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#51
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On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 09:14:26 +0000, Mike Williams wrote:
Wasn't it phil hunt who wrote: What would be sensible strategies/weapons for a middle-ranking country to employ if it thought it is likely to be involved in a war against the USA or other Western countries, say in the next 10 years? I think that any middle-ranking country that went up against USA/The West using military weapons would get seriously stomped on. I doubt if any country would attack the USA, though many would want to deter a US attack. The only way to have a chance would be to win the propaganda war, turning popular opinion in the USA against contesting the war. Indeed propaganda is important, but a bit outside what I've been discussing. Provoke your opponents into making the first media-visible aggressive step, and make yourself appear to be implementing passive resistance, or using a minimal defensive response. Meanwhile, if you can find any targets that are not media-visible (i.e. the US government can't publicly admit that the targets exist) then attack them aggressively. That's clever, I hadn't thought of that. -- "It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia (Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse the last two letters). |
#52
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On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:09:48 +0100, Michael Ash wrote:
Well, don't forget that only a very tiny percentage of any regular army will be composed of people fanatical enough to become suicide bombers. Your four-million strong Elbonian People's Happy Army will turn into a handful of suicide bombers and a whole bunch of deserters if you tried that strategy. Not to say it may not be the best use of that army, but I don't think it would be that effective. Indeed. Developing and caching weapons that allow people to be guerrillas with reduced risk to themselves (such as time-delayed mortars) would seem an obvious thing to do. -- "It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia (Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse the last two letters). |
#53
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"phil hunt" wrote in message .. . On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:26:01 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote: I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here, there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human involved in the decision to fire. That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous combat systems. Yes. The progrsamming for this isn't particularly hard, once you've written software that can identify a vehicle (or other target) in a picture. It's just a matter of aiming the missile towards the target. "The programming for this isn't particularly hard"? Gee, one wonders why only one nation has to date fielded a system that even verges on that kind of capability. And as to it being "just a matter of aiming the missile towards the target..." uhhhh...yeeeah, if you consider "just" including developing a navigational system that also supports its own survivability (i.e., is able to negotiate a route to the target down in the weeds), knowing where the target is in the first place and getting that data to the firing point realtime, and provided that you target just happens to match up with what is loaded in the missiles brain (Missile: "I am looking for a tank...tank..tank..." as it flies across twenty light skinned trucks loaded with dismounts). You are REALLY lowballing the estimate of how much R&D is required to field such a semi-autonomous weapon. Ever wonder why you are just now seeing such technology emerging in the US military (and hint--it ain't because of our "bloated" defense industry)? Weapons like this were in existance 20 years ago, for example the Exocet anti-ship missile. I'm not bsure what problems you envisage with doing this; perhaps you could elaborate? For gosh sakes, you are comparing apples and oranges. Exocet was fired at a known target location, and one which could not be mistaken for something else short of a freakin' iceberg, and during final approach locks in with its own guidance radar, operating against a background remarkably free of clutter. And besides, you are making a point against your earlier premise--if Exocet was so easy to develop and manufacture, even given the comparitive ease of its mission when contrasted to a system that has to find, identify, and attack various DIFFERENT kinds of targets with different signatures in the terrestrial realm as you have posited, then why have only a handful of nations been able to develop their own anti-ship missiles? because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and hit anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the target is right at the time the weapon arrives. What you could do is have the missile, if it doesn't find a target to hang around in the area looking for one. (The British ALARM missile does this literally :-)). There is one heck of a difference between ARM's that home on active threat emitters, or follow the last plotted course as HARM does, and these uber-CM's you have posited that can find and strike various kinds of (very passive)targets. Now if you want to send a flock of CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or targeting of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not every enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the insurgents we are no facing in Iraq do)? You can't prevent fratricide all the time, and most countries would have a higher tolerance from losses caused by friendly fire than most western countries do. The missile would know (at least approximately - within a few km) were it is, and therefore whether it is over land occupied by its own side. LOL! If it only knows "within a few km or so" where it is, then news flash--you won't even be able to use that puppy against a CVN. Your postulated brilliant-CM-on-a-shoestring-budget-able-to-be-manufactured-by-anyone is sounding more and more ludicrous. Discriminating between military and civilian vehicles is a lot harder, I agree. (b) Are you going to send it in low, where it MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit, but which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to most potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex navigation system) The topographic data would probably be available if the missile is flying over the territory of its own country. You have a rather optimistic view of the capabilities of most nations to handle development of truly accurate x-y-z topo data sets. And once you do have that data, you have to have a guidance system that can read it, remain compact enough to fit in your missile, and is capable of extremely rapid computational work, not to mention is able to manage a massive starting data set (when we did a relatively simple 3-D mapping effort of our 70+ square mile town a few years back it was going to take something like half-a-gig)--ever consider what your missile is going to have to deal with if it is going to have any kind of range at all? Otherwise, there are other methods of nagivation: dead reckoning, celestial, a LORAN-like system could be set up. Your LORAN system bites the dust when the curtain goes up. Automated celestial tracking/guidance is not the purview of the amateur, and I doubt you would get the requisite accuracy from such a system mounted on such a small platform. DR is a non-starter--again, you don't just hurl a few missiles in the general direction of the bad guys and say, "Gee, that was tough--time for a beer!" or up high where the view is better, It's possible that a mission might require some of the flight to be at high level and some at low level. I imagine the missiles could be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet cable into a slot on the missile. It pops up, it becomes Patriot bait. It stays low, the Avengers eat it. The CAP fighters can munch on either, but they will more than likely just remain occupied with frying each launch system as it unmasks. You are getting quite far off base with this if your objective is to find an asymetric attack method; what you are postulating plays to the US strengths, and that is the opposite of asymetric warfare. take the advice of the others who have already suggested the low tech approach--when you try to out-tech the US, you will lose. Brooks -- |
#54
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On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:52:28 GMT, Derek Lyons wrote:
(phil hunt) wrote: What would be sensible strategies/weapons for a middle-ranking country to employ if it thought it is likely to be involved in a war against the USA or other Western countries, say in the next 10 years? The most sensible strategy is not to get involved in such a war to start with. Indeed; but sometimes war is unavoidable. I think one strategy would be to use large numbers of low cost cruise missiles (LCCM). The elements of a cruise missile are all very simple, mature technology, except for the guidance system. Modern computers are small and cheap, so guidance systems can be made cheaply. Guidance systems depend on *much* more than simply their computers. You also need the inertial components, or their analogs, and *those* are going to be hard to obtain in large quantities, especially at any useful accuracy level. digital cameras can do much of the job, and they are available cheaply. snipped various fanciful uses Many of these depend on the West not deploying something it's exceedingly capable at; Electronic warfare and countermeasures. What electronic countermeasures could be used? Faster weapon system design mewans it could "get inside the decision curve" of Western arms industries, because by the time they've produced a weapon to counter the low-cost weapon, the next generation of low-cost weapon is there. Problem is, the Western powers can get inside this curve faster than the medium nation can. The factories, power grid, etc of the medium nation can be taken out within a few weeks to months via manned bombers, or our own cruise missiles. Vital components produced overseas can be stopped via blockade. That's after the war breaks out. The USA isn't likely to start bombing every country with an arms industry, is it? -- "It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia (Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse the last two letters). |
#55
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"phil hunt" wrote in message . .. On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 18:22:34 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote: snip since what has been postulated is essentially an autonomous attack system that does not currently exist even in the US. Third, the number of Patiots that can be made available is not a trivial number--count the number of missiles available in the uploaded canisters of a single battery, not to mention the reminder of its ABL that is accompanying them. Do you have actual numbers here? Six firing batteries per Patriot battalion, with eight launchers per battery, equals 48 launchers per battalion. Each launcher has 4 rounds onboard, so you are talking 192 missiles loaded out and ready to fire--not sure what the ABL is, but safely assume at least two rounds per tube in the battery/BN trains structure, so we are looking at what, another 384 rounds readily available? So total Pats equals about 576 rounds for a single battalion? Then you have the Avengers, with 36 Avengers in each corps level ADA Avenger battalion, each with 8 tubes uploaded, so just taking into account their initial upload you are talking 288 missiles without bothering to consider their ABL in the trains. But that's not all, folks--each division has its own ADA battalion, with another 24 Avengers, 24 BSF-V's, and 40 MANPADS (or a heavy division), so again minus the ammo in the trains, you have another 328 Stingers there. So your nominal corps force is going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of beween 576 and 1,100 Patriots covering it, another thousand plus Stingers (conservative estimate). Are you beginning to understand why trying to out-tech the US is an unwise move if you are really interested in asymetric warfare? Brooks |
#56
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ISTM that there are two possible objectives:
1) deterring the large power from starting a war 2) minimizing the damage a war does to the citizens Countries involved in terrorist-risistance campaigns tend to be unpleasant places to live. Resistance campaigns at home may have some outcome influencing effect (Nam was sold to the American publicv that way), but attacks on the larger country seem counter-productive as Afghanistan and Chechnya (Sp?) are discovering. Possibly non-terrorist strategies aimed at attacking the big country at home would back-fire simillarly. Probably some combination of being a tough nut to crack, giving up something the aggressor wants and persuading others that their interests are served by helping out is the winning strategy. Two countries faced with large, belligerent neighbours in the thirties were Poland and Finland. Neither neighbour could be bought off. The latter did rather well, the former poorly. Are there lessons in their experience? Peter Skelton |
#57
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"Kevin Brooks" wrote:
Then one wonders why those very same nations usually end up trying to buy the products produced by those "slow-moving, bloated" western defense contractors. Mainly because creating and maintaining a national defense industry is very hard and very expensive. Doing the same but ensuring that it keeps up with the state-of-the-art is even more so. D. -- The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found at the following URLs: Text-Only Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html Enhanced HTML Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html Corrections, comments, and additions should be e-mailed to , as well as posted to sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for discussion. |
#58
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"Kevin Brooks" wrote:
c) Development of a reliable, compact, onboard sensor suite that provides enough resolution to find likely targets, and a darned intelligent software package to handle target discrimination (from background clutter, earlier posited garbage truck, etc.), and can also recognize an entire range of potential targets and select the one you would want hit from amongst all of them. Sorry, but I don't see ANY potential foes we might face in your near term overcoming one, much less all, of those hurdles, and I am sure I have missed a few more. There's also the problem of ensuring that your swarm of missiles sent against a swarm of targets don't all choose the same, or a small set of targets. Non trivial at best, nightmarish at worst, and one that the 'high tech' nations have all looked at, and declined to solve, choosing instead other solutions. D. -- The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found at the following URLs: Text-Only Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html Enhanced HTML Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html Corrections, comments, and additions should be e-mailed to , as well as posted to sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for discussion. |
#60
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ess (phil hunt) wrote:
If they can be mass-produced for $10,000 each, then a $1 bn procurement -- and the sort of countries we're talking about typically sign bigger weapons contracts than that -- would buy 100,000 missiles. Procuring the missiles is only the first step. Then you have to train the crews, and store the missiles until needed, and distribute them when needed. All three are non-trivial problems in and of themselves. (And all four steps are vulnerable to disruption.) D. -- The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found at the following URLs: Text-Only Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html Enhanced HTML Version: http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html Corrections, comments, and additions should be e-mailed to , as well as posted to sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for discussion. |
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