. OTOH, please remember that the US government could cut their nation's emissions very significantly just by encouraging the use of smaller engines in cars and the finding of alternatives to internal flights (e.g., by encouraging better long-distance communication, thus avoiding the need for much long-distance business transport). These measures would do much to improve the level of environmental damage caused by the US, and since the rest of the world already do them, I don't see how the motivation can be anything other than political. This is my big objection, and the reason why I found it irritating when people here started making flippant comments about the US' attitude towards the Kyoto protocol.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.