asymetric warfare

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:24:21 GMT, Charles Gray wrote:

Phil misses the point, that most of the third world jsut doesn't
have the capabilities he's looking for. Even nations like China are
still importing weapons systems, not because they're stupid or mud
huts, but because the infrastructure to develop systems like this
takes a long, LONG time to develop.

Yes, and China makes a lot of its own weapons. As do countries like
India, or Iran, or South Africa, or Brazil.


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On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:38:09 GMT, Charles Gray wrote:
And Phil, that's another problem with your ideas-- they assume a
government that is reasonably non-corrupt,

I would put it differently "... reasonably competent", but i suspect
we're talking about the same thing.

and I can tell you from
expereicne that most 3rd world nations are run in a fashion that would
make Boss Tweed blanch.

If a country already has a proven capability to design and build
aircraft, it can probably build its own cruise missiles.

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On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:21:49 GMT, Fred J. McCall wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote:

o you know anything about programming? If you did, you'd know that
:developing algorithms is what programmers do.

No, IMPLEMENTING algorithms is what programmers do (and often without
understanding of what they are implementing).

DEVELOPING algorithms is what software and systems engineers do.

"software engineer" and "programmer" are different words for the
same job.

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On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:41:35 GMT, Fred J. McCall
:co-ordination = radio

In which case we're going to KNOW when you're spooling up to shoot and
you'll be dead before everybody gets rolled out and ready.

Hasve you never heard of encryption, or are you trolling?

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On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:55:08 GMT, Fred J. McCall wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote:

:On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 13:43:49 -0500, Ray Drouillard wrote:
:
:Also, since it's not encrypted, it can be spoofed using a local
:transmitter
:
:That doesn't logically follow; it's possible to make non-encrypted
:data that can't be faked, you just use a digital signature.

But the 'digital signature' is really just another encryption
algorithm, typically more easily faked or broken than full encryption.

*plonk*

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phil hunt wrote:

"software engineer" and "programmer" are different words for the
same job.

Although he seems to be making a hard-and-fast distinction which is not
universally made or uniformly recognized by certain terminology, surely
you would recognize that there is a difference between higher level
design considerations and low-level implementation tasks. On small
projects, especially personal or collaborative open source ones, they'll
be done by the same person(s) and probably not explicitly distinguished
in a task list (concrete or hypothetical), but on large projects the
distinction becomes more important. Someone with the title Senior
Computer Scientist is probably going to be doing a lot more design the
gruntwork, and the reverse is true of someone with the title Member of
Technical Staff.

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ess (phil hunt) wrote:

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 23:41:35 GMT, Fred J. McCall
:co-ordination = radio

In which case we're going to KNOW when you're spooling up to shoot and
you'll be dead before everybody gets rolled out and ready.

Hasve you never heard of encryption, or are you trolling?

Do you know how hard it is to maintain a keying system? Once *again*
you make the mistaken assumption that because encryption software is
widely available and doable by 'a competent programmer' that the
*rest* of the system is handwaving easily. (I don't have to ask if
you are trolling, the answer is starting to be obvious.)

D.
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phil hunt wrote:
George William Herbert wrote:
I've done several iterations of this problem,
though not with systems that went to full scale
development or production.

I believe that for suitably moderated operational
requirements, the problem can be much simpler than I
believe Derek thinks it is.

I belive that Phil is grossly underestimating the
real requirements, even for those suitably moderated
operational requirements.

Which requirements am I underestimating? (Bear in mind I'm
considering missiles for several different roles).

Let me give you an example... assume that you need a certain
pixel width of an object to successfully identify it
(say, 10 pixels across) with a certain contrast ratio.

You also have certain limitations on the maneuverability
of the airframe this is all one. It can't pull more than
a certain number of G's etc.

To successfully design the homing mechanism, you need to
assess the distance and light or background noise conditions
of the frequencies you're looking at (visual, IIR, whatever)
and the magnification of the imaging system and its optical
resolution. You need to have a wide enough field of view that
you can see the targets as you fly along searching, but not
so wide that you won't be able to discriminate a target
until it's so close that maneuvering to hit it becomes
a serious problem. You need to assess the impact on
the sensor and field of view of the background coloration
across the target areas, etc.

With a much simpler system, laser spot homing, I spent
some months working out that nested set of problems.
Taking one shortcut made the weapon not lock on if
the ballistic miss trajectory was too far off.
Taking another meant that it typically locked
on early in a portion of its flight that led to
it flying out of control as it lost energy trying
to track the laser spot as it flew out. It would
scrub too much forwards velocity off early and then
start to come down too short of the target and stall
out trying to correct for that. Bigger lifting
surfaces would solve that but cause other problems
for weapon packaging. The final solution was to
modify the trajectory limitations, with the more
aggressive sensor system. Which scrubbed a bit off
the maximum range (could still reach the old range,
but if your aim was off too much in the initial
firing it would just out and out miss short).

You actually have to sit down, design a notional design,
put a notional sensor on it, figure out what the
parameters are, and simulate it for a while to see
what the gotchas are. That requires models of the
sensor, guidance, optics or transmitter, target
behaviour, aerodynamics, and trajectory / movement
dynamics of the weapon.

Even getting a rough first pass of that to tell you
what the roughly right answers are is nontrivial,
can easily be months of work, and requires experience
across a very wide range of diciplines (or a keen
ability to figure out what you don't know and find
it via research).

But few of those have progressed to production.
The new Marines/Navy Spike missile is one
exception,

This is the Israeli ATGM, isn't it?

No, there are two missiles named Spike,
and I'm referring to the US Navy / China Lake one.
http://www.nawcwpns.navy.mil/~pao/pg...es/SpikeND.htm


-george william herbert

In article mail-0E43D5.00500922122003@localhost,
Michael Ash wrote:

North Korea, on the other hand, has enough artillery on the border to
completely level Seoul within a few hours, from what I understand. That
alone is enough to stop any plans for an invasion. In a way, it's even
worse than the nuclear problem. Unlike a nuke and its delivery system,
there's no possible way to take out mumble-thousand pieces of artillery
before the deed has been done.

Kinda makes you wonder how well they can coordinate those artillery
pieces... they can't even feed their troops.

Out of the tens of thousands of cannons sitting on the north side of the
border, anyone want to bet that no more than a couple of hundred
actually get to fire? Especially with a few dozen MLRS launchers and a
couple of hundred attack aircraft cranking out a few million
submunitions across their firing positions... while reducing their
command centers to smoking holes in the ground and jamming
communications.

For reference, look at the "massive" weapons infrastructure in Iraq, and
how they never managed to get more than a few percent of them into play.
And Iraq was in relatively good shape compared to what Korea's going
through right now.

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In article ,
ess (phil hunt) wrote:

If a country already has a proven capability to design and build
aircraft, it can probably build its own cruise missiles.

Maybe, but the requirement for the "cheap cruise missile" is really
"design and build reliable aircraft in lots of thousands or more, along
with a command structure that can handle the sheer number of support
troops, and a few thousands skilled technicians who can run around and
make sure the things work after sitting in barns for a couple of years."

Make one? You could do that out of a garage. Making a hundred? A
small factory. A thousand? It starts getting difficult. Ten thousand?
You're looking at a top 20 industrial power, at least.

And this is in *addition* to your regular armed forces, which have to be
kept up while you're building this one-trick weapon. And hope nobody
finds a cheap countermeasure for it (a one minute shuotff timer in your
guidance system, courtesy of the Malaysians you bought the chips from,
for example).

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