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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.
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.
Or when the smurf attack occurs in the middle of the lightning storm, during the "battle" (if you can still use the term in modern naval warfare, where there usually aren't even any enemy ships involved). When you are on a boat, there are so many things that can go wrong, all at the same time usually, I'm not sure you want to have to count on your laptop and your wireless setup to survive.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Speaking as a sailor (served from '88 to '96, and now from '01 to present..didn't want to miss this war), I can tell you that *everyone* on board a warship is a firefighter. There are some guys who specialize in it, but they just lead the fire teams. Everyone, from the newest seaman recruit up to the Old Man hisself, is expected to lend a hand in putting out any fires. Think of it: you've got nowhere to run to, and the idea of sitting in the ocean until you're rescued isn't very appetizing (except to the sharks...).
Reducing a ship's compliment by over 2/3 is a Bad Idea. When one of these ships gets hit with something the size of the bomb that hit the USS Cole, or the missiles that hit the USS Stark, I guarantee she will go down like a two dollar whore. The Stark is an especially good example, because when the missiles struck, one hit near her primary magazine. One lone individual kept the powder cool with a fire hose until he was found hours later. Considering his job was one of the ones likely to be eliminated by this "advance" in technology, the ship would almost definitely have gone down if she had been outfitted with it instead of a well trained crew.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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
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trains pretty much have two directions to go in normal operation
trains do not carry armed cruise missiles
trains get additional signalling from devices embedded on the track which could override internal commands
This is a far cry from controlling a warship...
+++ath0
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.
What are you all looking forward to when you finally have 802.11b?
-C
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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.
There is a good reason why warships have more people then are strictly necessacry to run them on board. 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?
The point is that they are reducing the people that are "strictly necessary". They can then reduce the manpower, and still have a reserve.
Do you know why warships are expensive? No, the main part is actually not building them. Over the life-time of the ship, the far biggest cost is salaries to the people on board. The navy has realized this and it is very wise to reduce the number of sailors and increase automation.
Furthermore, in these days the public is very sensitive about casualties (rightly so); it is thus good to reduce the numnber of people exposed to risk.
Tor
Just broadcast a stronger, interfering signal on the same spread spectrum. They could probably use a home cordless phone (some of which seems to pretty much kill 802.11b in many residences) and a pringles can.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
...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.
Bad form to reply to my own post but check this out:
;-)
The application crashed on a divide-by-zero, if I remember correctly. The underlying OS was nothing to do with it. Or would you rather the OS trapped that error and just substituted in a random number? With the source to the Linux kernel, I'm sure you could do that
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?)
It looks like they had two seperate goals here. One goal was to enable the ship to be commanded from any point. The obvious advantage to this is that it no longer matters if the bridge gets destroyed. You can re-establish your command center anywhere you like. The second was to reduce manpower by introducing more automated systems, which means that merely being able to issue orders by voice from any place on the ship is no longer enough. You need to be able to control automated systems from anywhere on the ship. Of course this doesn't explain why they went for wireless access points, rather than a whole bunch of wired access points.
The article explains the need for wireless here:
So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of the sensors.
If you take a closer look at the article you will also see just how better communications combined with a new set of sensors (etc) is expected to reduce manpower needs:
The wireless LANs will change the way crew members perform their jobs. "Today, they have to do rounds, every 45 minutes or two hours, for example," says Benga Erinle, director of government operations for 3ETI. "They're checking equipment, machinery, and filling out and signing paper logs." The TSM system is intended to do all this automatically. "It goes beyond simply gathering information," Erinle says. "We also use programs for diagnostics and prognostics, based on the data. If a critical system is going to fail, we'll pick that up and alert the chief engineer that this is pending." The TSM system also will change the Navy's long-standing practice of time-based maintenance--of replacing or tearing down machinery after so many hours or days of use.
In other words, on top of all the people who actually man the weapons and run the ship, you need a whole bunch of people who are just doing maintenance. This new system should reduce the number of those people.
All makes sense to me.
I can understand using wireless as a backup system, in case the wire lines get cut by structural damage (read: a hit). Using them as a primary communication system, on the other hand, seems like just asking for trouble.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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.
Thing is, I've worked with a bunch of OSs, including NT4 and guess what: if you set up a few hundred NT servers and workstations in a domain, and one bluescreens, it doesn't take all the others with it!
So this wasn't NT's fault, it was the Navy's.
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.
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
Of course, by the time they're throwing nukes around, this may be the least of the problems...
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
AES is proof against mathematical attacks, but it might not do as well against espionage. Remember: There's more than one way to cat a file.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.