Berlin is perhaps the best-located city on the planet from a purely economic point of view

July 26th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanGreat Britain was better suited to leverage deepwater navigation than Iberia, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), but it was not the ultimate European geography for industrialization:

By 1850, it was Germany’s time to rise.

Berlin is perhaps the best-located city on the planet from a purely economic point of view. It sits at the junction of the Spree and Havel Rivers, both navigable tributaries of the Elbe. Berlin is only sixty miles from the Oder, and the Havel reaches so far to the east as to almost connect the two river basins. This grants Berlin access to one of the world’s very few maritime systems that taps into more than one river.

And those are just the rivers immediately proximate to Berlin. Close to the west is the Rhine, Northern Europe’s financial-industrial powerhouse, navigable all the way south to the Swiss city of Basel, and possessing tributaries and distributaries that spiderweb through German, French, and Dutch lands. Close to the east is the Vistula—the last major navigable river before the Eurasian Hordelands. Close to the south is the Danube—the longest river in Europe as a whole, one of the very few that flows southward, and the only one mighty enough to punch through the Alps and Carpathians. Any economic hub centered at Berlin is uniquely situated to reach almost anywhere in Europe where wealth can be created. Berlin’s waterways dictate that Germany emerge as the heart of a massive empire with economic links to the North, Baltic, and Black Seas, so long as Berlin is left to develop.

But Germany has almost never been left to develop.

Germany’s location saddles it with three critical weaknesses that make it an insecure — and often poor — country, despite what ostensibly seems like the geography that most peoples could only dream of.

First, Germans don’t live at the western end of the continent like the Spanish or on an island like the English; they are in the very middle of the North European Plain. While Germany’s wealth potential is massive, German lands are inherently vulnerable. To the east is a nigh indefensible border with Poland, whose own eastern border is even less defensible. Germany’s western border is similarly difficult: Opposite it is France, typically the most consolidated European power. Balkan upstarts often seethe on the other side of the Vienna Gap, while maritime powers can easily harass — and at times even hold portions of — the region’s lengthy coastline.

[…]

Second, this man-in-the-middle position means that Germany has almost never been united. German rivers lead in different directions to different seas, making different cities look to different horizons for their economic well-being. The middle of Germany — the Harz Mountains region — is akin to having Appalachia between Boston and New York. The presence of not one but six major powers in immediate proximity long denied Berlin easy control not just of its borderlands, but large tracts of its interior as well, including most of the Rhine and Oder river systems. Unlike the English, who established a centralized government in the Thames valley as early as the tenth century, the initial German proto-state of Brandenburg didn’t start stabilizing as a country in its own right until the fifteenth century.

[…]

The Germans lacked independent access to the ocean. Germany didn’t control even one of its major rivers’ delta cities until 1720, when it finally seized Stettin on the Oder from the Swedish Empire. Even then German ocean access was sharply circumscribed. The Danish island of Zealand is positioned perfectly to regulate traffic between the Baltic and North Seas. Germans only got their first full access to the ocean in 1871, when Berlin finally proved able to fold Hamburg, on the Elbe delta, into the German Empire.

[…]

For the Germans industrialization changed everything.

[…]

The endless quantities of cheap, high-quality goods decimated the Germans’ painstakingly fostered cottage and guild industries. Economic depression triggered the revolutions of 1848. Prussia only held together because of its national planning mechanisms and the strength of its military class, which derailed the revolutions and ejected vast droves of dissatisfied citizens.

[…]

First, industrialization happened everywhere. Elsewhere in Europe, the various industrial revolutions launched from the respective capital cities. Money accrued in the capital and was spent from the capital, so road and rail networks radiated from it too, metabolizing whatever resources lay beyond in a system of diminishing returns. But the Germans, down to the most remote provincial city, were uniquely skilled in economic management and had already constructed the base road infrastructure that industrialization required to take root. Each and every one of the German cities was fertile ground for the seeds of industrialization.

[…]

Second, industrialization happened much faster. Fractured fifteenth-century Brandenburg with no coastline or major port city was a very capital-poor country. Money had to be husbanded with ruthless efficiency. Imperial Germany of the 1870s, by contrast, controlled the bulk of Central Europe’s river networks and was awash in war booty from its recent string of military victories against Denmark, Austria, and France. Germany’s hypercompetent governments included industrialists on their cabinets, and the public-private pairing ensured that adequate funding reached each and every project that needed investment.

[…]

The industrialization of England took nearly 150 years. The industrialization of Germany was carried out in less than forty.

Third, German industrialization had massive military applications. Most European countries’ military application of industrial technologies focused on quantity: more guns, more uniforms, more transports. Only Germany truly embraced the fundamental newness of industrial technologies to remake how it waged war. This would have been impossible had Germany not entered the industrial age with the highest level of literacy in the world, largely due to its ongoing need to maintain a qualitative edge over its quantitatively superior competitors. The most important manifestation of this superior education system was the innovation of the General Staff, a sort of military middle management designed to disseminate information up and down the chain of command. A military commission required a college degree. Fusing the expertise of local governments with academia, industry, and finance, the General Staff achieved two things: It encouraged the development of ever larger cannons that the military thinkers redesigned their strategies around, and it pioneered new logistical methods to take advantage of the German rail system.

[…]

After three generations of fine-tuning, the world came to know the gentle German mix of technology, logistics, and force as blitzkrieg.

Finally, industrialization unified the Germans as a country and as a people to a degree unheard of elsewhere, before or since. All governments got a boost from industrialization. Industrialization brought per capita increases in wealth, health, and living standards so unprecedented that you have to go back to the domestication of animals to find a point in human history where the general populace experienced so rapid and sustained a period of improvement. With rising wealth came rising government legitimacy. For the birthplace of industrialization, England, this was merely garnish; the English were already rich from the benefits of deepwater navigation and a globe-spanning empire. In Germany, however, the legitimacy gain wasn’t so much radically different, but exponentially faster and larger.

[…]

In a single generation, industrialization took them from being some of the North European Plain’s poorest people to some of its richest, and enabled them to impose decisive defeats in four significant conflicts with powers that had preyed upon them for centuries (Poland, Denmark, Austria, and France).

[…]

Germanic cities that had been unassociated since the death of Charlemagne connected their rail networks together to discover a peer relationship, far different from when a sleepy country town became connected to mighty London. The effect, economically and culturally, was electric, and considering the era, that term is used both figuratively and literally. This was not simply a culture that had finally unified, this was a culture that was ecstatic with its identity and its government in a way that few other cultures have ever approached.

[…]

It was the first country in the world to have the majority of its population urbanized — a critical development to both foster and take advantage of skilled labor in the industrial era — and by 1900 its many regional centers had grown to the point that Germany had more major industrialized cities than the rest of Europe combined. It was the first country to develop mass universities and research labs, and then to link the two directly into local governments and corporations, giving German industry the ability to source everything from loans to staff to scientific research, and giving rise to the national economic champions model of corporate organization that pervades Europe even today. And the Germans methodically and assiduously applied every new breakthrough, whether scientific or industrial, to every aspect of their national strategy, culminating in everything from engines so efficient and small that they could propel individual vehicles (via Karl Benz, Rudolf Diesel, Gottlieb Daimler, and Emil Jellinek, whose daughter was the original Mercedes) and modern pharmaceuticals (Gregor Mendel, Robert Koch, Friedrich Bayer, and Paul Ehrlich), to cannons (Alfred Krupp) and blitzkrieg.

[…]

Simply put, neither deepwater navigation nor industrialization was done diffusing. England could make better use of deepwater navigation than Iberia, and Germany could make better use of industrialization than England, but there was another geography that could make better use of both.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 1 Comment »

GPS jamming looks more like a weapon for a swarm attacking an urban target rather than as a way of stopping a swarm

July 25th, 2024

Swarm Troopers by David HamblingEver since radios have been used in warfare, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), there have been efforts to interfere with them:

Britain’s Royal Navy experimented with broadcasting signals to interfere with enemy communication as far back as 1902, just five years after the first radios were installed on ships. By WWI, the use of radio was more sophisticated, and so were countermeasures. The German Zeppelins used fixes from radio stations to navigate; so on the night of 19 October 1917, the French switched radio broadcasts from the Eiffel Tower to another station to send the airships off course. When the Germans started using their own transmitters for navigation, the Allies drowned these out with louder transmissions on the same wavelength, possibly the first attempt to deliberately jam radio reception.

[…]

The first radio-guided weapon to see action was the German FS-1400 or Fritz-X developed in WWII. This was a three-thousand-pound glide bomb designed to attack heavily armored battleships and cruisers. It was a simple bomb fitted with small fins worked by radio control. A flare on the tail of the bomb allowed the bomb aimer to follow its progress and adjust its course with simple up-down, left-right corrections.

[…]

The Allies captured Fritz-X missiles and control equipment, and had developed effective countermeasures within a matter of months.

The British Type 650 Transmitter, and jammers from the US Naval Research Laboratory and Harvard’s Radio Research Laboratory, nullified the Fritz-X. The jammer steered the bomb as far over in one direction as possible, overriding the operator’s commands. From being a guaranteed hit, it became a guaranteed miss. The Germans dropped the idea of radio guidance, and the next version of the Fritz-X was guided via a wire spooling out of the back of the missile.

[…]

At its simplest, jamming may simply mean broadcasting noise in the frequency band that the receiver is operating in. This sort of brute force jamming is rare in military circles, where communications tend to hop from one frequency to another at rapid intervals, and it is difficult to jam the entire spectrum with enough power. Smart jammers detect and analyze an opponent’s communications and can selectively jam only in the ranges where needed. Jammers are also likely to be directional, rather than blasting out noise in all directions.

In the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, tactical jamming took on a new urgency. Insurgents had started triggering bombs using cheap cell phones. Special countermeasures were fielded to block the signals; the Pentagon spent some $17 billion on electronic countermeasures with some fifty thousand jamming units being issued. These included portable Warlock Green units for foot soldiers, which are credited with saving many lives.

[…]

It is notable that the 2014 Black Dart exercise included an EA-18 Growler, the most modern electronic warfare aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory, equipped with a range of powerful jammers. When the radio signal to a drone is jammed, it is usually programmed to return to the last point where it could communicate or simply return to base.

[…]

There is a growing interest in free-space optical communications, sometimes described as “like broadband over optical fiber, but without the fiber.” The laser signal is beamed through the air to the receiver. This method only works over line of sight (obviously enough) and, because of atmospheric effects, the range tends to be limited to a mile or so. It can carry as much data as a broadband fiber optic cable and would be ideal for a swarm of drones forming a mesh network. Because it does not rely on radio waves, optical communication cannot be jammed or hacked into.

In a more low-tech version of optical communication, researchers at the Postgraduate Naval Center in Monterey have looked at communicating via QR codes as a form of “digital semaphore.”

[…]

The team found that QR codes could be read from over five hundred feet away. A swarm could pass messages between members to coordinate its actions.

[…]

An artillery shell is out of control as soon as it leaves the barrel, as is a heat-seeking missile when it leaves the rails. Some missiles, designed to target air defense radar, already pick their own targets. The distinction between controlled and uncontrolled is subtler than you might expect.

[…]

If blocking communications does not work, we can try another weak point, navigation. A human pilot has many ways of finding their way around, but most drones only have GPS. The power of the Global Positioning System’s signal has been compared to a car headlight over ten thousand miles away, making it an easy signal to jam.

However, anti-jamming measures are getting better. Raytheon has developed a sophisticated anti-jam device for GPS called Landshield built around a controlled pattern reception antenna. This has an array of receiving elements that combine to cancel out the jamming from any given direction. When a jamming signal is detected, the array automatically nulls it out. It is like looking through a cardboard tube so you can see a faint light in the distance without being dazzled by lights nearby.

Raytheon’s previous generation of anti-jam GPS was the Advanced Digital Antenna Platform, which weighed about ten pounds and was the size of a telephone directory. The new Landshield fits on a silicon chip and may be integrated with military GPS devices, from portable units used by individual soldiers to the GPS-guided Paveway bomb and, of course, drones.

[…]

On Monday, 22 January 2007, an electronic warfare exercise being carried out in San Diego harbor accidentally jammed GPS signals across the city. Disruption started almost immediately. The emergency paging system at a hospital stopped functioning. The automated harbor traffic management system stopped working, threatening to throw the port into chaos. Air traffic control at San Diego airport reported problems with their system for tracking incoming aircraft. Some bank ATMs reportedly stopped giving out money.

The reason for this disruption is that many modern systems use the precision time signal from GPS satellites. In some cell phone networks the signal is used to give each mast a unique identity; if it is lost, the mast drops off the network. GPS timing signals time-stamp financial transactions to prevent fraud, and this may be why the cash machines stopped working. Power utilities use the GPS time signal to keep alternating current from different power plants in phase across the grid. If this is lost, then attempts to switch power supplies to channel power to where it is needed become inefficient as the out-of-phase currents clash. This may ultimately produce blackouts.

GPS jamming looks more like a weapon for a swarm attacking an urban target rather than as a way of stopping a swarm.

This vulnerability is one reason why alternatives to GPS are a hot topic. One such is the system developed by Australian company Locata. This uses a network of ground-based ‘pseudo-satellites’ which give a more accurate fix and would require vastly more powerful jammers to block.

[…]

You can already navigate urban areas without GPS thanks to Wi-Fi. Each Wi-Fi hotspot has its own fingerprint, including a Service Set ID and Media Access Control address, and transmits them continuously. Service providers including Google and Navizon map out the location of each node; by identifying those closest to you, you can pinpoint your location within less than a hundred feet.

Other researchers are navigating using “signals of opportunity,” including not only Wi-Fi but cell phone signals, radio and television transmitters, and other sources of radio waves. These may not be as accurate as GPS, but they can be used indoors as well as out, and cannot be stopped except by jamming absolutely everything.

[…]

Tomahawk cruise missiles were originally equipped with terrain-matching radar to compare the scenery with an electronic landscape map to determine their location. The difference now is that every smartphone has the storage and processing power to scan the scenery and find out where it is.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles

July 24th, 2024

Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down:

Dubbed “Sky Fortress,” the concept was developed by two Ukrainian engineers in a garage who put a microphone and a cell phone on a six-foot pole to listen for one-way UAVs, said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.

“They put about 9,500 of these within their nation and now they get very accurate information that is synthesized in a central computer and sent out to mobile fire teams. And on an iPad, they get a route of flight of these one-way UAVs coming in, and they have a triple-A [anti-aircraft] gun and a person with six hours of training can shoot these down,” Hecker told reporters at the Royal International Air Tattoo on Saturday.

About three months ago, Russia sent a salvo of 84 UAVs into Ukraine, and the system helped the defending troops shoot down all but four, Hecker said.

The system was so effective that the engineers behind the system were invited to demo it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Hecker said. Other countries are looking at acoustic sensors, he added, noting that Romania recently did a demo with the system.

Each sensor costs about $400 to $500, he said, which suggests that the entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

There was no need for a pressure suit

July 23rd, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenOn April 25, 1962, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), the “Oxcart” was ready, and it was time for Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk to suit up:

Two physiological support division officers helped Schalk into a flight suit, which looked like a coverall. There was no need for a pressure suit because today Schalk was only going to make a taxi test. Out on the tarmac, an engineer rolled up a metal set of stairs and Schalk climbed up into the strange-looking aircraft.

[…]

Lou Schalk fired up the engines and began rolling down the runway for the taxi test. To everyone’s surprise, including Lou Schalk’s, the aircraft unexpectedly got lift. Given the enormous engine power, the aircraft suddenly started flying—lifting up just twenty feet off the ground. Stunned and horrified, Kelly Johnson watched from the control tower. “The aircraft began wobbling,” Johnson wrote in his notes, which “set up lateral oscillations which were horrible to see.” Johnson feared the airplane might crash before its first official flight. Schalk was equally surprised and decided not to try to circle around. Instead he set the plane down as quickly as he could. This meant landing in the dry lake bed, nearly two miles beyond where the runway ended. When it hit the earth, the aircraft sent up a huge cloud of dust, obscuring it from view. Schalk turned the plane around and drove back toward the control towers, still engulfed in a cloud of dust and dirt. When he got back, the Lockheed engineers ran up to the airplane on the metal rack of stairs. Kelly Johnson had only four words for Schalk: “What in Hell, Lou?” For about fifteen very tense minutes, Johnson had thought Lou Schalk had wrecked the CIA’s only Oxcart spy plane.

The following day, Schalk flew again, this time with Kelly Johnson’s blessings but still not as an official first flight. Harry Martin was standing on the tarmac when the aircraft took off. “It was beautiful. Remarkable. Just watching it took your breath away,” Martin recalls. “I remember thinking, This is cool. And then, all of a sudden, as Schalk rose up in the air, pieces of the airplane started to fall off!” The engineers standing next to Martin panicked. Harry Martin thought for sure the airplane was going to crash. But Lou Schalk kept flying. The pieces of the airplane were thin slices of the titanium fuselage, called fillets. Their sudden absence did not affect low-altitude flight. Schalk flew for forty minutes and returned to Area 51. It was mission accomplished for Schalk but not for the engineers. They spent the next four days roaming around Groom Lake attempting to locate and reattach the pieces of the plane. Still, it was a milestone for the CIA. Three years, ten months, and seven days had passed since Kelly Johnson first presented his plans for a Mach 3 spy plane to Richard Bissell, and here was the Oxcart, finally ready for its first official flight.

[…]

Schalk traveled up to thirty thousand feet, flew around in the restricted airspace for fifty-nine minutes, and came back down. His top speed was four hundred miles per hour.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Precision is not expensive

July 22nd, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonMusk was playing with a toy Model S, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), when an idea came to him:

It looked like a miniaturized copy of the real car, and when he took it apart he saw that it even had a suspension inside. But the entire underbody of the car had been die cast as one piece of metal. At a meeting of his team that day, Musk pulled out the toy and put it on the white conference room table. “Why can’t we do that?” he asked.

One of the engineers pointed out the obvious, that an actual car underbody is much bigger. There were no casting machines to handle something that size. That answer didn’t satisfy Musk. “Go figure out how to do it,” he said. “Ask for a bigger casting machine. It’s not as if that would break the laws of physics.”

Both he and his executives called the six major casting companies, five of whom dismissed the concept. But a company called Idra Presse in Italy, which specialized in high-pressure die-casting machines, agreed to take on the challenge of building very large machines that would be able to churn out the entire rear and front underbodies for the Model Y. “We did the world’s largest casting machine,” Afshar says. “It’s a six-thousand-ton one for the Model Y, and we will also use a nine-thousand-ton one for Cybertruck.”

The machines inject bursts of molten aluminum into a cold casting mold, which can spit out in just eighty seconds an entire chassis that used to contain more than a hundred parts that had to be welded, riveted, or bonded together. The old process produced gaps, rattles, and leaks. “So it went from a horrible nightmare to something that is crazy cheap and easy and fast,” Musk says.

The process reinforced Musk’s appreciation for the toy industry. “They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces.”

[…]

“Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”

Posted in Business, Technology | 5 Comments »

He intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest

July 21st, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew Roberts”If I had stayed in the East,” Napoleon said to General Gourgaud on St Helena, “I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.” Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life) Napoleon’s preparations for his campaign in Egypt:

The Ottoman Turks had conquered Egypt in 1517 and still officially ruled it, but de facto control had been long wrested from them by the Mamluks, a military caste originally from Georgia in the Caucasus. Their twenty-four beys (warlord princes) were unpopular among ordinary Egyptians for the high taxes they imposed, and were considered foreigners. After the Revolution, the idea of invading Egypt had appealed both to French radical idealists for its promise of extending liberty to a people oppressed by foreign tyrants, and to more calculating strategists such as Carnot and Talleyrand, who wanted to counter British influence in the eastern Mediterranean.

[…]

Between his secret appointment to command the Army of Egypt on March 5, 1798 and the date set for the expedition to set sail, May 19, there were fewer than eleven weeks for Napoleon to organize and equip the entire enterprise, yet somehow he also managed to attend eight lectures on science at the Institut.

As part of a misinformation campaign he spoke openly in the salons about the holiday he hoped to take in Germany with Josephine, Monge, Berthier and Marmont. To further the ruse, he was officially reconfirmed as commander of the Army of England, based at Brest.

Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the geographical key to the world’. His strategic aim was to damage British trade in the region and replace it with French; at very least he hoped to stretch the Royal Navy by forcing it to protect the mouths of the Mediterranean and Red Sea and trade routes to India and America simultaneously.

The Royal Navy, which had lost Corsica as a base in 1796, would be further constrained if the French fleet could operate from the near-impregnable harbour of Malta. ‘Why should we not seize the island of Malta?’ he had written to Talleyrand in September 1797. ‘It would further threaten British naval superiority.’ He told the Directory that ‘This little island is worth any price to us.’

[…]

His ultimate ambition — or fantasy — may be gauged by his demand for English maps of Bengal and the Ganges from the war ministry, and his request to be accompanied by Citizen Piveron, the former envoy to Britain’s greatest enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, ‘the Tiger of Mysore’.

[…]

As it transpired he had relatively little difficulty in raising the 8 million francs the expedition would cost, through ‘contributions’ extorted by Berthier in Rome, Joubert in Holland and Brune in Switzerland.

[…]

The cavalry was to be under the command of the Haitian-born General Davy de la Pailleterie, known as Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, whose father was a French nobleman and whose mother was of Afro-Caribbean descent, hence the nickname ‘Schwarzer Teufel’ (black devil) which the Austrians had given him when he prevented them from re-crossing the Adige in January 1797.

[…]

Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.

With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him.

He also included Herodotus for his — largely fantastical — description of Egypt. (Years later he would state that he believed ‘Man was formed by the heat of the sun acting upon mud. Herodotus tells us that the slime of the Nile changed into rats, and that they could be seen in the process of formation.’

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest. To that end he took 167 geographers, botanists, chemists, antiquaries, engineers, historians, printers, astronomers, zoologists, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, Orientalists, mathematicians, economists, journalists, civil engineers and balloonists — the so-called savants, most of whom were members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts — whose work he hoped would give the enterprise a significance beyond the military.

He failed in his hopes to persuade a professional poet to accompany him, but he did enlist the fifty-one-year-old novelist, artist and polymath Vivant Denon, who made more than two hundred sketches during his travels. Under their leaders Monge and Berthollet, the savants included some of the most distinguished men of the day: the mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier (author of Fourier’s Law concerning heat conduction), the zoologist Étienne Saint-Hilaire and the mineralogist Déodat de Dolomieu (after whom dolomite was named).

The savants were not told where they were going, merely that the Republic needed their talents and that their academic posts would be protected and stipends increased. ‘Savants and intellectuals are like coquettes,’ Napoleon was later to tell Joseph; ‘one may see them and talk with them, but don’t make one your wife or your minister.’

From Toulon on May 10, 1798, Napoleon addressed his Soldiers of the Army of the Mediterranean:

You have campaigned in the mountains, in the plains and before fortresses, but you have yet to take part in a naval campaign. The Roman legions that you have sometimes rivalled, but have yet to equal, fought Carthage on this very sea … Victory never forsook them … Europe is watching you. You have a great destiny to fulfil, battles to fight, dangers and hardships to overcome. You hold in your hands the future prosperity of France, the good of mankind and your own glory. The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.

In the same speech, he promised them 6 arpents (5 acres) of land each:

Denon later recalled that when the soldiers saw the barren sand-dunes of Egypt from the boats before they landed, the men joked to each other: ‘There are the six arpents they promised you!’

It was a grand expedition:

In addition to all the military equipment necessary for his army, he collected astronomical telescopes, ballooning equipment, chemical apparatus, and a printing press with Latin, Arabic and Syriac type.

‘You know how much we will need good wine,’ he wrote to Monge, telling him to buy 4,800 bottles, most of it his favoured red burgundy, but also to find ‘a good Italian singer’.

It was the largest fleet ever to sail the Mediterranean. There were 280 ships in all, including 13 ships-of-the-line of between 74 and 118 guns (the latter, Vice-Admiral François Brueys’ flagship L’Orient, was the biggest warship afloat). Napoleon had assembled 38,000 soldiers, 13,000 sailors and marines and 3,000 merchant seamen. His army was somewhat top-heavy as it included 2,200 officers, a ratio of seventeen to one against the more usual twenty-five to one – an indication of how many ambitious young men wanted to see action under him.

[…]

This gigantic armada was fortunate to make it across the Mediterranean without being set upon by Nelson, who was looking for him with thirteen ships-of-the-line. Nelson’s fleet had been scattered towards Sardinia by a gale the evening before Napoleon set sail, and on the night of June 22 the two fleets crossed paths only 20 miles from each other in fog near Crete. Nelson made an educated guess that Napoleon was heading for Egypt but reached Alexandria on June 29 and left on the 30th, the day before the French arrived.

[…]

Napoleon asked his savants to give lectures for his officers on deck during the voyage; in one Junot snored so loudly that Napoleon had him woken up and excused. He later discovered from his librarian that his senior officers were mostly reading novels. (They had started out gambling, until ‘everyone’s money soon found itself in a few pockets, never to come out again’.) He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids’ and ordered the librarian, ‘Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.’

He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on Ukraine

July 20th, 2024

In August 1964 the White House claimed an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, Dominic Cummings reminds us, and Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution:

The truth did not emerge until 2005 when an NSA document revealed all the lies. LBJ was looking for an excuse, had had a resolution drawn up in June awaiting the right moment, and used this ‘attack’ to order air strikes on the North. US claims about the unprovoked attack were false. The NSA knew they were false and there’d been a chaotic blunder. It was all covered up. The House voted 416-0, the Senate 88-2.

This ought to have been a lesson when considering the intense propaganda on Ukraine but the big lesson of history is almost nobody learns from history, that’s why it rhymes. Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on UKR: institutionalised lying from the White House and No10, the DoD and MoD, ‘mainstream’ media; the corruption of intelligence analysis; constant fake narratives about ‘the tide is turning’ to justify vast resources down the drain; fundamental inability to not fool themselves about ends, ways and means and what level of escalation is worth what political ends.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Had the Industrial Revolution happened anywhere else on the planet, there would have been a market crash

July 19th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanUnlike geography, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), technology can move, and it keeps moving until it settles in a geography that can make the best use of it:

Just as agriculture didn’t remain hidden in Egypt, the deepwater technologies that allowed the Iberians to overturn Ottoman power diffused out of far western Europe.

[…]

The Thames provided all of the unification and local trade opportunities of Europe’s other rivers, but it empties into the North Sea, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water, frigid, tidal-extreme, and storm-wracked. There is no day where you dare bring your B game on the North Sea, as the Spanish discovered in 1588 when it wrecked over half their armada in their failed invasion of England. The severity of the North Sea is the quintessential example of why it took so long for humans to master the oceans, and it was in this crucible that the English naval tradition was forged.

[…]

England’s maritime acumen enabled it to nimbly switch trade partners at will, keeping it an economic step ahead of all competitors. Its navy let it land forces at the times and places of its choosing, keeping it a military step ahead of all competitors. And its ability to easily relocate military and economic pressure made it the ally of choice for any European power that it was not currently in conflict with.

And that was before the English learned the Iberian secrets of deepwater navigation. With deepwater technologies, England leveraged its superior maritime acumen onto the global stage.

[…]

Between 1600 and 1800, South Asia and the Far East were removed forcibly from the Portuguese sphere of influence. English colonies steadily supplanted their competitors at key locations in Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, Diego Garcia, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, relegating the time of Portuguese greatness to history.

The faster and more maneuverable vessels of the English allowed them to raid deep into the Caribbean while denying the Spanish treasure fleets the “safety” of the open seas, leaving the Spanish with no choice but to put their coastal colonies on security lockdown and to assign naval assets to protect convoys. It quickly became obvious that the only locations the Spanish would be able to derive long-term income from were those that they had directly colonized with populations sufficient to resist English attacks. In response, the English founded a series of their own colonies in the New World to start the ball rolling on a demographic overthrow of Spanish power in the Western Hemisphere.

[…]

Ships capable of making round-the-world voyages made every significant culture aware of the others. Those ships’ cargo capacity enabled every previously sequestered river valley to trade with all of the others. Interaction, whether peaceful or hostile, trade or war, was no longer local but global.

[…]

Unlike the Iberian monarchs, the English businessmen saw more in the wider world than just spices and precious metals. They also saw bottomless markets. The English system, therefore, didn’t seek (just) simple plunder, but also to develop a global trade system with England at the center. Unlike deepwater navigation, which developed in response to the economic need, industrialization was an outgrowth of opportunity.

[…]

Had the Industrial Revolution happened anywhere else on the planet, there would have been a market crash as the prices of goods would have cratered due to insufficient demand. But at the time the British (as the English became known after their union with Scotland in 1707) were masters of the oceans, ruling a vast military and commercial empire that spanned the globe. This allowed them to shove all of their (massive) excess production down the throats of any people that they could access via water, particularly within their own empire. The British were (easily) able to cover all of the administrative costs of their empire, the capital costs of their industry, and have huge additional streams left over to justify both a stronger navy and more industrial development.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Technology | 7 Comments »

Some types of radar may be powerful enough to qualify as microwave weapons

July 18th, 2024

Swarm Troopers by David HamblingSome types of radar may be powerful enough to qualify as microwave weapons, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers:

The latest upgrade to the Active Electronic Steered Array (AESA) radar on the F-22 and F-15 fighters, known as APG-63(V)2, is said to be powerful enough to damage the guidance electronics on incoming cruise missiles at close range. This might be a better way for a fighter to tackle drones, as it has an unlimited supply of ammunition and can zap them one after the other.

[…]

It is possible to shield electronics against EMP by placing them inside a conducting “Faraday cage” and ensuring that any external receivers such as antenna are protected. This is easier with a small device, such as the control system for a small drone, than a large one. In addition, the dispersed nature of the swarm means the geometry of the attack will only be favorable for some of them, and much of the swarm is likely to survive a single pulse.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

They have nothing to do with cover and evacuate

July 17th, 2024

Surprise, Kill, Vanish by Annie JacobsenIn Surprise, Kill, Vanish, Annie Jacobsen notes that the U.S. Secret Service was stunned by the assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan:

That a singleton like Hinckley could unleash this kind of lethality made clear what the consequences could be in the event of an orchestrated attack by a Black September–type terrorist organization. The general feeling at the Secret Service, says Merletti, was, “We need to rethink our protection philosophy.”

[…]

A covert paramilitary unit called the Counter Assault Team (CAT) would now shadow the president twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. “They have nothing to do with cover and evacuate,” Merletti says of the CAT team. “They’re not stepping into the line of fire. Their job is shooting. They are shooters.” CAT members would be unconventional-warfare experts, capable of repelling a coordinated multi-shooter attack with crippling aggression, determination, and speed. The new philosophy was not simply to defend against an assassin but to have a guerrilla warfare corps of the Secret Service always there, anticipating an attack, as if the president were forever in a hostile environment. As if they were all behind enemy lines.

[…]

“We trained with Delta Force, British SAS, Navy SEALs,” recalls Merletti. “When it came to shooting, we were right there with them all, standing shoulder to shoulder.” At their classified training facility in Beltsville, Maryland, Counter Assault Team members shot close to a thousand rounds a month just to stay sharp.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Our scientists would need to know what to look for

July 16th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenJames Killian was the 10th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from 1948 until 1959, and Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under John F. Kennedy, where, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), he organized, oversaw, and then tried to cover up the facts regarding two of the most dangerous weapons tests in the history of the nuclear bomb:

Two thermonuclear devices, called Teak and Orange, each an astonishingly powerful 3.8 megatons, were exploded in the Earth’s upper atmosphere at Johnston Atoll, 750 miles west of Hawaii. Teak went off at 252,000 feet, or 50 miles, and Orange went off at 141,000 feet, 28 miles, which is exactly where the ozone layer lies. In hindsight, it was a ludicrous idea. “The impetus for these tests was derived from the uncertainty in U.S. capability to discern Soviet high-altitude nuclear detonation,” read one classified report. Killian was in charge of the tests, and his rationale for authorizing them was that if sometime in the future the Soviets were to detonate a high-altitude nuclear bomb, our scientists would need to know what to look for.

Instead of being difficult to detect, a nuclear bomb exploding in the ozone layer was instantly obvious in horrific and catastrophic ways. The fireballs produced by both Teak and Orange burned the retinas of any living thing that had been looking up at the sky without goggles within a 225-mile radius of the blast, including hundreds of monkeys and rabbits that Killian authorized to be flown in airplanes nearby. The animals’ heads had been locked in gadgets that forced them to witness the megaton blast. From Guam to Wake Island to Maui, the natural blue sky changed to a red, white, and gray, creating an aurora 2,100 miles along the geomagnetic meridian. Radio communication throughout a swath of the Pacific region went dead.

“We almost blew a hole in the ozone layer,” explains Al O’Donnell, the EG&G weapons test engineer who in the twelve years since Crossroads had wired over one hundred nuclear bombs, including Teak and Orange. O’Donnell was standing on Johnston Island, 720 miles southwest of Honolulu, on August 1, 1958, when the Teak bomb went off. Due to a “program failure” on the Redstone missile system (which carried the warhead to its target), the rocket went straight up and detonated directly above where O’Donnell and the rest of the arming and firing party were working. The bomb was supposed to have detonated twenty-six miles to the south. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky overhead. “It was scary,” O’Donnell sighs, remembering the catastrophic event as an old man, half a century later. There is a hint of resignation in his voice when he says, “But we were all used to it by then. The bombs had become too big.” In Teak’s first ten milliseconds, its fireball grew ten miles wide—enough yield to obliterate Manhattan. At H + 1 second, the fireball was more than forty miles wide, which could have taken out all five boroughs of New York City.

[…]

Killian’s high-altitude nuclear tests did not stop there. Two weeks later, another ultrasecret nuclear weapons project called Operation Argus commenced. Killian’s nuclear bomb tests had now expanded to include outer space.

[…]

On August 27, August 30, and September 6, 1958, three nuclear warheads were launched from X-17 rockets from the deck of the USS Norton Sound as the warship floated off the coast of South Africa in the South Atlantic Ocean. Up went the missiles and the warheads until they exploded approximately three hundred miles into space. This “scientific experiment” was the brainchild of a Greek elevator operator turned physicist, Nicholas Christofilos. Christofilos convinced Killian that a nuclear explosion occurring above the Earth’s atmosphere—but within the Earth’s magnetic field—might produce an electronic pulse that could hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads trying to make their way into the United States. While the phenomenon did occur in minutiae, meaning the arming devices registered “feeling” the pulse from the nuclear blast, Christofilos was wrong about the possibility that this would actually stop incoming enemy nuclear missiles in their tracks.

[…]

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tsar Bomba, detonated over northern Russia, flattened entire villages in surrounding areas and broke windows a thousand miles away in Finland. Anyone within a four-hundred-mile radius who was staring at the blast would have gone blind. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the United Nations Assembly that the purpose of the test was to “show somebody Kuzka’s mother”—to show somebody who’s boss.

Posted in Science, Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

You can smoke a cigar next to it as you weld it

July 15th, 2024

Elon Musk by Walter IsaacsonFalcon 9 rockets could make Musk money, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), but it would take a BFR to make human life multiplanetary:

The Starship system would have a first-stage booster and a second-stage spacecraft that together stacked to be 390 feet high, 50 percent taller than the Falcon 9 and thirty feet taller than the Saturn V rocket that was used in NASA’s Apollo program in the 1970s. Outfitted with thirty-three booster engines, it would be capable of launching more than a hundred tons of payload into orbit, four times more than the Falcon 9. And someday it would be able to carry a hundred passengers to Mars.

The Starship was originally going to be made of carbon fiber, but it was hard to work with:

Musk knew that the early Atlas rockets, which in the early 1960s boosted the first four Americans into orbit, had been made of stainless steel, and he had decided to use that material for the body of the Cybertruck. At the end of his walk around the facility, he got very quiet and stared at the ships coming into the port. “Guys, we’ve got to change course,” he said. “We are never going to build rockets fast enough with this process. What about going with stainless steel?”

[…]

“Run the numbers.” When they did so, they determined that steel could, in fact, turn out to be lighter in the conditions that Starship would face. At very cold temperatures, the strength of stainless steel increases by 50 percent, which meant it would be stronger when holding the supercooled liquid oxygen fuel.

In addition, the high melting point of stainless steel would eliminate the need for a heat shield on Starship’s space-facing side, reducing the overall weight of the rocket. A final advantage was that it was simple to weld together pieces of stainless steel. The aluminum-lithium of the Falcon 9 required a process called stir welding that needed to be done in a pristine environment. But stainless steel could be welded in big tents or even outdoors, making it easier to do in Texas or Florida, near the launch sites. “With stainless steel, you can smoke a cigar next to it as you weld it,” Musk says.

Posted in Business, Technology | 5 Comments »

It was in the Directors’ interests for Napoleon to go to Egypt

July 14th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAfter his victories in Italy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon turned his attention to England:

Napoleon visited Boulogne, Dunkirk, Calais, Ostend, Brussels and Douai over two weeks in February to evaluate the chances of a successful invasion, interviewing sailors, pilots, smugglers and fishermen, sometimes until midnight. ‘It’s too hazardous,’ he concluded. ‘I will not attempt it.’ His report to the Directory on February 23, 1798 was unequivocal:

Whatever efforts we make, we shall not for some years gain naval supremacy. To invade England without that supremacy is the most daring and difficult task ever undertaken… If, having regard to the present organization of our navy, it seems impossible to gain the necessary promptness of execution, then we must really give up the expedition against England — be satisfied with keeping up the pretence of it — and concentrate all our attention and resources on the Rhine, in order to try to deprive England of Hanover…or else undertake an eastern expedition which would menace her trade with the Indies. And if none of these three operations is practicable, I see nothing else for it but to conclude peace.

[…]

It was in the Directors’ interests for Napoleon to go to Egypt. He might conquer it for France or — just as welcome — return after a defeat with his reputation satisfyingly tarnished.

For Napoleon it represented an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of both his greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and he did not rule out the possibility of using Egypt as a stepping-stone to India.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Nearly all of the major, durable powers fell into one of two categories

July 12th, 2024

Accidental Superpower by Peter ZeihanBefore 1400, Peter Zeihan explains in The Accidental Superpower, true ocean transport was a rare thing:

In this era nearly all of the major, durable powers fell into one of two categories. The first were powers with navigable rivers that could easily extend their cultural reach up and down the river valley, enrich themselves with local trade, and use the resources of their larger footprint to protect themselves from — or force themselves upon — rivals. The second were powers that lived on seas sufficiently enclosed that they were difficult to get lost within. These seas didn’t work quite as well as rivers, but they certainly blunted the dangers of the open ocean and allowed for regional transport and trade. France, Poland, Russia, and a few of the Chinese empires fell into the first category, while the Swedes, Danes, Phoenicians, and Japanese fell into the second.

[…]

The Ottoman Empire originated on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, a nearly enclosed sea small enough that it functioned as a river in terms of facilitating cultural unification, but large enough that it allowed for a reasonable volume of regional trade. And Marmara didn’t exist in isolation. To its northeast was the Black Sea, while to its southeast lay the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean — all three enclosed bodies of water that the Ottomans were able to use their naval acumen to dominate. Emptying into the western Black Sea was the Danube, by far Europe’s largest river, which allowed the Ottomans to expand as far north into Europe as Vienna. By the measures of the day, the Ottomans had within easy reach more useful land, river, and sea than any other power — and nearly more than all of their European rivals combined.

And then there was trade. From their home base at the supremely well-positioned Istanbul, the Ottomans dominated all land and sea trade between Europe and Asia and from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

The largest and most lucrative of those trade routes was the famous Silk Road, the source of all spices that made it to Europe. Pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cumin, and saffron might seem like minor luxuries today, but their only sources were in South and Southeast Asia. Between the unreliable nature of ocean transport and the yet-to-be-mapped African continent, there was no reliable all-water route. The only way to access Asian spices was for the Silk Road to traverse China, Central Asia, Persia, and ultimately Ottoman-controlled lands. Between the hundreds of middlemen, the sheer distances involved, and the hefty tax the Islamic Ottomans placed on spice transfers to Christian Europe, upper-class Europeans often spent as much on spices as they did on food.

[…]

In 1529, they laid siege to Vienna at the head of the Danube valley. Had they won they would have been able to pour an empire’s worth of resources through the gap between the Alps and Carpathians onto the North European Plain, a wide highway within which the Turks would have faced no barriers to conquest.

But they failed — because the world had changed.

A handful of key technologies made all the difference:

  • Compass
  • Cross-staff
  • Carvel
  • Gunport

Nearly all of these technologies, Zeihan notes, were developed, refined, and operationalized by two countries that had almost nothing to do with the Ottomans:

Europe’s westernmost peninsula is Iberia. At the time of the Ottoman rise, the peoples of Iberia, the Portuguese and Spanish, had very little going for them. Nearly alone among the major European regions, Iberia has no rivers of meaningful length and only very narrow coastal strips, forcing most of its people to live in a series of elevated valleys. Unsurprisingly, in the 1300s Iberia was Europe’s poorest region. It also didn’t help that the two had borne the brunt of the Arab invasion, being occupied by the Moors for nearly seven centuries.

[…]

The Turks found themselves forced to divert massive resources from their Danube campaigns to an increasingly failed effort to defend their Mediterranean assets (most notably the Egyptian breadbasket).

[…]

Until Portugal’s arrival in South Asia, local oceanic shipping — including the maritime arms of the spice trade that the Ottomans controlled — was purely coastal, sailing with the monsoonal winds: east in May–June and west in August. Winds offshore may have blown year round, but they were erratic and local ships couldn’t reliably navigate or survive the turbulence. The Portuguese deepwater craft, in contrast, found navigating the Indian Ocean to be child’s play. Portuguese vessels were able to eviscerate the Ottoman connections to the Asian spice world, and then directly occupy key spice production locations, via its ships redirecting the trade in its entirety to Lisbon. Even with the military cost of maintaining a transcontinental empire and the twenty-two-thousand-mile round trips factored in, the price of spices in Portugal dropped by 90 percent. The Silk Road and its Ottoman terminus lost cohesion, and the robust income stream that had helped make the Ottoman Empire the big kid on the block simply stopped, all because of the ambitions of a country less than one-twelfth its size.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 11 Comments »

Shooting down a $1,000 drone with a $5,000 missile is not a winning strategy

July 11th, 2024

Swarm Troopers by David Hambling In November 1973, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), the USAF shot down a hapless drone with a carbon-dioxide gas dynamic laser:

Mobile laser weapons are currently in the range of tens of kilowatts. Unlike earlier lasers powered by chemical reactions, they are electric, so can keep firing for as long as they have power, giving them an effectively unlimited magazine. They are not powerful enough to burn through armor but are capable of destroying missiles or small drones.

The great thing about lasers versus small drones is that the cost-per-shot is so low. Shooting down a $1,000 drone with a $5,000 missile is not a winning strategy. A $1 burst of precisely-guided laser energy makes much more sense. Also, the laser does not have a limited ammunition supply, but can keep firing as long as the generator has fuel. In principle, it can keep firing for as long as the drones keep coming, though lasers still tend to overheat after a while.

[…]

Even if it does not destroy the drone outright or cause it to crash, the laser will burn out optics and damage sensitive control surfaces or other components.

[…]

Although the laser may have a range of a mile or more, as soon as it is spotted or starts firing, the drone swarm is likely to drop low and hug the ground for cover, limiting the laser’s effective range to a few hundred yards at best.

[…]

If it starts at a few hundred meters, it will be less than ten seconds before the drones are at point-blank range.

[…]

High-energy lasers operate on a single wavelength, so anything that reflects or absorbs that particular wavelength may reduce its effectiveness. The laser defense may be defeated by something as simple a mirrored nosecone, although this is not nearly as easy as it sounds. The reflective surface has to be tailored to the type of laser it is facing.

[…]

Laser protection does not need to be absolute. Protection that means that each drone takes several seconds rather than one second to destroy will guarantee success for the swarm.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

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