Howard Berkowitz writes:

In article , (John
Schilling) wrote:

Exactly. I am _not_ in favor of gun confiscation, but I really can't
accept the idea of the unorganized militia, with sporting weapons,
deterring either regulars or invaders. With a laptop and intimate
knowledge of communications networks, I can be a MUCH nastier deterrent.

More likely, you can come to the same end as Archimedes, accomplishing
no more in the end than one guy with a hunting rifle.

You are missing asymmetry. Archimedes' enemies used low tech, just lots
of it. Losing a major C3I node, or the logistics network, is much more
of a problem to a high-tech invader.

Even high-tech invaders still use tens or hundreds of thousands of
men with purely mechanical weapons guided by the unaugmented human
eye and brain, who can use all the traditional low-tech methods of
hunting down the fool who thinks his Archimedean brain alone will
triumph over their brain and brawn combined.

Whereupon they can get on with repairing the C3I node and you can
get on with bleeding out on the floor.


Now, with a laptop *and* a rifle, you can accomplish a lot more than
with either alone. On the defensive side, every detective with a hunch
as to where that nuisance with the laptop is, every house-to-house search
for same, has to allocate a SWAT team per target instead of just a couple
beat cops. Which means the whole process takes them longer for the same
available resources and gives you that much more time to make a nuisance
of yourself with the laptop.

Ahem. If one tracks many of the more destructive hacking attempts, the
computer delivering the attack, the hacker, and the target often are on
different continents. Those SWAT teams had better have LONG range.

Hacking attempts against the academic and commercial internet, yes.
Military operations, outside of bad technothriller movies and novels,
are not dependant on the global internet. You can hinder the enemy's
R&D and procurement efforts and so delay his acquisition of newer
and better guns, but if you are wholly unarmed the guns he's already
got are more than sufficient.

And the networks that help coordinate his gunmen at the operational
level, the ones which are of immediate concern to you, are not so
broadly distributed. The enemy has no reason to put a node, terminal,
or other access point anywhere he doesn't have at least a minimal
military presence, and those are pretty much by definition places
where his SWAT teams can reach.


For that matter, you'll probably have to deal with armed enemy soldiers
one way or another just to get terminal access in the first place.


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