asymetric warfare

On 23 Dec 2003 13:05:12 -0800, John Schilling wrote:
(phil hunt) writes:

On 19 Dec 2003 15:56:55 GMT, Bertil Jonell wrote:
In article ,
phil hunt wrote:
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.

Have you looked up "Tactical and Strategic Missile Guidance" by Zarchan
(ISBN 1-56347-254-6) like I recommended?

I haven't -- I tend not to read off-net sources, due to time, space
and money constraints.

Then you know just enough about any subject to be dangerous. We're
still at least a decade away from the net being more than a suppliment
to the printed word - what gets put online now is the stuff that is
exciting and/or bragworthy,

That's true to some extent, though as you say it's getting less true
all of the time.

If you want to talk intelligently about what it takes to make a guided
missile, you need to know stuff that is printed in Zarchan and a very
few other (unfortunately expensive) textbooks and is to the best of my
knowledge not online anywhere. A good library may substitute for the
out-of-pocket cost of the book; there is no substitute for the time
and effort of reading the book.

Indeed. True of Internet-based material too, of course.

--
"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).

Michael Ash wrote in message news:mail-0E43D5.00500922122003@localhost...

North Korea, on the other hand, has enough artillery on the border to
completely level Seoul within a few hours, from what I understand.

I'm not sure that this is possible with any real-world conventional
artillery. "Damage" Seoul, yes. "Completely level" is a whole other
order of destruction.

That alone is enough to stop any plans for an invasion.

.... depends on our motivation. If we were, for instance, responding
to a North Korean nuclear attack, damage to Seoul might be considered
an acceptable cost.

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.

I'm not sure that this is true. The artillery pieces, in firing,
would be giving away their location, and we would have total air
superiority over the battlefield.

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan

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

--
"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).

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003 22:32:24 +0000, Paul J. Adam wrote:
In message , phil hunt
writes
On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 20:40:27 -0800, Steve Hix sehix@NOSPAM
speakeasy.netINVALID wrote:
One problem here; totalitarian regimes tend not to tolerate lots of
initiative in their underlings, which makes preparing for this sort of
fighting somewhat harder.

True, but there are exceptions, Nazi Germany being an obvious one.

The Wehrmacht had a good system of mission command at company level and
below, but was absolutely devoid of initiative at the operational level:

True, particularly as the war went on.

--
"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).

On 23 Dec 2003 14:43:23 -0800, John Schilling wrote:
Chad Irby writes:
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.

How do you jam a homing pigeon?

With a hawk or falcon, perhaps?

And the command and control battle, *on this issue*, favors the
North. Planned bombardment of fixed targets by prepositioned
artillery assets, requires only the general distribution of an
"Execute War Plan A" message in real time. War Plan A itself
can be distributed ahead of time, and as securely dug in as the
guns that will execute it. The implementation order goes out by
general broadcast, landline telephone, bicycle courier, signal
flare, and I wasn't kidding about carrier pigeons. With massive
redundancy in all channels. It will get through.

Once events diverge from War Plan A, yes, the NKPA will be blind,
dumb, and paralyzed. But the first day of battle, on the border,
will probably be theirs.

This seems an accurate assessment.

--
"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).

Pete wrote:
"George William Herbert" wrote
Done properly, especially with one time pad encryption,
one can handle this sort of situation.
Consider... the use of CD-R's for pads. They give you 650
megabytes of storage. Assume one message of 1k contents
per minute is sent; that works out to a bit over 43 megabytes
of pad per month, or about 518 megabytes per year. Each receiving
station can have its own pad and its own recipient keying.

And then when one of those CD's gets lost or captured...

One of those CDs is lost or captured, and then the opponent
has a years worth of weather reports and routine messages
to two tech sergeants and a light squad of flunkies and
guards in a warehouse / launch bunker in the middle of the
desert.

You use a different CD pair for each bunker. It's easy enough
with CD-Rs.


-george william herbert

John Schilling wrote:
and Carrie Fishe

*with* an M-16.

Don't forget the M-16.


-george

Fred J. McCall wrote:
:I wasnt pretending this was military grade weapon (the GPS component rules
:that out straight away) but if someone told you this 10 years ago you would
:write it off completely.

Really? I find that quite odd, since I remember George talking about
how to build a rocket much more cheaply than we are STILL building
them and didn't "write it off completely". I'm pretty sure that was
more than 10 years ago.

I started saying that more than 10 years ago now, yeah.

There are now several other companies flying stuff in
the price / performance / complexity range I was talking
about, though I have not yet gotten full development
funding for my project and didn't receive one of the
DARPA FALCON project awards, though several of the
others did.

I do find the price tag pretty ludicrous,
given that you can't buy a car for that kind of money.

A lot of that is markup and costs associated with stuff
that has nothing inherently to do with the structure or
systems (interiors are not cheap).

Car engines and drivetrains also cost a lot more than
pulsejets do, cruise missile wings don't have to be
structurally all that complicated, etc.

People build homebuilt aircraft that are far larger
and more complicated (other than guidance electronics)
than our notional cruise missile for a thousand or two
thousand hours work invested, using tools and technology
that can be obtained in the bush in Rwanda if need be.
If we assume the cruise missile is half that effort,
that's five hundred to a thousand hours of effort.
In a lot of countries, people get paid a couple of
bucks an hour for reasonable tech-oriented labor.
If you wanted to do this with a prop (or, ducted fan)
there are two cycle aviation engines off the shelf
in quantity one at $2k and down for low power,
$4-5k and up some for about a hundred horsepower.
The ducted fan / afterburner job used in the
second generation, never used Kamizaze plane
used a hundred horsepower engine and a wooden
fan unit.

The only cost center which runs the risk of running
severely outside the budget is the computer and guidance
hardware. The INS will be several thousand in quantity
even if it's fiber optic gyros and MEMS accellerometers,
if you're aiming for 10 meter inertial accuracy over
those 200ish kilometers. The camera system engineering
will not be trivial, though the camera itself may end up
being very cheap (or cameras... CMOS cameras for $20 or
less retail today means that some solutions may just be
"buy more cameras"). The computer itself is trivial
and off the shelf, even hardened for flight. The software
is a sticky point but not as hard as some have made it out
to be, other than the image-matching software. I believe
that the image-matching problem is overstated here based
on previous investigations I have done, but I am not a
competent expert on that corner of the problem.


-george william herbert

phil hunt wrote:
(It's generally not a good idea to use canned phrases like this)

Only in keyed algorithmic encryption; random one time pads make it
harmless, as I understand it.


-george william herbert

John Schilling wrote:
[...]
Invoking the Asymmetric Warfare buzzword does nothing to counter those
capabilities. It isn't clear that they even *can* be countered, save
in kind, but if it is possible it will involve a whole slew of very
hard problems in its own right, and that the amateurish solutions
posited here are not going to cut it.

Pushback. While you are generally correct... I think that some of
the enthusiasts here are not paying enough attention either to
details or to the big picture... I believe that there are some
unconventional and asymmetrical things which could be done which
would severely hamper western style warfare.

One of the things which could be done looks a lot like one of the
things under discussion here. There are many others, and the
overall strategy of defense by and only by massive cheap cruise
missiles is a grand scale loser, but as part of doing a lot of
other things it might well be a viable strategy component.


-george william herbert