Slashdot Mirror
New Technology May Cut Risk of Giving Syrian Rebels Stinger Missiles
Hugh Pickens writes "PBS reports on a proposal of arming Syrian rebels with a force equalizer to make a decisive blow against Bashar al-Assad's ruling regime — an idea that has so far failed to take hold inside the Obama administration because of serious concerns about flooding a troubled region with dangerous weapons that someday might fall into the wrong hands. Could sophisticated weapons, such as anti-aircraft missile systems, be outfitted with mechanisms that would disable them if they fell into the wrong hands? According to military analyst Anthony Cordesman the U.S. could modify Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank weapons with batteries that cease functioning in a few weeks or months or the weapons could be built to require authentication codes before they are enabled to work. "I think it would be relatively decisive," says Cordesman. ... Another idea is to install GPS-disabling devices so that Stinger missiles only worked in a designated geographic area, such as only in Syria. Such weapons, it is believed, might tip the balance in favor of the rebels in the same way that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, provided by the United States to the Afghan Mujahedeen, helped expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Cordesman stressed that this type of weapon would have to be thoroughly tested to make sure the controls work and could not be undone. 'You could not transfer these types of weapons without these types of protections. You simply have no way to know where they would end up, how they would be transferred, what would happen to them.'"
paging DVD Jon
history will simply repeat itself if we don't learn from it.
We don't want these guys using this stuff against our own troops once our gov't betrays them (isn't that Uncle Sam's standard MO?).
Doesn't US military and government have better things to do, other than supporting prospective pro-Islam terrorists; in past Osama, and now Rebellions in Syria and Fettullah in Pennsylvania?
If you give them an 'expiry date' then they can't be used for future incidents. Couple that with geographical lock and it should be fairly safe.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
"force equalizer to make a decisive blow"
The batteries in my stinger missile have gone dead! What will I do?
The poster picked an apt comparison: it's just like when the US trained and gave weapons to the Afghans against the Soviets. How's that one working out for you guys?
The authentication methods are buggy or can be easily circumvented (thus are buggy).
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
They have lost their damn minds. No way can this have a happy ending. And to think they learn nothing at all from history. The bitching about fast and furious is still going on.
Everything can be hacked, given time and effort, and what this plan will do is to encourage the crazies of the world to get a better understanding of how to make even more lethal weapons. Please don't.
It seems that the US and Russia are fighting a proxy war over middle east oil by alternately propping up and destabilizing the already unstable Islamic regimes there. There is probably legitimacy to this. Without the middle east, Russia will become Europe's oil supply, and thus Europe will lean toward supporting the least stable major power and probably involve itself in another exciting world war.
A better answer here might be to heat up this cold war, as Reagan did in the 1980s and Mitt Romney suggests he may do, by talking tough to the Russians and the Europeans both, and making it clear what's on the table here. International politics is a purely Machiavellian matter because as cruel as Machiavellianism can be, it saves lives and empires from the dustbin of history.
Oh yeah, because this sort of technology worked so well in Fast and Furious when Mexican drug lords used American assault weapons against us after the batterries in the GPS tracking system meant to locate them failed. I am not very convinced this sort of technology would be very difficult to override. The comparison of the Syrian rebels to the Afghan Mujahedeen, aka Taliban, who we are still fighting now, demonstrates an unfornate grasp of history by the people behind this idea. It's still not clear if the Syrian rebels should get military aid from us period -- they are still not a cohesive group, and elements of the rebellion still engage in things like torture and attacks on civilian targets.
"apparently" you mean "pulled out of my ass 5 seconds ago" amirite?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Like the previous poster I replied to, you also need to learn what you're talking about.
The MB was not the ones responsible for the attack on our ambassador.
Nor did "we put them in power" or "give them two countries".
Nor do those countries have "very substantial arsenals".
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Geiger: No, wait a second! Don't touch it.
Rico: Why not?
Geiger: Well, that's a Lawgiver. That's programed to only recognise a Judge's hand. You touch that, it'll take your arm off!
[Rico grabs the gun and points it in Geiger's face. The gun has accepted his grip]
Rico: Gee, how do you like that? I must be a Judge.
[he shoots Geiger]
Maybe we could add a GPS tracker that way we could track the weapons and know exactly where and how they are used...I know! We need a good name for this operation...hmm...missiles go fast, so maybe we could call it "Operation Fast and Furious!"...oh wait...
The US ambassador to Libya was killed by al-Qaeda, not by the Muslim Brotherhood and the US surely did NOT put either in power.
The US didn't do very much in Libya.
The US gave substantial military arsenals to Libya and Egypt? Where did you see that? I can not find anything anywhere on the internet to back that claim.
Where in the World are you getting this information from?
Anyway, round and round we go in the Middle East. The US needs to pull out completely - including ending all support for Israel. The Middle East is this tar baby that has brought the US nothing but death and heart ache and we have received no benefits from the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent there in military action and foreign aid.
And it's the principal of thing: we have no business sticking our noses in places that don't belong.
Oh don't even try, the type of ignorant pillock who thinks that anyone foreign is everyone foreign (i.e. Osama Bin Laden was foreign, so all foreigners are terrorists) can't be reasoned with. They're lost causes beyond help so utterly caught up in their ignorant nationalistic mindset that all hope of anything of value coming from their mouth on a topic involving somewhere outside of their home country is long lost.
Bad idea.
http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps.html
This is also how Iran took down a drone.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
Syrian Rebels ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Al Qaeda.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57531618/rebels-ally-with-al-qaeda-group-to-take-syrian-base/
But the Libyan "rebels" were Al Qaeda imports, too. Just the distortion field of western corporate media makes this "Arab Spring" bullshit.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
ZOMG. Alert the presses! The leader of the free world in his role as chief diplomat invited the leader of another nation, one we have poor relations with, to the white house to talk, to negotiate, to do, you know, diplomatic stuff! SHOCKING!!!
You are as ignorant as you are racist. no I dont like these countries that dislike us a whole lot either. But the man wears multiple hats. The job of POTUS isnt to just shoot first and talk later. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "Talk softly, but carry a big stick." The POTUS is both the chief diplomat, our face to the world, and the CIC of our military, our head general effectively. The diplomat side talks, the CIC side is the big stick. Shooting first cannot work unless you kill every last one of them because anyone left alive will hate us eternally, and full scale genocide will endear us to no one. So we talk. We be diplomatic. We dont shoot first, we are not Han Solo. We shoot when provoked, when talking has failed, when it is the last option.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Great idea, and as soon as some 12 year old technologist finds out how to disable it we have a bloodbath.
Digital Restrictions Management has and always will fail to a determined adversary. Professional security developers with millions of dollars of support had their attempts for DRM on game consoles, satellite cards, cell phones and other hardware defeated by the home brew community. Start getting professionals with proper labs and budgets involved and DRM will always fail, it's just a matter of time. What DRM can do is buy you time, but it does at the cost of exposing whatever DRM mechanism your using at that moment.
Better to provide proper assistance to the rebels to begin with and that way you can help guide them to make sure they turn out like the Taliban. That's what happens when you take a hand's off approach. This time I say we let's the Europeans or Asians step and do the right thing with boots on the ground.
You're probably right that this is duct tape for a leaky political mess.
I'm less concerned about them shooting down our drones than smuggling them into New Jersey and shooting down commuter flights, or waiting on boats offshore to shoot down international flights. When a few 747s explode into the Pacific, we might find ourselves reconsidering these giveaways.
The obvious reason for designing an intentionally high maintenance weapon is expensive ongoing service contracts, the "prevent arms from falling into the wrong hands" is just the straw dog to get it to pass and make some dough.
If you really wanted a solution to the "prevent falling into wrong hands" problem, you'd produce about 100 times as many SAMs as you "need" but 99 of them are booby trapped with bad source code in the guidance computer or intentionally faulty whatevers in the innards, so they intentionally don't work. Then use the usual crypto channels to distribute, perhaps in real time, which serial numbers actually work to "our guys". OR certain serial numbers work on certain GPS distributed UTC dates and they rotate every week/month/whatever.
Launching a SAM against a .mil aircraft and missing is usually a career ending mistake as the AC and its friends take great offense at such activities and vaporize the launcher. So odds are 99/100 that its about as effective as a parachute flare and somewhat less than 1 in 100 that it'll actually blow up a plane. With those odds you're better off throwing rocks than stealing SAMs.
All missiles and rockets are already serial number tracked thru the whole supply chain and down to the individual issued to soldiers, and there exists a great crypto infrastructure, so...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If this decision was being made purely on political grounds...
Politics has nothing to do with it. Politically, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, etc should be considered some of our worst enemies, in direct contradiction to every principle we claim to stand for. The decisions are based on who we believe would be the better customer, and what we get in return. We will sell to anybody that can guarantee easy, reliable access to cheap resources and keeps out the competition.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So diplomacy is no longer part of the presidents job?
When did we make that change?
Try not to cry to much when Romney loses.
Look how well that worked out.
Korma: Good
In security circles, doesn't physical access = assumed compromise? Game consoles & "locked" phones, e-Readers, etc. are all compromised within hours of being released to the masses. I think one should be very careful before placing trust in physical access security.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Formula 1 all the way down to Formula 3000 uses GPS to get millimetre accuracy. how can they do that, you ask, when the GPS signals are scrambled in the lower bits? well - and this i heard about as far back as 1993 when i was working for Pi Technology - all that is needed is one single low-power GPS transmitter, placed in the centre of the track which *is* accurate. the GPS receivers lock on to that; this gives a concentric ring of millimetre-level accuracy and the remaining GPS satellites can be used to pinpoint the location.
the point is: a powerful enough (or localised) set of transmissions could easily be used to fake the position such that standard GPS receivers would be fooled, thus defeating any GPS-based "security". what's great about that for the terrorists is that any Cruise Missiles or UAVs homing in on their position might also go "huh??" and take a sharp random turn against a cliff. good, eh? mmm....
Can we just stop trying to solve all our problems with more weapons?
captcha: captive
It was called "The System" Whenever you picked up a weapon, your DNA was checked against a database. No approval means no shooting....until you visit a Drebin (black-market gun launderer) ;-)
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
How about we mind our own goddamn business and stay the hell out of some third world nation's civil war?
Or perhaps you should read what he posted here and in other places? And do you even know the definition of the word? I've railed against overuse of the word before. But even I'm pretty sure labeling all middle easterners terrorists qualifies.
AC's strawman of redirection is hit for 9000 critical damage. AC loses.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I mean, sure, maybe they couldn't use it as a stinger, but that doesn't mean it couldn't still be used as a weapon against US interests. If it has explosives in it, how would this stop anyone from repurposing those explosives if the missile ceased functioning as desired?
As far as I recall, during the 1st Gulf war against Iraq, the French maker of the Exocet missile said in an interview that in the future the it would be a good idea to design missiles so they couldn't be used against freindly forces. It sounded like what he had in mind was an encoded message that would disable the missle if fired against a ship or aircraft.
That's ok for warships and warplanes, but if the missle was stolen during a conflict, it could be used against a civlian target that didn't have the electronic countermeasure.
All the suggested countermeasures would be somewhat effective, but not 100%.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
The issue at hand is not really whether to build in a kill switch into surface to air missiles, but that we're supporting the wrong guys there: al Qaida and islamists, a.k.a. the Syrian "rebels." They may not get their hands on dangerous equipment now, if this equipment is DRMed, but once they overthrow the current secular government there, they'll establish their theocracy, and that theocracy is guaranteed to be just as bad, or likely worse towards the US than the current secular Syrian government has ever been. And, as a state actor, this future theocracy (about to be brought to us courtesy of the current US shortsightedness) will acquire non-DRMed weapons. And then? How do you plan to put that malevolent genie back in the bottle? This whole direction the remodeling of the Middle East has been taken since the so called "Arab Spring" isn't going according to our interests: quite the opposite is true. It's so sad we don't have a First Directive yet, as in the Star Trek Universe! It would have prevented quite a lot of blunders in this region of the world that our leaders totally misunderstand, yet claim to model.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I fully believe that these "safegaurds" will work perfectly for their intended purpose: To soothe the concerns of politicians long enough to make the sale.
Clearly none of this can fully work.... one way or another, with time and enough units, any protection can be disabled, and a disabled device can be re-enabled, or modified.
However, this allows politicians to claim its safe, and then be shielded from blame when it doesn't work out, and they can easily kill any investigations once the heat dies down.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
People kill people.
but ya, giving weapons to others means they'll probably get ebay'd to someone else later. So if you are worried about it, don't give anyone any weapons.
Be seeing you...
in the 1980s we celebrated these mujadeen as freedom fighters. We trained and armed them. It bit us in the ass.
I propose we stop giving out stinger missles peroid.
In the movie a shoulder fired antiaircraft missile was supposed to be disabled. It was - it's flight computer was in fact disabled. But they used the explosives to blow up a ship.
The world is a big place. You trying to shut down *everything* bad that can ever happen isn't gonna work out how you planned.
You're right, according to this source:
However, I was thinking of a descending or ascending flight leaving an airport, many of which are at the water's edge. We have enough problems with people shining laser pointers at these planes.
And you'd be right if this was an argument where we were trying to talk sense into this isotope of Phil. But it's not an argument. It's a debate in a public forum. One guy says something, the other guy disagrees, the wisdom of the crowd votes one up and one down. The rest of us are informed about which idea is crazy and which is rooted in sanity, and the masses are better off for it.
But their core ideology certainly is. You seem to be totally unaware of the deeply anti-US sentiment in their midst; starting from their very first founder Hassan al Banna.. In fact, it was hatred for the US where he stayed for a while that made him found the MB in Egypt. His followers are not different.
Without military intervention of NATO, those guys wouldn't be in power there right now. They would be either dead or subjugated. Fact is: we are helping our worst enemies, and nobody really seems to care. This temporary eclipse of reason and logical thinking among western policy makers is downright scary. I don't hold the general populace responsible for cheering the wrong team: thanks to mass media, they don't know any better. But those in the know should really summon up the courage to finally speak up and insert some sanity into the current debate.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Syria is in the middle of a bloody civil war. Both sides are committing atrocities. One side has much more killing power than the other.
We know Assad is a "bad guy," but Assad remains in power for a reason. He has the support of a lot of people. He is maintaining that support, too.
How do we know that the rebels are not also "bad guys?" If they prevail, will they not butcher their erstwhile opponents?
We should stay out of Syria's civil war.
I am not unaware of it, but that has absolutely nothing to do with blaming the wrong people. Seriously? Explain to me that. Explain it. Explain how the fact the C hates A is relevant to the situation that B killed A and B != C.
Simple. You can't. It is irrelevent. That would be like being attacked by someone backed by the Afghanistan government, but invading Iraq instead..... ....Is that you Mr Rumsefeld?
The MB is not our worst enemy. They are certainly no worse than Ghadafi or Mubarak (sp). We see a sudden outbreak of people wanting their rights, to overthrow oppressive dictators, and we're supposed to prefer the dictators who kill and trample over their own people? Again, much like the other racist, you are lumping everyone over there into the "terrorist" category, even when they do not warrent it. Your brush is too big.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Early returns aren't looking good for him in terms of which one is being judged crazy.
I worked in election humor!
You're hte one talking about multi-decade conspiracies, and having wars just for training the troops and sating bloodlust and telling me what I really meant by putting words in my, when I point out and applaude when a President does more than just order troops in by trying to be diplomatic?
But I'm the one full of BS, Mr Coward?
The only thing you got right is that being diplomatic very often comes down to making a threat. What else would you do? Bribe them? That never works or lasts. And making a diplomatic threat still better than just going over and nuking everything in sight at first provocation. So I'm sorry, but you're a fool.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
It's actually a combination of battery and cooling unit, and it uses Argon gas in order to enable the acquisition indicators, which are needed for the IR and UV targeting systems. Without those parts, you're back to a relatively dumb aiming mechanism. Not that I don't think that any DRM you tried wouldn't be hackable anyway.
Probably they would just get Russian SA-24 "Grinch" missiles instead, which are roughly equivalent to Stingers, with much less DRM than the proposed missiles.
The electronics-based, "DRM" type approaches aren't optimal due to increased complexity. Installing something that requires a GPS lock, time-expiring auth code, etc, reduces the chances of the weapon positively functioning in combat. Furthermore, unless sophisticated Permissive Action Links are used, then any practical solution could potentially be defeated by third-party control/firmware. If they can't keep console hardware from being modchipped without resorting to judicial means, what do you think is going to happen when these diverted weapons end up in the hands of a group with state sponsorship?
Thus, I suggest that the problem be attacked via chemistry. Attempt to develop explosives and rocket propellant that will decompose over time. Yes, this is likely to make the weapons sensitive to storage conditions (thereby altering the "expiration date"). However, a device whose warhead would "expire" in 5 years at room temperature is likely to last at least 12 months in the desert. Other "poison pills" could be added, eg. a compound that would degrade the warhead if it were frozen in an attempt to prolong viability.
Yes, this approach might result in weapons that have to be swapped out frequently, but it would also prevent MANPADS given to erstwhile allies from coming back to haunt us in 15 years. If rogue actors can swap out the propellant and warhead while retaining the appropriate weights & distribution for flight characteristics, then they've probably got state sponsorship anyway (meaning they could get weapons regardless).
Batteries can be replaced.
Activation codes can be written down (or simply bypassed).
This might sound crazy, but we could stop meddling in the internal affairs of almost every country on the planet.
Almost every day, you see Syria in the major news, as if it were the greatest problem this country has. They're beating the wardrums again, so get out your wallets. They say, never mind the povery, the joblessness, and fuel and energy shortages, just jump into another loosing conflict. Regardless of sad stories what the news sites tell you, the war mongers want to go over there because they sent soldiers to fight against us.
As far as the Stinger missiles, they are top shelf tech that shouldn't be sent as care packages. While they are not that complicated, I am sure that they could be modified to be used against the U.S. Their parent system, the Redeye, is not all that different, and was available in the 1960s. Aside from what the news tells you, the stingers battery/cooling canisters could easily be rebuilt giving years of dangerous enjoyment.
Will the Syrian rebels turn on us, just like they are with the did with their own?
What better thing to shoot an airliner down?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
this isn't diplomacy, this is war. Do you know the difference? Giving our enemies weapons didn't work out so well for us in the past, did it.
try not to bury your head too deep in the sand
go fuck yourself dywolf, I'm no racist and even if I was, it would have nothing to do with this situation. He invited people who represent organizations whose stated purpose is racist at it's core. They are actively trying to take over the world, literally, and convert or kill everyone in their path. They stand for slavery, treating women as property, rape as as a hobby and just about everything evil in this world. It's in their fucking literature they hand out at brunch.
In this case, the job of POTUS is to sick the Marines on them, and blow the rotten bastards to smitherines.
Unless you want your mother, wife, daughters, sisters, and any other female member of your family to be killed for even looking the wrong way at a boy. Honor killings, something these freaks find completely acceptible.
The smart play would be to quietly bury some code in the guidance system that causes the missile to explode in the tube if it targets and fires upon a friendly IFF beacon.
American soldiers have to pull the trigger. Period. Any "anti-theft" modification to an existing weapon system is either going to going to be vulnerable to cheap circumvention or is going to take far too long to develop and implement to be relevant for this conflict. Or both for that matter.
This is a political problem, not a technology problem, and not a logistics problem. If NPR can put American reporters on the front lines in Aleppo, then SOCOM can insert and extract anyone they need to at any point. That's not a solution to the political problem either. Even if special forces personnel got in and out without being noticed, it would be impossible to deny US involvement and be believed. At that point, you might as well just do what we did in Lybia: Establish air superiority, pure and simple.
Personally, I suspect that we haven't gotten more involved in Syria specifically because of the election cycle. Our "I got your back" strategy in Libya was very successful but outside of the circle of foriegn policy nerds, the administration got surprisingly little credit for a creative solution that saved thousands of lives and manufactured a lot of goodwill in the region. With that tepid public reaction, there was no way were they going to stick their feet in the Syrian swamp before today. Assuming a re-election is secured, you can expect US involvement in bringing down Assad to move back to the front burner. Our foreign policy goals with respect to both Iran and Israel are too important to let this bump along indefinitely.
Can't they just use some kind of relatively unstable explosive that degrades in a set time, and print a 'Launch By:..' date on the outside?
I'm actually really glad you're right on this occasion, but when I made the post he was +4. The ugly disease of ignorant xenophobia/racism-based nationalism has become all too prominent on Slashdot recently, and sadly the sentiment sometimes gets modded up and stays modded up, which, on a site historically known for having posts modded up with at least some modicum of intelligence and a bit of insight is a sad sight to see.
... like ... lol?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Tell that to the Israelis currently under fire by Hamas, which the Egyptian MB demonstratively back...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.