War « Isegoria

The chances of anyone looking for it there are slim

Tuesday, March 26th, 2024

I read and enjoyed Annie Jacobsen’s Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins, so I was paying attention when she announced her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, and I caught this interview, which actually meanders through all of her related books:

She mentions that most of her first book, Area 51, got much less attention than a small section on UFOs. Most of the book is a well researched summary of what we know about classified programs like the U-2, its successor the A-12, better known in its later Air Force configuration, the SR-71, and the F-117, and that small section on UFOs has to rely on much sketchier evidence:

Of the seventy-four individuals interviewed for this book with rare firsthand knowledge of the secret base, thirty-two of them lived and worked at Area 51.

Area 51 is the nation’s most secret domestic military facility. It is located in the high desert of southern Nevada, seventy-five miles north of Las Vegas. Its facilities have been constructed over the past sixty years around a flat, dry lake bed called Groom Lake. The U.S. government has never admitted it exists.

Key to understanding Area 51 is knowing that it sits inside the largest government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and Training Range. Encompassing 4,687 square miles, this area is just a little smaller than the state of Connecticut—three times the size of Rhode Island, and more than twice as big as Delaware. Set inside this enormous expanse is a smaller parcel of land, 1,350 square miles, called the Nevada Test Site, the only facility like it in the continental United States.

[…]

Two early projects at Groom Lake have been declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency: the U-2 spy plane, declassified in 1998, and the A-12 Oxcart spy plane, declassified in 2007. And yet in thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports, the name Area 51 is always redacted, or blacked out. There are only two known exceptions, most likely mistakes.

[…]

According to most members of the black world who are familiar with the history of Area 51, the base opened its doors in 1955 after two CIA officers, Richard Bissell and Herbert Miller, chose the place to be the test facility for the Agency’s first spy plane, the U-2. Part of Area 51’s secret history is that the so-called Area 51 zone had been in existence for four years by the time the CIA identified it as a perfect clandestine test facility. Never before disclosed is the fact that Area 51’s first customer was not the CIA but the Atomic Energy Commission. Beginning in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission used its parallel system of secret-keeping to conduct radical and controversial research, development, and engineering not just on aircraft but also on pilot-related projects—entirely without oversight or ethical controls.

That the Atomic Energy Commission was not an agency that characteristically had any manner of jurisdiction over aircraft and pilot projects (their business was nuclear bombs and atomic energy) speaks to the shadowy, shell-game aspect of black-world operations at Area 51. If you move a clandestine, highly controversial project into a classified agency that does not logically have anything to do with such a program, the chances of anyone looking for it there are slim.

Jacobsen contends that Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 fake-newscast adaptation of The War of the Worlds profoundly influenced authorities in the US and around the world:

“Thousands of persons believed a real invasion had been unleashed. They exhibited all the symptoms of fear, panic, determination to resist, desperation, bravery, excitement or fatalism that real war would have produced,” which in turn “shows the government will have to insist on the close co-operation of radio in any future war.” What these military men were not saying was that there was serious concern among strategists and policy makers that entire segments of the population could be so easily manipulated into thinking that something false was something true. Americans had taken very real, physical actions based on something entirely made up.

[…]

America was not the only place where government officials were impressed by how easily people could be influenced by a radio broadcast. Adolf Hitler took note as well. He referred to the Americans’ hysterical reaction to the War of the Worlds broadcast in a Berlin speech, calling it “evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy.” It was later revealed that in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had also been paying attention. And President Roosevelt’s top science adviser, Vannevar Bush, observed the effects of the fictional radio broadcast with a discerning eye. The public’s tendency to panic alarmed him, he would later tell W. Cameron Forbes, his colleague at the Carnegie Institution.

This leads us to Roswell, New Mexico:

During the first week of July 1947, U.S. Signal Corps engineers began tracking two objects with remarkable flying capabilities moving across the southwestern United States. What made the aircraft extraordinary was that, although they flew in a traditional, forward-moving motion, the craft—whatever they were—began to hover sporadically before continuing to fly on. This kind of technology was beyond any aerodynamic capabilities the U.S. Air Force had in development in the summer of 1947. When multiple sources began reporting the same data, it became clear that the radar wasn’t showing phantom returns, or electronic ghosts, but something real. Kirtland Army Air Force Base, just north of the White Sands Proving Ground, tracked the flying craft into its near vicinity. The commanding officer there ordered a decorated World War II pilot named Kenny Chandler into a fighter jet to locate and chase the unidentified flying craft. This fact has never before been disclosed.

Chandler never visually spotted what he’d been sent to look for. But within hours of Chandler’s sweep of the skies, one of the flying objects crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Immediately, the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or JCS, took command and control and recovered the airframe and some propulsion equipment, including the crashed craft’s power plant, or energy source. The recovered craft looked nothing like a conventional aircraft. The vehicle had no tail and it had no wings. The fuselage was round, and there was a dome mounted on the top. In secret Army intelligence memos declassified in 1994, it would be referred to as a “flying disc.” Most alarming was a fact kept secret until now—inside the disc, there was a very earthly hallmark: Russian writing. Block letters from the Cyrillic alphabet had been stamped, or embossed, in a ring running around the inside of the craft.

In a critical moment, the American military had its worst fears realized. The Russian army must have gotten its hands on German aerospace engineers more capable than Ernst Steinhoff and Wernher Von Braun—engineers who must have developed this flying craft years before for the German air force, or Luftwaffe.

This would be a much more reasonable hypothesis, if the cutting-edge craft had crashed near Soviet-controlled territory. All of this is sourced from “Interview with EG&G engineer.” EG&G was a defense contractor out of MIT that had worked on the Manhattan Project.

The first thing they did was initiate the withdrawal of the original Roswell Army Air Field press release, the one that stated that a “flying disc… landed on a ranch near Roswell,” and then they replaced it with the second press release, the one that said that a weather balloon had crashed—nothing more.

[…]

The first order of business was to determine where the technology had come from. The Joint Chiefs of Staff tasked an elite group working under the direct orders of G-2 Army intelligence to initiate a top secret project called Operation Harass. Based on the testimony of America’s Paperclip scientists, Army intelligence officers believed that the flying disc was the brainchild of two former Third Reich airplane engineers, named Walter and Reimar Horten—now working for the Russian military. Orders were drawn up. The manhunt was on.

[…]

The brothers were the inventors of several of Hitler’s flying-wing aircraft, including one called the Horten 229 or Horten IX, a wing-shaped, tailless airplane that had been developed at a secret facility in Baden-Baden during the war. From the Paperclip scientists at Wright Field, the Army intelligence investigators learned that Hitler was rumored to have been developing a faster-flying aircraft that had been designed by the brothers and was shaped like a saucer. Maybe, the Paperclips said, there had been a later-model Horten in the works before Germany surrendered, meaning that even if Stalin didn’t have the Horten brothers themselves, he could very likely have gotten control of their blueprints and plans.

[…]

A records group of more than three hundred pages of Army intelligence documents reveals many of the details of Operation Harass. They were declassified in 1994, after a researcher named Timothy Cooper filed a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. One memo, called “Air Intelligence Guide for Alleged ‘Flying Saucer’ Type Aircraft,” detailed for CIC officers the parameters of the flying saucer technology the military was looking for, features which were evidenced in the craft that crashed at Roswell.

Extreme maneuverability and apparent ability to almost hover; A plan form approximating that of an oval or disc with dome shape on the surface; The ability to quickly disappear by high speed or by complete disintegration; The ability to group together very quickly in a tight formation when more than one aircraft are together; Evasive motion ability indicating possibility of being manually operated, or possibly, by electronic or remote control.

[…]

A former Messerschmitt test pilot named Fritz Wendel offered up some firsthand testimony that seemed real. The Horten brothers had indeed been working on a flying saucer–like craft in Heiligenbeil, East Prussia, right after the war, Wendel said. The airplane was ten meters long and shaped like a half-moon. It had no tail. The prototype was designed to be flown by one man lying down flat on his stomach. It reached a ceiling of twelve thousand feet. Wendel drew diagrams of this saucerlike aircraft, as did a second German informant named Professor George, who described a later-model Horten as being “very much like a round cake with a large sector cut out” and that had been developed to carry more than one crew member. The later-model Horten could travel higher and faster—up to 1,200 mph—because it was propelled by rockets rather than jet engines. Its cabin was allegedly pressurized for high-altitude flights.

Horten H.IX V2 before a test flight

[…]

The next batch of solid information came from a rocket engineer named Walter Ziegler. During the war, Ziegler had worked at the car manufacturer Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW, which served as a front for advanced rocket-science research. There, Ziegler had been on a team tasked with developing advanced fighter jets powered by rockets. Ziegler relayed a chilling tale that gave investigators an important clue. One night, about a year after the war, in September of 1946, four hundred men from his former rocket group at BMW had been invited by Russian military officers to a fancy dinner. The rocket scientists were wined and dined and, after a few hours, taken home. Most were drunk. Several hours later, all four hundred of the men were woken up in the middle of the night by their Russian hosts and told they were going to be taking a trip. Why Ziegler wasn’t among them was not made clear. The Germans were told to bring their wives, their children, and whatever else they needed for a long trip. Mistresses and livestock were also fine. This was not a situation to which you could say no, Ziegler explained. The scientists and their families were transported by rail to a small town outside Moscow where they had remained ever since, forced to work on secret military projects in terrible conditions.

[…]

And then, six months into the investigation, on March 12, 1948, along came abrupt news. The Horten brothers had been found. In a memo to the European command of the 970th CIC, Major Earl S. Browning Jr. explained. “The Horten Brothers have been located and interrogated by American Agencies,” Browning said. The Russians had likely found the blueprints of the flying wing after all. “It is Walter Horten’s opinion that the blueprints of the Horten IX may have been found by Russian troops at the Gotha Railroad Car Factory,” the memo read. But a second memo, entitled “Extracts on Horten, Walter,” explained a little more. Former Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel’s information about the Horten brothers’ wingless, tailless, saucerlike craft that had room for more than one crew member was confirmed. “Walter Horten’s opinion is that sufficient German types of flying wings existed in the developing or designing stages when the Russians occupied Germany, and these types may have enabled the Russians to produce the flying saucer.”

The Soviets never went on to develop a flying wing, but another superpower did.

Jacobsen summarizes the Roswell incident near the end of her book:

The flying craft that crashed in New Mexico, the myth of which has come to be known as the Roswell Incident, happened in 1947, sixty-four years before the publication of this book. Everyone directly involved in that incident—who acted on behalf of the government—is apparently dead. Like it does about Area 51, the U.S. government refuses to admit the Roswell crash ever happened, but it did—according to the seminal testimony of one man interviewed over the course of eighteen months for this book. He participated in the engineering project that came about as a result of the Roswell Incident. He was one of the elite engineers from EG&G who were tasked with the original Area 51 wicked engineering problem.

In July of 1947, Army intelligence spearheaded the efforts to retrieve the remains of the flying disc that crashed at Roswell. And as with other stories that have become the legends of Area 51, part of the conspiracy theory about Roswell has its origins in truth. The crash did reveal a disc, not a weather balloon, as has subsequently been alleged by the Air Force. And responders from the Roswell Army Air Field found not only a crashed craft, but also two crash sites, and they found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall. Physically, the bodies of the aviators revealed anatomical conundrums. They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes. One fact was clear: these children, if that’s what they were, were not healthy humans. A second fact was shocking. Two of the child-size aviators were comatose but still alive.

Everything related to the crash site was sent to Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, where it all remained until 1951. That is when the evidence was packed up and transported to the Nevada Test Site. It was received, physically, by the elite group of EG&G engineers. The Atomic Energy Commission, not the Air Force and not the Central Intelligence Agency, was put in charge of the Roswell crash remains. According to its unusual charter, the Atomic Energy Commission was the organization best equipped to handle a secret that could never be declassified. The Atomic Energy Commission needed engineers they could trust to handle the work that was about to begin. For this, they looked to the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of—EG&G.

The engineers with EG&G were chosen to receive the crash remains and to set up a secret facility just outside the boundary of the Nevada Test Site, sixteen miles to the northwest of Groom Lake, approximately five and a half miles north of the northernmost point where Area 12 and Area 15 meet. A facility this remote would never be visited by anyone outside a small group with a strict need-to-know and would never have to be accounted for or appear on any official Nevada Test Site map. These five men were told there was more engineering work to be done, and that they would be the only five individuals with a set of keys to the facility. The project, the men were told, was the most clandestine, most important engineering program since the Manhattan Project, which was why the man who had been in charge of that one would function as the director of this project as well.

Vannevar Bush had been President Roosevelt’s most trusted science adviser during World War II. He held engineering doctorates from both Harvard University and MIT, in addition to being the former vice president and former dean of engineering at MIT. The decisions Vannevar Bush made were ostensibly for the good of the nation; they were sound. The men from EG&G were told that the project they were about to work on was so important that it would remain black forever, meaning it would never see the light of day. The men knew that a secrecy classification inside the Atomic Energy Commission charter made this possible, because they all worked on classified engineering projects that were hidden from the rest of the world. They understood born classified meant that no one would ever have a need-to-know what Vannevar Bush was going to ask them to do. The operation would have no name, only a letter-number designation: S-4, or Sigma-Four.

[…]

There was the crashed craft that had been sent by Stalin—with its Russian writing stamped, or embossed, in a ring around the inside of the craft. So far, the EG&G engineers were told, no one working on the project when it had been headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had been able to discern what made Stalin’s craft hover and fly. Not even the German Paperclip scientists who had been assigned to assist. So the crashed craft was job number one. Reverse engineer it, Vannevar Bush said. Take it apart and put it back together again. Figure out what made it fly.

But there was the second engineering problem to solve, the one involving the child-size aviators. To understand this, the men were briefed on what it was they were dealing with. They had to be. They were told that they, and they alone, had a need-to-know about what had happened to these humans before they were put in the craft and sent aloft. They were told that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience. Because two of the aviators were comatose but still alive, the men would have to transfer them into a Jell-O-like substance and stand them upright in two tubular tanks, attached to a life-support system. Sometimes, their mouths opened, and this gave the appearance of their trying to speak. Remember, the engineers were told, these humans are in a comatose state. They are unconscious; their bodies would never spark back to life.

Once, the children had been healthy humans. Not anymore. They were about thirteen years old. Questions abounded. What made their heads so big? Had their bodies been surgically manipulated to appear inhuman, or did the children have genetic deformities? And what about their haunting, oversize eyes? The engineers were told that the children were rumored to have been kidnapped by Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi madman who, at Auschwitz and elsewhere, was known to have performed unspeakable experimental surgical procedures mostly on children, dwarfs, and twins. The engineers learned that just before the war ended, Josef Mengele made a deal with Stalin. Stalin offered Mengele an opportunity to continue his work in eugenics—the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase desirable, heritable characteristics—in secret, in the Soviet Union after the war. The engineers were told that this deal likely occurred just before the war’s end, in the winter of 1945, when it was clear to many members of the Nazi Party, including Mengele, that Nazi Germany would lose the war and that its top commanders and doctors would be tried and hanged for war crimes.

[…]

Mengele’s victims included Jewish children, Gypsy children, and people with severe physical deformities. He removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls. He removed and transplanted eyeballs, and injected people with chemicals that caused them to lose their hair. On Mengele’s instruction, an Auschwitz inmate, a painter named Dina Babbitt, made comparative drawings of the shapes of heads, noses, mouths, and ears of people before and after the grotesque surgeries Mengele performed. Another inmate doctor forced to work for Mengele, named Dr. Martina Puzyna, recounted how Mengele had her keep detailed measurements of the shapes and sizes of children’s body parts, casting those of crippled children—particularly their hands and heads—in plaster molds. When Mengele left Auschwitz, on January 17, 1945, he took the documentation of his medical experiments with him. According to his only son, Rolf, Mengele was still in possession of his medical research documents after the war.

The EG&G engineers were told that part of Joseph Stalin’s offer to Josef Mengele stated that if he could create a crew of grotesque, child-size aviators for Stalin, he would be given a laboratory in which to continue his work. According to what the engineers were told, Mengele held up his side of the Faustian bargain and provided Stalin with the child-size crew. Joseph Stalin did not. Mengele never took up residence in the Soviet Union. Instead, he lived for four years in Germany under an assumed name and then escaped to South America, where he lived, first in Argentina and then in Paraguay, until his death in 1979.

When Joseph Stalin sent the biologically and/or surgically reengineered children in the craft over New Mexico hoping it would land there, the engineers were told, Stalin’s plan was for the children to climb out and be mistaken for visitors from Mars. Panic would ensue, just like it did after the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. America’s early-warning radar system would be overwhelmed with sightings of other “UFOs.” Truman would see how easily a totalitarian dictator could control the masses using black propaganda. Stalin may have been behind the United States in atomic bomb technology, but when it came to manipulating the people’s perception, Stalin was the leader with the upper hand. This, says the engineer, is what he and the others in the group were told.

For months I asked the engineer why President Truman didn’t use the remains from the Roswell crash to show the world what an evil, abhorrent man Joseph Stalin was. I guessed that maybe Truman didn’t want to admit the breach of U.S. borders. For a long time, I never got an answer, just a shaking of the head. Here was the engineer who had the answer to the riddle inside the riddle that is Area 51, but he was unwilling to say more. He is the only one of the original elite group of EG&G engineers who is still alive. He said he wouldn’t tell me more, no matter how many times I asked. One day, I asked again. “Why didn’t President Truman reveal the truth in 1947?” This time he answered.

“Because we were doing the same thing,” he said. “They wanted to push science. They wanted to see how far they could go.”

Again, the small sections on UFOs are wildly different from the rest of the book.

In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, 13 years after the book came out, she doesn’t quite walk back her claims about the Roswell flying saucer being a Soviet hoax, but she reveals who that anonymous source was to explain why he was so credible. It was Al O’Donnell, the technical expert who had wired most of the atomic bombs used in atmospheric tests, right after World War 2, while that was still allowed.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

The Topographical Bureau was a small, highly efficient organization within the war ministry

Sunday, March 24th, 2024

In August, 1795, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon got himself attached to the Topographical Department of the Committee of Public Safety for the direction of armies:

The Topographical Bureau was a small, highly efficient organization within the war ministry that has been described as ‘the most sophisticated planning organisation of its day’. Set up by Carnot and reporting directly to the Committee, it took information from the commanders-in-chief, plotted troop movements, prepared detailed operational directives and co-ordinated logistics. Under Clarke, the senior staff included Generals Jean-Girard Lacuée, César-Gabriel Berthier and Pierre-Victor Houdon, all talented and dedicated strategists. Napoleon could hardly have been better placed to learn all the necessary strands of supply, support and logistics that make up strategy (although the word entered the military lexicon only in the early nineteenth century and was not one Napoleon ever used).

[…]

The Topographical Bureau was also the best place to make his own estimations of which generals were worthwhile and which expendable.

[…]

The Topographical Bureau’s curious office hours — from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. — allowed Napoleon plenty of time to write a romantic novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, a swansong for his unrequited love affair with Désirée. Employing the short, terse sentences of the heroic tradition, it was either consciously or unconsciously influenced by Goethe’s celebrated novel of 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Napoleon read no fewer than six times during the Egyptian campaign, and probably first when he was eighteen.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The Pentagon does not have the budget to create anything as slick and sophisticated as the latest smartphone

Wednesday, March 20th, 2024

The smartphone industry’s research budget was around $150 billion in 2014, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), dwarfing the Pentagon’s entire R&D spend of around $60 billion:

In aviation, the Pentagon is the biggest player in the game; only a handful of other countries can afford to develop fourth and fifth-generation combat aircraft like the F-22. But when it comes to small electronics, the Pentagon does not have the budget to create anything as slick and sophisticated as the latest smartphone.

Posted in Economics, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The other 28 M-1s keep fighting

Tuesday, March 19th, 2024

David Axe explains how the Russians are taking out Ukraine’s M-1 Abrams tanks:

The 47th [Brigade] lost its first M-1 on or before Feb. 26, when a Russian first-person-view drone struck the tank’s ammunition compartment and sparked a fire that ultimately destroyed it. It’s possible the blast door that normally would prevent flames from entering the compartment—and cooking off the 120-millimeter main gun ammo—was open at the time of the strike, but it’s hard to say for sure.

The second Abrams got knocked out on or before March 3—this time reportedly by a Kornet laser-guided anti-tank missile that hit the relatively thinly-protected side of the tank’s hull and passed right through the attached M-19 explosive reactive armor. Kornets have tandem warheads: the first charge clears the armor; the second explodes inside the tank.

A second missile struck the turret, followed by an FPV drone, but it was the first missile—and the blaze resulting from its impact—that did in the 69-ton M-1.

The third confirmed Abrams loss, a week after the second, apparently also resulted from an anti-tank missile strike, which sparked a fire that cooked off the main gun rounds in the ammo compartment. The blast doors and the compartment’s exterior blowout panel must have failed.

A laser-detection system may have saved the two Abrams that fell victim to Kornets or similar missiles. But it wouldn’t have prevented the other loss. Nor would it prevent what’s almost certain to happen in the coming weeks and months as the war grinds on and the other 28 M-1s keep fighting: losses to mines, artillery and possibly even other tanks.

Posted in War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses

Sunday, March 17th, 2024

On March 3, 1795, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon set sail from Marseilles with 15 ships, 1,174 guns and 16,900 men to recapture Corsica from Paoli and the British:

His expedition was soon scattered by a British squadron of fifteen ships with fewer guns and half the number of men. Two French ships were captured. Napoleon wasn’t held responsible for the reverse, but neither did this quintessential landlubber learn the lessons of attempting to put to sea against a similarly sized but far more skilfully deployed force of the Royal Navy. Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain’s 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain’s 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack. The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon’s weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

Posted in War | 6 Comments »

The cost of each new generation of military aircraft rises exponentially.

Wednesday, March 13th, 2024

In 1984, Norman Augustine, former Under Secretary of the Army, and CEO of aerospace company Martin Marietta, published a set of “laws” about military procurement, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers):

His most celebrated pearl of wisdom is Augustine’s Law 16, which says that the cost of each new generation of military aircraft rises exponentially.

[…]

Although intended facetiously, Augustine’s Law 16 has been remarkably accurate. The North American P-51 Mustang was one of the most important US fighters of WWII. Over fifteen thousand were built, at a cost of around $50,000 each in 1945 dollars ($655,000 in 2014). It was succeeded in the 1950s by the jet-powered F-100 Super Sabre at a cost of $700,000 ($6 million in 2014), ten times as expensive in real terms. The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom, which first flew in 1960, broke the million-dollar barrier, costing $2.4 million apiece in 1965 ($18 million in 2014), tripling the cost of its predecessor. Even allowing for inflation, the upwards curve is steep.

[…]

The USAF’s new F-15 Eagle, also from McDonnell Douglas, was set to replace the F-4. The Eagle was a superb aircraft, but it had reached a new high, costing in excess of $20 million ($45 million in 2014), almost tripling again the cost of its predecessor.

[…]

Extensive flying exercises found that the big twin-engine F-15 was only slightly superior to the small, cheap fighters fielded by the Russians in a dogfight. If it came to a war, the small band of F-15s would be overwhelmed by swarms of Russian MiGs. Certainly, the F-15s would be able to knock out plenty of the Russians at long range, but when the survivors closed with them, the contest would be bloody and one-sided.

The Air Force decided to go for a “high-low” mix, supplementing the elite F-15s with a large number of cheaper aircraft known as lightweight fighters. The aircraft selected for the lightweight fighter role was the single-engine F-16 Fighting Falcon, two-thirds the size of the F-15. It was to be the embodiment of a concept by fighter guru John Boyd for an austere aircraft with extreme agility that could beat anything in a dogfight. Being less complex, it would be so cheap it could be acquired in vast numbers. The F-15 with its powerful radar was the champion at long-range combat; the agile F-16 was to be the champion in the “furball” of dogfighting.

During the development process, the purity of the F-16 was slowly corrupted. It became heavier, less agile, and more expensive as more and more capabilities were added.

[…]

At $15 million in 1998 dollars ($22 million in 2014), the F-16 was cheaper than the F-15, but more expensive than anything in the previous generation, including the big F-4.

[…]

The US Navy went through a parallel experience. They also replaced the F-4 Phantom, and chose the F-14 Tomcat, a $ 38 million (1998 dollars, $ 55 million in 2014) carrier-based fighter. Like the F-15 it had a big radar and impressive long-range capabilities.

Again the F-14 was too pricey to acquire in large quantities, and the Navy took up the idea of bolstering numbers with a smaller, cheaper aircraft. They chose the F-18 Hornet, originally a failed competitor in the Air Force’s lightweight fighter competition. The F-18s costs grew from a planned $5 million to around $29 million (2003 = $37 million in 2014).

Posted in Economics, Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

Most American prisoners belong behind bars

Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Contrary to the popular narrative, Rafael A. Mangual argues, most American prisoners belong behind bars:

Contrary to the claims in Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow, drug prohibition is not driving incarceration rates. Yes, about half of federal prisoners are in on drug charges; but federal inmates constitute only 12 percent of all American prisoners—the vast majority are in state facilities. Those incarcerated primarily for drug offenses constitute less than 15 percent of state prisoners. Four times as many state inmates are behind bars for one of five very serious crimes: murder (14.2 percent), rape or sexual assault (12.8 percent), robbery (13.1 percent), aggravated or simple assault (10.5 percent), and burglary (9.4 percent). The terms served for state prisoners incarcerated primarily on drug charges typically aren’t that long, either. One in five state drug offenders serves less than six months in prison, and nearly half (45 percent) of drug offenders serve less than one year.

That a prisoner is categorized as a drug offender, moreover, does not mean that he is nonviolent or otherwise law-abiding. Most criminal cases are disposed of through plea bargains, and, given that charges often get downgraded or dropped as part of plea negotiations, an inmate’s conviction record will usually understate the crimes he committed. The claim that drug offenders are nonviolent and pose zero threat to the public if they’re put back on the street is also undermined by a striking fact: more than three-quarters of released drug offenders are rearrested for a nondrug crime. It’s worth noting that Baltimore police identified 118 homicide suspects in 2017, and 70 percent had been previously arrested on drug charges.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 4 Comments »

It established him as a politically trustworthy soldier in the eyes of the Jacobins

Sunday, March 10th, 2024

Although Napoleon wasn’t present at Avignon’s capture, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), it formed the backdrop for what was easily his most important piece of writing to date, the political pamphlet Le Souper de Beaucaire:

Le Souper de Beaucaire was a fictional account of a supper at an inn at Beaucaire, a village between Avignon and Arles, which Napoleon wrote at the end of July 1793. It took the form of a discussion between an officer in Carteaux’s army, two Marseillais merchants and two citizens of Montpellier and of nearby Nîmes. It argued that France was in grave danger, so the Jacobin government in Paris must be supported because the alternative was the victory of European despots and a vengeful French aristocracy.

[…]

When Napoleon showed the manuscript to Saliceti, who was now a government commissioner in Provence, and Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin, they arranged for it to be published at public expense. It established him as a politically trustworthy soldier in the eyes of the Jacobins.

[…]

It so happened that one of Carteaux’s représentants-en-mission (political commissioners) was none other than Saliceti. Carteaux knew little about artillery and was looking for someone to take over the artillery on the army’s right flank after the wounding of its commander, Colonel Dommartin, and in the absence of Dommartin’s second-in-command, Major Perrier. Saliceti and his colleague Thomas de Gasparin persuaded Carteaux to appoint Napoleon to the post, despite his only being twenty-four years old. Napoleon suspected that his education at the École Militaire had been a deciding factor in getting him this first major break. He would later say that the artillery was short of ‘scientific men, that department was entirely directed by sergeants and corporals. I understood the service.’

[…]

By October 9 Saliceti and Gasparin had obtained for Napoleon command of all of the artillery outside Toulon. Since this was clearly going to be an artillery-led operation, the post gave him a central role.

[…]

Napoleon threw himself into the project of capturing Fort Mulgrave. By cajoling nearby towns he got together fourteen cannon and four mortars as well as stores, tools and ammunition. He sent officers further afield, to Lyons, Briançon and Grenoble, and requested that the Army of Italy furnish him with the cannon not then being used to defend Antibes and Monaco. He established an eighty-man arsenal at Ollioules to make cannon and cannonballs, requisitioned horses from Nice, Valence and Montpellier, and injected a sense of unceasing activity into his men. Constantly imploring, complaining and raging – there wasn’t enough gunpowder, the cartridges were the wrong size, trained artillery horses were being requisitioned for other uses, and so on – he sent scores of letters with demands to Bouchotte and even on occasion to the Committee of Public Safety itself, going over the heads of Carteaux and his immediate superiors.

[…]

Along with his energy and activity, his letters convey a meticulous attention to detail in everything from the price of rations to the proper building of palisades. Overall, however, his message was constant; they only had 600 milliers (just over half a ton) of gunpowder, and if they couldn’t procure more it would be impossible to start serious operations.

[…]

The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order. He commandeered a foundry where shot and mortars were manufactured, and a workshop where muskets were repaired. He got the authorities in Marseilles to supply thousands of sandbags. This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre’s Terror. By the end of the siege Napoleon commanded eleven batteries totalling nearly one hundred cannon and mortars.

[…]

Doppet was impressed with his artillery commander, reporting to Paris: ‘I always found him at his post; when he needed rest he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak: he never left the batteries.’

[…]

Napoleon showed considerable personal bravery in the batteries and redoubts of Toulon, at one point picking up a blood-soaked ramrod from an artilleryman who had been killed near him and helping to load and fire the cannon himself. He believed it was this action that gave him scabies. ‘I found myself in a very few days suffering under an inveterate itch,’ he later said of this ‘terrible malady’. The cutaneous irritation stayed with him through the Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was only cured in 1802 when his doctor, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, applied sulphur baths and by ‘putting three blisters on my chest … brought on a salutary crisis. Before that I had always been thin and sallow; since then I have always had good health.’ Some historians have argued that limited contact with the blood-stained ramrod was unlikely to have been the real cause, but Napoleon would probably have also donned the dead man’s gloves, which would have made dermatitis infection far more likely.

During one assault on an outlying fort protecting Mulgrave, Napoleon was wounded by an English gunner, who ‘ran a pike into’ his left thigh. He was trying to enter the battery by its embrasure, but fortunately reinforcements came around by the rear, entering at the same moment. Many years later Napoleon showed off to a doctor ‘a very deep cicatrix [scar] above the left knee’, recalling that ‘the surgeons were in doubt whether it might not be ultimately necessary to amputate’. In a book he wrote in exile on St Helena on Julius Caesar’s wars, Napoleon contrasted the commanders of the ancient world, who were well protected during battles, with those of the modern, concluding: ‘Today the commander-in-chief is forced every day to face the guns, often within range of grapeshot, and all battles within cannon-shot, in order to assess, see and give orders, as the view is not wide enough for generals to be able to keep out of the way of bullets.’ One of the accusations made by his detractors was that Napoleon wasn’t personally brave. ‘Cowardice had of late years been habitual to Bonaparte,’ wrote the English writer Helen Williams in 1815, for example. This is absurd; not only do cowards not fight sixty battles, but Napoleon came near death several times between battles too, while reconnoitring close to the enemy. The number of people killed near him and the bullet that hit him at the battle of Ratisbon are further testaments to his great physical bravery. Napoleon’s troops appreciated his courage and his ability to magnify their own. When all the gunners trying to establish a battery of cannon within a pistol shot of Fort Mulgrave were killed or wounded, Napoleon christened it ‘Hommes Sans Peur’ (Men Without Fear) and thereby continued to receive volunteers to man it. Nobody better understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier.

[…]

By mid-November he had surrounded Fort Mulgrave with batteries, and on the 23rd he captured its British commander, General Charles O’Hara, who had tried to counter-attack from it in a sortie and spike the French guns of one of them. ‘General Dugommier fought with true republican courage,’ Napoleon reported of that action. ‘We recaptured the battery … The guns of the Convention were un-spiked in sufficient time to increase the confusion of their retreat.’69 It was very rare to be able to repair guns that had had metal spikes hammered into their firing mechanisms, let alone quickly, and it was a sign of the professional pitch to which Napoleon had trained his men.

At one o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, December 17, 1793, Dugommier put Napoleon’s plan of attack on Toulon into action. A column under Claude Victor-Perrin (later Marshal Victor) got beyond the first line of defences at Fort Mulgrave, but faltered at the second. At about 3 a.m. Dugommier sent in the next assault of 2,000 men in the teeth of driving rain, high winds and lightning strikes. Led by Napoleon, whose horse was shot from under him, and Captain Jean-Baptiste Muiron, this assault finally took the fort after heavy hand-to-hand fighting. Napoleon then proceeded to pour heated cannonballs onto the Royal Navy vessels across the harbour below. The memory of the explosion of two Spanish gunpowder-ships stayed with him for the rest of his life. Decades later he recalled how ‘The whirlwind of flames and smoke from the arsenal resembled the eruption of a volcano, and the thirteen vessels blazing in the roads were like so many displays of fireworks: the masts and forms of the vessels were distinctly traced out by the flames, which lasted many hours and formed an unparalleled spectacle.’ He was exaggerating – only two ships caught fire rather than the whole fleet – but the effect was nonetheless dramatic.

[…]

Great and deserved benefits flowed to Napoleon from the victory at Toulon. On December 22 he was appointed brigadier-general and inspector of coastal defences from the Rhône to the Var. Saliceti brought him to the attention of the senior politicians Paul Barras and Louis-Stanislas Fréron, but best of all, as he later put it, Toulon ‘gave him confidence in himself’.

Rarely in military history has there been so high a turnover of generals as in France in the 1790s. It meant that capable young men could advance through the ranks at unprecedented speed. The Terror, emigration, war, political purges, disgrace after defeat, political suspicion and scapegoating, on top of all the normal cases of resignation and retirement, meant that men like Lazare Hoche, who was a corporal in 1789, could be a general by 1793, or Michel Ney, a lieutenant in 1792, could become one by 1796. Napoleon’s rise through the ranks was therefore by no means unique given the political and military circumstances of the day. Still, his progress was impressive: he had spent five and a half years as a second-lieutenant, a year as a lieutenant, sixteen months as a captain, only three months as a major and no time at all as a colonel. On December 22, 1793, having been on leave for fifty-eight of his ninety-nine months of service – with and without permission – and after spending less than four years on active duty, Napoleon was made, at twenty-four, a general.

[…]

During the Piedmontese campaign Napoleon received official confirmation of his promotion to brigadier-general, which required him to answer the question ‘Noble or not noble?’ Very sensibly, given that the Terror was still raging, he answered, technically untruthfully, in the negative.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

One of their friends was firing her weapon, and it suddenly jammed

Friday, March 8th, 2024

Rob Henderson fills the first part of Troubled with stories from his childhood in foster care, until he gets adopted by a couple that gets divorced. Then his adopted Mom brings home a “friend” named Shelly, who becomes a second mom. They don’t feel safe, so they decide to learn to shoot:

Shelly and Mom had met up with several of their friends at an outdoor shooting range. They’d gone once before; this was their second time. One of their friends was firing her weapon, and it suddenly jammed. As she tried to figure out what was wrong, she carelessly moved the pistol around. Suddenly, the gun fired. Shelly was standing fifteen feet away, talking to a man and his young son. The bullet went straight into her lower back. Had Shelly not been standing there, the bullet would likely have killed the boy.

They were barely able to make ends meet before Shelly was disabled:

At last, Shelly had received a large insurance settlement from the shooting. She and Mom never mentioned the specific amount. I figured it was a few hundred thousand dollars, given what they bought: a new truck for Shelly, a Ford Mustang for Mom, and a motorboat they kept docked at a marina at Shasta Lake. In Red Bluff, having a new boat and a new Ford Mustang was really something.

Mom and Shelly also bought three houses in Red Bluff. One was for us to move into and two were investments to “flip.” They had agreed that the family should move into another home as a way to “start over.” But they strongly disagreed about what to do with the rest of the insurance settlement.

[…]

Mom and Shelly expected to make a lot of money by selling the other two homes they’d bought. These houses required some upkeep, and I wanted to help out, so I’d stop by both homes every week to rake the leaves and mow the lawns. Shelly explained that both houses would likely be sold within two or three months at the most, and I didn’t mind doing the extra work for that amount of time.

But three months passed, and there were no buyers.

[…]

“I would lie awake in bed at night for months, because I knew this day would come,” Mom said.

We were sitting in the living room of the biggest house I had ever lived in, and I learned that it had been a temporary dream. Eight months had passed, and the two houses Mom and Shelly had intended to flip had still not sold. Shelly and Mom had run out of money. The year 2005 was the right time to invest in houses in California, they said. But not 2006. They explained that all our homes were being foreclosed, and that we had to leave Red Bluff.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Weapons | 1 Comment »

A helicopter is necessarily a complex, delicate, and expensive piece of equipment

Wednesday, March 6th, 2024

David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers) the history of quadcopter drones:

A helicopter is necessarily a complex, delicate, and expensive piece of equipment. This is because steering involves changing the angle or pitch of the rotor blades, which needs an elaborate mechanical arrangement. The quadrotor has four sets of blades, and steers and maintains stability simply by speeding up or slowing down different rotors. Without modern electronics, it would be impossible; with them it is easy.

Modern multirotors date back to the late 1980s with the Gyrosaucer toy produced by Japanese company Keyence. However, modern developments tend to be traced back to US engineer Mike Dammarm, who developed his first battery-powered quadcopter in the early 90s. This was marketed by Spectrolutions Inc. as the Roswell Flyer in 1999 and later adapted into the Draganflyer, a range which is still going.

Multicopters multiplied, and the big breakthrough came in 2010 when Parrot produced their first AR.Drone. This was hailed as a fantastic toy: a helicopter sending back video via Wi-Fi which you control with an iPhone. The AR.Drone was a bestseller, and the world woke up to the potential of multicopters.

[…]

Multirotors have a couple of major advantages over fixed-wings. For one thing, they can operate indoors, going through buildings, tunnels, and bunker complexes. And they give a more stable view than a moving fixed-wing.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

You have to fire a lot of unguided weapons to score a hit

Tuesday, February 27th, 2024

The implications of the lethal, portable drones for ground combat have not yet been worked out, David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers):

Soldiers can see the enemy at a distance and attack them with incredible precision. If someone is shooting at you with machine guns or rockets, you can hide behind a wall or in a hole. There is no way of taking cover from LMAMS short of being inside a closed bunker. It can fly around to attack from any direction and can dive into trenches. This makes it unique, and the tried and tested tactics of previous decades will have to be revised. Lying flat and keeping your head down may simply make you an easier target.

In the future, firefights with rifles may become as rare as stabbing with bayonets. The real action may take place at longer ranges without any face-to-face contact at all.

[…]

You have to fire a lot of unguided weapons to score a hit. For rifles and machine-guns, a figure of twenty thousand rounds or more is often quoted for every casualty. Artillery and mortars fire hundreds of rounds, tearing up vast areas of landscape without hitting a target. Guided weapons are different. From their first use in the 1960s, laser-guided weapons were hitting the target more than half the time. With such weapons, range is irrelevant: a target is as easy to hit from two miles away as from two hundred yards. A squad with twenty LMAMS is likely to score close to twenty hits — which may be on vehicles, firing positions, or individuals.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Training doctrines, levels of violent crime, and public scrutiny were very different back in the mid-1990s

Friday, February 23rd, 2024

In his 25-year police career, Greg Ellifritz pointed guns at lots of people:

Admittedly, in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have pointed guns at all of those folks.

In my defense, training doctrines, levels of violent crime, and public scrutiny were very different back in the mid-1990s as compared to our modern age. We were taught to point guns directly at any felony suspect regardless of the level of danger they posed to us. It was just the way things were done. Back in the day, very few cops would have ever considered using a position like “low ready” to confront a potentially armed suspect. We took people down “at gunpoint.” That meant pointing a gun at the suspects’ chests and faces while demanding compliance.

Things have changed.

Most likely due to the fact that most cops now record every criminal arrest on body cameras, police administrators have demanded changes to use of force policies. Cops were pointing guns at too many people without a reasonable cause to do so. Sticking a gun in the face of an unarmed teenage kid in a stolen car looks bad when the bosses review the body cam footage.

The police bosses started cracking down on excessive gun play. Pointing a gun at someone was once considered a “threat” of force generally equivalent to harsh verbal language. At some point during the last decade or so, pointing a gun directly at another human being changed from a low consequence “threat of force” to a serious ”use of force” that was documented and investigated.

While some changes were certainly needed, I fear we might have gone too far.

[…]

Police bosses will argue “pointing a gun at someone meets the elements of the crime of aggravated assault.” That’s correct, in some cases. Putting someone in a painful wrist lock or throwing a person to the ground meets the statutory definitions for assault as well, yet cops do that all the time without issue. Handcuffing someone without their consent meets the statutory definition of “kidnapping” or “unlawful restraint.” Does that mean that cops shouldn’t handcuff people? That’s silly. Society recognizes that cops can legally use force to affect a lawful arrest so long as it is objectively reasonable to do so. I would argue that there are lots of scenarios cops face where it is reasonable to point a gun at someone even if it isn’t (yet) reasonable to shoot that person.

[…]

The thing that many police bosses fail to realize is that sometimes pointing a gun at someone compels compliance when all other tactics don’t work. Cops generally aren’t pointing guns at suspects just for fun. They often point guns as a last resort when all other tactics have failed. When an officer appears competent and points a gun at a suspect, that threat of lethal force often convinces the bad guy to go along with the program. The officer doesn’t have to physically hurt the suspect.

The whole thing includes some illustrative stories.

Posted in Crime, War | 8 Comments »

British tests of Trident missiles are rare

Thursday, February 22nd, 2024

The test firing of a Trident missile from a Royal Navy submarine has failed, for the second time in a row:

The latest test of the UK’s nuclear deterrent was from HMS Vanguard and was seen by Defence Secretary Grant Shapps.

The missile’s booster rockets failed and it landed in the sea close to the launch site, according to the Sun, which first reported the malfunction.

Mr Shapps said he has “absolute confidence” in Trident’s submarines, missiles and nuclear warheads.

This is highly embarrassing for both the UK and the US manufacturer of the Trident missile.

British tests of Trident missiles are rare, not least because of the cost. Each missile is worth around £17m and the last test in 2016 also ended in failure when the missile veered off course. Test-fired missiles are not armed with their nuclear warheads.

[…]

The missile was supposed to have flown several thousand miles before landing harmlessly in the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa. Instead, it dropped into the ocean near to where it was launched.

[…]

The missiles the UK uses are drawn from a common pool that the US and UK both use, and the US has conducted multiple tests without these kind of problems.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

XTEND say that operators can fly one of their drones like a pro within a few minutes of trying it out

Wednesday, February 21st, 2024

Skilled FPV drone operators are becoming the most feared opponents in the war in Ukraine, David Hambling notes:

When a Ukrainian drone strike team recently took out the Russian FPV operator known as Moisey it was seen as a big success. Moisey was personally credited with destroying dozens of vehicles and killing almost 400 Ukrainian soldiers.

Standard consumer quadcopters like the ubiquitous DJI Mavic series are designed to be flown out of the box by an untrained user. The operator does not exactly fly the drone so much as tell it where to go, with the drone doing all the piloting and preventing crashes. The drone will auto-hover at a fixed point even in gusty winds and, thanks to sonar and other sensors, avoid obstacles.

[…]

FPVs by contrast are stripped-down racing machines without any of the piloting aides on standard quadcopters. This is partly a matter of cost, but mainly to do with speed — a drone switched to manual mode with all the obstacle avoidance turned off is faster than one in normal mode where speed is automatically limited to how fast it can fly safely.

This is why FPV pilots wear VR-style goggles: they need to have good situational awareness, to look ahead and plan their path to avoid flying into things. FPV cameras have a wide field of view so the operator does not make a sharp turn and find a wall in front of them.

[…]

Russia’s Academy BAS says its combat FPV operator course takes a month, working 12 hour days with no days off. The equivalent training at Ukraine’s Victory Drones takes 33 days, and participants are expected to have 20 hours practice on a simulator before they start. The pass rate on FPV courses can be as low as 60%, compared to up to 95% for regular drones.

The average hit rate for FPV drones is sometimes quoted at 10% whereas highly skilled operators may succeed with 70% or more of their attacks.

[…]

XTEND say that operators can fly one of their drones like a pro within a few minutes of trying it out. This includes carrying out tricky maneuvers like flying through doorways or windows, which is exactly the kind of skill needed by an FPV kamikaze operator, or even flying around inside buildings or tunnels.

The intelligence provided by XTEND also solves one of the big issues with current FPVs, that of losing communication in the last second of flight as the drone drops below the radio horizon.

“Our XOS operating system enables a drone to have several ‘state’ solutions to determine what happens during comms-failure, including: hover, continue to target, return to home, patrol, and more,” says Shapira.

This effectively allows the operator to ‘lock on’ to a target as soon as they identify it, so the drone will find a target even if it is evading rapidly, or the signal is lost due to jamming or other causes. In principle XOS could be trained to aim at the weak spot on a target, such as the turret rear of Russian tanks where an FPV hit often results in instant destruction.

[…]

Last year, XTEND signed a contract to supply Israel’s Ministry of Defence with a multi-drone operating system enabling an operator to control “dozens of human-guided semi-autonomous drones simultaneously.”

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

That might seem like a lot of money for a radio-controlled model aircraft

Tuesday, February 20th, 2024

”Like mammals evolving beneath the feet of lumbering dinosaurs,“ David Hambling notes (in Swarm Troopers), “a very different type of drone has been proliferating close to the ground”:

These are little craft that do not compete with the lofty lords of the air. And while the big drones are in decline, their miniature cousins have been preparing to inherit the earth.

[…]

As of 2015 the Pentagon has around ten thousand drones, and nine thousand of them are small, hand-launched craft made by AeroVironment Inc of California

[…]

It may look like a toy aircraft with a four-foot wingspan, but it puts air power in the hands of the foot soldier.

[…]

Big drones compete with the manned aircraft that they resemble, but for once, looking like a toy may be an advantage.

[…]

Raven’s built-in GPS meant it could fly a mission via a series of programmed waypoints with no human intervention, so it could take pictures of a building or installation even if it was out of radio range. Endurance was tripled to an hour, and a new modular design meant changing sensors (say, switching between day cameras and infrared night vision) was a matter of “plug and play”.

[…]

Unlike the Predator, which requires pilot’s qualifications to fly, Raven operation can be learned in about three days.

[…]

The controller comes with a shrouded “viewing hood” to make the screen easier to see in bright sunlight — an echo of the black cloth that the TDR-1 operators covered themselves with in WWII.

The ground control unit can run training software, known as the Visualization and Mission Planning Integrated Rehearsal Environment or VAMPIRE. With VAMPIRE, an operator can practice flying virtual missions without needing to launch anything; it is like playing a handheld video game. An enhanced version can download sensor feeds from actual missions; this add-on is known as the Bidirectional Advanced Trainer (yes, that’s VAMPIRE BAT).

[…]

The video feed was originally recorded on a consumer eight-millimetre video recorder, a Sony Handycam, which allowed the user to freeze-frame or look back through the flight; it is now recorded digitally. The other piece of hardware is a ruggedized laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook computer. This provides a moving map display via Army software called FalconView.

[…]

In 2012 a complete system with two ground control stations, three RQ-11B air vehicles, plus all the sensors, spares, and carry cases, can cost the US military $100-$200,000. A single air vehicle on its own costs around $34,000. It is the sensor package, especially the thermal imaging, that pushes the price up.

To civilians that might seem like a lot of money for a radio-controlled model aircraft, but it needs to be put in context. In the conflict in Afghanistan, soldiers have on occasion used shoulder-launched Javelin anti-tank missiles costing $70,000 against individual insurgents behind cover. The mine-resistant MRAP armored trucks, hastily purchased to give protection against IEDs, cost about $600,000.

[…]

It’s certainly a low-cost option compared to $14 million for a Reaper. The Reaper also costs about $4,000 an hour to fly, so one ten-hour flight costs as much as a Raven. The F-22 Raptor costs $50,000 an hour to fly, the F-35 over $30,000, making Reaper cheap by Air Force standards.

Cheap drones were clearly a thing nine years ago, but super-cheap FPV quadcopters with 40-mm grenades or RPG warheads were still in the future.