asymetric warfare

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.

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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.

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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


--

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?

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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

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

"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.
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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.
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ess (phil hunt) wrote:
The problems listed above are information-processing problems, that
is, software problems. Does it really require billions of dollars to
solve these problems? I say no: a few small groups of really
competent programms can be many times more productive than how
software is traditionally written.

The issue isn't programmers Phil. The issue the massive amounts of
R&D to develop the information needed to specify the sensor that the
programmers will process the output of. The issue is the massive
amount of R&D needed to develop the algorithms the programmers will
implement to analyze the output of the sensor. The issue is the
thousands of hours of R&D needed to develop the database that the
software will use to compare the output of the sensor with...

Writing the software is but one small piece (howsoever important) of a
much larger and more complex effort.

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.

You could have the tightest, fastest, most efficient analysis code in
the world... But it's all meaningless without the other things that go
into making a targeting system. What you have is the typical myopia
of the programmer.

D.
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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.
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