asymetric warfare

"phil hunt" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 06:33:33 GMT, Thomas J. Paladino Jr.
wrote:

Another target for LCCMs would be surface ships. Telling tghe
difference between a ship and water is easier than detecting land
vehicles (detecting what sort of ship it is would also be quite
easy, I imagine). Anti ship missiles would probably want ot have a
bigger warhead than anti-land force missiles (or a 'swarm' option
could be used).

While 'swarming' ships with cruise missiles could possibly overwhelm
their
anti-missile systems, it is still not a feasible plan for an effective
weapon system. Think about it; how many missiles would be needed to get
through the anti-missile defenses and still cause major damage? 75? 100?
More? Per ship? Where are all of these missiles going to be set up and
launched from, and how are you going to keep them from being destroyed by
a
B-2 in the first 10 seconds of the war?

Why would all the missiles have to be launched from the same
location?


LOL.... now you're talking about *multiple* lauch & storage facilities, for
potentially 500-1000+ missiles, all cooridinated with each other to hit the
same small targets *simultaneously*? The infrastructure and technology for
that undertaking would be even more cost prohibitive, but just as futile.
Even if they were somehow built and tested (extraordinarily unlikely);
again, what would stop *all* of these facilities from being taken out in the
first 10 seconds of the war? (And keep in mind that if just a couple of the
facilities were disrupted it would exponentially decrease the effectiveness
of the entire system). These systems would be nearly impossible to conceal,
and would be eliminated right off the bat --if not preemptively during their
testing phase (since nothing like this has been built, it would have to be
tested thoroughly, and that would be impossible to conceal. From there, it
wouldn't take long for US intel to deduce what the intent of such a system
is, and order it eliminated).

Face it, this is a bad idea.

Thomas J. Paladino Jr.
New York City

In article mail-F29439.19342618122003@localhost, Michael Ash wrote:
Is 'brainwashing technology' somehow not in the same realm of fantasy as
'magic fairy dust'? I was under the impression that it was something you
only found in bad novels and movies.

Fox News? The Sun? ;-)

--
I give confidential press briefings.
You leak.
He's been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets act.
-- Irregular verbs, Yes Prime Minister.

George William Herbert wrote:

The response was "Yes, but now they're working 95% of the time,
rather than 55%".

As I understand it, one of the things that motivated the invention
of integrated circuits was reliability -- of naval electronics
and avionics. The systems were coming up against the limits
of what one could reliably do with discrete components.

Paul

In article ,
Mike Williams wrote:

The last I heard, the projected date for the launch of the Galileo Next
Generation Global Navigation Satellite System was some time in 2005, so
after that date there could be an alternative to the American GPS.
However, anyone who's at war with the US is likely to be also disliked
by the Europeans behind Galileo, and might find that they can't get good
readings from either system.

It doesn't really matter whether the enemy is on good terms with Europe
or not. Just because it's a European system doesn't mean the US can't
jam it into uselesness as soon as hostilities begin.

In article ,
phil hunt wrote:
I've worked as a programmer for
defense contractors (and for other large organisations), and believe
me, there is a *lot* of waste and inefficiency. If the software was
written right, it could probably be done with several orders of
magnitude more efficiency.

What competing method is there except for Open Source?

-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."

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?

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.

How will the information-gathering to determine the alliegance of
each square click be organized? How quickly can this organization get
information and collate it? How will that information be sent to the
launch sites? How will the launch sites input it into the missile?
*How accurate and timely will it be?*

Note that at the end of Desert Storm, Swartzkopf designated a spot for
ceasefire talks with the Iraqis that he thought was held by the US. But
it wasn't. The units that he thought were there were several kilometers
away.

(Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse

-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."

In article mail-BF72AE.19331618122003@localhost,
Michael Ash wrote:
In any case, I fully believe you. My statement was mostly CYA. I don't
think that making everybody be a suicide bomber is terribly effective,
but I don't know enough to rule it out.

Remember that suicide bombings was something the palestinians started
with because Israel had countered all their previous methods of attack:
Cross border raids, cross border artillery, airplane hijackings,
storming embassies, leaving bombs in public places etc etc.
Of course, they are trying to make a virtue out of this necessity now.

Tell them to wait in a building by the window. When they see
Americans, shoot (at) them. As it was, I suppose the high ranks were too
busy trying to get out of harm's way with as much cash as possible to
put any effort into making life hard on the US Army.

More probably most of the grunts were too smart to follow such orders
and bugged out the second the Colonel left them.

-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."

In article ,
phil hunt wrote:
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.

But there are no ranging shots with such mortars: Its fire for effect
from the first round. They'd have trouble hitting a barn, if it was
smaller than 10 Downing Street.

-bertil-
--
"It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or
strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an
exercise for your kill-file."

(Derek Lyons) wrote in message ...
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.)

Let's also not forget that the effort required to develop, test,
produce,
store, train troops for, and, eventually, deploy some massive amount
of
(Low Cost Cruise Missiles/Uninvented Mystery Munitions/Diesel
Subs/whatever)
has to be done in complete and total secrecy. It doesn't do you any
good to come up with your stuff if the first act of teh war is to bob
the depots holding it. Or, if you're favoring a surprise/preemptive
strike, the weapons are observed moving from the depots, thus alerting
the target. While there
may be some holes in U.S. Intel, out ability to find and follow that
sort of stuff us pretty good. (Before you go holding up Iraq as a
counterexample, please note that prior to 1990, there was very little
in-depth coverage of Iraq, so new patterns were hard to spot. They
also managed to score some coups by doing stuff that was unexpected,
such as pursuing the use of Calutrons, long obsolescent for reasons of
inefficiency, for Uranium enrichment. They can, for example, hide the
buildings, but they can't hide the electical generators or the
transmission lines, and it becomes a matter of following the leads.
Or, perhaps, one of the Bright Young Guys following the activity of
your factories in the Trade Publications notes an upswing in certain
activities.

So, to cut short a bit - If producing some massive amount of cheap
somethings
is even feasible, it won't do you a bit of good unless you can hide it
from
the watchful eyes of the NRO and the NSA. You can hide little stuff,
but not the sort of overwhelming swarm that's been postulated so far.

--
Pete Stickney

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:40:13 -0500, Ray Drouillard wrote:

"pervect" wrote in message

Denying the US use of GPS would have a negative impact on US military
capability, but it would not eliminate it.

Even if the non-encrypted civilian access GPS is turned off, the
military system will work fine.

Not entirely. Older military GPS receivers use the less
precise civilian signal to get a coarse position fix before
they lock onto and receive the military signal. If the
civilian signal was turned off entirely, these receivers would
either take an extremely long time to initialize after being
turned on, or would not be able to get a position at all.


ljd