Slashdot Mirror
How Tech Almost Lost the War
An anonymous reader writes "Blame the geeks for the mess in Iraq? Wired says so. Networked troops were supposed to be so efficient, it'd take just a few of 'em to wipe out their enemies. But the Pentagon got their network theory all wrong, with too few nodes and a closed architecture. Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq."
Our military doesn't have efficient networked killing machines? Go to liveleak.com and look for some AH64 Apache videos from Iraq or Afghanistan. They are killing people from 1-2 miles away with very accurate 30mm cannon fire all while communicating with the guys on the ground.
Funny, they're busy blaming the democrats for the war this week.
== Bad when you create 2x more insurgents because of all the civvies you just collaterally damaged.
We should've sent the guys who said we were going to be greeted with candy and flowers.
It upset our oil supply, thereby raising the price of oil. The oil cos, and subsequently the Bush family, liked that. Halliburton got paid way too much for a government contract that was handed to them on a silver platter. Every stock holder in Halliburton, including most of the Bush administration liked that.
I'm sure there were many reasons we went to war. They all point to money and power.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
He is calling Hizbollah opeartives (Israel opponent in the 2006 Lebanon War) "primitive foe". That is as far from the trough as it could be. In fact Hizbollah won this war because it was more technically and organizationally sophisticated than IDF in ground war.
According to prisoners each Hizbollah anti-tank missile operator launched more than dozen missiles during the training. The Israel Army representative told that IDF "could only dream" about such level of training. BTW cheapest ATGM cost around 5k $. But Hizbollah also used some 9M133 Kornet (60k $ a pop). And Hizbollah had a lot of ATGM operators, so many that ATGM were used often against Israel infantry. Hizbollah operatives were well coordinated, using mobile phones and radio, well supplied and had had a network of concealed concrete bunkers, with communication lines, optic and stores.
It's plain stupid to call combatant capable of successful launch of modern anti-ship missile "primitive foe".
The authoritative study of civilian casualties was done by a group from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Here is a link to an article bolstering the validity of the study; it has links to a review of the original study.
The "iraq body count" guys are just counting dead listed in press releases.
I agree with him. C is not easy. It is a language for programmers, not for people that are mainly into e.g. mechanical stress simulations. Granted, with appropriate libraries, and all that, you could make an environment suitable for mechanical stress simulations, using C as a base language. But unless you already have that environment, and are able to show it to him, there's no reason for him to start learning C.
I suggest you try to show him MATLAB instead, and see if he's more impressed this time. (And the matlab compiler makes this a "compiled" language too, if "compiled" is of importance to you (I assume it's totally unimportant to him)).
It's much worse than an over-reliance or mis-application of technology, or having the means justify the end, it's mistaking a means for an end.
Jeff Huber just put up an excellent essay on this which can be summed up by the two quotes by Clausewitz:
"Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa."
and
"If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits."
The most efficient "kill-chain" won't do squat unless there is a clear and achievable objective. The other problem is that the "kill-chain" that is being used is purpose built for set piece battles between great powers basically 2nd generation warfare (web 1.0) versus 4th generation asymmetric warfare.
You don't even need Clausewitz, Powell will suffice. To use a shortened version of the Powell doctrine:
- Do we have a clear attainable objective?
- Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
- Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
- Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
- Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?