Slashdot Mirror
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."
I can see Microsoft's new marketing campaign now. "PS3's are for terrorists"
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?!
I'd thought guerrilla wasn't exactly a new concept...
/* BTW inexpensive == cheap */
Ignore this signature. By order.
The real problem with expending your military might in an endless fight is the same as abusing antibiotics. You train your enemy how to adapt to your attacks and how to generate new ones against you. This is one reason why we had the Powell Doctrine. You attack with a clear goal, a clear exit strategy, and overwhelming force. This is what we learned in Vietnam. Powell & Armitage were the only members of the Bush administration who were in the army and we told to shut up by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. Now we have trained a new generation of Mugahadin on two fronts how to bleed the US Army. In fact this was Bin laden's stated policy. He said he could run a $100,000 opperation against us and in turn we would spend billioins to fight him. At the time of this post "The War in Iraq Costs $471,396,995,064. Wow Bush et. all could not have done a worse job of responding to asymmetrical warfare. This is how Afghanistan defeated the U.S.S.R. and in some ways Afghanistan was the straw that broke the camel's back. Now we as a country have run up or credit cards only to run up or mortgages on s speculative bubble only to run up of national debt to what end. The dollar plunges, the rate of abortions goes up, and the federal government expands its powers. For what?
In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare.
Such as? I couldn't find much at all in the article except for some vague references to IEDs and cell phones, terrorist manuals found on the internet (most of which, according to TFA are terribly inaccurate) and ridiculous comments such as the one about PS2 being used as a missile guidance system. Sounds like someone came up with a new buzzword "open source warfare" and thought it was so cool that it warranted a 5 page article. People have used guerrilla tactics forever and I don't see anything terribly new here except perhaps detonating bombs remotely using a cellphone.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Wow.
I didn't know veterinarians were so militant.
Though I can see the rationale... if you're going to spay (or bathe) a cat, you'd better be learned in the arts of war.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Cheap terrorism becomes "global warfare".
Calling the World Trade Center attacks an "Attack on America" just upgraded a couple of lunatic terrorists to warfaring guys that can attack a nation.
What a bunch of bullcrap. But good for the security industry. They can sell a bunch of crap on that. The Iraqis are now used to live with a big one every week. America turned into a bunch of pussies because of one lousy (OK, it was pretty good, but it was still just one) attack. I am from Germany and we went through this before. The RAF formed in the 70s and the whole nation went ape shit crazy. Anti-Terrorism-legislation went unanimously through parliament that was against basic rights and the constitution on many accounts.
I think this makes terror work in the first place. If we don't pass legislation. If we don't go ape shit. Then we win against them. The loosing starts by calling them terrorists. They are a bunch of lunatics that badly need to be put behind bars. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Modern warfare"? This article marks just another loss.
Hate to break it to you, but you do know that computers were around before 2002, right?
Monstar L
"Open Source" is so 1995. Good lord, he even makes reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Could this article be more hackneyed? Time to update the buzzwords at least. This is Warfare 3.0! (Or is that too 2002?)
The insurgency has an advantage in that all they really need to do to win is continue to create a lot of chaos. That's a somewhat more modest objective than invading and occupying another country on the other side of the globe, which no number of PS3s and radio shack components will enable any guerilla army to do any time soon. They aren't particularly high tech, unless you were naive enough to think Iraqis didn't have cell phones and the Internet prior to the war. So technology isn't really leveling the playing field at all; it's just the nature of counter insurgency warfare.
It's a shame we lost a $100,000 robot to disarm a much less expensive IED, but that's why we built the robots. Ideally they'd come back from every mission, but if they don't it's quite an improvement over losing a solider, as we might have done in Vietnam.
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.
Given their extremist political views, I'd think they'd use Subversion instead of CVS.
Ghengis Khan did not build a government that could outlast the absence of his troops. His empire fell apart right after he died. The Khmer Rouge fell apart at the first sign of foreign intervention. The Germans did significant damage to their rear-area security on the Eastern front by terrorizing local populations and creating fertile ground from within which Soviet saboteurs could operate.
The Romans were mostly successful because they extensively employed the strategy of Pax Romana, which basically the antique equivalent of the modern concept of soft power. You see, for most of the peoples around the Roman Empire, war was endemic (for example, the Germanic tribes raided each other on an annual basis) and they knew that life would be longer, more prosperous, and more peaceful if they joined their larger neighbor.
There are many kinds of power (power being defined as the ability to influence events to your advantage). The ability to inflict damage is one, the ability to entice others to your position is another, the ability to bring economic factors into the game is another, political will is another, and so on. Also, power is non-fungible, that is, being powerful in one area does not compensate for a great weakness in another area. This is why the EU, which is a great economic power, is not considered a world power as it lacks the political will to act in concert. Similarly, India's large population and military might (they are a nuclear power) do not compensate for its economic weakness.
Fear works to some degree, but only in concert with other elements of power. You can only build a stable system if the majority of people within that system agree on its fundamental precepts (this is one aspect of political power). So, if we try to build a government in Iraq based on fear, we are going to run into problems that the power we exert in one arena (military might) will not compensate for our failure to exert power in other arenas, such as political will.
Developing a strategy that will bring several elements of power to bear is doable, but very difficult. That is why, in the future, we should avoid electing uneducated people (an MBA is not an education), or at least elect uneducated people who will appoint educated advisors and then listen to them instead of the veep.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Nah, most of their tanks came from Tankograd, a city they built pretty much from scratch around some enormous tank factories.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
All your points amount to NOTHING because Cheney stated exactly what would happen as well when he supported 41's decision not to invade Baghdad. Even Dick (the heartless devil) Cheney knew what would happen and told us clearly concisly and with conviction. Its not some self-fulfilling prophecy, it was the inevitable result of our actions. Clear to ANYONE who knew anything about Iraq, even some of the Vulcans; Cheney knew, Powell knew, and Armitage knew. Bush didn't even know who the Kurds, Shia, and Shite were when he invaded.
European opposition was like an adult saying to a teenager "don't drink and drive or you'll smash into a tree or worse kill some poor family who are driving home." Then the kid goes out gets drunk and smashes his Dad's suburban into a minivan full of kids at 95 mph. That's Iraq. That's not 20/20 hindsight. Just because you did not have the ability to model the results of a US invasion of Baghdad does mean other people didn't know what was going to happen.
If the EU is trying to "assert" themselves against us why is NATO in Afghanistan? Why because it was a legitimate target and one that needed attention. Iraq at the time was just another shit hole ruled by an asshole with limited ability to extend its power beyond its border. What poower it did have still acted as a counter balance to Iran.
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.