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Soldiers Call for Engineering Tech Support
chuckfucter writes "Wired news writes that soldiers in the battlefield now have their own army of geek advisers whom they can contact whenever they need technical support. The stakes are much higher here, with troops asking about the structural integrity of bridges, roads, dams and airfields: Can this structure be safely used after sustaining damage from bombings?"
Give it a few months and they'll outsource it to India like all the other tech support jobs.
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In heavy Indian accent... "Thank you for calling the United States Army Tech support line, what is the problem today?" "excuse me i can't understand what your saying..." "I said what seems to be the problem today sir?" "I still can't make that out." "Sir, how can I help you?" "Umm well...OH MY GOD WERE UNDER ATTA....*line goes dead*" yup....how long before someone running for office has this outsourced to save the tax payers money?
So its the same guys that stated "hell yeah it stands after a plane hits it, it was built that way" ? How can a civilian engineer tell if a bridge stands after a bomb hit ? Are there engineers that actually have seen lets say an iraqi rope bridge that has been mortared around 5 times and can tell if it holds a humvee or not ?
Thanks for calling the USMC technical support line.
If you have been shot, press "1".
If you have been bayoneted, press "2".
If you want to shoot someone else, press "3".
If you want to talk to a human being, a real nerdy type, the type you jock military type assholes used to bully in high school then you can kiss my safe, bunkered, hairy corn-fed ass. Yeah, not so clever now are you? Right, now Ive got your attention, lets talk about that wedgy you gave me in sixth grade...
Well, this is from 1991.
The military's "combat cell phone" system is called MSE, Mobile Subscriber Equipment. It's kind of slick. Its all digital. There's a little box that's plugged into the phone that has crypto keys in it. The same keygen box plugs into...
SINCGARS, the standard digital tactical field radio of the US military, which uses digital spread-spectrum frequency hopping. The key box is used not only to supply the various keys for encrypting, authenticating and decrypting signals, but also for salting the RNG for the freq hopping algorithm. SINCGARS is also used by Air Force FACs and CAS units to communicate with ground units.
SINCGARS is used by EVERYONE in the US military.
Above that, they have various satellite, VHF and UHF radio systems, etc. (TRITAC comes to mind, used for Division-Corps-Army comms).
Military fascimile machines may be slow, but their data streams are encrypted also.
The Signal Officers are in charge of keeping track of all the crypto boxes, distributing code books, etc. for the units they're attached to.
Brigade and Division HQ units have signals units associated with them.
But this is all from 1991 when I was a 2LT at SOBC, Ft. Gordon, GA.
I'm sure some of the Jane's books have more details.
It may make the difference between life and death.
Then I'm glad they decided to use this method instead of AskSlashdot.
Youre ignoring the main point - Saddam was behind Sept 11 ;)
Examples given were load-bearing estimates, structural damage estimates, trajectory calculations, etc. Absolutely none of the stuff your average PC geek would do.
solider> *talking into a radio* my M16 is jammed and the enemy is closing in, what do I do?!
nerd 1> have you tried installing GNU/linux on it? it never jams.
nerd 2> Mister, install gentoo. It's the only way to be sure it wont jam again. You have to throw each bullet yourself but-
nerd 3> *sigh* why would anyone install linux on an M16 while OSX is available for the AK47?
and so on...