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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.
"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.
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.
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.
Because when someone is shooting at you you tend to drop the keys or forget them or lose them. This is why tanks don't require keys now. Someone was attacked and got taken out because they were fumbling with the keys.
I don't want to do a sig now
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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=
"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
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 thought we were the Popular Front
"Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?"
"He's over there."
I think this has been covered for new programs starting about 15 years ago... PDF of under SECDEF memo
People whose spend there lives studying geo politics don't understand it very well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Just because I can see the moon in a telescope doesn't mean I can reach out and touch it. It's a matter of physical and logistical problems, not just telemetry.
... 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.
Who is "us" in this story?
*I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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
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"
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...
And Abdel Majed Abdel Bary is British. So the conclusion is obvious... ;)
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.
* 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.
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!
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.
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+++
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
So... how do you disable the knife used to decapitate them?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Germany never attacked us either. Evil should be destroyed when it is encountered. Averting the eyes in the face of evil is evil as well.
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.
ISIS has been very clear about their desire to attack America and the West. Waiting for them to kill a ton of people before doing anything is a poor strategy.
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"?
True, but don't forget that Germany did declare war on the US first and that the US was more or less obligated to respond in some way... which we did with our own declaration later on the same day.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
And ISIS hasn't
Add a ? to the end of that.
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.
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.
No they've been very clear... just like Al-Qaeda was in the 90's.
Hopefully this time around it doesn't take a few buildings getting knocked down down for us to respond properly.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
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.
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.
They get in the way at very bad times.
Let's say we're in a war with an enemy that isn't woefully under-equipped. Your tank battalion pulls up to resupply and repair. Tanks are shut off while this is going on.
Then the bad guys drop a bunch of bombs on you. You and most of your tank crew survives. Unfortunately, the tank commander who had the keys is now a fine mist settling onto the ground. Alternatively, half of your crew is dead, half of another tank's crew is dead. If there were no keys, you could operate one tank. As it is, you can operate zero.
And then it turns out the airstrike was followed up by the bad guy's tanks rolling over the next hill.
Give keys to everyone? Now you've defeated the purpose of keys, because there are such a massive number of keys that "the bad guys" will find at least one.
Or if you'd like a less spectacular scenario, keys have a failure rate. You don't want to be waiting for a locksmith during a war.
the whole damn article is flamebait, thx mods
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.
Just because I can see the moon in a telescope doesn't mean I can reach out and touch it. It's a matter of physical and logistical problems, not just telemetry.
No, it's a matter of not wanting to announce to the world that we have a space-based weapons platform capable of striking anywhere on the globe in a matter of seconds with precision measured in fractions of an inch. A couple of beheadings don't warrant letting that cat out of the bag.
A desire motivated in large part by over a century of America and the West (mostly the thrice-dammned British Empire) screwing around with imperialist games the Middle East. Let's go pour some more gasoline on that fire, I'm sure we'll put it out eventually.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Declaring war is not unreasonable when someone's navy is shooting at your submarines.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So, we should execute John McCain as a traitor to the US, for providing material support to a terror organization and providing aid and comfort to an enemy?
Because you really don't know what's happening, do you? Mr. Jones?
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"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
HA.. This will be easy then. We kicked the UK's ass in the war of 1812.. Well, after we ended it but didn't get the word out to all the troops.
In case anyone is wondering, I'm talking about the battle of New Orleans in which an overwhelming British force was defaced and humiliated by a handful of regulars and some volunteer dirt farmers from the south. Communications were slow back then and it took some time before everyone actually knew the war ended.
Sigh.. The entire government in the middle east was destroyed and disbanded at the end of WWI. Of course WWI was not about imperialism but even Thomas Jefferson had to bitch slap them because of the detestable things they were doing.
When WWI ended, something needed to be done with the lands. Most of it worked out somewhat well. Of course things change over time. Here is more on it.
It really isn't and wasn't about imperialism. It was about ending the status quo and getting aid in WWI.
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.
That has no bearing on my post. Right now, they are actively trying to kill Americans and other Westerners en masse. We can either let them, or do something about it first.
Maybe you're willing to sacrifice the lives of your family and friends for the sins of politicians who have been dead for 50 years. I'm not.
At worst the War of 1812 was a stalemate, at best it was a British/Canadian victory. Even if marginal. Only commenting on the basis of correcting a error (or outright troll/lie). I won't respond to any more of your trolls on the subject.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
How was what John McCain did evil? WTF.
He went on a mission to pledge support for ISIS, before Oceania was always at war with Eurasia.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I see you completely ignored the battle of New Orleans like I specifically spelled out as my qualifier.
Had you actually comprehended what you read, you yourself wouldn't appear to be trolling right now. It happened after the war of 1812 ended but was part of it because no one had told them it ended yet.
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.
Did you even read those "articles"? They said he met with a moderate faction of the FSA whose leader was later forced out and the group then disbanded.
Let's skip the occupation of the US capital, and burning of Washington's public buildings, then... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
That certainly happened during the war, rather than after.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Yup.. Sure did happen just 4 months before the battle of New Orleans.
Like I said, some southern dirt farmers and a handful of regulars turned all that around. Out numbered by more than 2 to 1, they killed 7 times as many British, wounded 8 times as many, and caused almost 6 times as many to run off and go missing.
But you can say the invasion of Washington D.C. was a huge victory for the British but I would suggest that a victory against largely women and children and slaves isn't all that much of a victory (the main forces were on the fronts not lounging in the capitol. Rear Admiral Cockburn was only able to make the invasion because the war with France ended. It was basically a sneak attack. They knew the defenses were weak and planned on attacking Baltimore and Philadelphia too.
In New Orleans, they thought they could over whelm the defenders and found out they were wrong.
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.
Germany never attacked us either.
Germany attacked the US on several occasions in the Atlantic (as well as killing US civilians on British ships) but the US remained resolute on "not getting involved in another European war". In the end, Germany declared war on the US with their allies, Japan.
There's a pertinent Churchill quote here, "You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else".
Evil should be destroyed when it is encountered. Averting the eyes in the face of evil is evil as well.
"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy."
- Christopher Dawson.
To show I'm not simply pulling relevant sounding quotes out, I'll explain what they mean. Blanket statements like "all evil must be fought" are naive and immature in the real world. They also tend to ignore the fact that when people become moral crusaders they end up committing more heinous acts in the name of "good" than the evil they were attempting to destroy. Beyond this, the meaning of the term "good" becomes more ambiguous over time until it means "what every we say you have to do". Claiming that it's "evil" to avert your eyes from evil is disingenuous and well, pretty evil in itself which makes it wrong. You're trying to create an "if you're not with us, you're against us" scenario which is pretty much page one in starting a dictatorship.
Ironically, the Nazi's started out to save Germans from the Bolsheviks which cropped up in post WWI Germany and became increasingly popular due to the harsh conditions created by the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi's also capitalised on this sentiment with ultra-nationalism but always maintained they were working for the good of Germany fighting the Bolsheviks. In the beginning, this may have even been true, but as we know over time the Nazi regime became more and more oppressive, however their propaganda never stopped telling the Germans they were the good guys and to be a good guy you had to conform to Nazi ideals (I.E. theatre advertisements went along the lines of "Good Germans dont listen to foreign radio", referring specifically to the BBC which the British beamed across the channel).
To fight evil, you must never run in gung-ho. You must take careful, measured steps to ensure that you dont become the evil you fight. This is what made WWII a defining moment for the west. The majority of the fighting was done by the Russians but because they were as bad as the Nazi's were (both to their own people and the enemy) they didn't benefit in the long term. The western allies on the other hand were careful and smart.
Ironically it's because the west was gung-ho in Iraq that organisations like ISIS gained power. Saddam was, like it or not, a stabilising force in the region. He was a dictator, but a secular one in a region of theocratic nutbar governments (including our "valued" allies, Saudi Arabia). Saddam would never have tolerated ISIS/ISIL and without the civil war the power vacuum created in Iraq ISIS wouldn't have found so many recruits.
Destroying the "great evil" that was Saddam landed us with ISIS, going off half cocked with ISIS will create what. There will be no "and the great Satan was destroyed. The end." because people will still be living after you declare victory and a power vaccum will exist. A long term solution is not to meet them with force, but to weaken their powerbase. However this is hard and requires forethought and planning where as dropping bombs makes it look like you're Doing Something(TM) now. Screw what might happen in the future.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Destroying the "great evil" that was Saddam landed us with ISIS, going off half cocked with ISIS will create what. There will be no "and the great Satan was destroyed. The end." because people will still be living after you declare victory and a power vaccum will exist. A long term solution is not to meet them with force, but to weaken their powerbase. However this is hard and requires forethought and planning where as dropping bombs makes it look like you're Doing Something(TM) now. Screw what might happen in the future.
No, leaving Iraq prematurely is what fueled ISIS. A long term solution would have been to do exactly what we did in Germany, Korea, and Japan. There's a lot of things I'd like to say in response to your other points, but frankly I don't have the time or will to do it on Slashdot. I just don't care that much.
so you're saying the British cheated and that it wasn't fair
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
When WWI ended, something needed to be done with the lands. Most of it worked out somewhat well.
not really. borders drawn by cartographers in Europe resulted in lots of messy stuff we've been dealing for decades.
mfwright@batnet.com
"Reliant's prefix number is one six three zero nine." -- Spock, Star Trek II
Exactly! Star trek technology again. If you are going to use technology then look to where technology scenarios have been solved - even if it's only fiction. The ENTIRE division could have had a prefix code that disabled any number of functions.
prefix.all=disable
prefix.engine.all=disable
prefix.navigation.all=disable
prefix.weapons.all=disable
However America should not leave it's powerful weaponry for a third party to control. Iraq is completely demoralized they've just had the shit kicked out of them and their ideological enemy (Islam) has a knife to the throat of their children. It doesn't matter what weapons you give to someone who has no heart to fight and, when the enemy knows your families name and address they have you by the balls.
Islamic extremists have dominated the *psychology* of war constantly hitting at ideological weaknesses of the west, undermining our allies and using our own political shortsightedness against us to undermine western democracy - which they hate. Yet we have continued to make the same mistakes.
Over ten years ago our political representatives decided to lie to us (again) about compromising our values. They thought torturing and brutalizing people would be a good idea. However, long before 911 Islam was committing human right violations and we just didn't care. Now it all comes back to haunt us with new enemies, yet we are surprised when these psychos chop our citizens heads off. That's the price we pay for compromising our values. They don't have an ethical framework, we do. The answer is not to discard our ethical framework and become them - the answer is to strengthen our ethical framework and show the resolve of our mettle, not our metal. Our right *IS* might.
An old idea I've not heard in the news is "we are sending a crack team of diplomats" because the masses are too stupid to realize that hiding behind airstrikes and drones is cowardice, because the uneducated amongst us always think force is the right answer to every problem and because our Faux media insists on its shallow mindedness for ratings. We still haven't learned that Islamic extremism is using asymmetrical warfare against us to bleed us financially and worse, morally. Islamic extremism has effected a change in our entire way of life, and all we have done is radicalized them more because we turned from our ideals. This is not a path to victory.
Until the western world returns to the ideals that made us strong in the first place these extremists are going to continue to work a strangle game on us and slowly slowly slowly choke us. They hit us where WE think we are weak, but our ideals are our true strength because ideals can't be terrorized. When people of good character see the west sticking to its ideals *they* sympathize, when we don't *they* radicalize. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military equipment ain't going to do what winning hearts and minds can do. Why can't we learn that? Why can't we take a step back and say, hang on a minute - what is really going on here?
Leaving tanks and destruction then saying "here are some guns, it's on you now" was never going to work. Taking responsibility for what we have done with our military and leaving schools, hospitals, training police, teachers will. Let ISIS or al-ki-assholes blow up the Iraqi people's new infrastructure and see how many friends they win.
That's the nice America that Islamic extremists can never defeat, no matter how many heads they take.
Ok people - rant over - sorry about that but I think it needed to be said.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
No. I'm saying that when ready and expecting them, the British would lose the battle even with about an 8 to 1 advantage just by organizing some sod busters as was competently shown in the battle of New Orleans. I'm also saying that burning of DC is not all that impressive when you consider the facts. Its sort of like winning the special olympics and thinking you are a world class athlete.
Aren't border always drawn by cartographers? That is their job.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
No, I am the eggman. You are the walrus.
Demented But Determined.
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.
Yes, defending team on home ground has the advantage, particularly without air support and advanced weaponry.
As to "kicking ass in the war of 1812", Wikipedia says
"British losses in the war were about 1,600 killed in action and 3,679 wounded; 3,321 British died from disease. American losses were 2,260 killed in action and 4,505 wounded."
So I leave the audience to draw their own conclusion.
You seem to have not read the "in Europe" part, which changes things considerably.
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.
I don't think it matters. Border drawn in Pakistan and India are under dispute all the time. It was an empire that crumbled in the middle east. Someone had to draw borders and the most competent did.
Read up on the Battle of Queenston Heights. America had a 3 to 1 advantage and even killed the British General Brock. But America suffered a decisive loss. Or how about The Surrender of Detroit where an entrenched American force surrendered to the British even though they numbered twice as big as the British force. It was the engagements during the war that count. Not a side show that happened after, even if those parties didn't know it was actually all over. Hey, I generally like America. I lived there long enough. But facts are facts. It was victory for the British/Canadians considering the objective of America was to take over Canada, which they didn't. Canada was successfully defended, which also counts as a victory. Not the overwhelming ass-whooping Canadians like to think of it. But still a victory. And it was 200 years ago. So get over it. Everyone.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.