What Bloch foresaw with stunning prescience was a future battlefield that would be far more lethal than most of his contemporaries imagined

April 9th, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseIn The Kill Chain, Christian Brose tells the story of Jan Bloch:

Jan Bloch was not a soldier. He was a banker who was born into poverty in Warsaw in 1836 but worked his way up to become a wealthy railroad financier in Russian-controlled Poland. He never served a day of his life in uniform. But he was passionate about military issues and for years obsessively studied how the new technologies of his era would change warfare.

Bloch examined the introduction of the machine gun, smokeless gunpowder, long-range artillery, new types of explosives, railroads, telegraphs, steamships, and other innovations. And he traced their increasingly devastating effects from the Crimean War in the 1850s through the American Civil War a decade later, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the Russo-Turkish War that began in 1877, and the start of the Boer Wars in 1880. He poured the results of his lifelong study of technology and warfare into a six-volume doorstop of a book that he published in 1898, four years before his death. He called it The Future of War.

What Bloch foresaw with stunning prescience was a future battlefield that would be far more lethal than most of his contemporaries imagined. The invention of smokeless gunpowder would literally lift the fog of war that had hung thick over past conflicts so that, unlike in previous skirmishes, opposing armies would remain dangerously exposed after the initial volleys of gunfire. Rifles could shoot farther, faster, and more accurately than ever. For centuries, the best professional soldiers could fire a few accurate shots per minute. At the end of the nineteenth century, average conscripts could fire dozens of accurate shots per second. And because bullets had become smaller, soldiers could carry more of them into combat.

Modern fast-loading artillery, equipped with range finders and high-explosive shells, were 116 times deadlier, by Bloch’s calculation, than guns from just a few decades prior.

[…]

For Bloch, this meant that battlefields would become killing fields, where combatants would never “get within one hundred yards of one another.” War would cease to be “a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority.” Instead, Bloch predicted, “the next war will be a great war of entrenchments.”

[…]

Much of the war was waged with modern technology but antiquated doctrine.

[…]

Another factor that made the war so calamitous was the military technological parity that existed between the great powers.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

How is China turning deserts into arable lands?

April 8th, 2022

China has a total land area of 3.5 million square miles, but only 12% of that land is arable. Researchers there claim to have developed a novel technology that can convert desert to arable land:

The technology developed by the researchers at Chongqing Jiaotong University involves a paste made from plant cellulose, that can greatly improve the ability of desert sands to hold water, minerals, air, microbes, and nutrients essential for plant growth.

This paste was applied to a sandy 1.6-hectare plot in the Ulan Buh Desert, in the Mongolian Autonomous Region. Over time, the plot was transformed into fertile cropland capable of producing tomatoes, rice, watermelon, sunflowers, and corn.

Professor Yang Qingguo, of Jiaotong University, explained that “The costs of artificial materials and machines for transforming sand into the soil is lower compared with controlled environmental agriculture and reclamation”

According to the Chinese researchers, the plants grown in the sandy plot delivered higher crop yields, using the same amount of water needed for growing crops in normally arable soils. Moreover, the amount of fertilizer needed to produce the crops was lower than what is generally required for the growth of vegetables in other soils.

Posted in Science, Technology | 8 Comments »

Lethal autonomous weapons have existed for a long time

April 7th, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseLethal autonomous weapons have existed for a long time, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

Such systems, with varying degrees of capability, are currently in use by at least thirty different states. The US Navy, for example, has used the Phalanx gun and Aegis missile defense systems to defend its ships for decades. Though far less capable than the intelligent machines of today and tomorrow, these systems can be switched into a fully automatic mode that enables them to close the kill chain against incoming missiles without human involvement. The decision to trust those machines to do so was born of necessity: it was unlikely humans could respond fast enough to counter incoming missiles. That inability was deemed a greater danger than the option of turning the kill chain over to a machine that could shoot down missiles in time-sensitive situations more effectively than humans could.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Is financial innovation a good thing?

April 6th, 2022

Is financial innovation a good thing?

In the context of a free market, innovation is a positive-sum game. The innovations that survive — most don’t — are the ones that conserve resources and improve quality. In the case of financial innovation, improving quality could mean better risk management.

But financial innovation does not take place in the context of a free market. Our financial system is permeated with government guarantees. Some guarantees, like deposit insurance or pension guarantees, are explicit. Other guarantees, like “too big to fail,” are implicit.

These guarantees can be exploited by firms that take on excessive risk. If a gamble pays off, the gains go to owners and managers of the firm. If the gamble turns out badly, some of the losses go to taxpayers. Even though managers might not consciously be searching for ways to game the system, the competition for returns will push them in the direction of doing so.

Innovative financial instruments and practices can facilitate gaming the system, without regulators realizing it. Clever innovations can enable a bank to comply with the letter of a regulation while violating its spirit. Sometimes, even the executives of the bank are fooled. They do not realize that their profits are coming from this “regulatory arbitrage,” rather than from real business skill.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

Both militaries had tanks, radios, and airplanes

April 5th, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseHistory is replete with examples of military rivals that had the same technologies, and what set them apart is how they used them, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

The archetypal case is that of France and Germany in the 1930s. Both militaries had tanks, radios, and airplanes. But whereas the French chose to employ those technologies as part of their effort to build better versions of the fortifications they had relied upon in World War I, Germany combined those capabilities into a new concept called blitzkrieg, which enabled the German army to maneuver rapidly through France’s defensive positions, capturing Paris in roughly one month in 1940.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 11 Comments »

The Psychology of Your Scrolling Addiction

April 4th, 2022

To better understand why people fall into (metaphorical) rabbit holes, researchers conducted a series of studies with a total of 6,445 U.S.-based students and working adults:

Through this research, we identified three factors that influence whether people choose to continue viewing photos and videos rather than switch to another activity: the amount of media the person has already viewed, the similarity of the media they’ve viewed, and the manner in which they viewed the media.

In the first part of our research, we were interested in exploring whether the pull of the rabbit hole would grow stronger or weaker once people had already viewed several videos. We had participants view either five different music videos or just one music video, and then we asked them if they’d rather watch another video or complete a work-related task. In theory, one might expect that people would get tired of watching music videos after watching five in a row, reducing their desire to watch more of them. But in fact, we found that the opposite was true: Watching five videos made people 10% more likely to choose to watch an additional music video than if they only watched one video.

Next, we examined the impact of framing the videos people watched as similar to one another. We showed participants the same two videos, but for half of the participants, we explicitly labelled the videos with the same category label (“educational videos”), while for the other half of the participants, we didn’t include a category label. We found that simply framing the videos as more similar via the category label made people 21% more likely to choose to watch another related video.

Finally, we looked at how people acted after watching several videos consecutively, versus when they watched the same number of videos with some interruptions. We had one group of participants complete two work tasks and then watch two similar videos, while the other group completed the same four tasks, but alternated between them (i.e., work, video, work, video). Despite having done exactly the same activities, the order made a big difference: The participants whose video consumption was uninterrupted were 22% more likely to choose to watch another video than those who alternated between work tasks and videos.

Posted in Media, Science, Technology | No Comments »

The information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself

April 3rd, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseThe information that most US military machines collect is not actually processed onboard the machine itself, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

It is either stored on the system and then processed hours or even days later when the machine returns from its mission. Or it is streamed back to an operations center in real time, terabyte by terabyte, which places a huge burden on military communications networks.

Either way, it is the job of humans, not machines, to comb through most of that data and find the relevant bits of information. In 2020, that is the full-time job of literally tens of thousands of members of the US military.

[…]

In reality, these supposedly “unmanned” systems require dozens of people to pilot each one remotely, steer its sensors, maintain it on the ground, and analyze the information that it collects, much of which is discarded because there are simply not enough people to process all of it.

Indeed, for years, the US military has supplied only a fraction of the drone missions that its commanders in combat have demanded. The problem has not been a lack of drones, but a lack of people.

[…]

In the absence of machines that can share information directly with other machines, this is how the United States connects its battle networks: a lot of people sitting in a lot of large rooms.

[…]

More often they use a computer-based instant messaging program called mIRC chat. I have watched individual servicemembers juggling a dozen separate chat windows, which can often involve taking information generated by one machine and manually transferring it to another machine. They call it “hand jamming” or “fat fingering.” It is slow and prone to human error.

A friend of mine who recently did targeting in the US military told me that the best way his unit could get on one page in identifying a target was with Google Maps. They had to gather up all of their different streams of information about the target from their assorted sensor platforms, come to a time-consuming decision on where the target actually was located, and literally drop a pin in Google Maps to direct their shooters where on earth to fire their weapons.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

This shows up as a stripe of interference perpendicular to the orbital path of the satellite

April 2nd, 2022

While most satellite imagery is optical, meaning it captures sunlight reflected by the earth’s surface, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites such as Sentinel-1 work by emitting pulses of radio waves and measuring how much of the signal is reflected back:

Coincidentally, the radars on some missile defence batteries and other military radars operate using frequencies in the NATO G-band (4,000 to 6,000 Gigahertz) which overlaps with the civilian C-band (4,000, to 8,000 Gigahertz), commonly used by open source SAR satellites.

In the simplest terms, this means that when the radar on the likes of a Patriot battery is turned on, Sentinel-1 picks up both the echo from its own pulse of radio waves, as well as a powerful blast of radio waves from the ground-based radar. This shows up as a stripe of interference perpendicular to the orbital path of the satellite.

Patriot missiles are not the only system that create this type of interference. Other military radars that operate on the same C-band frequency include naval radars such as the Japanese FCS-3, the Chinese Type-381 and the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. All should be detectable when switched on and in view of Sentinel-1.

Dan confirmed the site of the radars he discovered during his initial research by using other open sources such as imagery on Google Maps and even data from the Strava running app.

He also highlighted other interesting missile battery locations, such as the Swedish STRIL array which acts as the country’s early warning system against Russian aircraft and missiles.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

This was how America acted when it was serious

April 1st, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseIt is difficult to overstate the all-encompassing sense of urgency that Washington felt in the early years of the Cold War, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain):

The way Eisenhower saw it, Washington’s primary role was to get the big things right. That started with picking the right people—not necessarily good people or nice people, but exceptional people, the kinds of people who might today be called “founders.” Eisenhower believed in empowering these founders by giving them broad authority to solve clearly defined problems, providing them all of the resources and support they needed to be successful, and then holding them strictly accountable for delivering results. In short, it was a strategy of concentration—of priorities, money, effort, and, most importantly, people.

[…]

He awarded gigantic contracts with fat margins to companies and technologists and integrated them into one military-industrial team. He scraped a space launch center out of a boggy stretch of Florida wetland called Cape Canaveral. He repeatedly blew up rocket engines and missile prototypes on the launchpad. But along the way, Eisenhower defended Schriever, got him more money when he needed it, and protected him from bureaucrats and staunch rivals, such as fellow Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who tried to kill the project at every turn…

Eventually, Schriever and his team did the impossible: they developed the Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons to precise locations on the other side of the planet in minutes.

[…]

This was how America acted when it was serious. The paramount concern was picking winners: the priorities that were more important than anything else, the people who could succeed where others could not, and the industrialists who could quickly build amazing technology that worked.

[…]

This is how Silicon Valley originated: as a start-up incubated by the Department of Defense. Margaret O’Mara, a historian and former staffer for Vice President Al Gore, has observed, “Defense contracts during and after World War II turned Silicon Valley from a somnolent landscape of fruit orchards into a hub of electronics production and innovations ranging from mainframes to microprocessors to the internet.”

[…]

A sprawling bureaucracy materialized in the 1960s to administer and discipline the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower’s more personalized approach to military acquisition and innovation, which was based on picking winners and holding them accountable, became bureaucratized amid the broader adoption of the industrial age management practices that had come into vogue in leading companies.

No one did more to further this trend than Robert McNamara, a veteran of Ford Motor Company who ran the Pentagon for much of the 1960s. Under his tenure, in the spirit of improving efficiency, new layers of oversight, analysis, and management were added, and these grew and began choking off the ability to develop breakthrough technologies quickly.

[…]

The result was that the process of developing military technology became harder, slower, and less creative. This outcome only intensified in the early 1970s, when many engineers in Silicon Valley began growing uncomfortable working for the US government as the Vietnam War grew more divisive.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Over-the-horizon radar systems are very expensive to build and essentially immobile

March 31st, 2022

China has set about building over-the-horizon radars to track American aircraft carriers as they make their long journey across the Pacific Ocean:

The frequency of radio waves used by most radars, in the form of microwaves, travel in straight lines. This generally limits the detection range of radar systems to objects on their horizon (generally referred to as “line of sight” since the aircraft must be at least theoretically visible to a person at the location and elevation of the radar transmitter) due to the curvature of the Earth. For example, a radar mounted on top of a 10 m (33 ft) mast has a range to the horizon of about 13 kilometres (8.1 mi), taking into account atmospheric refraction effects. If the target is above the surface, this range will be increased accordingly, so a target 10 m (33 ft) high can be detected by the same radar at 26 km (16 mi). Siting the antenna on a high mountain can increase the range somewhat; but, in general, it is impractical to build radar systems with line-of-sight ranges beyond a few hundred kilometres.

[...]

The most common type of OTH radar uses skywave or “skip” propagation, in which shortwave radio waves are refracted off an ionized layer in the atmosphere, the ionosphere. Given certain conditions in the atmosphere, radio signals transmitted at an angle into the sky will be refracted towards the ground by the ionosphere, allowing them to return to earth beyond the horizon. A small amount of this signal will be scattered off desired targets back towards the sky, refracted off the ionosphere again, and return to the receiving antenna by the same path. Only one range of frequencies regularly exhibits this behaviour: the high frequency (HF) or shortwave part of the spectrum from 3–30 MHz. The best frequency to use depends on the current conditions of the atmosphere and the sunspot cycle. For these reasons, systems using skywaves typically employ real-time monitoring of the reception of backscattered signals to continuously adjust the frequency of the transmitted signal.

[...]

OTH systems are thus very expensive to build, and essentially immobile.

[...]

A second type of OTH radar uses much lower frequencies, in the longwave bands. Radio waves at these frequencies can diffract around obstacles and follow the curving contour of the earth, traveling beyond the horizon. Echos reflected off the target return to the transmitter location by the same path. These ground waves have the longest range over the sea. Like the ionospheric high-frequency systems, the received signal from these ground wave systems is very low, and demands extremely sensitive electronics. Because these signals travel close to the surface, and lower frequencies produce lower resolutions, low-frequency systems are generally used for tracking ships, rather than aircraft.

Posted in Technology, War | 1 Comment »

There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space

March 31st, 2022

In 2016, Facebook unceremoniously pushed Palmer Luckey out of the virtual reality startup he founded, Oculus. Then Luckey founded Anduril:

Luckey is now winning billion-dollar Pentagon contracts. One of them is for a counter-drone system based on its “battlefield operating system,” called Lattice. Anduril’s demo video shows one of the company’s sentry surveillance towers detecting a hostile drone and dispatching a small high-speed drone of its own to literally knock the intruder out of the sky. Recently, Anduril acquired a company that makes robot submarines.

[…]

Anduril has a valuation of nearly $5 billion, making Luckey a rare founder of two unicorns. He is unusual for a military contractor. Perpetually garbed in a Hawaiian shirt, and occasionally still in cosplay threads, his vibe is much more cheerful hacker. His conservative politics also make him an awkward figure in Silicon Valley. (One of his sisters is married to the right-wing provocateur and congress member Matt Gaetz.)

[…]

There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space: Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril. All three of those companies were founded by people who had just sold their previous company for billions of dollars.

Posted in Business, Policy, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The first key to Starstreak’s capability is its guidance system

March 30th, 2022

The UK is sending Starstreak High-Velocity Missiles (HVMs) to Ukraine:

The first key to Starstreak’s capability is its guidance system. Most MANPADS fire heat-seeking missiles — first, the missile’s infrared seeker head needs to become locked onto the target’s heat signature, before it’s launched and then autonomously homes in on it, in a ‘fire and forget’ mode. Depending on the age of the missile, certain heat-seeking MANPADS will also require some time for the seeker to cool down before it can lock on.

In contrast, the Starstreak uses laser-beam-riding guidance, in which the operator fires the missile as soon as a target is detected in the optically stabilized sight. Line-of-sight is then maintained throughout the engagement process. The aiming unit projects two laser beams onto the target, with sensors on the missile calculating the relative positions until impact. The intensity of these laser beams is low enough that, the manufacturer claims, the targeted aircraft won’t be able to detect them.

Overall, this guidance method is more accurate than traditional laser guidance, in which the target is ‘painted’ with a single beam. The twin-laser approach is more resistant to maneuvering targets that could otherwise break the laser lock. At the same time, unlike infrared-guided MANPADS, the Starstreak cannot be spoofed by flares or other heat sources. Unlike most air defense missiles, it’s effectively immune to countermeasures, including the latest L-370 Vitebsk (exported as the President-S) directional infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) found on many Russian Aerospace Forces helicopters.

Another advantage is that smaller targets can be engaged (as long as the operator can see them through the sight), including those with infrared signatures that might be insufficient for a heat-seeking missile to track.

In another break from MANPADS tradition, it’s not a single missile with a traditional warhead that’s guided onto or very near the target before detonating. Instead, three tungsten darts are released from the missile body, which contains the rocket motor, during the end-game terminal portion of the attack on the target.

The velocity of these darts, also known as ‘hittiles,’ is such that the Starstreak can destroy not only targets in the air [but] also heavily armored targets on the ground if the need arises. The darts have small control surfaces at the front to ensure they are steered into the target, via the projected laser matrix. They fly in ‘formation’ with a separation of around 5 feet.

The speed with which the missile itself then closes in on the target — up to 2,000 mph — gives it little chance of escape within a very brief engagement window, or ‘unmasking time.’

[...]

Once they have penetrated the target, the darts also explode, each one carrying a fragmentation warhead.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales

March 30th, 2022

The rise of the Internet broadened our intellectual horizons, Scott Alexander argues:

We got access to a whole new world of people with totally different standards, norms, and ideologies opposed to our own. When the Internet was small and confined to an optimistic group of technophile intellectuals, this spawned Early Internet Argument Culture, where we tried to iron out our differences through Reason. We hoped that the new world the Web revealed to us could be managed in the same friendly way we managed differences with our crazy uncle or the next-door neighbor.

As friendly debate started feeling more and more inadequate, and as newer and less nerdy people started taking over the Internet, this dream receded. In its place, we were left with an intolerable truth: a lot of people seem really horrible, and refuse to stop being horrible even when we ask them nicely. They seem to believe awful things. They seem to act in awful ways. When we tell them the obviously correct reasons they should be more like us, they refuse to listen to them, and instead spout insane moon gibberish about how they are right and we are wrong.

I can only describe this experience from my own side of the aisle, which was the progressive side. We watched the US population elect George W Bush and act like this was a remotely reasonable thing to do. We saw people destroying the environment, leaving the poor to starve, and denying gay people their right to live as normal members of society. We saw people endorsing weird ideas and conspiracy theories, from homeopathy and creationism to the Clintons murdering their enemies. We were always vaguely aware from reading the newspapers that some of these people existed. But now we were seeing and conversing with them every day.

[…]

And so we asked ourselves: what the hell is wrong with these people?

And New Atheism had an answer: religion.

That was it. It was beautiful, it was simple, it was perfect. We were the “reality-based community”. They were ignoring Reason and basing all of their opinions on three thousand year old fairy-tales because people told them they would burn in Hell forever if they didn’t. There was nothing confusing or unsettling at all about the situation, and we did not need to question any of our own beliefs. It was just that some people had been brainwashed by their church/mosque/synagogue to believe transparently wrong things, so they did. Sin began with the apple tree in Eden; conservatism began with the Bible in Jerusalem. Language separates us from the apes; not being blinded by religion separates us from the Republicans.

This was a socially momentous proposal. The Democratic Party is centuries old, but the Blue Tribe — the Democratic Party as a social phenomenon with strong demographic and ideological implications — can be said to have started in 2004.

Posted in Policy | 5 Comments »

It does not amount to “formalized” training

March 29th, 2022

President Joe Biden said on Monday that US troops stationed in Poland have been “helping train the Ukrainian troops” in that country — but this has been clarified:

The sources told CNN that while US troops are indeed providing some instruction to the Ukrainians at a military base in Poland, it does not amount to “formalized” training.

Rather, the coaching is more tactical and in-the-moment, the sources explained. That includes showing the Ukrainian soldiers picking up the weapons shipments in Poland how to use some of that equipment, like the Javelin anti-tank missiles that the West has been sending in large numbers. Poland has become the central transit point of arms transfers into Ukraine.

The US has allocated $1 billion in security assistance to Ukraine in the last month alone, and intends to provide Ukraine’s armed forces with more than 9,000 shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons, including Javelins; nearly 7,000 small arms including machine guns and grenade launchers; 20 million rounds of ammunition; and 100 armed drones.

“These are direct transfers of equipment from our Department of Defense to the Ukrainian military to help them as they fight against this invasion,” Biden said earlier this month. “We’re going to continue to do more in the days and weeks ahead.”

NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Tod D. Wolters told US lawmakers on Tuesday that the US had been providing “advice and assistance with respect to materiel” going into Ukraine, but that the US forces are not “in the process of currently training military forces from Ukraine in Poland.”

“There are liaisons that are there that are being given advice, and that is different than what I think you are referring to with respect to training,” Wolters told Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas when asked about the training.

Wolters said separately during the hearing that “as you well know we’ve made dramatic improvements in our information sharing and intelligence sharing, and as [the Ukrainians] continue to pursue their campaign, our advice and our assistance with respect to material will be very, very important,” Wolters said.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Some of the technologies behind China’s Assassin’s Mace weapons were indigenously developed

March 29th, 2022

Kill Chain by Christian BroseAfter the Gulf War, Christian Brose explains (in The Kill Chain), the Russians weren’t the only ones to notice the US military’s success:

Upon visiting Baghdad, Chinese military officials learned that Saddam Hussein had the same aging Soviet air defenses and other weapons that China did, and in some cases, Iraq’s were better.

[…]

What unnerved the Chinese Communist Party was not just the stealth and precision of US forces but also their ability to achieve victory without completely annihilating the Iraqi military.

[…]

In 1996, as tensions between China and Taiwan flared, the United States sailed an aircraft carrier battle group into the Taiwan Strait, one hundred miles from China’s mainland, and the Chinese military struggled to locate its exact position. Three years later, China watched again as the same US way of war that had triumphed in Iraq destroyed Serbia’s ability to fight and forced Milosevic to capitulate. This time, however, it was personal, because a US airstrike had destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

[…]

Under what it called its 995 Plan (named for the Belgrade embassy attack in May 1999), China accelerated work to build a different kind of military. It continued to spend money on traditional military systems, such as ships and tanks, but its priority was to develop what it called “Assassin’s Mace” weapons. The name refers to special weapons that were used in Chinese history to defeat more powerful adversaries.

[…]

In the event of a war in Asia, the US military would build up its iron mountains in these forward bases, much as it had used similar bases to wage the wars in Iraq and the Balkans, and this would enable US forces to fight how, when, and where they wished. China knew that Washington assumed all of this, and it built larger and larger quantities of increasingly capable missiles, primarily medium-range and long-range ballistic missiles, to wipe out America’s critical warfighting infrastructure in Asia.

[…]

As a result, China developed early-warning and long-range radars to spot approaching US aircraft from as far away as possible. It also built dense and formidable networks of integrated air and missile defense systems that would aim to shoot down US planes from greater distances and high-powered jammers that would seek to destroy their ability to communicate.

[…]

The fact that aircraft carriers could move — so first had to be located — made them much tougher targets than land bases. But China knew that most US carriers were not based in Asia and would need to sail into the region from elsewhere in the event of conflict.

[…]

So, China set about building over-the-horizon radars, long-range reconnaissance satellites and aircraft, and other means of hunting America’s floating airfields as they made their long journey across the Pacific Ocean.

[…]

The DF-21, the world’s first ever anti-ship ballistic missile, was designed to do just that — fly out more than one thousand miles, slam into a carrier, and cripple its ability to fight, if not sink it altogether.

[…]

As Washington lurched from one costly military acquisition debacle to another, Beijing fielded an even more capable carrier killer missile, the DF-26, which may be able to fly twice as far as the DF-21, possibly farther, carry a larger warhead, and strike more precisely. It also fielded quiet diesel submarines and anti-ship cruise missiles that were harder to detect and defeat because they could fly low and maneuver unpredictably.

[…]

An additional set of Assassin’s Mace weapons focused on doing to the US military what it had done to Iraq in 1991: destroying the underlying systems that sustained the ability to wage war. In America’s case, this was its communications and intelligence satellites, especially its Global Positioning System (GPS), which enabled US weapons to find their targets. It was the information networks that moved targeting data from sensors to shooters. And it was the logistics enterprise that allowed US forces to flow into theaters of operations and sustained forces in combat with food, fuel, and supplies.

[…]

This was all part of a broader warfighting doctrine that Chinese military officials ultimately called “systems destruction warfare.”

[…]

Some of the technologies behind China’s Assassin’s Mace weapons were indigenously developed, but many fell into Chinese hands as the result of a long-term and large-scale campaign of state-sponsored theft.

[…]

It was often noted, for example, that China’s CH-4B unmanned aircraft was a spitting image of the US Predator drone, and that its J-20 fifth-generation fighter jet looked strikingly similar to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Indeed, some joked in Washington that all of the multi-billion-dollar acquisition disasters that plagued the US military were actually part of an ingenious plot to sabotage China when it tried to copy them.

[…]

By 2012, General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of US Cyber Command, estimated that the United States was losing a quarter of $1 trillion every year to cyber-enabled industrial espionage, much of it by China. He called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

Why assassin’s mace?

A club-type weapon sounds like a rather unsuitable weapon for an assassin. The actual Chinese term is Sha Shou Jian (literally “killing hand club”), which refers to a pair of short wooden or metal rods used as a martial arts weapon. “Jian” normally denotes a long Chinese swordbut Sha Shou Jian are blunt and heavy. They could be concealed in the long sleeves of court robes and used to make surprise attacks — hence the association with assassins.

And although some Western commentators like the *New Atlantis *claim that the meaning of the assassin’s mace “remains elusive, ” it’s no mystery to Mandarin speakers. Sha Shou Jian a popular expression used by sports commentators, businessmen and even in romantic advice columns. Alastair Johnston of Harvard University criticizes the way Washington pundits want to make the Assassin’s Mace “mysterious and exotic”: it’s simply the decisive, winning quality. In sports, the Assassin’s Mace may be the key goal-scorer; in business, it’s any quality that puts you ahead of the competition; in love, it might be the subtle smile that wins over the object of your affections. Johnston suggests that a fairly idiomatic translation would be “silver bullet” and that the concept behind it is less fiendishly oriental than is often supposed.

[…]

The Pentagon defines the Maces as technologies that might afford an inferior military an advantage in a conflict with a superior power. In this view, an Assassin’s Mace is anything which provides a cheap means of countering an expensive weapon. Other examples might include Chinese anti-satellite weapons, which might instantly knock out U.S. space assets, or a conventional ballistic missile, designed to take out a supercarrier and all its aircraft in one hit. It’s an interesting contrast to the perspective of the American arms industry, which can end up spending vast amounts countering low-tech, low-cost threats like mines and IEDs.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

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