June « 2023 « Isegoria

They provide a tool in many ways better than an armored troop carrier, at a fraction the cost

Friday, June 2nd, 2023

Cheap drone-based bombs have taken their toll on armored vehicles in recent wars, which might pave the way for motorcycles, of all things:

Motorcycle are fast, nimble, and outstrip even tracked vehicles in off road capability. In the woods a bike can get between the trees right under the densest canopy and travel along single track trails no wider than what a person or deer might walk, and wind between and, for the skilled enduro rider, Over! massive rocks and terrain that would rip a tank apart.

[…]

100lbs of kit (Equivalent to a heavy fighting load for a long patrol) is fairly easily and regularly carried by amateur adventurers on their bikes as they head out to the woods, or go on a cross-country tour. Allowing many to go hundreds of miles off-road at paces averaging well above walking or even running, and then instantly get back up to highway speeds as soon as they find one.

[…]

The off-road capability means obvious or watched routes are easily avoided, concrete barriers are easy to skirt around or between (or in the case of enduro riders: hopped), and checkpoints set up to control car traffic easily circumnavigated. similarly most dual-sport bikes can ford up to waste deep (or even chest deep with a homemade snorkel) water and at 300-700lbs total weight, depending on bike and equipment, most bikes can be transported in civilian small boats (this is how many adventurers surmount the Darien gap on trips to South America), allowing waterborne insertion without specialized landing craft, and the evasion of bridges that act as chokepoints.

Then once the bike is stopped it disappears completely.

Armoured vehicles are large, made of steel, and have large, HOT, engines which drive Wheels or tracks, which in turn generates a great deal of friction, heating those elements massively. Thus Satellites, radar, And infrared imagining have a relatively easy time of finding them.

Just on the face of it, with no concealment, bikes are difficult to detect via satellite, the width and length of a bike viewed directly above resembles the profile of a log or trash bins or small pile of rubbish more than any other vehicle an analyst might be looking for. And that’s if the satellite has the resolution to see the bike at all. Satellites also have the weakness that they only get individual snapshots of an area, meaning any indirect movements (not in a straight line) don’t betray their destination if seen and, until machine learning improves, are highly dependent on analysts actually looking at images and drawing conclusions, thus inherently limiting how realtime the information they can (a troop movement might take an hour to be identified once the satellite passes at which point a vehicle can be hundreds of kilometers way).

Similarly the radar cross section of a bike is shockingly small. Now a radar cross section is the size of a shape estimable from radar detection. Stealth Fighters might have a radar cross section as small as 1cm², so ably have the designers limited radar bouncing back, but then they need to since there is no clutter or concealment around a jet flying through empty air over enemy territory, and very little naturally travels faster than sound. However For most objects their radar cross-section is largely proportional to their size: a human for example is about 1m², a non-stealth light aircraft 3-5m², etc.

Whereas the radar cross section of a light vehicle can be 10-50m² (~+10 to +20dbm), and tanks closer to the 40-100m² (~+15 to +20) end of that spectrum, well above their actual size due to their metal composition and shape creating natural corner reflectors, motorcycles have a max radar cross-section just under 10m²(10dbm), which only occurs in spikes 90 degrees to the side as well as smaller ones to the immediate front and rear, For about 280 degrees of the spectrum the radar cross-section of a Motorcycle is smaller than that of it’s rider (average of about 1m², or 0dbm), rendering it pretty much indistinguishable from clutter, unless it starts flying through the air or sailing a calm sea ( or I suppose travelling a perfectly flat desert). On an open highway At highway speeds a motorcycle would be detectable by aircraft radar, since in nature only Cheetahs and falcons move that fast, a computer could reliably distinguish that from background noise, if it had a good angle… but at an off-road pace of 15-30km/h? Fat birds and dear travel that fast, hell the tips of tree branches probably reach that speed shaking in the wind. And geese, with a ~30cm² (-5dbm) radar cross section, comparable to the bike’s low end cross section, Regularly fly at 50-70mph (80-110kph), so even on open roads at legal rural “highway” speeds, there’d either be a large number of false positives or good chance the bikes go ignored by the radar software/operator, or undetected.

[…]

So summing up: bikes are incredible.

They provide a tool in many ways better than an armoured troop carrier, at a fraction the cost, have the best stealth of any vehicle under a 100 million dollars per unit, and given the easier time radar has at detecting supersonic airborne units… perhaps the best stealth period. They perfectly combines the versatility of foot travel, with the ability to get up to highway speed in under 10 seconds, and give fighters the ability to carry a full 100lb fighting load without significant physical exertion.

No wonder they are currently being used by Insurgents and militias across the middle-east and Africa, and no wonder many of the armies fighting said militias have started to replicate their tactics.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 11 Comments »

An all-out attack on undersea cable infrastructure would cause potentially catastrophic damage to the U.S. and its allies

Thursday, June 1st, 2023

It is not satellites in the sky, retired Admiral Stavridis notes, but pipes on the ocean floor that form the backbone of the world’s economy:

Currently, more than 95% of the traffic coursing through the global internet is carried by just 200 undersea fiber-optic cables, “some as far below the surface as Everest is above it,” Stavridis wrote in the forward to a 2017 report, “Undersea Cables: Indispensable, Insecure,” which raised alarms about the extreme vulnerabilities of the seabed commercial networks.Stavridis, who led the NATO alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander, warned that an all-out attack on undersea cable infrastructure would cause “potentially catastrophic” damage to the U.S. and its allies, and their ability to transmit confidential information, conduct financial transactions and communicate internationally.

“Whether from terrorist activity or an increasingly bellicose Russian naval presence, the threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing.… The threat is nothing short of existential,” according to the report itself, which was written by then-British parliamentarian Rishi Sunak, who is now the country’s prime minister. The U.S. — and its allies and adversaries — are focusing on this potential threat from an offensive as well as a defensive standpoint, according to Stavridis and other experts, including a U.S. naval analyst. They are also tapping into the telecommunications cables as valuable sources of intelligence.

[…]

Last month, two major submarine internet cables were cut to at least one of Taiwan’s outlying islands, raising U.S. concerns about possible sabotage by China, the archenemy of the key U.S. ally, said the Washington-based U.S. naval analyst, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing military issues. Taiwan’s National Communications Commission has blamed China but stopped short of saying it was intentional. Even so, the U.S. analyst said, the incidents heightened U.S. concerns that China is testing its seabed warfare capabilities, perhaps in advance of a military invasion of Taiwan. Seabed warfare also has gained significance because of Russia’s efforts in mapping undersea infrastructure and its suspected role in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. Russia has built its own deep sea spy sub, the Belgorod, which can fire two-megaton nuclear warhead torpedoes at depths no existing weapon system could intercept — and could take out an entire U.S. port or aircraft carrier strike group. And it quietly has been building other specialized deep seabed war vessels, including intelligence ships and submarines that disrupt undersea cable infrastructure. Last month, Ireland’s military released surveillance footage of at least two Russian ships off the Galway coast near a newly opened seabed communications cable. Irish senator and security expert Tom Clonan told local media the ships were well-known to the Irish defense community, including one that has a diving platform and carries deep-sea submersibles. Six years after that report was published, Stavridis told USA TODAY, “I am more concerned now than I was in 2017 about the dangers of an attack on undersea cables.”

[…]

Navy has commissioned a next-generation attack submarine that can sneak along the ocean floor and perform covert operations.

[…]

According to Pentagon budget documents and a congressional report on this sub. It will cost roughly $5.1 billion; a standard submarine in the same category cost $3.45 billion in 2021.

[…]

They said the Navy remains committed to completing the Orca, an extra-large unmanned undersea vehicle that can lay mines, conduct surveillance and engage in Special Operations offensive warfare missions. The Navy wants to deploy five of the massive robotic submarines to do the dangerous job of laying undersea mines. And though the Navy has cited that as an urgent priority, the effort is more than 3 years behind schedule and has exceeded costs by at least $242 million, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report last September. Another vehicle known as the Snakehead, or “Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle” (LDUUV), also aims to support U.S. subsea and seabed warfare and has been undergoing in-water testing, the three Navy leaders wrote. “The LDUUV program aimed to address a critical gap with increased depth, endurance, and payload capacity,” they said, but it has been put on hold, at least temporarily, “to support higher Navy priorities.” And a third, the MK 11 SDV, can clandestinely ferry Navy SEAL teams to conduct offensive and defensive operations against China in contested areas.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War | 4 Comments »

Gaikokumaniakku: Possibly relevant: https://www.yahoo.com/ne ws/britain-says-developi ng-radio-wave-132346318. html
Gaikokumaniakku: Possibly relevant: https://www.laserfocuswo rld.com/lasers-sources/a rticle/14211951/testing- 50-kw-lasers-in-weapon-s ystems I did a few searches trying to find good news about long-range electrolasers, but I only found short-range devices suitable for clearing IEDs.
Shadeburst: The three thousand feet sounds highly suspect. A formation of WW2 Forts would drop all its bombs simultaneously on a signal from the lead bombardier. As the formation was spread out across the sky, side- as well as long-ways, and the bombs were released over a period of a few seconds (during which time the formation had traveled a thousand feet) the intention was to bomb an area, not a pickle-barrel pinpoint. In addition, Europe being Europe, the target might often be obscured by cloud, in...
Gaikokumaniakku: Also, the cars may or may not be well-designed but the charging stations apparently were designed to be convenient for copper thieves.
Gaikokumaniakku: “Musk, in contrast, spent more time walking assembly lines than he did walking around the design studio. ‘The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory,’ he says.” I have heard rumors that Tesla cars cannot survive car washes or mud puddles unless they are first put into “car wash mode.” If such rumors are true, maybe the factory is well-designed but the car is badly designed.
M. Mack: Elon sounds pretty “Old School,” like Henry Ford and his right hand man “Cast Iron” Charlie Sorensen. Between them, they defined the auto industry, with the moving assembly line, one worker doing one task, and setting up the River Rouge plant to be vertically integrated, from the iron ore being turned into steel and iron in blast furnaces on site all the way to the cars rolling off the end of the line, and close to every step in between.
Elmer: Few decades back Marlin made the Supergoose, a 10-gauge bolt action shotgun with a 36-inch extra full choke barrel, took 3 1/2 inch 10-gauge shells, had a 2-round box magazine. Heavy, ugly, slow rate of fire unless you knew how to run a bolt gun, but it brought down geese at distances a 12-gauge could only dream about. Might be pretty good against drones. About the same time Ithaca made a 10 gauge 3 round semi-auto shotgun, also took 3 1/2 unch shells; IIRC, a 32 inch full choke barrel was...
Phileas Frogg: Blanket censorship of internal criticisms and critiques, without respect to their efficacy, is a sure sign of a social group lacking the internal social flexibility to withstand a serious external threat to their cohesion. The only thing keeping them together is the static nature of their circumstances; change that and there is a high likelihood of failure. Such a group is ossified and ready to break. I hesitate to put a number on it, but I’m willing to wager that a shockingly small...
Lu An Li: For McChuck and thank you. Makes sense. Unity of command.
McChuck: Just as there can only be one king, and army may only have a single commander. Command, by its very nature, rests upon a single head. Two commanders will constantly butt heads, confusing the troops and adding to the natural chaos of war. They often end up fighting each other more than the enemy. Even if they have the best of intentions, two commanders will inadvertently misdirect each others’ troops and interfere with each others’ plans.
Lucklucky: Maybe bad translation. But i think it means it is better to have 1 good and 1 bad than 2 good to be able to choose.
Lu An Li: “I believe it would be better to have one bad general than to have two good ones.” Someone explain this to me.
Gaikokumaniakku: After the lemur bites the millipede, it sprays its toxic secretion, which the lemur then rubs all over its fur. Research suggests that there is a practical purpose to this: the benzoquinone secretion functions as a natural pesticide and wards off malaria-carrying mosquitos. The secretion also acts as a narcotic, which causes the lemur to salivate profusely and enter a state of intoxication.
Freddo: If you want to reach the mass market you need an equally sized megaphone (or a lot of luck). A push by Oprah will do it, Joe Rogan probably to a lesser extend. Amazons algorithm and star rating have been wokified to the point of uselessness; goodreads fast approaching the same point. Aspiring writers get the advice to build their own internet presence, but that of course is a lot of work by itself. I like the concept of a book bomb where a group of like-minded authors do a push of a new novel.
Felix: And, no mention of romance novels. Aren’t they supposed to be 50% or better of books sold? Sure, there are big name romance writers. A lot of them, if the grocery store is indicative. But. No mention?
Felix: Jim, what are the important, unread books you have in mind?
Albion: As someone who has published a couple of books (independently) on-line I can testify no one reads them much. In a way not a problem as it was more of a hobby, and there is a certain pleasure in getting words down in roughly the right order. But in terms of return for effort, it is barely a penny an hour in all likelihood. As they say, don’t give up the day job. Equally I can go to a library or bookshop, and while there tens of thousands of books available, I know I don’t want to read...
Phileas_Frogg: Jim, Your comment is obviously true, and yet the religion of those Ellis Islanders has managed to intellectually persevere, and indeed dominate, in intellectually rigorous fields, and in particular at the most intellectually rarified branch of the government (SCOTUS is 6 Catholics, 2 Protestants, 1 Jew). It is an odd paradox. I suspect we’re seeing a selection process take place where the less intelligent, curious, and literate Catholics are ending up non-Catholic, while the more...
Jim: Pre-World Wars America was so much more literate than now that it may as well have been another planet. Nor has the displacement of Americans by the descendants of Ellis Islanders helped much.
Jim: No one buys books because no one reads books. There are books of great importance that practically no one has had access to for dozens or hundreds of years now available for free on the Internet Archive, and they have been “viewed” only a handful of times, let alone read. It would be comical were it not so tragic.

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They provide a tool in many ways better than an armored troop carrier, at a fraction the cost

An all-out attack on undersea cable infrastructure would cause potentially catastrophic damage to the U.S. and its allies

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