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War(ship) Driving For 802.11b Controlled Destroyers
Jason Straight writes "There's a story at pcworld, that describes how navy warships will be equipped with 802.11b networking to allow the captain to control the ship from anywhere on the ship.
" The point of the article also gets into the issue of cutting manpower for the ships - going from 300 people on each to destroyer to 90, and makes the point that the only way to do is through automation.
Terrorist take over the United States Navy, w/o Wires!
"And in other news, the USS Bigship crashed into the USS Otherbigship because someone forgot to turn ESSID broadcasts off."
5 posts, and already, 'The page cannot be displayed'. I expected better from PCWorld.
so we could not go war scubbing and hack into destroyers and make them shoot at your old bosses window when the ship is in port????
Whoever makes 802.11b repeaters will have their stock shooting up in the next few days then. With their excessive steelwork and armory, a warship is an extremely BAD place to run on 802.11b as the signals will bounce around everywhere (being at the high frequency they are).
Funnily enough, a lot of people predicted the coming of 'war boating' just three months ago here on Slashdot.
mogorific carpentry experiments
So you have some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place.
If weapon systems are under control of such a remote control pad then it is even scarier.
"Take off every zig! For great justice!"
...for a saturday morning cartoon.. specially one of those cute ones with a really smart sidekick and a stupid detective..
"... allow the captain to control the ship from anywhere on the ship."
Great, just what the crew wanted: Their captain giving orders while he's in the head.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Sung to the tune of "If You're Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands" If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq. If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq. If the terrorists are frisky, Pakistan is looking shifty, North Korea is too risky, Bomb Iraq. If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq. If we think someone has dissed us, bomb Iraq. So to hell with the inspections, Let's look tough for the elections, Close your mind and take directions, Bomb Iraq. It's "pre-emptive non-aggression", bomb Iraq. Let's prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq. They've got weapons we can't see, And that's good enough for me 'Cos it's all the proof I need Bomb Iraq. If you never were elected, bomb Iraq. If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq. If you think Saddam's gone mad, With the weapons that he had, (And he tried to kill your dad), Bomb Iraq. If your corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq. If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq. If your politics are sleazy, And hiding that ain't easy, And your manhood's getting queasy, Bomb Iraq. Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq. For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq. Disagree? We'll call it treason, Let's make war not love this season, Even if we have no reason, Bomb Iraq.
This is flat out one of the worst ideas I've ever seen. Worse than those Navy crusiers running on NT 4.0 (when the systems crashed the ships went dead in the water IIRC)
I've heard of WarDialing, WarDriving, and WarFlying...whats next WarBoating? I sure hope they aren't relying on 802.11b's security measures.
Simply, if a whole bunch of people get killed on the ship, then there are still enough left to run it. This is not insignifigant, after all who wants to have an undermanned ship after 1/4-1/2 the crew dies?
here's hoping they use more than just WEP to protect the damn thing....airsnort...
oh well, now all those green peace boats sailing by can get wireless access and look at all the pr0n passing through the chilly sea air....
Captain! The enemy has smurfed us. We cannot contact the nuke control center on the bridge due to the ICMP flood.
In other news, the export of Pringles, laptops and speedboats to the Persian Gulf region has increased dramatically.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
"It sounded like a great idea until the terrorists released a virus called WOPR that exploited a vulnerability in MS Captain and launched a thermonuclear war..."
Now we know what happened to the SS minnow
So I suppose then the few remaining crew will become vulnerable to an insanity virus, and have the Atlantic fleet all drive off to the Bermuda Triangle?
Well, with one can of Pringles, anyway.
What kind of chalk marks would indicate this kind of access point?
"What'll it be tonight, sir? Minesweeper, or battleship?"
I used to work for Supershuttle, a van service that transports people to and from the airport. In my case, I was taking people to and from the San Francisco airport. One place we serviced was Treasure Island, then a Naval Base. I always asked the sailors what they did for the Navy. Almost every single one was a shipboard firefighter.
After a while, I came to the conclusion that there are probably a lot of shipboard fires during naval combat.
So, my point is, is it such a good idea to reduce the complement from 300 to 90?
But what do I know. I'm just a shuttle driver. Or I was just a shuttle driver, anyway.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Oooh, this was an obvious one...
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
...and so can the Iraqi in the motorboat.
*-- my other sig's a piece of shit too.*
Destroyer captains were notably irritated after being presented with their newly mandated hats that included an embedded Airport base station.
An anonymous officer complained "I've got 10 pounds of circuitry on my head now...first the anti-homosexuality halo, now this!"
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
I'm not sure how many people have noticed, but most railroads are now running radio-controllable locomotives.
I'm a bit of a rail buff and I from time to time I like to go down to the yard and watch them assemble trains. Nowadays the engineers have a large remote control, in the form of a strap-on breastpack. From this control they can pretty much operate all of the primary functions of the train (IE throttle, brake, horn, bell, etc.) This makes it possible for the engineer to build the train essentialy unaided. He can drive the locomotive up to a switch, jump off, drive the whole train past the switch, throw the switch, then back the train all the way down untill the locomotive clears the switch, throw it back and jump back on the locomotive. In the past this operation would have either required two people, one to drive the loco and one to throw the switch, or else the engineer would have to walk the length of the train twice (not really a viable proposition when you've got a mile-long train on a busy line.)
Is it dangerous? Working on the railroad is always dangerous. But in reality it's probably safer than otherwise. Fewer people to keep track of. It's a pretty neat system.
Now IMHO it's fucking retarded that they are planning to use 802.11 for this. BTW the article link is 404 so don't bitch at me for not reading it.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Small Ship hein? Ok Apple uses 802.11g since the Keynote in 7 Jan. (airport extreme) why are they going to use an old technology??
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon
Not exactly sure what the us navy is up to, but I can guess. The big items of military equipment are getting too expensive to buy, even for the us. The only alternative is to make extensive use of COTS hardware and software to push down the prices. The aim is to modify cheap stuff to deliver what you need, with the idea that at least that way you can have a lot of them, even if they might have some compromises.
NT & 802.11b are just two examples of this, I'm sure if people do a little digging they will find more - in particular the computer hardware.
After all, a destroyer is just a platform for missiles and a radar. And a target, of course. Never say that to the navy though, they are kind of sensitive to that type of thing.
The question of /. readers is, how could they be supported in doing this better ? As usual, they get a load of contractors in who sell them the advice that Microsoft is a sure bet. What would an open source warship look like? Even better, how could you retro fit an existing hull to provide a cheap platform that be some use?
One thing is for sure, other countries have picked up on the same idea.
I applaude the navy's decision to use inexpensive, off-the-shelf technology developed in the private sector.
I look forward to working with the Navy's new 802.11b technology, and exploring what each ship has to offer.
signed,
John Q. Hacker
The point of the article also gets into the issue of cutting manpower for the ships - going from 300 people on each to destroyer to 90, and makes the point that the only way to do is through automation.
They obviously havn't heard what happened to the Katana fleet...
Beans again?! I think not.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The Navy is very authoritarian, and this model doesn't work well in modern warfare. Often the captain leaves orders and goes somewhere. Then the situation can change suddenly and the responding officer not only has to decide what to do, sometimes he has to decide if it's ok to violate the captain's orders to respond to the unforeseen. And he might have just minutes or seconds to respond. That's bad enough. With this high-tech, the captain may have the remote control, but he won't have all the information available as quickly as on the bridge. It would be like channel-surfing while looking at the TV Guide instead of at the TV. The subordinate on the bridge will have to factor in all the uncertainty about where is the captain, what does he know, is he sober and awake, ... Too confusing.
War takes plenty of brains, but peace takes even more.
I happen to write software for a few Navy platforms, and this article is not quite on target.
For starters, the idea is to reduce emissions and radar signatures, not enhance it. Since a $200 parabolic antenna can pick up WiFi at 20 miles, and get enough of a signal to make use of it, 802.11b has a problem here. Of course, on a subsurface plaform this is not an issue.
Second, huge sections of Navy ships are RF quarantined, with no emissions allowed. Sometimes it's for security, sometimes it's because they don't want RF signals popping up around weapons with very sensitive electronics. Even the captain has to follow these rules. I said the first paragraph wasn't an issue for submarines, but this paragraph is, in a big way.
Third, 802.11b enabling the captain to "run the ship" from anywhere presupposes that the captain can "run the ship" whenever he or she has a network connection and... what, a PDA or PC? Again, nope. The captain has a staff, external communications, and a ton of sensor data. About the best the captain can do with a PDA is to see what's for dinner and check email.
Pringle's cans are now covered by ITAR export restrictions.
My first objection to this concept was to wonder what would happen to all this automation when it gets things shot through it. But then I recalled that modern ships are not designed to withstand attack and still be effective. With so many kinds of modern weapons, if you're hit, game over.
Our existing naval ships were designed like this so much that they could beat off an attacking air squadron, but could not get a shot off at four men attacking the ship from a rowboat.
Modern ships are a curious mix of outmoded ideas, window dressing, high technology and ludicrous "cost cutting" measures. It is a wonder they function in their missions at all. Replacing the expensive human element with more weird hardware by the lowest bidder will not make them perform their missions any better. We all know how hard it is to get complex distributed systems to work 24/7 - and that is when they're sitting in some purpose built office block. The only thing comparable to naval service for those systems would be a +7 earthquake. Anyone like to take bets on being able to print out a document on the 7th floor East printer 20 minutes after a nice big earthquake?
But this is not about making capable, survivable, robust ships. It is about trying to fight better and cheaper wars. It's a numbers game. If you "need" 25 ships to accomplish your mission objectives worldwide and you can only get them to work 50% of the time, then you need to buy 50 of the things. How much money do you save by eliminating sailors vs. how much do twice as many ships cost?
By turning over the world to bookkeepers we've done away with style, service, elegance, and quality. Maybe, if we turn war over to them they will succeed in making it so efficient that it also ceases to exist.
The relevant naval saying here is: "Ships don't fight, men do." ...even if they don't use Windows.
I really doubt critical ship information would ever pass through something like this, but if the captain is able to control the ship from anywhere onboard?.. That's just begging for trouble.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
However, I distinctly remember that the navy used to be proud of their lack of automation. This allowed warships to survive severe amounts of damage without perishing. If a radio operator is severely wounded, you can replace them. If your transmitter board is damaged, you can throw in a new one. If a jolt takes out the hard drive on your software radio, you're screwed. Perhaps the US hasn't been in a real war for so long they forgot how to design for damage?
I'm not saying I want a war, or that I dislike the idea of warship automation, but the original stated intention of the Navy seemed somehow admirable in a way that installing 802.11b wireless helm control just doesn't. Increased automation does tend to increase the fragility of a device, and the amount of problems that might occurr. What happens when the captain walks out of range of a transmitter? What happens if the laptop is stolen, or comandeered? What is stopping someone from dropping little 802.11b jamlets onboard?
And what OS, praytell, will this system support? Will the Navy solicit imput from BMW?
-c
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
First of all, as a Marine that has spent time aboard ships, this seems absolutely ridiculous. They Navy hates automation beyond email. Second of all, this is just asking to get hacked. 802.11b can be received for kilometers. Being on the ocean, one big reflective antenna, you could probably extend this distance to miles with a decent antenna, obviously with great latency, but it would work. I couldn't access the story, but I really hope the Navy rethinks this technological advance.
"especially in these days of asymmetrical combat. (i.e. terrorism)"
Okay, lets see:
-world's most insecure networking technology...check!
-world's most insecure, unstable, practically-end-of-life'd operating system....check!
(remember, WINNT is the OS of choice in the navy, despite that whole dead-at-sea-had-to-be-towed-in incident)
I think we've hit upon the Destroyer equivalent of "screen door on a submarine". Only way this could get any better is if they use ColdFusion for the web interface with a MS-SQL backend(and, of course, Exchange for email.)
Still, that's going to make for some fun dialog boxes:
"Searching for newly installed hardware- Found, AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense System. Please insert vendor CDROM"
Better hope you don't have an IRaQ conflict!
Wait wait, I'm on a role.
PocketPC:"oooh yeah baby, oooo[pop click click DING!]
Captain: "#$@!%$"
[wham! Clink clink clink clink...]
"CAPTAIN IN THE GALLEY!"
Captain: "SEARGENT! HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU, MICROWAVE OVEN USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WHILE I"M TRYING TO DOWNLOAD PO...uh...TECHNICAL SPECS!"
Seargent: "SIR, SORRY SIR, I WILL FINISH MY POPCORN IN THE AFT GALLEY!"
Oh, but there's more.
"Anyone up for a fireworks display?"
"Oh, the USs Potshot back in port?"
"Yeah, grab the pringles can."
Let Saddam get his nukes. Just don't think that he gives a shit about being part of the civilized world. If anything, the civilized world shows him for the failure that he is, and he can't stand that.
In the meantime, why don't you come up with something a bit more original, instead of just parroting someone else's poetry?
What are you all looking forward to when you finally have 802.11b?
-C
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
So, how long before someone warchalks a destroyer?
.: Max Romantschuk
The British Royal Navy has resisted automation for years. They purposefully take many more crew members than they need so that when they lose half of them in battle the ship can still function.
The Skynet computer underneath the pentagon.
a Beowulf cluster out of these...
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
There's a story at pcworld, that describes how navy slashdotters will be equipped with 802.11b networking allowing them to slashdot from anywhere within the ship. The point of the article also gets into the issue of cutting manpower for the ships - going from 300 people on each to destroyer to 90, giving the rest even more time for slashdot.
thanks to MS-Windows NT: "For about two-and-a-half hours, the ship was what we call 'dead in the water,'" said Commander John Singley of the Atlantic Fleet Surface Force" ... read on (1998)
Ok three - Electomagnetic pulse radiation, hang it Tempest too.
Then we have toy OS systems. And to signal your orders to the enemy: priceless - For everything else there is VISA.
"Models M1 through M4 were not entirely stable."
First off, there is no need for the captain to be "instantly reachable". It's not like he's the only one which can make command decisions on a ship. It's been a while, but IIRC the title of the person who is in control of the ship is the Officer of the Deck. Should neither the captain nor Executive officer be on the bridge, one officer is designated the OOD and has effective command of the ship. Now, in a crisis, the XO and Captain almost always attempt to return to the bridge to reassert command, but the OOD can make all decisions (including breaking previous captain's orders, should the OOD deem it necessary) until relieved. So, it is silly to design a system to allow the captain to controll the ship from anywhere. Someone in the chain of command is already doing that from the place most suitable to do so, the bridge (or CIC, as appropriate).
Second, virtually all ships have a voice intercom systems set up throughout, which can relay orders back to the bridge far faster and more efficiently than some silly handheld WAP thingy. They're hardwired, so no emissions. They are invariably redundant, and far more likely to survive damage than a WAP system.
Finally, reduced manpower is a great goal, but generally is highly driven by putting in machinery which requires fewer operators. Communications systems are not really any manpower saver. And, as noted by others, you need twice as many people on a ship as it takes to operate all machinery: remember you have to run the ship 24x7, so you need at least two shifts (there's a little overlap, but 2x is a good rule of thumb), and you better have some extras for damage control and casualty replacement. So, you'll get manpower savings by automatic ammunition loading systems, better fire-supression, more efficient engines, better EW weapon systems, but not by adding WAP points.
Dumb idea.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
So if they have the capability to make the ship automatic, why not do it with a wired network? Why are they using wirelessin a METAL ship?
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
The military could and should go with software that is based on open standards: UNIX/POSIX, X11, etc. And in their implementations and deployments, they should then stick as much as possible to those open standards. They can then buy software and hardware from many different vendors and have a choice among multiple implementations, including some open source ones.
Soon we'll see this message on the hacker IRC channels
'Wh00h D00d! 1 5c0red 4 84TT7E5H19 !"
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
...this kinda bothers me. For one thing, those 90 people had better be trained and had better be sufficient to bring the ship home in case of systems failure, or WORSE, in case of some enemy decides to jam the 802.11b signal preventing them from operating the ship.
You can bet that if the thought occured to me, it had occured to someone else already as well.
Cutting manpower on ships is not a "bad" idea, but one that should be explored with extreme caution. It's important that there be a certain level of redundancy and cross-training among the ship's crew. By making each man more significant for the ship's operation, each man becomes less expendable. It would take less to cripple a ship or even prevent it from going to sea at all.
I'm not sure they're thinking this thing through well enough.
these are PROTOTYPE systesm... they are not outfitting the Nimitz with it and saying "here ya go!" it's going to take at least 2 years of trials before it's even considered for use and must undergo battle simulation.
Automating the ship to reduce manpower is a great idea for peace time, but in a heavy war you want 4 guys to every station... how do you get the engines running while you are still floating but have a 20 foot gaping hole in the center of the ship from an excocet missle that ripped out 99% of the computer communications systems? you use muscle power... the surviving crew does it all manually.
All your ship are belong to us!
The parent actually raises a good point. Can the captain stay informed enough in any given position on the ship to make command and control decisions effectively? I doubt it.
For instance, if the ship's smaller (fewer bunks, fewer supplies required, more fuel efficient so smaller fuel tanks, more space-efficient and lighter electronics, etc. etc.), wouldn't that inherently make it easier to fight fires? More armor around the magazine and the fuel tanks?
On another topic, why do you say that you "didn't want to miss this war?" Whilst, if the need really arose, I would do my duty to defend my country, and I do understand that fighting wars is something you've trained for years to do, I can't understand why you'd be anxious to fight a war (which is the only interpretation I can place on your comment). Lots of people are likely to die, indirectly through your actions, if a war happens. Some of them will be Iraqi civilians. Most of them will be Iraqi conscripts who probably don't want to die defending Saddam's leadership. Some will be fellow Americans, the odd Pom and maybe a few Aussies. It's possible some could be your friends and acquaintances. There's a small but real chance one could be you. WTF would you *want* to be in a war?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
for whatever reason, the boss had a telephone extension installed in his office bathroom (he owned the building)..one of the things you learned there very quickly was, when you were paged to extension 13, you did NOT pick up the phone.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
I don't think this really is about letting the captain command from anywhere. It was mentioned in the article, but most of the article talks about automating the monitoring of the ship's systems: using a computer to listen to a bunch of sensors, rather than having a crewman 'sense' manually by patrolling the systems and checking readouts. This is entirely different from controlling the main functions (weapons and propulsion) of the ship.
These days, a captain would spend most of his time (at least when the ship is in action/at war) in the Combat Information Center. There, he's surrounded by 5-30 specialists, who each have a console with 2x21" screens and two radio channels (one in each ear). These people supply all the information the Captain needs to deploy his ship.
There's no way you can do this with a laptop, as some posters have suggested.
They purposefully take many more crew members than they need so that when they lose half of them in battle the ship can still function.
A lot of people have been pointing this out, but it seems to me to be largely irrelevant in this day and age - any kind of combat an armed surface ship is going to encounter is going to either do so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant, or it's going to straight-up sink it (look at the Sheffield, the oversize crew was just that many more people to die). Basically, here just don't seem to be that many weapons systems left these days that have the capability to do severe damage to a ship, killing half the crew, and leave her in any shape that the surviving half is going to want to try and stay aboard - it's either a skiff full of C4 attacking you in harbor, or an Exocet missile blowing you clean in half, there's no middle ground anymore.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I think it's good form to reply to one's own post.
Mod parent up!
The "Total Ship Monitoring" system in the article was for maintenance, not combat control.
I believe that proper operation in this case is to trap the error and kill the application in question.
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
It's all about damage compartmentalization. Something the Navy knows quite a lot about in the mechanical world...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You talking about WEP? a gig of captured data and it's cracked.
You are right about WEP. The thing is that nobody said anything about WEP so I would imagine that they are not using it since it is well known to be easily compromised. I would place my bet on them using either TKIP (better than WEP but not best) or AES. The problem is that I think AES is in the 802.11i spec not 802.11b. I wonder if they are really going to use 802.11b as the article states or if it is a proprietary 802.11x implementation?
Note: This article is a really good primer on 802.1x excryption techniques. They state that AES is now a Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS Publication 197, that defines a cryptographic algorithm for use by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive, unclassified information. The Secretary of Commerce approved the adoption of AES as an official Government standard in May 2002.
So no, WEP is not likely.
Back when this incident happened, it (of course) made Slashdot.
A number of articles I read indicated that an untrapped divide by zero error caused the entire machine to crash, OS and all. Under any real OS, such an error would only cause the OS to terminate the offending application. This particular machine crashing started a chain reaction that led to almost every single machine on the network crashing.
IIRC from another article, the offending app/error wasn't even REMOTELY connected to the propulsion system. It just happened that bad design allowed one error in one system to cascade into a total failure of all systems.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"It appears that you are going to war. Would you like to:"
1) Bomb Iraq?
2) Bomb Red Hat's HQ?
3) Bomb IBM's HQ?
4) Just plain bomb out?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
So eventually it'll be just like startrek the search for spock where you get a hit to the automation center and then have to self destruct yourself...
ahh well, at least we won't see any of scotty's engine room whiteshirts toasted again due to warp core breaches.
Didn't they try something like this before with disasterous results. Didn't it have something to do with Microsoft?
-=fshalor
"Reliant's SSID is 16309..."
"I don't understand."
"You have to learn why things work on a starship"
"Each ship has it's own SSID to prevent an enemy from doing what we're attempting: using our Pringle's can to order Reliant to lower her shields."
I can imagine just the signal alone being a security issue. The reason subs don't use active sonar all the time is because it gives away their position. It sure will make it easy for enemy forces to find our battleships, when all they have to do is listen for 802.11b, 2.4GHz transmissions.
Good news for missile manufacturers...
The new type of missile they will have to make is one that homes in on all the 802.11b signals.
The ship itself takes care of steering the missile right to its destination after launch.
The more signals the better (the bigger the ship).
Even smarter missiles home in on the signal that broadcasts " I am the main engine, I am the main engine, happily running at 250rpm. "
Onet
this reminds me of that one GI Joe episode when the captain of the USS Missouri turns his ship over to Cobra and they staff it with a bunch of their robot / androids. then the USS Missouri faces off against the whole Atlantic Fleet.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
is that the navy is also converting all their old systems to use micro$oft on the servers and the workstations as well. I wonder if a server crashes will Bush declare war on bill gates.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
Strike teams will have an easier time taking over a ship manned by 90 people than they would one with 300. Most special forces have some kind of training in this type of mission.
Hey... wait a minute...
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
[Retired Navy with 20 years as a Data Systems Tech.] That line in the article about the captain having "control" of the ship from anywhere was poorly written and reflected the writer's imagination, not the Navy's intent for this kind of technology.
To begin with, the captain ALREADY has "contol" of his ship wherever he is, even while in the shower. At the same time, the captain of a ship NEVER has "control" of his ship even when on the bridge. The point is what you mean by control. The ship is always under the captain's command, but he does not execute those commands himself. The captain never takes the helm, takes over damage control efforts, or actually uses any weapons systems himself. He gives the commands to see that those things are done, and is responsible for the training and performance of the people who do it. The article makes an unnecesary jump from wireless networked remote mechanical sensors and controls, to operational command and control.
As an example, the article mentions tying in the Integrated Condition Assessment System (ICAS), which is a system I know something about. This system is used to track the material condition and readiness of the ship, and to track damage control and engineering plant information. Wireless remote sensors might be a big improvement to that system, but is not going to result in steering the ship from Damage Control Central or the Chief Engineer's stateroom.
A good point is made about automation being a required step towards smaller crews on Navy ships, but that is not the only requirement by far. For example, a ship has a certain number of exposed square feet of steel and aluminum that require a certain number of man-hours per month to maintain. Sticking with damage control items - every water tight door, emergency light, and fire extinguisher/hose/nozzle on the ship gets weekly inspections and monthly maintenance. Automated "rust sensors" won't change those efforts a bit.
When a ship is in port overseas, usualy one third of the crew is "on duty" at time. The other two thirds can go ashore and see the sights. That leaves only 30 out of 90 onboard to man a dozen or so Quarterdeck and security watches through six four-hour watch periods. When half of a crew of 350 is on Christmas leave, you can still get enough people together to bring onboard the truck loads of milk, bread, printer paper, and spare parts that just arrived on the pier.
The scary thing in this is the possibility that the Navy will reduce the crew size without finding ways to reduce or outsource all these low-tech mundane tasks too. But I have reason to believe they are considering this issue, so I think the most likely change would be a reduction from 350 to 250, with high-tech wiz-bang stuff providing half the reduction, and marine contracting of some low-tech paint roller action providing the rest.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
will they use some wEpon stuff on the ship?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Is on the way. The technology we use in UAVs will be used in ships. First they will be remote controlled and then the technology mature to where ships, like UAVs will be mission autonomous.
Why not go all the way and create an unmanned battle ship ? Have a small land crew communicate with it from time as to update its mission and check on its status.
Now every AOE, AOM, and WC3 player is going to be out there screaming that they should be a Navy captain because they more experience in RT exercises.
OMG, this is will be just like Kirk and Kahn! Some little boat from(insert evil foreign power of the week here) will access our ships network and take control! Dropping our shields!! oh wait... Well anyway, you get the idea...
KAHN!!!
and in the middle of aborting the launch of a ****-nuke he gets a Nave-Blue Screen of Death
Privacy is terrorism.
Can the captain stay informed enough in any given position on the ship to make command and control decisions effectively?
Yes...I can. It's not too hard really. Why the hell is everyone talking about me all of a sudden? Geez.
Having worked on the AEGIS Weapon's System (the computer system that controls naval destroyers) I can say with a great deal of certainity that this is bullshit.
First of all, crew size is not being reduced on destroyers. The navy just awarded a contract called DD(x). This new generation of warship's are much smaller (hence--smaller crew size) and meant for latorial battle (close to shore).
The captain controls the ship from the CEC and all the equipment in the CEC is massive. The thing is, there are about a dozen operators required to control the ship. It's not something that one person can do off of a PDA.
Now, ships do have connections to the outside world. Mostly used for email and such. This connection is physically isolated from the rest of the ships computer systems. The wireless is simply for internet access. It's just so the captain can get his email off the toliet.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
I worked as a contractor on the CG-class cruisers, and in the upgrades for those we used a fiber optic ATM network w/redundant cables.
Additionally, people here seem not to be aware that the ship's systems controlled by the network (like above) are for propulsion, navigation, electric plant and damage control. The weapons systems are a completely separate entity.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Our ex-president was giving orders while getting head. Which is worse?
A smaller crew means less people available for damage control and maintenance, which can reduce the effectiveness of a warship drastically. James F. Dunnigan, in his textbook "How To Make War", makes a point of explaining that the lack of skilled technicians on Soviet naval ships also limited their maintenence/damage control ability, and so these ships had to be kept in port as much as possible, to reduce wear and tear. My point is, automation may makes ships cheaper, and it will certainly reduce the number of lives at risk - but it won't neccessarily make warships more effective.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Wasn't that a key part of the Bismarck's defeat, ie that its cabling was damaged in combat?
One thing they never discuss is how they get wireless networking to work reliably inside shielded metal boxes. They don't address secure spaces, either, which function as tempest enclosures in their own right, and from which any RF emissions would be a violation of opsec. For example, outboard operations is usually at the bottom of the ship, a secure space, a tempest enclosure, and full of electronic warfare components. Just where you'd want a transmitter. Last I checked, AES or Triple-DES were not approved for classified data. Has that changed? If not, can you put an encrypted transmitter for unclassified data in a secure space?
I like the idea of cutting down a destroyer crew from 300 to 90. If they can do that effectively, it would make a huge difference in crew comfort. From this article, though, it sounds like the snipes would be most of those cut, and I wonder what that does to the crew's ability to respond to attacks, accidents, or disasters. On the ship I served on, Engineering was the backbone of shipboard firefighting at sea, and provided the bulk of the repair teams. If you take a missile hit, having a bunch of extra people to put out the fires, deal with the flooding, and so forth would be a real advantage.
Now, if they can get rid of most of Deck, they could really slim down. All that would take is finding paints or finishes that don't require constant maintenance to keep a steel ship from rusting in salt water. They've gone a long way with epoxy-based paints for the hull, but the decks and above-water surfaces didn't get the same treatment.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Ships run into each other due to the fact that they were running windows and microsoft networking hardware (loss of signal). Once the signal was lost, the ships could not be controlled because the system used to control the ship had a stop error.
CNN reports American destroyers fired on RIAA, again. This marks the fourth such attack in 2 months. The shell pattern spelled out the following "3133t rulez! p2p theze!"
our next story: the smoldering ruins of Microsoft remain...
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
I served in the sixties on DD-630, the Braine, a WWII destroyer.
0 563007.jpg0 563010.jpg
Gunnery fire control was handled by a big grey box that housed an analog, gear driven computer. Quite a piece of sophisticated machinery.
In WWII the Braine was stationed on picket duty for Okinawa. She was hit by two kamikazes:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/
Though her fire control was badly compromised by loss of automatic communications to the gun mounts (not to mention loss of gun mounts), and loss of crew, she continued to defend herself, using men to pass fire control information to the functioning mounts.
When I served we had a damage control drill in which the CO threw catastrophe after catastrophe at the crew. At one point we had a simulated fire in a stern compartment (under the depth charges), no water pressure, no CO2, no breathing apparatus, and no portable pumps.
The resolute damage control crew had a bucket brigade organized with wet towels wrapped around their faces.
The point of all this is simple. On warships one ought not strive solely for efficiency. Redundancy, simplicity,robustness, and general utility are substantial virtues.
A lot of men is often a way to obtain these.
The Captain doesn't control the ship directly. Doesn't the captain give orders to the XO who gives orders to the helmsman? In case the bridge is destroyed I imagine control could be accomplished with direct communications to the engine room.
CON.EXE has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Press any key to continue.
"Shit!!, the bridge is a mile away!"
There's an awful lot of deck to defend if your enemy can get in close.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Once the system's in place, and before it gets approved for "battlefield" conditions, the Navy should do a "Crack our Battleship's Network!" event as a security test.
If the opportunity to crack into a battleship's control systems isn't enough to draw people in for the challenge, offer a couple of prizes. Second-place winner gets to, say, fire a surface-to-surface missile into a Yugo. First-place winner gets to use another Yugo as an artillery projectile.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I used to have a friend who was a navy nuclear tech. That sounds exciting, neh? Well, actually he spent most of his time standing in a small room monitoring a bunch of dials -- and the "nukes" are probably the smartest enlishted men in the navy. Seems like a waste, and a perfect application for telemetry.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
With the advent of operating system controlled warships, and now wireless networking, it's very apparent that the Military will soon need some new jobs, including, quite literally, hackers. If it's controlled by a computer, and there's a network on it that can be accessed by the outside world, you can be sure various nasties out there will recruit their own people to engage in network warfare.
Why strap a bomb on a tugboat if you can simply steer a US Warship into a dock or a sandbar somwhere via a laptop? This is probably unlikely to happen, but you get my point. The Military will now need people that can hack enemy networks, and defend ours. And that need will only increase as the age of remote-control warfare accelerates. More and more combat aircraft will be remotely piloted in the future, and the various branches of the service will surely find new ways to use automation, remote-control, and real-time computer control to take over dangerous jobs. There will never be a substitue for boots on the ground slogging a rifle, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine a not-so-distant future where most of an "attack" actually comes from US soldiers and sailors sitting in a room, trailer, tent, or ship somewhere, using their laptops and workstations to wreak havoc upon hostile nations by jamming up networks, shutting down power stations, messing with streetlights, taking down air traffic control centers.....all from a keyboard. And similarly, defending the US from such attacks. That future might not be as far off as you think.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Of course, by the time they're throwing nukes around, this may be the least of the problems...
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
And Captain Kirk had to disable the computer after it destroyed a number of starships!
Radio silence? An 802.11b-equipped ship is a sitting duck.
When someone builds an 802.11b-operated swab or deck buffer, then I'll be impressed!
First off, i doubt if even the captain earns 80k / year. So....
l enlistedsalary.htm
Lets say salary is 32k/year (probably hi, but whatever) based on http://usmilitary.about.com/library/milinfo/pay/b
So... thats 11.2mil per ship per year (assuming 350 per vessel), and 225mil over 20 years. Now lets say that these people get an additional 2500/year for their family, and it costs 250/mo to clothe and feed them (it's not that expensive when you do it in bulk!). So, that's 5500/yr/person, 1.925mil per vessel, 38.5mil over 20 years.
Sorry, but it ain't 80k per person.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
A lot of people seem to be unaware of this (just as a lot of people are unaware that the whole thing was anything but a video game) but during Desert Storm, two US Navy ships were damaged by mines, one very badly. (Don't remember the names of the ships right offhand, sorry.) The more severely damaged one barely made it back to port, and it did so only because of a large, well-trained crew with plenty of redundancy working very hard to keep going.
The same is probably true of the USS Cole (the "skiff full of C4" incident, for those who didn't catch the reference) -- the size of the hole in the ship rather strongly indicates that the result of that attack was not "so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant." As for the Exocet case, most anti-ship missiles are big enough to destroy smaller ships quickly and completely, but not to do the same to the big ones. I'm not sure there's any non-nuclear missile big enough to take down an aircraft carrier in one shot -- but the better missiles could certainly do a lot of damage and kill a lot of crew, again making redundancy very important.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
While I agree that the U.S. Military is not always perfect or always blessed with the all the brains that they purport to have I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. Note that in the article they said that the system was "...based on the IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN standard." They also pointed out that this is part of a longer term project that they have been running not the initiative of the month. While I doubt that they've got it perfect I also doubt that they've just equipped the 3'rd fleet with a poorly controlled destroyer ready to be hacked by any idiot with a pc.
If you want to learn about the Navy's projects from a level that will actually be useful rather than the jokes and jabs that are mostly being posted here I suggest reading the United States' Naval Institutes monthly magazine Proceedings. In fact recently there was even an article written by an officer about the benefits of open source in the DoD. Also of interest to many people maybe the extensive automation being considered for the Coast Guard's new cutters which has been the topic of several articles.
It depends on what you call a "real war," I suppose. The U.S. has been so busy lately picking up the slack from our fair weather "allies" that we haven't had the spare time to fight what you would probably call a "real war." Ever since France, Germany and Russia abdicated their roles as great powers and began to act like American protectorates, we've been pretty busy. Int the past 20 years:
Grenada, 1983
Panama, 1990
The Gulf War, Allied Liberation of Kuwait, 1991
Somalia, 1992-1994
Kosovo, 1999
Afghanistan, 2001-
Gulf War, part deux, 2003 (?)
You're welcome, by the way.
Carthago delenda est!
"Hello, this is your captain speaking, I am currently sitting on my couch watching reruns of 'friends' and controlling the entire operations of this ship with my palm pilot. Have a nice day!"
How about Infra-Red? Not detectable w/a pringles can, and fast enough for most data communication. Multiplexed emitters would mean one cable per compartment.
Except, there's a built-in safeguard in having more than 50 on board: As Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time...." More people on board means you have to fool more people at once to get your high powered hardware to obey a stupid or criminal order.
It may cost more to run them but I think we don't want anyone to deploy too much automation on boats like that.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
take down a CVN in one shot? not necessary. Fire > 255 missiles at it, and some will get through to the CVN to cripple it at least. (IIRC, AEGIS can simultaneously track and target 255 targets, but it could be more. But each ship in the battle group holds between 40 (DDG) and 80 (CG) missiles overall. Some of those will be harpoon and tomahawk missiles. Sure, the VLS can salvo them very rapidly, and one AEGIS ship can control the missile firing of other ships in the cluster, but there are no reloads...
... that these ships will not rely SOLELY on wireless networks for communications and control. Every ship I was on (which amounts to four or five of varying ages) still had, and occasionally used, VOICE TUBES for communicating between spaces - you know, pipes with horns on each end that you yelled into. Yeah, we had electronic voice circuits too... but a voice tube never goes on the blink.
Sean
You mentioned it... the "deluge of wires". Every pound of weight you can trim from the ship gives it more capacity to hold weapons, sensors, ammo, etc...
Sean
And if you've let a ship big enough to have a boarding party get close enough to board, chances are your ship is already in pretty bad shape. Boarding is a very difficult evolution even if the boardee is COOPERATING. One guy with a .50 shooting at the boarding party would ruin their whole day.
Sean
Back in the late 80's early 90's when I was in, they talked about how automation would reduce the number of people needed to man a ship. What nobody ever discussed was how they were going to man the watch sections. Let's assume that you have 4 sections with 22 people each (88 total crew plus CO & XO). In port you need 3 watch standers on the quarterdeck (POOW, OOD, and messenger), one roving patrol, one engineering watch, and one engineering rover. That's 3+1+1+=6 people per watch. With 6, 4-hour watch section in port you need 36 people to cover the in port watches. Even going to 4 six hour watches, you need 24 people to cover watches. This doesn't include duty radioman, master-at-arms, CDO, shore patrol if you are OCONUS, or anything else I've forgotten. This gives us 39 (or 27). Now the khaki answer is go port/starboard (either within or between watch sections), which is fine until retention drops to zero because being port and starboard 24/7 would suck (the snipes on the Midway were rumored to be doing this). During an in port emergency, you'd be hard pressed to man all the watchs, supply 2 fire teams, SAT, and the BAF. That is just for the normal in port watches, the problem becomes even worse at anchor or in a hazardous area (ie. UAE) where extra watch standers are needed. These aren't positions that can be automated away.
between the greater and lesser infinities sleep the dreams undreamt
A.G. Lafley, president and CEO of Proctor and Gamble, complained strongly about the US Government's recent decision to add Pringles to the list of munitions subject to export control laws.
"I mean, come on", Lafley complained at the company's recent AGM. "We were just starting to gain market share in the highly covetted 15-25 year-old male, Arab, electronic terrorist demographic. And now this? It's so un-American! My question to George Bush is: Where's your head at?"
In a related mater, Lafley again denied that he supports Satanism.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Wouldn't walkie talkies be just about as (or even more) effective for giving orders? As for staying informed, maybe the only information needed is "Hey, captian, get your butt up here NOW! We're under a tack." Plus, the ability to give a few general orders on the way, such as "Raise the shields!"
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Oh.. you Don't workfor M$?
Then why does www.kitten.org.uk
map to Microshaft's 2000 server page?
I think this is a good example of the point others have made before me-- if all he did was monitor a bunch of dials, something which could be done by a computer, why didn't they have some low-paid private do this, instead of your friend? Probably because they needed someone who could not only monitor dials, but who knew what was going on behind the dials and could react intelligently when a situation arose. I'm not saying there's no place for computers, but there are a lot of concerns that need to be taken into account.
This is really stupid. The purpose of all those extra people is to be able to keep the ship going with duct tape, baling wire or whatever else it takes when all the fancy high-tech stuff breaks down or gets shot to pieces.
Sounds like more and more of the decision making regarding things military is being done by people who have never seen actual combat. They think that if they spend enough on high-tech doodads it's going to make America totally invincible. A lot of good all those computers did for the Cole.
I was thinking something like a zerg rush swarm attack with lots of small boats, similar to the one the general playing the bad guys in the recent war games at the Pentagon used to sink the entire US Gulf fleet.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
As with ALL military organizations, a lot of time is spent "making" work for the conscripts... there are just SO MANY latrines to clean, or dishes to wash... so when somebody runs out of work to do, then it's a major crisis.
And heaven help the ship if the captain's son were to be knifed by hairy terrorists!
You must think in Russian.
Automation worked really well for the good ol' Enterprise in Star Trek III. All the enemy had to do was fire on the automation computer center and they were hosed. No crew to run the ship equaled no redundancy for Kirk! And then he started the precedence of retiring any ship starting with "NCC-1701" by self destruct...
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
And just what are these wireless devices going to communicate with? Each other is a dead given fact. But unless you have a shock collar on some poor mechanic, something is going to have to run up and down those ladders and turn those handles.
To analogize this with cars, in the 70's, the electronics under the hood consisted of spark plug wires and battery cables. A modern car has 45+ sensors that monitor everything including water temperature. But, what a mess. And this didn't come free of weight or management. The warships are similar to that 70's car. Everything is mechanical. So, they must be talking about some serious re-thinking to the way ships are built.
This is only the tip of the ice berg.
What's wrong with wires?
An example of solid technology that in war time (like you just got bombed) is sound powered phones instead of externally powered electric phones...
Why make our ships run fewer people are more prone to breaking.
Ok, so take out 30 sailors and replace them with 5 wireless techs... What happens when war starts and all the hatches are sealed up and you can get to the next room to fix the broken parts?
This sound ominously similar to drive by wire... but worse.
The only advantage I can see is that now with the same number of sailors you have have 1/3 more ships out pounding the seas...
-v
yes, the military knows about security but they're now on this "commercial-off-the-shelf" kick, and it's not at all clear they fully understand the sacrifices they are making in terms of security and reliability when they do this. Seems odd. If you're going to buy a zillion cards and chips, wouldn't it still be relatively cheap to use a standard that's better secured than 802.11?