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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.
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)
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?
Interestingly enough, I have a friend who designs and implements repeater systems on big ships (aircraft carriers). He once described to me the difficulty of making a simple walkie talkie radio work all around the ship. The excessive steelwork and armory are the least of his worries. Making it all work with less than 1mw is the big issue.
Remember, "stealth" is important, and when a carrier group goes dark to be more invisible, the last thing we want is the enemy sniffing out a little walkie talkie somewhere.
Take that little walkie talkie times a thousand repeaters and you are looking at quite a bit of radiation. They literally have to make sure that only one is operating at a given time on a given frequency. In a ship with 5000 occupants, this is quite difficult.
Then again, this is just a little destroyer the article is talking about. I imagine 802.11b is probably alright still, but they will probably use something like bluetooth--lower power--and then putting a tranciever in every room. Still, interesting to think about..
Cool! Amazing Toys.
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
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.
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.
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)
just rig a microwave oven to run without the door and point it at the ship. all standard 802.11b communications will be scrambled.
the standard 100mW WiFi transmitter is nothing against an 1100W microwave oven with the door open.
and we should keep using flags and pigeons which are all but impossible to interrupt and intercept
This (humourous) rebuff to the people who are worried about wireless control of warships is misplaced. The danger is partially social as well as technological. You know when a pigeon has been intercepted - you don't get the pigeon or because you see it is a physical medium like the post you are familliar with the possibility of interception and thus treat the message with appropriate scepticism.
With 'hi tech' the user is usually a 'poor knowledge' user and will accept the results blindly. How many times have you questioned the results of a pencil and paper calculation vs. an electronic calculator even though a slip of the finger can make the calculator result useless but accepted blindly? A communication blackout on a wireless network on board a ship may just be accepted as 'normal' because, after all, the Windows PC at home screws up sometimes. Humans (mostly) nowadays blindly accept the results (and failings) of computers and don't understand the failure modes. This is the biggest risk.
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.
That is one example. Another is the basic infantry soldier. As part of basic training, they are taught the differences in security of radio (least secure), direct land line (More secure), and person to person (most secure).
The challenge/response authentication used by the military for voice communication, to my knowledge, has never been broken by an enemy either.