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Could Tech Have Stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us?
JonZittrain writes: This summer, ISIS insurgents captured Mosul — with with it, three divisions' worth of advanced American military hardware. After ISIS used it to capture the Mosul Dam, the U.S. started bombing its own pirated equipment. Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.
I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?
We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.
I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?
As desirable as it would be in the case if ISIS, wouldn't implementing such kill switches on weapons be as ineffective as DRM for copyrighted material, with undesirable side-effects for "legitimate uses" and plenty of workarounds for "illegitimate" users?
Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
No. Next question.
Any system that's trusted to grant or revoke capabilities must have done way to be authenticated. Any authentication system can be faked with sufficient knowledge. You can control how difficult faking the system can be, or how much knowledge is needed. But it cannot be eliminated.
Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
You cannot permanently defend technology with more technology, just add timesinks. If you create a killswitch, you add multiple attack vectors - either the people who control access to the killswitch themselves, the people who designed the killswitch, or the possibility of brute forcing or exploiting that killswitch.
They don't put disable switches in them because the first thing someone would do is figure out how to disable them. So ISIS would have just disabled the Iraqi equipment, seized it, re-enabled it then disabled the switch.
Not even to mention what would happen to US forces if their equipment contained similar devices.
Next question.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
Look at what the Viet cong managed to accomplish. Even if a piece of equipment can be secured with sophisticated means, the parts could still be salvaged and built into something else.
It does not matter in any case, as the maxim that physical security is required for any security still holds valid. We cannot secure something if it is in the physical possession of an enemy.
No.
"pirated" is not the verb you want there, it's "stolen". To equate piracy with theft is purely political and thus retarded and dilutes the meaning of both words.
If the stuff requires complicated keys, you can take/destroy the keys and leave the gear.
No one would buy it if a foreign power could disable it. Instead, you get what is often called the "export version" or, more colloquially for Russians, the "monkey model." I can assure you that whatever might have been captured in Mosul might have been of American origin and might have actually done some of the things reported, but it has nowhere near the capabilities of the real deal.
Cause security and things like that can't ever be bypassed or anything...
Digital restrictions do not work in the real world. With this the military is going to have to pirate it's own equipment to use it.
I can see it now a soldier out in the field goes to fire a rocket launcher and it goes oops sorry we can't connect to the DRM server please try again later.
Name one DRM scheme that hasn't been cracked?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
There is a kill switch for military equipment. It's called drones.
I am reminded of Asimov's story "The Mayors," in Foundation (first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1942, in which an "ultrawave relay" disables the warship that the Foundation sold to the Anacreonian navy when the Anacreons try to use it against them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So what the enemy needs to do to win is to get disable codes?
Given Pentagon's contractor efficiency and reporting requirements, the choices will probably be in a plaintext file accessible from the internet, in a budget report.
Maybe not sell U.S. military equipment to anyone.... I know it will reduce the profits of companies that like to make big money off of war and death, but so the fuck what.
Military equipment MUST just work on demand!!! Our fighting men aren't going to want their tank to shutdown right in the middle of combat and have to enter a new key code. There are very good reasons why stuff tanks don't require keys and that discovery was paid for with blood. It sounds like some idiot with no clue on combat requirements wants to impose a technical problem on our fighting men to solve a political problem.
I don't want to do a sig now
How about we just stop invading other countries where we know people don't like to see Americans? If we had opted out of the second Iraq war, we could have saved thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our own collective faces on the international stage. To top it all off we wouldn't need to be having this discussion at all. We didn't accomplish anything with that war.
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The US has not given the Iraqi military "advanced" weapons. They currently have no air defense at all except what the US provides them. The most advanced weapon system they have is the M1A1 but even that has had a lot of tech and armor stripped from it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Is to stop taking sides in disputes inside hostile (but sovereign) nations and supplying the "good guys" with our weapons.
If the weapon is sufficiently fiddly and delicate, and the attacker has limited time to subvert it, a variety of means might work (many of them already explored with nukes and/or SALT arms reduction verification stuff in the late cold war); but for simpler, more durable, gear, and hardware subject to prolonged attack, Not Happening.
In particular, nukes are (relatively) easy to secure because they include a fair amount of conventional explosive, improper detonation of which will produce a mess but a fairly worthless yield, which offers a nice failsafe option. With devices that aren't as intrinsically touchy, you don't have the same leverage.
We (the west) have these amazing satellites that can read a newspaper from high orbit. Don't we have weapons that can target these people whilst they are in transit from one city to another to reduce the chances of harming innocent women and children. If we can see them whilst they are travelling between cities in column formation, we should theoretically be able to surically strike them, no?
There is heavy weaponry, modern heavy weaponry, and outdated heavy weaponry. Part of the answer may be to mothball replaced or outdated hardware (yes, expensive but what isn't when we're talking the military-industrial complex), and make that what we arm the ally-of-the-week/enemy-next-year with. If it gets pirated, at least we aren't getting shot with our own best hardware.
At least outfit anything that can kill more than twenty people at once with a satellite beacon so a drone can take it out if it is stolen and deemed dangerous enough.
Special rings in the chamber that corrode/expand over time or wear out like a lightbulb at 700hours-ish of usage. Guidance chips that require preauth would also work in missles/laser artillery to some degree.
I'd bet on the components breaking down as a better option as its much harder to create a good spring inside a sealed case, etc..
As soon as it becomes known that the weapons exported by US have a "kill switch" or the equivalent, a lot of users will simply stop buying them.
We should not make these weapons in the first place , then we would not have these problems.
The situation in Iraq has spiralled out of control from the fallout of the second world war repartitioning of the middle east with not regard for the indigenous people.
war begets war
every time we try and fix it gets worse and now we face the possiblity that the russians and the middle east might unite against us.
we need to back away and leave it well alone and stop selling weapons to anyone.
[site]
Bring it all back home. For all the hullabaloo about letting technology getting into "enemy hands", including export restrictions, the "let's just leave a bunch of military hardware in the Middle East" scenario was apparently never considered a risk.
Of course, it's too late now for the Mosul equipment, but the same thing could happen anywhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It's almost as if the belligerent, short-sighted idiots are still in charge.
We need leaders who understand the geopolitical situation and can use tools of negotiation. These are social issues, not tech.
Betteridge says no
Would you want a weapon that would only work if someone else said it was okay to use? It's been tried before but it does not work. BTW, did Thatcher herself figure the codes out? and disable them? I think that credit goes to good British Engineers and not to some politician.
I thought we were the Popular Front
Once the soldiers learn how to disable the lockout it will become unwritten standard practice to remove the lockout before relying on it, all it would take is one incident where it got locked out due to a bug or other failure. Would you want your life relying on a weapon that would stop working if it couldn't phone home?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The Mosul Armory should have been equipped with an explosive capacity to render the arms and ammunition useless before they could be captured by the enemy. Such a system assumes that the Iraqi military is competent : an obvious fantasy.
and this is not new, ie enemies using captured weapons against others, so WTH don't these stock piles get blown up moments after being taken over? Do we really only find out about this days later?
Wasn't there a huge stock pile of explosives in Iraq left unattended during the takeover and surprise surprise they were what fueled the IED craze which killed and wounded thousands? I'm just saying, there's even recent history how completely dumb it is to leave weapons available to the enemy. Well, unless the military just enjoys a fight so they want wars/fighting to last longer. Silly I know but what else explains the pure ignorance of not directing cruise missiles, or others on these stock piles?
To add kill switches that can easily be bypassed by anyone. And probably would end up being designed to be bypassed in the long run.
The problem is, how did the equipment get in their hands in the first place?
The solution is, stop putting equipment were it can be aquired by our enemies. That includes shipping it over sea, unless it's going to be physically used in active combat.
But we all know these wars are not:
A. fought to win
B. justifiable
C. directly intended for our or anyones benefit other than rich warmongers
They even destroyed the dies used for manufacturing the parts for those planes and the Iranians just made new ones.
"Could Tech Have stopped the mujahadeen from using our own heavy weapons against us?"
"Could Tech Have stopped mexican cartels from using our own heavy weapons against us?"
"Could Tech Have stopped Afghani armed forces from using our own heavy weapons against us?"
"Could Tech Have stopped Iraqi armed forces from using our own heavy weapons against us?"
there is no amount of technology that will intercede to short-circuit the natural conclusion of a foreign policy of wreckless interventionalism
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've been told that the US used ever-so-slightly larger ammo & guns than the Japanese in WWII, so that the US ammo couldn't be used in Japanese guns, but the Japanese ammo could be used in US guns.
Of course, this doesn't help if the enemy captures the guns, too.
Betteridge aside, what we want and should do is scuttle. Destroy the equipment before it is taken if it cannot be retrieved. There may be some logistical hurdles, but this is far easier and cheaper than retrofitting or designing new weapons with a remote kill switch.
Silence is a state of mime.
As usual, the answer to the headline question is "no". No one wants to buy equipment they won't own; there's always the risk of the wrong person using the killswitch; the killswitch can easily be disabled by destroying the receiver so it wouldn't even fulfill its function. I could see killswitches finding use for prison or riot gear, and maybe to prevent tech from getting captured, but as a general rule the military will avoid them like if it were equipment which could all simultaneously stop functioning at a critical time.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
We gave or sold F14's to Iran. When they pissed us off, we stopped giving them replacement parts IIRC. I suspect suppliers of complex weapons have similar leverage over the people they sell to in many/most circumstances.
So we already have this, in slow motion.
The US already used its rather effective kill switch technology: precision guided bombs. Simple, effective, and just like any other solution you can dream up for this problem, expensive.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
"...but is there a way to improve on what we face now?"
Sure there is. If you want to stymie this sort fo thing in the future, all you have to do is stop equipping foreign forces with US hardware.
If you're not selling/giving the hardware to non-US forces, it will be very difficult for non-US forces to get a hold of it.
Pretty simple, though that might cut into some weapon manufacturer's profits so it's probably not tenable.
=Smidge=
Who is "us" in this story? Why the inclusive pronoun? Nobody attacked me. Nobody attacked the United States or United Kingdom.
Examine your thinking and question your assumptions - or other people will do your thinking for you - manipulating your self-interest and good will to ends that do not serve you well.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?"
No. Of course not. If you can destroy or disable your own equipment remotely then it's only a matter of time before someone else figures out how to use or break that function on their own,.
A much better approach would be to put a little red button on the bottom of everything and let nature take its course.
"I hate warriors, too narrow-minded. I'll tell you what I do like though: a killer, a dyed-in-the-wool killer. Cold blooded, clean, methodical and thorough. Now a real killer, when he picked up the ZF-1, would've immediately asked about the little red button on the bottom of the gun."
Where did this idiot get his history? The Exocet missile had no kill switch. In fact British ships were sunk by the Exocet in the Falklands war. IF there were kill codes and Margret Thatcher used them disabling the Exocet missiles how did these ships get sunk?
I don't want to do a sig now
Exactly. There's a reason hummvees and tanks don't have locked ignition switches. It goes something like "Holy shit, we're about to get vaporized! Start the truck! Start the truck!"
Instead of having merely a kill-switch, how about something that will blow up in their faces and decapitate them?
but they both have the weakness that they need a strong logistical support. So if a weapon was isolated too long, it would become useless.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think this has been covered for new programs starting about 15 years ago... PDF of under SECDEF memo
More like "Would ISIS exist in the first place if USA didn't train the taliban and extremists during the communist era to act against the Soviets, which includes dear Bin-laden, and then left them to seek other justifications to use their newfound talent and equipment after Soviets collapsed?"
Or:
"Would ISIS exist if USA didn't trigger a domino of events starting from the documented removal of Mossadegh in Iran who was the first democratically elected leader, with the Shah, because Mossadegh wanted to up the oil price to fair margins that would benefit Iranian people and bring some order and civilized advancement to them,
which lead to the known revolution and Iran becoming what it is today, while afterwards the USA supported Sadam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran war only to later remove him because "lol dictator" which left a power vacuum that enabled fundamentalists who are much worse than a simple dictator."
Or:
"Would ISIS exist to this extent if USA didn't supply the rebels and terrorists and the "Free Syrian Army" with money and weapons that ultimately ended in ISIS hands, which includes the reporter who was beheaded recently who was attached to an FSA regiment before they changed allegiance to ISIS."
I could go on.
Point being, tech can't stop shitty politics.
I immediately thought of the 1st episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where 99.9% of their modern military force was rendered inoperable. No. Thank. You.
The best "kill switch" is to kill the idea of leaving a ton of advanced military hardware in the hands of less-than-solid governments in the first place (no matter how much defense contractors want to sell their wares). You'd think we would have learned from Iran and the F-14s we left in Iran in the late 1970s as the Islamic Revolution took place.
... Not giving them weapons? As an American Citizen, I'd be serving perhaps 10 years for possessing an M16 machine gun that we were just giving to the Iraqis. When 2nd amendment debates pop up, few people say citizens should be allowed to own tanks, MRAPS etc, but are ok with giving it to a 3rd world country (where many of the Iraqi Army soldiers turned on us as soon as we armed them).
why on earth would 'we' want to disable their gear? "We" armed them to begin with, back when they were 'moderates fighting assad'.. aka, pawns to remove assad and allow a saudi-backed natural gas pipeline to run through syria from qatar - breaking up gazprom's european monopoly.
When their false flag attacks failed to give the US the greenlight to go in, they were beefed up to the point where now they're "ISIS". "We" left them the equipment as a gift, and a few beheading videos later, the drums of war repeat.. oh, what's that you say? "We" might need to go into Syria to "defeat the barbarians"? how convenient. bad kabuki.
1) Missiles are different than tanks. The "boots on the ground" physically use tanks. Missiles, by definition, are controlled or fired from a distance.
2) Military equipment such as tanks MUST be available to use at a moment's notice. You can't wait for a computer to confirm authentication/authorization before being allowed to drive, aim, or fire it. This is the reason tanks don't have ignition keys.
3) All DRM can be broken eventually. Once broken, it will be used against you by your enemy.
4) A computer can't prevent a diesel engine from starting. A battery and some re-routed wires will easily get around it when you have physical access to the vehicle/device. You prevent physical access to your server rooms for similar reasons.
5) If your hardware requires remote (radio/satellite) communications to enable them, they can be jammed or spoofed.
6) Adding built-in weaknesses to your military equipment just makes them weaker and vulnerable.
Small drone that finds the equipment and infiltrates humvees and bugin hiting buttons to it broadcast it location. For weapons have a small drone at blazing speed knocks the weapon out of their hands and breaks the weapon or the enemy.
Build-in audio/video monitoring technologies, as well as kill switches (both to stop them, maybe seal them & - if necessary - kill occupying pirate users of them). Simple deterents... "You steal it... It kills pirate drivers."
I must say ISIS took a turn that no one was expecting: after much success as a post-metal band and releasing 4 albums, they decided to re-emerge as Islamic terrorist group in Iraq.
Money, and oil. Always has been, and always will be.
We're in the Middle East for oil. Regional stability, means more money, presumably, for the US from oil production. As for the equipment that was left there? It's cheaper for us to leave it there, than bring it back. THIS situation with ISIS, is a consequence of that. Hindsight is 20/20 here...
Sorry, but we could have avoided this situation if that gear was repurposed elsewhere globally, brought back home, or made useless by ordinance.
On a sidenote, since ISIS was apparently known about since 2006 (earliest I could find...), did no one in the entire US Intelligence sector think their momentum and acceleration was a possibility, and US military gear might not have been a target? Ho hum....
For instance with tanks, if you make them drive-by-wire and you make the computer control system small enough, you can just pull the computer when you're done with the tank and take it with you.
Of course, the enemy could counter this in several ways. They could jerry-rig the tank to work minimally without a control system, but it would not be nearly as effective. They could steal the control computer, but that's a security issue - the key components should be under lock and key and heavy guard. Or they could steal the control software and load it on a smartphone or something, but that's again a security issue. And all of these require more technical knowledge than hot-wiring a car.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Did you not watch the Battlestar Galactica reboot? The first thing the cylons did was send a kill code to all colonial forces rendering the entire fleet helpless. Nuked the 12 colonies immediately afterward.....
was to not give it to them in the first place.
But all the "experts" and "true believers" who forgot history and reason, decided arming the "arab spring" could not possibly become a problem for us, like the last times.
All those experts and "defenders of the faith" need to a) OWN THIS instead of making excuses and b) GTFO and be replaced by people with memories longer than the last week's CNN broadcast.
an apology to all those called "racist" or worse for reminding these "leaders" and "news" people of the fallacy of arming Islamic factions, would be nice as well.
Doing so would increase the cost of the US arming its own troops of course. Selling to foreign governments allows defense contractors to amortize the fixed R&D cost over more units and allows them to scale production more efficiently thereby reducing the unit cost.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Wouldn't the better choice would be simply to not sell/give our military hardware out to unstable/abusive governments? I think this kind of unrest was predicted long ago when the US tried to force Iraq to be a "unified" country when there were insurmountable differences between the Shias & Sunnis only kept in check by military oppression, first by Saddam then by occupation.
The only way I could see this working would be a physical disablement. If you have a weapon, be it a nuke, conventional bomb, or tank, it has all the physical hardware and chemicals it needs to work. Disabling the control equipment is a setback but, will never fully prevent someone from repurposing the core equipment. If you can strip a nuclear bomb down to its core and firing mechanisms, you can make your own driver.... maybe that is a bad example because there is likely a lot of "secret sauce" in the actual sequence of making a plutonium core properly compress but... that is a rather specific issue to the specific type of device.
These sorts of safegaurds are really about defense in depth and decreasing the short term value of a resource to enemies. So even if you manage to get a group together that can infiltrate a launch site, its useless to you in the amount of time you will have while they muster a response and deal with you.
The only real long term solution is physical disablement which presents a whole host of serious issues including the potential of an enemy sending a disablement signal or something triggering such components accidentally through some other interaction or service error.
Such things certainly have their place, but, there are limits to how much of that is really effective before it becomes just a burden and a liability.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
As many have already stated, any system that prevents usage can be circumvented if you have unrestricted physical access.
So, the best solution seems to be to simply not give potential enemies the weapons in the first place. If that means hunting down and destroying our own weapons once our enemies get them, then so be it, that's what you have to do.
But no soldier is going to allow a kill-switch on anything they use, they would likely be the first people to disable such a kill-switch, just as a safety measure to ensure they can use the weapon without restriction.
weapons = tech
Aside: DUMB Dice-sponsored question.
When it comes to war and its strategy I trust the in depth reporting 'war nerd' only and he published a very nice article few years back 'Hi-Tech Toys vs Fanged Vermin' and the conclusion is that powerful high-tech weapons are not that much useful in urban warfare. http://exiledonline.com/future...
HMMWV's don't have keys, you think a soldier wants a key to turn on / off the weapon that could save his life? Technical options simply aren't feasible. That equipment was already "lost" as the cost to take it back to the US exceeded the value of the equipment. The decision was made to leave it. When it began to fall in to enemy hands, it should have been immediately destroyed.
Most sophisticated military hardware is dependent on regular maintenance and a supply of spare parts. ISIS shouldn't have access to either of these elements. Very quickly these items will degrade and become unusable. Tanks, helicopters and the like are surprisingly brittle without effective maintenance and repairs. Therefore is this really an issue?
Case in point is Iran which possess a large arsenal of western weapons after the fall of the Shah. They only managed to refit some of their stuff by indulging in the Iran-Contra agreement.
---
* Fire all the technical writers and editors. I'm sure the engineers will have no trouble writing maintenance manuals using complete sentences.
Eliminate inventory controls. Soldiers will steal anything not nailed down.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
ISIS, Al Qaeda, $insert_name_here didn't exist until the US invaded Iraq and gave the locals an excuse to unite in opposition to foreigners invaders. Remember Al Qaeda was the name given by US forces for the loose band of tribal ethnic groups that, at the connivance of the CIA and under the direction of Osama bin Laden, united around the idea of repelling the Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan. Every action the US takes brings about the exact opposite of what they want, a clear case of the law of unintended consequence.
Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French.
I didn't know the Iron Lady was a hacker! Just kidding, just kidding, I know she used nuclear blackmail to accomplish this.
Boy, just imagine what the Russian Mob could do with a nuke to back them up... oh, wait, Putin seems to already be doing this as we speak.
#DeleteChrome
Everything we build to blow shit up is a drain on the economy - there is no added value.
Spend a million dollars on a bridge to nowhere is more valuable than weaponry, it keeps the jobs local even if it doesn't add value. At least the bridge won't be used against anyone.
But regardless, kill switches are a dumb idea if your life depends on it. Given the current state of software development in government/large enterprise projects like this, it will have been hacked before it even gets deployed.
And even so, a bomb/rocket is still valuable even if the ignition is busted; ignitions are easy and any random DIY with a month of free time can build a very accurate delivery system; the nazis had it figured out 75 years ago.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
No one is going to buy your exported arms if they know you can disable them at any moment.
Yep bring it all home then issue it to the local police as surplus. Those M1 tanks could come in handy for the local sheriff..
This would make a good plot for a sci-fi show ....
For cryin' out loud, people, did some idiot politician with no idea how tech works in the real world come up with this idea?
Here's the problem:
Simply put, any tech can be hacked. As you'll note from the last several decades, copy protections, DRM, what have you, can and have all been hacked to circumvent them, and in some cases it took a fraction of the time to hack them than it did to create them in the first place! You design some sort of technology to 'remotely disable' weapons of war and two things will happen:
1. The 'enemy' will hack them at a critical moment so you can't use them, and
2. You leave them behind, they'll hack them and use them anyway.
You want to 'disable' weaponry you're forced to leave behind? The best way is the tried-and-true old-fashioned way: You rig them with explosives and destroy them. For bonus points, you booby-trap them so that the enemy sets them off when they come to take posession of the aforementioned weapons left behind, so that you not only destroy the hardware, you destroy as many of them as possible in the process, and in the case of these 'Islamic State' assholes, the more of them you can take out, the better. Congratulations, you've made the world a better place through the use of demolition charges.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The goal of the equipment that is destroyed and the charging of the matter against the ISIS is not enough institutionalized argument of any chump ability towards the goals trending towards poverty ISIS fights for. The military's attack strategy has always been succumb to pressure not institutionalize against argument. The ISIS group of self-extreme defense has never been a particular interest in typography, but lately has been able to produce measures of fear against the American side. It doesn't make sense to have any sort of noted history for their particular argument. The heterotyped argument wouldn't be to produce mass introduction of their immediate supremacy on a tough stand they are arguing they must fight against, instead the total inter-active argument would be to produce non-social hierarchy. Since there is no supreme gasoline goal against any tough stand, and they use mostly intro-oral situations of conduction, they have intro-populated their hierarchy of social agenda only against the total supreme state of their high arco standard. Supreme gasoline is used mostly in all ISIS equipment, as an introductory form of fuel stage. The goal against our gasoline of standard high octane, which can not be reproduced is irrelevated and must be ignored.
http://www.exxon.com/our-fuels
US equipment has a very high requirement for maintenance. This requires not only expertise but also replacement parts (This goes back a long way: Reagan's deal with Iran was to funnel spare parts for their F-14s to them against US and international law).
ISIL has many pieces of captured American hardware, but much of it was already non-functional due to Iraq's inability to maintain; and that percentage is only growing as time goes on.
You want to disable a division of tanks? I think the technical measure you're looking for is the CBU-100 cluster bomb. As long as you strike while they're still grouped together, you should be able to render them nonfunctional pretty effectively.
Software solutions to this sort of problem do not work. We've seen this a million times - if you have hardware access, getting software access is just a matter of time and effort. So you need to disable the hardware - and conveniently, we already have an entire category of "anti-tank weapons". So why not use them?
You're assuming they don't already have interlocks built in. If they had such a system, it would behoove them to refrain from revealing the system until you absolutely had to. If there were a system like that and it was well known, ISIS would seek other weapons systems and equip themselves. As it is, they're heavily reliant on our equipment, and as far as we know, those systems could be full of microphones, GPS tags, weapons interlocks, even self destruct devices just waiting for the US to invoke them during an invasion. Using them now would make their existence obvious, and limit their potential. Triggering them during a firefight, when the user might not even realize what happen, would have the maximum affect and potentially even keep their existence secret.
The word you are looking for is....salvaged.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
There are all sorts of reasons that kill switches are not implementable. A better approach is to not leave advanced weapons all the heck over the place. Don't sell them, don't loan them out, ... If someone wants a weapon from the USA, they get something primitive, or they get a US soldier. We've got to adopt a policy where we are the only people with the best weapons.
Perhaps tanks â" currently usable without even an ignition key â" could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.
It will work like this
Ethereal female voice:
For your next shot please enter your mobile phone number. The activation code for your gun will be texted to your phone soon!
The gunner and the loader patiently wait for the text message.
Slightly annoyed ethereal female voice: ...
You can not engage engines unless you request a transaction code! One code is currently processed. Either cancel that request or wait till your gun fired. Then request a TAN for the engines. I thank you for your patience.
The crew gets tense as they hear the unrhythmic firing around them. Actually they are not scared yet
Ethereal female voice:
Due to heavy combat operations in your area and an overload of the network text messages are delayed up to ten minutes. Thank you for your understanding.
The crew of the tank is still unconcerned. Assuming the enemy only has shoulder launched rockets that also require a TAN, they believe the network overload is of more concern for the enemy than for themselves.
Tut Tuuuut.
+++
New Text Message received
Dear Sir, you failed to pay your phone bill in a timely manner.
Right now you are not eligible to use networks outside of the USA. Please pay at your earliest convenience to restore your connectivity.
Please note: credit cards can not be processed online right now as you can not access the internet via the network you are connected to right now.
Best Regards and Have a Nice Day
Your Network Corporation - "We never leave you out in the sands"
+++
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If they know that they can be turned off with a switch, no country would buy US weapons. The risk is too high.
The first thing you do when you capture enemy weapon systems is to root the device and flash the ROM. I heard cyanogenmod already has boot loaders for M1A1 Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle and Nimitz class aircraft carriers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He first approved to bomb the crap out of Iraq for nothing. (Except lobbing missiles at Israel, ten years earlier). He then approved to destroy Syrian society. He now wants YOU to send even more weapons to Syria "in order to counter ISIS". Never mind, ISIS got only strong because of whackos like John McWeaponsIndustry.
One day, there will be serious blowback, my dear Americans. And with serious I mean more than 9/11. Somebody will be fed up with your antics.
In the case of ISIS, the US had plenty of time to bomb this hardware before it became an issue.
It might be better to bomb it after capture. These vehicles are status symbols. Let the leadership, politicians and such climb in and start to use it. Then bomb it. Then bomb the most raggedy assed looking Toyota pickup trucks nearby, ones without even a heavy weapon mounted in the truck bed. That's where the experienced cadre are riding, trying to maintain a low profile.
"Reliant's prefix number is one six three zero nine." -- Spock, Star Trek II
That's the enemy's dream--sit somewhere at a keyboard, type in a few codes obtained by a mole. Right when a decisive battle is about to begin, transmit code. All our stuff stops working, they pulverize us.
You can't prevent that, no matter how hard you try. You think Home Depot wanted their customers hacked? Of course not. If simply not wanting your system to be hacked was all it took, security would be easy. .
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"but is there a way to improve on what we face now?"
Yes, it is simple... Quit selling weapons to anyone in the Middle East.. Let them beat each other to death with sticks and stones.
Actually the kill switches and degradation modes and remote control overrides are well known... Check Pakistani intelligence, for example. They know their radar systems are degraded and remotely hackable, they know their F16s are degraded and remotely decomissionable, but they are still better than anything else Pakistan can get.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
It's called a GBU-24 with an MK-84 payload. We had every capability of destroying the equipment, and come to think of it we could destroy it any time we wanted to provided we can find it.
Our problem is not the lack of technology. The problem is the lack of a CiC with a set of testicles.
Thermite grenades, small amounts of ordinary plastic explosives, even pistols for electronics ... sometimes the old ways are best.
Forget the James Bond movie gizmos, that only works in Hollywood.
My Dad spent some time in armored cavalry as both a blacksmith/welder and as a driver. I'm going to have to ask him how much damage he could do with a mechanic's ball been hammer and a couple of minutes.
Authenticating....please wait...
Rejected...do you have CAPS LOCK on?
The USA should let ISIS do their thing. They have not attacked the US. They are only threatening us now because we are attacking them without provocation. Their recent killing of two USA citizens who were caught in Syria were only done try to get the US to stop bombing them...not out of a desire to start a war with the US.
Let regional countries tackle them if they are scared. They are plenty capable of doing so. They just don't think they need to because they think the USA will take care of it. In the end they are the ones threatened by ISIS.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Rather than go down the rabbit hole and argue the the vulnerability/tactical merits of kill switches on conventional weaponry, lets deal with the real problem. Poor management. This is not the first time this has happened with US military material. This happened in Croatia when Serbs overran an OP and got off with a number of light armored and troop transport vehicles. This happened at the end of the 1st gulf war when Iraq seized over 100 tons of ordinance, high explosives, and light arms abandoned by US forces because it would cost too much to clean it up/bring it back. If you don't want someone else to use it, take the some of the C4 you're leaving behind an make sure the assets are decommissioned.
There is no app for stupid.
Clear enough answer. But it's the wrong question. You cannot solve people problems with technology. And this is very much a people problem.
Of course, wanting to "solve" it now is a little late. It should never have been allowed to arise. Given that *cough* certain well-known state actors *cough* had more than a little influence in enabling, empowering, even encouraging the precursors, it's not a hard argument to make that various people in power should've known better, and that failure will now have to be paid for in blood. Much, much more blood than their original plans could ever have saved. Worse, it's not the first time they pulled tricks like what is at the root of this and have it backfire spectacular. You'd think that these days people in high places would get picked for their ability to learn from history. Evidently not.
Next question.
I Wonder how many have died directly and indirectly since USA and allies attacked Iraq
The French gave the British potentially valuable information on the Exocet's capabilities and limitations, and details on how it operated (e.g. its radar frequency, which you need to know if you want to use jamming).
Despite this, 4 of the 5 Exocets launched were hits, and damaged or sank British ships.
But that is the point: Piracy IS theft; it deprives another person of something of value. Copying a song or a movie is not theft and is not piracy. It is copyright infringement.
I suppose the problem is that "The Copyright Infringement Bay" doesn't have a nice ring to it.
Bad idea.
1- Military spec requires that something work in ALL SITUATIONS (including EMP attack, chemical attack, high heat, being flooded, etc). It's incompatible with a lets-block-this-thing-from-working-in-some-conditions design.
2- How will the knowledge of a "kill switch" fare on weapons sales?
3- ISIS were GIVEN most of these weapons (missiles, mortars, cannons, etc). They used to be the United States's "friends" battling Syria before they changed their minds and started attacking Iraq.
Every nut and bolt of American Military Hardware was paid for with MY TAX MONEY. And now we are blowing it up because our own military is too freaking lazy to collect their own shit when they leave a country.
So, we are spending money to blow up our own money.
The Pentagon/Military Industrial Complex is a self-running money-spending machine that cannot be stopped. They add nothing of value to our country and only destroy money and lives. The more we spend, the more we fuck up the planet. Theoretically; infinite money == destruction of the world.
ISIS isn't the enemy. We are. We have met the enemy and it is us. Even if ISIS disappeared tomorrow, we'd invent another enemy to replace them. Because without an enemy, the MIC can't function. It's a monster that needs to be fed, and we're happy to feed it because America Fuck Yeah!
Anyhow, trillions of tax dollars down the tube. And yet the GOP wants to complain about the cost of Obamacare. Fucking shysters. Where's my needless war refund?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
No, it couldn't.
If you can remotely disable it then why not just remotely blow it up?
Hey, there's a new strategy... remote control bombs disguised as other sorts of weapons. Sure.. raid this depot... I dare ya!!
This is precisely why Brazil dumped the Boeing bid. Lethal military hardware that is only marginally under the control of its operators is less than worthless. We tolerate that kind of thing in the commercial realm because I can always just go buy another smartphone or whatever from another vendor if the "protection" interferes with my work. In the battlefield, if your weapons don't work, you're dead.
The CIA who armed and funneled all of the USA's taxpayers money to ISIS could have stopped them.
Instead they enabled them, to further justify the USA's CIA created boogeyman "terrorism" foreign policy, and more military industrial complex/international banker enrichment.
To bad the American people are a bunch of fucking idiots.
This is very doable and is implemented in all secure military grade comm systems. These typically have anti-tamper elements that prevent the unauthorized with fooling with what is inside the box. I worked in this field for 30 years so actually know something about it. This is what the NSA should actually be doing instead of reading our email and facebook but of course it is real work and they don't get to look at as many dirty pictures.
The main obstacle is that many end users would not buy or deploy a system with this feature.
It is surprizing how naive many of the posts on this topic are.
The word you were looking for is reckless. We've had *plenty* of wrecks when it comes to foreign intervention.
The International Secret Intelligence Service (ISIS) is the workplace of the main characters of Archer. It is quite obviously a spy agency, with international offices . ISIS Headquarters is located in New York City and operates above a wash & fold.
Malory Archer: ISIS isn't your own personal travel agency. it doesn't exist so you can jet off to Whore Island.
Malory Archer: Sterling?
Sterling Archer: Hm? Sorry I was picturing Whore Island.
These wars are for the control of hydrocarbons and pipelines. All this posturing about religion is just an attempt to divide and conquer. People are soo stupid!
that they sunk within sight of the eastern seaboard?
No country is going to buy weapons from a country that could disable them. It just would not happen.
And unless you are Iraqi, ISIS did not use the weapons against you. They did use the weapons against US Interests in the region though.
Our general rule of thumb regarding radios and communications equipment... Zero it out if it's going to fall into the hands of the enemy (there's a button for that.) If you don't have time to zero it out, we were also provided an axe to smash the radio if need be. (If current or future crypto, changed weekly, fell into enemy hands-- they could listen to our communications.) Obviously smashing it to bits with an axe is a last resort measure, but... It was a measure.
Sharks. With frickin' lasers on their heads.
They're funded by right-wing wealthy Americans and Brits looking to shake up some elections.
Why not just embed the hardware with geo-tracking software of some kind, and hardcode it to specifically not blow up in certain places on the planet. Hell you could even have it blow up immediately, once programmed to explode in the area that you don't want it to. That way you can still sell your weapons, and no need to worry.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
"Margaret Thatcher forced François Mitterrand to give her the codes to disable Argentina's deadly French-made missiles during the Falklands war"
Bologna.
I've seen the insides of 70's era AM39 Exocet. They don't have codes. They certainly don't have remote turn-off codes.
And then there's the fact that they worked perfectly. Six (five AMs, one SM) launches, four hits. Two sinkings. Much better results than anyone could have predicted.
Perhaps you don't understand how the MIC game works.
If somebody steals gear of a customer you get to sell more gear to destroy the stolen gear.
...U.S. money started a nice fire in Ukraine. That will warm McWarIndustry for the next couple of years. The Russkies are finally somewhat of a worth enemy again. Billions to be made in electronic warfare and cyber against their S400 system alone.
Because I'm certain that ISIS wouldn't do anything as gruesome as chop off a finger to fool a biometric reader.
Have gnu, will travel.
And if someone has physical access to disabled equipment, it's just a matter of time before they figure out how to disable a kill switch. That's why the pressure will be on destructive kill switches, which could have been done with a few feet of det cord before we left the stuff there in the first place.
OTP?
A one-way function can be used. If data that match the hash are sent to the device, detonate its vital parts.
The real question is: Who's going to keep the disabling key? Weapon manufacturer? US? Russia? Iraqi army? Iraqi solders defected to ISIS? UN?
The Romanian army used to have each field gun machined individually with the bolt that acts as a hinge for the breach have a unique thread. In the event of a position being compromised in battle simply removing the bolt made the weapon useless. Sometimes simple traditional methods are pretty darned effective.Oddly since each bolt was unique traditional machinists could not make that many unique threads. They actually had gypsies that were admitted into the factories at night that somehow knew just how to make each thread unique.
While this event has been unfolding, I have been reading the intense Vietnam war soldier's memoir "The Things They Carried."
I have been asking myself, what have I figured out from watching 45 years of social destruction since Vietnam, as a peace advocate? Is there any portable, positive idea that peaceniks, military thinkers and politicians could all agree upon to stop the miserable trail of war and destruction we see in various parts of the world?
This recent ISIS arms capture is as good an example as any of the unfortunate tendency of guns to fall into the hands of people who seek to use them.
The key word here is "fall into the hands of...".
So here is the idea. Reasonable military professionals, politicians and peace advocates alike should come together: There should be no free or low cost guns or ammunition transferred to any political or social group. This should be implemented by a World Treaty.
Like another poster stated this is the worst thing you could possible do!! DRM should only be limited to things that can't cause lethality or even life changing situations. Guns(weapons) don't kill people. People kill people, using lack of self control and weapons as an excuse. I would rather have a 6 shot revolver than a m16 if I need to make absolutely sure that shit will fire and save my life or my family and friends lives when the time comes. how many times things fail at the exact time you need them the most??
It might still be on the whitehouse Oval Office desk, "the buck stops here". Take responsibility for yourself and stop letting our elected leaders put us in positions like this. It's just pathetic. If it hasn't already happened on a large scale I could see the way Russia's military got sold off to the highest bidder start happening to the USA.
And I can't wait until the Snowden generation gets into office. Have fun while you still can, you pointless irrelevant dinosaur politicians.
... Wouldn't the easiest solution be Biometrics that have to be programmed in via a trained tech? Maybe even have a special little "Surprise" if unauthorized users tried to use them? Isn't this a huge sci-fi trope about future tech? "Oh your DNA pattern didn't match what's been printed on this gun. BOOM!" Isn't this something that's used on civilian vehicles now to prevent theft? I wonder how hard it would be to implement this on "Heavy Weapons"... I'd think, surely the anti-material/anti-air platform weapons would have something like this... don't they?
Like any good DRM, make it annoying, but little else. Any DRM is beatable if in enemy hands. However you make it so they can't IMMEDIATELY use it, or it will be a pain in the ass to fix it so they can. Something simple like a Tank with an easily removable critical piece of the electronic sighting apparatus. When you have to abandon ship so to speak, grab the widget and go. Sure they can drive the tank around, and even fire the gun, but if they can only aim at things manually it will make it much less effective against countermeasures. Then again, removable firing pin (if such a thing even exists), sure they could machine a new one, but that would take time.
Military arms is unfortunately the worlds largest trading goods. That is the really big problem. Solve that.
Quran is the culprit
Casteism
Maybe this is what numbers stations are for? It's Russians handing out activation codes to their (or our) weapons!
No, I'm not suggesting this is actually true, but issuing keys that have to be periodically entered to keep a weapon active makes a degree of sense. A stolen weapon won't immediately deactivate, nor will those of an ally who turns coat, but come the next update period, the key issued is one that works for everyone except the people you want to lock out.
Of course, governments don't REALLY want to do this, or it will quickly be pointed out that insurgents/terrorists/freedom fighters are continuing to use weapons that could have been deactivated.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.