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Technology Leveling The Playing Field In Modern War
The IEEE spectrum site has up an article written by the author Robert N. Charette describing the 'empowerment of the individual to conduct war' through technology. In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare. "As events are making painfully clear, [counterterrorism expert John Robb] says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing 'small groups to...declare war on nations.' Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3."
the germans did pretty good with old technology, and I think that even today they'd make most smaller countries think twice about attacking them if they 'only' had wwII era weaponry.
In fact all that tech is quickly becoming a weakness.
Think about South Korea, more afraid of North Koreas conventional weaponry and artillery then of their nuke (assuming they really do have one).
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Seriously, WTF? How does a Playstation have any benefits over other smaller, cheaper, lighter computer hardware for guiding missiles? How does cheap computer hardware have any benefits at all when you don't have the software to run on it? How would hardware and software have any benefits at all when you don't have any guided missiles in the first place, and if some rogue state (or the CIA, depending on whose side you're on) wanted to supply you with them, they could just supply you with guidance systems at the same time?!
on the subject.. remember Bruce Simpson and his DIY cruise missile that various governments stamped on?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3302763.stm
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
He's talented and not afraid of controversy and his part in the infamous "jet carts" episode from Scrapheap Challenge is excellent. I always thought he had a point about this one.
btw. I always though IE D from the article was a very misleading term - many of these devices are NOT improvised the insurgents pack them out on a factory line and some of them are relatively advanced in the design and detonation system - as far as I can tell from the news reports.
We can think of terrorists much in the way we think of "trolls" on an Internet forum. Essentially, they both perform acts intended to annoy other people, to the point that the targets end up overreacting in such a way that hurts themselves. In the Internet world, comparing the evolution of Slashdot versus GameFAQs shows the right way and the wrong way of handing such folks.
Take Slashdot. Support for community-wide discussion was enabled, and soon enough, there were "trolls". After some experimentation, a community-based moderation system was set up. So nowadays the "trolls" can post all they want, but the community will ensure that such comments are moderated down. So in general, the "trolls" are ignored, and even marginalized, without compromising the ability of Slashdot users to freely discuss a very wide variety of issues. Best of all, those who want to read what the "trolls" write are free to do so, if they browse at -1.
Take a site like GameFAQs. Early on, they added discussion forums to their site. Soon enough, they got "trolls" posting there. But instead of taking a sensible approach like Slashdot, where a large swathe of the community is involved in the moderation process, GameFAQs appointed a small, select number of moderators. Most of these moderators were immature, anti-social, 15-year-old unemployed kids who had hours upon hours each day to do nothing but delete the posts of others. In their quest to eradicate "trolls", they essentially destroyed the ability for the legitimate GameFAQs forum users to have any meaningful discussion. They overreacted, and took out not only the trolls, but everyone there who had something interesting to say.
That isn't exactly correct, and, more importantly, war doesn't boil down to just having the best tanks. What's more important is how you use them.
1. German tanks _were_ weaker. Yes, everyone knows about Tigers and Panthers later, but in 39 we entered the war with Pz-I and Pz-II. That was the bulk of the German army. The I series was little more than an armoured car with two _medium_ machineguns in a turret. They were intended to be training tanks, but got pressed into the war because of lack of anything better.
Plus a couple of better ones, half of them captured from the Czechs, but they were anything but the bulk of the army.
Most German soldiers were equipped with a bolt action rifle until the end of the war.
Where Germany excelled were the doctrines. I.e., how you use that equipment.
E.g., tanks were weaker, but that was ok, because they were only supposed to punch through or bypass, take some important position, then let the enemy attack you to take it back. And then you could use the 88mm FLAK gun to kill any better tanks the enemy might have had. That was Blitzkrieg.
E.g., the soldiers may have had bolt action rifles, but that was ok because the German infantry doctrine had the squad machinegun as the central piece, and the rest of the squad was mostly support for it. (By comparison, the Americans saw it the other way around, so they were saddled with the shitty BAR as a piss-poor substitute for a squad MG.)
2. The Soviet union was more technologically advanced than you seem to think, grasshopper.
The T34 was years ahead of anything anyone else had. The 76mm gun could break through any other nation's tanks' armour even with the high explosive round. And the front armour was just short of invulnerable to anything Germany had on a tank.
The T34 was one of the reasons why Germany rushed to attack the USSR early. Hitler couldn't risk waiting until it's produced in large numbers.
You know the (in)famous German Panther? Well, that was a shameless copy of the Soviet T34. Really. The initial proposal was to just start manufacturing T34s, but it was seen as a matter of national pride to not be that obvious about it. So they changed the gun on it and a few other details, but otherwise it was still just a modded T34.
The KV-1 and KV-2 were a nightmare for the German army too. It took quite literally hundreds of hits to disable one. That was _years_ before the Tigers.
Add other advances, like rocket artillery, early semi-automatic rifles (and mass use of SMGs, far ahead of the numbers the Germans had), etc, and the Russians weren't technologically handicapped at all.
Heck, even their AT guns, Germany used any they could lay their hands on. There were whole series of vehicles built with captured soviet AT guns. That says something, doesn't it? They wouldn't have used something that's two generations behind.
3. Don't get me wrong, the USSR did have its own problems and handicaps. But it wasn't as handicapped as most people seem to assume anyway.
The biggest and foremost problem the USSR had wasn't technological at all. Their army had just gone through Stalin's purges, and was (A) lacking competent officers, (B) paralized with fear of being the next scapegoat if they show any initiative, and (C) put under the control of comissars who were there just for political reasons, not for any military competence. The USSR, including the army, also had a _massive_ morale problem. At least half the people (and almost all the minorities and non-Russian Soviet republics) would have been happier to fight against Stalin than for him.
_That_ is the main factor that almost doomed the USSR in the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
A second problem -- again, mostly because of doctrine and political idiocy, rather than technology -- was that the Russians didn't believe in using radios on their tanks. They had them in homeopathic quantities, if at all. So once they were buttoned up in combat, each tank was almost on its own and had
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>This is how Afghanistan defeated the U.S.S.R. ...along with US funding, training, and a steady supply of Stinger missiles...
The Muj didn't beat the Soviets alone. They could never have done it without our assistance.
-l
Indeed. Machiavelli laid this out in The Prince centuries ago. It's a very readable book, I recommend it.
That's why it's kind of mind-boggling to see the US fail so miserably in its imperialist occupation in Iraq. The part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is especially laughable in this respect; it shows that Bush, along with his merry band of war criminals, is most certainly as stupid and ignorant as he looks.
Firstly, the author was not saying that open source is a form of terrorism. What he was saying is that the rapid and open communication model used by open source is much more efficient than the closed encrypted compartmented model used by the U.S. Military Industrial Complex: Terrorists communicate on open websites in near realtime while the military communicates through channels with huge delays. A single terrorist can read the terrorist literature from anywhere and change tactics appropriately. A single U.S. soldier neither has access to the up-to-the-second information on new tactics nor the authority to act upon it.
In terms of acquisition, a terrorist can cobble together any sort of armament with any materials available and if it doesn't work, they try again very rapidly. A single U.S. soldier must generally wait for new specially designed equipment to come from the U.S. to combat a given problem. This can take months when lucky and years when not lucky. While the new special equipment likely works very well, the need may have gone away by the time it is delivered. It's not the danger of consumer devices the author was pointing out; it the fact that the enemy has simple cheap and brutally effective weapons based on consumer devices where we have nothing that is either that cheap or nearly as cost effective for the battle at hand. The point about the PS3 was not that the bad guys have PS3 based missiles it's the fact that say a blackberry's processor is just as capable of running a cruise missile as a 1 million dollar circuit card on a cruise missile. That's not to say that the terrorists have the software, it only points up the fact that we ought to question why it takes the U.S. a million dollar control board to do the same thing you could do with a PS3.
What I think the author was trying to say is that we should have the Industrial portion of the Military Industrial Complex cranking out cheap equipment from off the shelf parts designed to meet the need at hand rather than designing multi-million, multi-billion, or multi-trillion dollar systems that take months, years, or decades to field. Why send in a $100,000 packbot to look for explosives if you can send in a $1000 wheeled vehicle made from R/C car parts. With the availablity of cheap explosives on the part of our adversaries, there is no way we can hope to solve the problem with money when there is a 1:100,000 disparity in the cost to us to take out insurgent weapons.
I work for a company that develops quick off the shelf systems for the U.S. military. One system I worked on along these lines ran linux and consisted of lightly modified PC's combined with other special gear. I think we spent 6 months just performing the environment tests to show that the equipment would survive multiple trips to 40 below zero, explosive decompression of an aircraft around it, salt spray etc. It took over a year to get this expedited product out the door.
While the testing was was justified in the case I worked on, I don't see a reason to worry about antarctic applications of tiny cheap and disposable robots for use in the desert. Even if the lifetimes of a lot of this special purpose equipment are short, I think it would be better to put out more cheap equipment faster. A crate of mostly working robots for examining IED's designed as the 90% solution,ON THE GROUND TODAY (with the soldiers), is worth a lot more that a perfectly tested triple checked crate of indestructible robots delivered after the squad they were supposed to protect has perished.