asymetric warfare

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 21:23:50 -0800, pervect
wrote:

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:46:51 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:



You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today. The days of grinding towards the Capital worrying only
about the front line and hoping a golden bullet takes out the Leader
are dead and gone. This is 2003 not 1943.

I think there are technologies that our fictitious nation of Elbonia
can use that will make disrupting their C&C structure a lot more
difficult. I would even go so far as to say that investing in a
modern C&C infrastructure would probably be the best first investment
Elbonia could make. Probably the best approach would be to grow their
own experts (rather than to rely on commercial systems of others and
think that they can just buy one).



So all Elbonia has to do is create a modern middle class, capable
of supporting an educated technical infrastructure...and by the way,
keep said middile class from chucking the leadership out. Not only
isn't that easy, but that';s not a 10 year project, its a 30 year
project.


I also think there will be an increase in the use of nuclear weapons,
and that the wave of current US military actions will, as a side
effect, encourage nuclear proliferation. I don't think that this will
be widely announced, though - I think that everyone will claim not to
have weapons of mass destruction, and when intelligence turns up
irrefutable evidence of nuclear weapons, they will merely blink and
calmly state that said weapons are purely defensive for use against
military targets only and are in no way classifiable as being WMD.

Why would the U.S. wish to increase using nuclear weapons? I think
the decision to start creating new nuke designs is stupid, but in any
case, the U.S. doesn't *need* nukes in most concievable engagements,
and in fact using them would degrade our own effectiveness.

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 06:34:18 GMT, Charles Gray wrote:

Why would the U.S. wish to increase using nuclear weapons? I think
the decision to start creating new nuke designs is stupid, but in any
case, the U.S. doesn't *need* nukes in most concievable engagements,
and in fact using them would degrade our own effectiveness.

One reason to create new designs is shelf-life concerns about the
current inventory which contains some 20 year old weapons. Creating
longer lasting and more easily maintained weapons could be cost
effective in the long run rather than trying to maintan our current
store of aging weapons.

Scientists are testing an mixture of Plutonium isotopes which decays
16 times faster than normal to see what the long term effects on the
bomb components will be. Tests will be run to simulate the effects of
60 years of aging on current designs to see what, if anything, needs
to be done to keep our current weapons working for another 40 years.

--
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft

pervect writes:

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:46:51 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today. The days of grinding towards the Capital worrying only
about the front line and hoping a golden bullet takes out the Leader
are dead and gone. This is 2003 not 1943.

I think there are technologies that our fictitious nation of Elbonia
can use that will make disrupting their C&C structure a lot more
difficult. I would even go so far as to say that investing in a
modern C&C infrastructure would probably be the best first investment
Elbonia could make.


I would say that investing in a *robust* C&C infrastructure is the
third best investment Elbonia could make. That's not the same as
a *modern* C&C infrastructure, especially in Elbonia.

The first best investment, of course, would be a professional NCO
corps, and the second best a professional officer corps. Well led
forces can be somewhat effective even when completely isolated;
poorly led troops a phone call away are no asset.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

On 23 Dec 2003 11:18:11 -0800, (John Schilling)
wrote:



I would say that investing in a *robust* C&C infrastructure is the
third best investment Elbonia could make. That's not the same as
a *modern* C&C infrastructure, especially in Elbonia.

Robust is closer to what I should have said than modern, some of my
bias for modern technology is showing. A nice, modern centralized
commuinication system that can be quickly decapacitated with one
strike is a liability.

The first best investment, of course, would be a professional NCO
corps, and the second best a professional officer corps. Well led
forces can be somewhat effective even when completely isolated;
poorly led troops a phone call away are no asset.

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 13:48:39 -0800, pervect wrote:
On 23 Dec 2003 11:18:11 -0800, (John Schilling)
wrote:

I would say that investing in a *robust* C&C infrastructure is the
third best investment Elbonia could make. That's not the same as
a *modern* C&C infrastructure, especially in Elbonia.

Robust is closer to what I should have said than modern, some of my
bias for modern technology is showing. A nice, modern centralized
commuinication system that can be quickly decapacitated with one
strike is a liability.

I've argued elsewhere[1] that middle-income countries should
consider using a wireless internet mesh as the foundation for their
(civilian) information infrastructure. Why not allow the military
system to piggyback off that? (as a backup: the civilian
system might be down in an area, and there should be a separate
military system as well). Now a proper wireless internet
infrastructure would mean every apartment building, workplace,
school, hospital, etc being connected. It would be quite difficult,
both militarily and politically, to shut down such a widespread
network.

[1] at http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_122.html

--
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people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse
the last two letters).

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:46:51 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:



And then the secondary system gets targeted PDQ...

AFAIK, against a good spread-spectrum system, you won't do much better
than to be able to monitor the total energy with a broad-band
detector.

Spread spectrum systems also tend to have much lower transmitter power
than conventional systems - by Shannon's channel theorem, the channel
capacity is proportional to the bandwidth, but only grows
logarithmically with transmitter power. So you'll need a lot less
power for a given bitrate with a wide channel.

The net result is that you can only detect the energy of the
transmitter above background noise when you are fairly close to the
transmitter.

I'm really not sure how quickly you can count on taking out a spread
spectrum transmitter. Especially when it's put on a low duty cycle
transmit mode rather than a continuous transmit mode.

To be realistic, I'd anticipate that anything that looks like an
antenna farm would be bombed, and that some anti-radiation missiles
(presumably looking for signals in the known bandwidth that the enemy
uses) might be left "loitering" in areas that are likely to contain
transmitters (ones with good lines of sight). I suspect that the
former might be more important than the later. Prepatory intelligence
work (like bribing or having agents follow service people) would also
be a factor in locating transmitter sites.

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 23:08:58 -0800, pervect
wrote:


I'm really not sure how quickly you can count on taking out a spread
spectrum transmitter. Especially when it's put on a low duty cycle
transmit mode rather than a continuous transmit mode.

I'm going to throw some numbers at this problem.

The shannon-hartley capacity of the communication channel should be

B(log2(1+S/N)), where S/N is the signal/noise ratio (measured at the
receiver), and B is the bandwidth.

Let's say our goal is to have the same channel capacity as a 25khz
channel with a 10 db S/N. That would be about 86khz. Round it up to
100khz, this is just a BOTE calculation.

Now lets suppose our spread spectrum channel is about 10Ghz wide.

log2(1+S/N)= 10^-5

S/N=.69e-5 (needed at the receiver)

Assuming inverse square law propagation, we'll have to be about
1/sqrt(.69e-5) = 400x closer to the source than the receiver is to get
a S/N of 1. So if the reciever was 40km away from the transmitter,
we'd have to be within about 100m of the source to have a S/N of 1.

With long enough integration times from a fixed site, we can probably
get some sort of bearing with a S/N 1, but I doubt that any sort of
rapidly moving radiation seeking missile is going to be able to lock
on unless the signal is at least as strong as the noise. It should
also be pretty easy to setup false antennas transmitting low levels of
broadband noise to make any such missile's job very difficult unless
the attacker doesn't mind launching a bunch of them and also doesn't
care what they might hit (collateral damage).