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

Thursday, 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

Wednesday, 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

Tuesday, 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.

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

Sunday, 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.

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Much of the Vietnam debacle has been repeated on Ukraine

Saturday, 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.

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

Thursday, 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

Wednesday, 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.

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Our scientists would need to know what to look for

Tuesday, 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 »

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

Sunday, 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.

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

Friday, 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

Thursday, 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 »

Raiders of the Lost Anachronism

Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

I recently re-watched Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time in decades, and I noticed that the film takes place in 1936 — which got me thinking about the year and what didn’t fit.

Fortunately Indy is approached by Army Intelligence, not the CIA, which didn’t exist yet, or its predecessor, the OSS, which was still a few years off, too.

What stood out though was the firearms. I couldn’t have told you what model of revolver Indy carried — apparently it was a Smith & Wesson M1917 — but it looked appropriate.

I couldn’t have told you what model of semiautomatic Indy carried, either. In fact, I didn’t remember him even carrying one, but it looked appropriate, too. It turns out the semiautomatic he used at the bar in Nepal was a Browning Hi-Power — introduced in 1935, and not comercially available for sale in the United States until decades later. This makes sense when you realize that Indy was originally envisioned as carrying a Colt 1911, and the Hi-Power is its rather similar successor — and the prop-masters found it more reliable with 9-mm blanks than the 1911 with .45 blanks.

Then the Gestapo agent pulls out his Walther P38, which, of course, was introduced in 1938. I would expect all the Nazis in a Hollywood film to be armed with the iconic Luger P08, and many are. If you pay attention, you can also catch an iconic Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” in the bar scene.

But what caught my attention was the German submachine guns. There’s a lot of fully automatic fire in the movie, and the German soldiers and Nepalese and Arab henchmen are all using MP40s, which, of course, were introduced in 1940. The MP40 did have a predecessor though, the MP38, introduced in 1938.

Apparently the German soldiers are mostly armed with the brand new Mauser Karabiner 98k bolt-action carbine, rather than the established Gewehr 98s rifle, but that’s a minor quibble.

It’s odd that large numbers of Germans are openly operating in Egypt in 1936, and its downright odd that they have a one-of-a-kind flying wing to transport the Ark:

The Flying Wing was designed for Raiders of the Lost Ark by production designer Norman Reynolds. It was inspired by the Horten Ho 229, a prototype German fighter/bomber that never entered production during World War II, and modeled after a Horten VII by the German brothers Reimar and Walter Horten. It was built in 1944 as a test bed for a bigger jet propelled Horten IX.

The design of the aircraft is similar to the Junkers G 38 that came out in the late 1920′s, particularly with regard to the landing gear, general shape and appearance. It was a flying wing based on Prof. Junkers’ own patent that predated Jack Northrop’s theories that the Horton Brothers used for their Ho 229.

The elaborate prop was built in England by Vickers Aircraft Company and painted at EMI Elstree Studios in London, before being disassembled and sent in parts to Tunisia, then rebuilt on location for filming.

After the Flying Wing was destroyed in the film in 1981, the remains sat quietly in the Tunisian desert, where parts of it was salvaged by prop collectors.

Indiana Jones with Panzerfaust
Perhaps the most anachronistic bit of military hardware though is the shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon Indy threatens to use against the Ark. The film prop is a Chinese Type 56 copy of the Soviet RPG-2, outfitted with a shoulder grip similar to an M9 Bazooka’s. The German Panzerfaust didn’t enter service until 1943. The American bazooka combined two cutting-edge innovations, shaped charges and rockets, and got shipped to our Soviet allies. Captured models inspired the German Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems

Tuesday, July 9th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenAs President Kennedy’s new secretary of defense, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Robert McNamara called for the Pentagon to assume control of all spy plane programs:

McNamara was at the top of the chain of command of all the armed services and believed his Air Force should be in charge of all U.S. assets with wings. The public had lost confidence in the CIA, McNamara told the president.

[…]

One plan was that the CIA might work in better partnership with the Air Force. President Kennedy liked that. On September 6, 1961, he created a protocol that required the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to comanage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs together as the National Reconnaissance Office, a classified agency within Robert McNamara’s Department of Defense. A central headquarters for NRO was established in Washington, a small office with a limited staff but with a number of empire-size egos vying for power and control. The organization maintained a public face, an overt identity at the Pentagon called the Office of Space Systems, but no one outside a select few knew of NRO’s existence until 1992.

[…]

“Because I was the person with a list of every employee at the area, it was my job to know not just who was who, but who was the boss of somebody’s boss. An individual person didn’t necessarily know much more about the person they worked for than their code name. And they almost certainly didn’t know who was working on the other side of the wall or in the next trailer over. Wayne Pendleton was the head of the radar group for a while. He was my go-to person for a lot of different groups. One day, Pendleton suddenly says, ‘I’m going to Washington, Jim.’ So I said, ‘What if I need you, what number should I call?’ And Pendleton laughed. He said, ‘You won’t need me because where I’m going doesn’t exist.’ Decades later I would learn that the place where Wayne was going when he left the Ranch was to a little office in Washington called NRO.”

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals

Sunday, July 7th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon, while still “merely” a general, was elected a member of the Institut de France, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), then (as now) the foremost intellectual society in France:

Thereafter he often wore the dark-blue uniform of the Institut with its embroidered olive green and golden branches, attended science lectures there, and signed himself as ‘Member of the Institut, General-in-Chief of the Army of England’ in that order.

[…]

His proposers and supporters at the Institut undoubtedly thought it a boon to have the foremost general of the day as a member, but Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals. He had read and annotated many of the most profound books of the Western canon; was a connoisseur, critic and even amateur theorist of dramatic tragedy and music; championed science and socialized with astronomers; enjoyed conducting long theological discussions with bishops and cardinals; and he went nowhere without his large, well-thumbed travelling library. He was to impress Goethe with his views on the motives of Werther’s suicide and Berlioz with his knowledge of music. Later he would inaugurate the Institut d’Égypte and staff it with the greatest French savants of the day. Napoleon was admired by many of the leading European intellectuals and creative figures of the nineteenth century, including Goethe, Byron, Beethoven (at least initially), Carlyle and Hegel; he established the University of France on the soundest footing of its history.

Posted in Education, Policy, War | No Comments »

A small drone with an electric motor is invisible

Thursday, July 4th, 2024

Swarm Troopers by David HamblingWhile a hovering drone a few tens of feet away is an easy target, David Hambling explains (in Swarm Troopers), one approaching at a hundred miles an hour is virtually impossible to hit:

Hunters have difficulty hitting flying geese at more than about eighty yards, even with the spread of shot from a shotgun. Hitting one with a rifle is harder and putting a bullet through the Kevlar wing of a drone may only make it wobble. Unlike a goose or an airplane with “wet wings” containing fuel, a drone can only be seriously damaged by hitting a vital part.

A lethal drone like Switchblade will cover that last eighty yards to the target in around two seconds and its body presents a target four inches across. It can fly at low altitude, putting it below the horizon and making it difficult to see against a cluttered background. It can attack in complete darkness, and as it was seen in the section on swarming hunters, drones will come in from several directions at once. Some may even come from vertically above the target.

[…]

Before [World War 2], it was estimated that [anti-aircraft] guns would score one hit for every two hundred rounds. In reality it took closer to twenty thousand. A shell takes ten seconds or more to reach its target at high altitude, in which time a WWII bomber will have travelled about fifty times its own length. The slightest mis-estimation of range or speed means the shell has no chance of hitting. Anti-aircraft batteries fired a curtain of shells into the path of oncoming bomber formations rather than aiming individually. The mass of shell bursts did at least act as a deterrent.

[…]

Air defenses rarely shot down attacking aircraft. Shells did not hit planes, but sprayed them with high-velocity shrapnel fragments. The shrapnel generally caused minor damage or injured crew members, but this could force an aircraft to abort its mission and send it limping home. It took a lucky hit, or the cumulative damage from several near-misses, to down a plane.

Air defenses rarely shot down attacking aircraft. Shells did not hit planes, but sprayed them with high-velocity shrapnel fragments. The shrapnel generally caused minor damage or injured crew members, but this could force an aircraft to abort its mission and send it limping home. It took a lucky hit, or the cumulative damage from several near-misses, to down a plane.

[…]

One approach was to make every fourth bullet from a machine gun a phosphorus tracer round that leaves a glowing trail. This showed the path of the bullets so the gunner could adjust his aim, directing the visible stream of bullets towards the target. Like the wall of shell bursts from larger guns, the stream of tracer was also a deterrent: it takes a steely nerve to deliberately fly into a hail of bullets.

[…]

Unlike other aircraft, the kamikazes were not deterred by slight damage. Machines guns and 20mm and 40mm cannon consistently failed to prevent a kamikaze from hitting his target. Only the big five-inch naval guns could destroy a plane with one hit.

[…]

One analyst calculates that, because they scored so many hits compared to the casualties suffered, kamikaze attacks cost the Japanese fewer planes per hit than other types of attack.

[…]

Admiral Halsey’s solution to the kamikazes was an intensive program of air strikes on their airfields. Navy carrier air wings and Army Air Force B-29s destroyed large numbers of kamikazes on the ground, ending a threat that could not be stopped by anti-aircraft guns.

[…]

The guided missile was the air-defense equivalent of the smart bomb. Instead of firing thousands of rounds and hoping for a lucky hit, a single projectile homed in on the target and guaranteed a shoot-down. Heat-seeking missiles were effective at close range, while bigger and heavier missiles with radar guidance took over at longer ranges.

In the 1960s, the US foot soldier had his personal air defense in the form of the Redeye missile. This was a portable heat-seeking missile that could take out a fast jet two miles away, an almost impossible feat even for a quadruple heavy-machine gun that had to be carried on a truck. The main problem with early versions of the Redeye was that it was purely a “revenge weapon” – it could only lock on to a jet’s exhaust from behind, so you couldn’t shoot down a plane until it had already flown over and bombed you.

In the same period, protection from heavy bombers was provided by the Nike Hercules. This missile stood forty feet high and flew at Mach 3 and had a range of eighty miles. While the Redeye carried two pounds of explosive, Nike Hercules was armed with a twenty-kiloton atomic warhead capable of bringing down a whole formation of bombers in one go.

[…]

The plan was to take the existing M48 Patton tank and fit it with a new turret armed with a pair of WWII-era 40mm guns. Manual aiming was not enough; it would be guided by the radar from an F-16 aircraft with a new computerized fire-control system. On paper, the Sergeant York looked like a sound proposition.

The result was a billion-dollar fiasco. The Patton tank chassis were worn out, giving up after three hundred miles of road tests instead of the four thousand planned. The 40mm guns had been stored badly and were in poor shape. The biggest defect was the radar; designed for air-to-air combat in the open sky, it could not deal with all the clutter at ground level. It was easily confused by things like waving trees, which it mistook for helicopters.

[…]

The modern Stinger looks a lot like the 1960s Redeye, and the Patriot missile looks like a smaller version of the old Nike. Rather than being bigger and more powerful, they are smarter and more agile. As with bombs, intelligence trumps brute force.

Modern missiles can spot targets faster and shrug off the clutter that confused Sergeant York. They are highly resistant to jamming and deception. They are harder to avoid in the dance of death known as the “terminal engagement phase,” when planes maneuver wildly in a desperate attempt to get away as the missile closes in.

Air defense has become a duel between radar operators and “defense suppression” aircraft equipped with electronic warfare pods, decoys, and missiles that home in on radar emissions. The attackers attempt to blind, confuse, or evade the defenses and get close enough to launch their missiles. A radar signal is like a searchlight on a dark night, advertising its position over a wide area. Radar operators respond by only turning their radar on at intervals, and by moving position when possible. It is a duel whose outcome is largely determined by who has the best technology.

The current refinement of the Patriot missile is state of the art. This is several generations on from the missile that was hailed (inaccurately) as the Scud-buster of the 1991 Gulf War. The fifteen hundred pound missile travels at almost a mile per second and can destroy an aircraft anywhere from treetop height to eighty thousand feet, at a range of a hundred miles away. Costing somewhere over a million dollars per shot, the Patriot is an effective weapon against a whole range of targets. A battery of Patriots can defend against attack helicopters like the Hind, strike aircraft, heavy bombers, and is now effective against Scuds and other ballistic missiles.

The recent focus has been on tweaking Patriot for missile defense because shooting down aircraft simply is not an issue. US air superiority in recent conflicts means that nobody has been in a position to bomb US forces. According to the USAF’s 2014 Posture Statement:

“Since April of 1953, roughly seven million American service members have deployed to combat and contingency operations all over the world. Thousands of them have died as they fought. Not a single one was killed by an enemy aircraft. We intend to keep it that way.”

[…]

The sharp end of a Patriot missile battery comprises four launch vehicles, each with four missiles ready to fire. In principle, a Patriot battery can take on sixteen aircraft at a time (of four times that number with new, miniature PAC-3 missiles). While two or more missiles may sometimes be launched on different trajectories at a difficult target, the battery might take out sixteen Reapers in a matter of seconds.

Whether Patriot could even hit small drones is another question entirely.

[…]

It is hard to image a three-quarter ton missile engaging a four-pound drone. And even if every missile worked perfectly, the seventeenth drone would get through — along with all those following.

Patriot missile batteries rely on radar, which is vulnerable; one hit could put the whole battery out of action. The drones might target the launch vehicles and personnel. Systems like the Patriot are not armored against attack, and the M983 trucks that transport the Patriot are as vulnerable as any other truck. Missiles are explosive targets full of flammable rocket fuel.

[…]

Nor can the problem be solved by issuing Stingers to every soldier; at over $38,000 a shot, they are too expensive to be bought in such volumes. Worse, missiles like the Stinger are heat-seekers that depend on the target having a hot engine. A small drone with an electric motor is invisible.

[…]

The USAF’s F-22A Raptor is arguably the best fighter in the world, but its six radar-guided AMRAAM missiles and two infrared Sidewinders will not dent a swarm, even if they were able to lock on. The Raptor’s 20mm cannon makes little difference. The rotary cannon has a high rate of fire to ensure a good chance of a hit, and the entire magazine is expended by six one-second bursts.

[…]

Against most opponents, air supremacy means destroying enemy air fields so their aircraft cannot take off or land. This was the answer to the kamikaze threat.

[…]

Small drones do not need a runway, air base, or hangars.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

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