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Insider's Look at High-Tech High-Speed Navy Vessel
Xidus writes "Computerworld is running an article on the technology behind the US Navy's newest HSV (High Speed Vessel), focusing on interfaces designed to reduce the number of personnel needed on the bridge. Lots of pretty pictures. No word on OSes, although Mozilla is mentioned, and UNIX-ish desktops are visible, along with some nifty virtual-reality tactical displays. Would you like to play a game?"
Hope they have lots of armor around the servers, and a backup bridge.
"uses paperless charts"
It worries me that China is working on an anti-satellite warfare, and the military keeps marching down the GPS for everything road. WWIII could see a lot of pretty hardware sitting at the docks while the navigator runs down to supply to see if they have any "old fashioned" compasses and charts.
Oh well. The military knows what they are doing, right?
Given the previous story on increasing virus/worm activity, whether the DOD has any rules concerning the use of Windows in military settings.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Not everyone gets to window shop at Lockheed.
All of that technology, to serve what end? Killing people.
...
If only there were a reason for America to apply its talents to making the world a better place, instead of making it 'safer for Americans'.
I'm a techno-geek, but its very, very hard for me to get excited about such advanced use of technology for the purpose of putting killing machines on the ocean. Lets see the remote helicopter be used for drought control, or crop maintenance, or airlifting badly needed parts for the local U.N. pump in a village, or something
As long as there are men making weapons, there will be war.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Reducing the number of people required to man the ship is great and all, but, if memory serves, one of the debates about reducing the number of people required to man the ship is the subsequent reduction in number of people available for damage control. If the ship takes damage and there aren't enough (remaining) people able to control the damage, the ship is even more likely to be out of the fight or even lost completely.
I am a Nigerian Colonel,... just kidding. I am writing this in the hopes that I might spare you the horror of your own hypocrisy.
Please cease the use of any of the following: Computers, all frequency hopping radios such as a cellphone, any device making use of transistors of any sort, aluminum cans, modern four wheel drive vehicals, any civil project which might have involved explosives (most roads, power generated by dams, and possibly drinking water), weather forecasts produced with aid of any satellites/computers/radar (ie all of them), trauma medicine, some insecticides, nuclear medicine, nuclear power (which provides a major fraction of the worlds power needs), underwater and space exploration, and, of course, any political system that doesn't involve you being the wholly owned an insignificant subject of someone else.
If those pump parts were badly needed in a village important to the people outside of it, they'd have the resources to buy them. And since I don't see you putting your money where your mouth is, feel free to start leading by example we'll follow along at our earliest convienence. It says something that a 9 year old in the US has a great enough availability of resources that he can get a well built in Africa where the native africans can't.
FYI War pre-dates weapons. Weapons were invented to settle wars quicker. It turns out that while a person can beat another to death with their bare hands, it's exhausting, and time consuming.
Maybe the problem is there just aren't enough american nine yearolds. That must be it.
And so concludes this episode of Oversimplification Theater.
If you check the manufacturer's (Incat) website, they are pretty actively pushing off-the-shelf passenger/freight catamarans to militaries. Only minor modifications (apart from the IT) were necessary to turn a perfectly normal ro-pax cat into the "Swift".
For sure the cheapest way to obtain a new fast vessel class for a navy! Common sense, really: use commodity hardware.
US Navys's HSV 1 "Joint Venture" is a similar arrangement (it's actually Incat's first 96-metre ship, in previous civil life served as "Devil Cat"). Compare to Royal Australian Navy's "Jervis Bay".
"Nearly every function of the ship, from navigation and steering to engine and damage control, is conducted and monitored using commercial, off-the-shelf hardware and software."
LORAN and GPS have been commercially available in civilian navigation systems for ages. Computer navigation and steering is not new. I'm a little surprised that the damage-control isn't customized, but the rest isn't that unusual. In general, a ship is a ship is a ship, and the problem of problems of making it stay afloat and go where you want are the same for military and non-military craft.
May we never see th
The primary role of the US Navy in peacetime is to keep the sealanes open. The only reason you can get those Reeboks for $30 is because the US ensures safe shipping throught the world. Even so, piracy is on the rise since most European nations have killed their navies and the availability of small watercraft in third word countries is greater.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I don't think the Chinese are rational thinkers when it comes to Tiawan, and if they decide to take the island by military means (I think they will manage it using dirty island politics) I don't for an instant think they would hesitate to blind and damage the US military with a satellite strike.
Would we counter with a nuclear strike against the Chinese based on their satellite strike? Absolutely not - in the Western world if no life is lost you don't toss nukes.
The entire space based infrastructure needs to be throughly reviewed. Or, we can wait until the after strike "review board." Maybe we can get the national security advisor to testify?
I realize the original commenter was trying to poke fun, but 'Millitary outsourcing' has been going on so long they have a word for it... Mercenary... and the problem with outsourcing is that while it may or may not be cheaper in the short term to fill a temporary shortfall, mercenaries tend to be more focused on staying alive long enough to collect thier pay, than the zealous die for your country fanatics... making them less 'combat effective.'
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I cannot understate this......everybody knows that a product with pretty screenshots is easier to sell than an ugly one even if the ugly one is much better at doing what it is supposed to do......but real world experiences have shown me that if a software is pretty it does not even need to do anything at all!
I'm not joking here, I have seen software that has been sold and initially installed purely on the basis of a simulated user interface. Management are happy because it looks pretty, and users just carry doing thier job with "the old system" until such time as the "bugs are ironed out" in the new system. Put another way, a total lack of functional code is just a bug, whilst lack of a pretty screenshot is lack of product.
I hestitate to say this is wrong, however. When I go and look at the home page of a new software package one of the first things I look at is the screenshot, and I rarely look at the todo list or "Known issues" until I have actually installed!
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
There was a time when knowing how to read charts, use a sextant, and basicly know where the hell you are at in the world with the use of some very low tech tools was required serve onboard a ship but it seems even in the 1990s this true and proven system started to phase out in the civilian circut. I'm not familiar with the current military stance on the subject.
I percieve this technology as being really damned useful. Even back in 1983... I was the only person who could figure out how to use the LOMAR(sp) system to gadge our posisition, but never the less took readings with a sextant. For 10 days our readings were within minutes of each other, the new system proved it self, but was still a good practice in the event the electronics failed.
I'm all for technology. GPS is a wonderful thing! Digitaly displayed charts are much easier to deal with then protractor and compass. Electronic and remote controls I can see as being useful. But all these wonderful tools are dependent on electricity to operate. It's my hope they would see the wisdom of using humans, paper charts, compass and sextant in the event of a catastrophic failure. After all, being military and sea salt water and technology don't mix. When push comes to shove, you gotta fight for flee... not continue pushing the crosswalk button in the hopes it does something.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
a new ship that can take out the swift by the press of a button.... a canoe with an EMP :D
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
The Navy's track trecord with skelton crews and automation is not flawless.
The Yorktown didn't survive a divide by zero calculation.
I like automation and I love computers, but are they really going to have a technically savvy crew? A crew that could fix the onboard systems if they break, not just utilize them while they are working?
I like the idea of some manual controls to get them out of a pinch.
From the article (talking about the unmanned "Fire Scout"):
Here is one hoping, their encryption is up for it, and their SSL implementation is reliable. Otherwise, "man in the middle attack" may get a new meaning and that "another aircraft" may not be a friendly one...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How we handle Taiwan is important for their internal stability. If we can push them around, are they really a peer? And I think they are. The Chinese are very American in a lot of ways, or the want to be. They just have a different world outlook. Did you know that USA in Chinese is mei guo, or brutally translated rose country? They revere the contributions of the American Volunteer Group, or Flying Tigers, during WWII. They're not as predisposed to venerate the individual, are less blunt, and mercurial in their approach to things, particularly national affairs. While they want to be the one and only China, a nation whole not divided, the leadership knows what an invasion of Taiwan would really mean, and they don't want that. Now, who can be certain if we'd hold to our obligation to defend Taiwan against a mainland invasion, in this political climate, I doubt it. Even on its own Taiwan would inflict horrendous casualties on an invading force, probably requireing months of prepatory bombing by the Chinese. And that's assuming Taiwan didn't restart another illegal nuclear weapons program. Faced with invasion, I've no doubt they'd use it, and the technology would certainly be within their means.
Even in that scenerio, the blinding of US satellites would be nearly useless. The taking of Taiwan would not be an afternoon out. We fly intelligence aircraft looking into china more or less routinely as it is, and there are still SR-71s. If they're not doing it as part of a first strike scenerio (which would just be insane), the only motive they'd have to do it is if expecting direct combat with US forces to deny us real-time imaging. But they couldn't sustain that, not like we could. They may have the boots and rifles, but we've got the force multiplyers. Besides, they'd never bite the hand that's spinning up their economy. It'd be suicide.
I don't have the "In case of WWIII" playbook. But if the Chinese blind a satellite they don't want us to see what they're doing in the next few hours, not days, weeks, months. I would imagin Norad would find few things more provokitive. And with a warheads flight time of under an hour, there isn't much time to decide what happened. Consider that even in the Cuban missle crisis while the Soviets could have taken out almost every US satellite, they didn't. And didn't plan to even as they were mulling over going foreward into WWIII. I doubt that was an oversight.
but 'Millitary outsourcing' has been going on so long they have a word for it... Mercenary
Yes, even internal to nations the military duties are often outsourced by paying someone who needs the money.
How many of the sons and daughters of current politicians serve in the military?
Given the many lives at stake, the only people even possibly qualified to make grave decisions about going to war, of authorizing people to kill and to risk being killed, are those that have experienced those same horrors firsthand.
There are no guarantees that decision makers will be wise, but if their children were in the fray of the battles they instigate it would bring a lucidity to their decision-making process that otherwise could be missing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The system works best, in what i've seen, in the following way: the top policy makers should set priorities and schedules (as in: go as soon as you're ready, just standby, don't go - the world changed) based on information avliable from national security sources. The top military men should plan the actions and carry them out appropriately. Two examples of each:
Vietnam: policy makers decided we had to stop communism. But we couldn't be too mean, so they told the top brass how to fight the war. As a result, it was a giant clusterfuck that we didn't win because the policy makers wouldn't let us win. Failure for everyone.
Somolia: policy makers decide we must take out Adid (he's a bad man.) Command at the base requests armor to get the job done - policy makers decide that would be too mean - light armor only. Our elite troops sit around for a month and a half chasing wild geese until finally they roll out - everyone is under prepared, and they don't have armor to back them up. They come back, minus a few men (one dragged through the streets) and a few with bullet holes in them, but they're still ready to carry out their mission. Policy makers decide it isn't worth the media hit (american boys dragged through the streets in Mogisomethingoranother, newws at 11) and pull the troops out. We lost men for something that wasn't worth doing: everyone loses.
Operation Desert Storm (Gulf War I): policy makers decide we must liberate our friend Kuwait from a crazed dictator (keep in mind exactly what the objective is). They go to the joint chiefs and tell them what the goal is. The joint chiefs go to work, plan an extrodinary attack (including using 6 (i believe) SEALS (to keep this on topic) to divert a whole Iraqi division - oustanding) and liberate kuwait. Less than a week later, we have acheived what we wanted - Iraq out of Kuwait. Success accross the board - everyone's happy. Note, the policy makers did not dictate how the action would go - only that it was required and they supplied what the military asked for.
Operation Iraqi Freedom (Gulf War II): policy makers decide the Hussein regime must be taken down. Military planners planned a overly successful attack plan (from boarder to Baghdad in days). Objective complete - the policy makers didn't interfere.
Thus: civillians set priorities (based on avliable information), military men acheive them.
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