At Mach 5 and beyond, things heat up pretty fast

February 19th, 2023

The U.S. might be slipping behind Russia, or even China, in the race to develop hypersonic missiles, but that might be because the U.S. military has its sights set on a bigger prize, a hypersonic bomber:

Meet the Air Force’s secret hypersonic bomber: the Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and Strike program, a.k.a. Project Mayhem.

The mighty bomber would have a few advantages over its missile-based adversaries, but the big one would be usability. Where missiles like the Kinzhal, Zircon, and China’s Dongfeng-17 are expensive (around $100 million) one-shots, a hypersonic plane traveling in excess of Mach 5 — Project Mayhem would reportedly travel Mach 10 — could be refueled and used again, and again, and again.

The idea of a hypersonic plane dates back to the Space Race, culminating in the North American X-15A-2 record-breaking Mach 6.7 flight in 1967. Further aerospace advancements created mechanical wonders like the supersonic SR-71. Project Mayhem would likely use a multi-cycle propulsion system, employing a jet engine to reach Mach 3 before transitioning to an air-breathing scramjet for hypersonic speeds. But designing a reusable plane at such speeds comes with serious limitations.

At Mach 5 and beyond, things heat up pretty fast thanks to friction and air resistance, so any plane hoping to go that fast and survive the experience would need to be cloaked in advanced materials that haven’t even been invented yet. None of this even touches on the fact that maneuverability at such speeds will also be a gargantuan engineering undertaking, and that combining a traditional jet engine with a scramjet has never been successfully accomplished.

Because of this unique operating environment and the necessity of precision-sensitive design, Project Mayhem is turning to model-based engineering (MBE) to digitally construct every system on the hypothetical plane.

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

Showing off erudition is more of a bug than a feature

February 18th, 2023

The Internet deluges us with information, Arnold Kling notes:

Martin Gurri terms it a tsunami.

Tyler Cowen, who has speed-reading superpowers, says that he finds Twitter to be information dense, by which he means that for him, it contains more information per line he reads than do other media. I disagree with him about Twitter, but I like the term information dense.

I wish that Tyler Cowen would switch his essays to Substack. Same with Martin Gurri.

For several months now, I have found Substack to be more information dense than books. For 2022, I could not even come up with a list of best nonfiction books of the year. But I subscribed to a few dozen Substacks.

I am reading fewer books that I did before Substack came along. The most recent book I read was Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, by Randolph Nesse. Relative to what I wanted, the book did not disappoint. But boy, it felt like it took a long time to get there. The book is not information dense. I had the annoying sense that in the time it took me to read the book I could have profitably explored many substacks.

[…]

Actually, showing off erudition is more of a bug than a feature. Professors who enjoy citing a wide range of references in their lectures and writing are kidding themselves if they think the rest of us have the patience for it. Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus had a major, lasting influence on my view of banking and finance. But re-reading it now, it’s really painful. I want to say, “Stop showing off and get to the point.”

People used to talk about the enjoyment they get from “curling up with a good book.” There might be people for whom that is still be true for novels. It is not what we are looking for in non-fiction works.

Even good short pieces can benefit from being edited down…

Posted in Arnold Kling | 4 Comments »

Soon, governments across Africa and elsewhere were knocking on their doors

February 17th, 2023

After completing his education at Eton College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and serving in the Scots Guards and the SAS, Simon Mann decided to try his luck in Africa:

In 1993, Mann went to Angola to seek fortune in the oil industry with his friend Tony Buckingham. Within months of their arrival, the oil-producing city of Soyo was captured by anti-government rebels. It seemed like their oil venture was doomed — until, as Mann tells the story, he proposed a solution: reconquer Soyo. Mann and Buckingham called upon South African contacts, most of whom had backgrounds in the South African Defence Force and the shadowy Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB), an apartheid-era counterinsurgency unit. One of these contacts, Eeben Barlow, was a former South African military officer who had seized the opportunity of apartheid’s collapse to recruit compatriots into a private military company (PMC) called Executive Outcomes (EO).

Together, they secured Angolan government contracts for EO to reconquer Soyo, and eventually help the government win the civil war. Their success in achieving an Angolan victory put Mann and his friends on the map. Soon, governments across Africa and elsewhere were knocking on their doors.

EO soldiers have since taken part in conflicts across the continent, and Mann has gone on to many more adventures. In 1997, his own PMC, Sandline International, was involved in the controversial Sandline affair in Papua New Guinea. In 2004, Mann was arrested for organizing a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, and spent the next five and a half years in some of Africa’s most notorious prisons. He was released in 2009 after a pardon. His memoir, Cry Havoc, was published in 2011.

The meaning of “mercenary” gets torturous, he notes:

For example, if I joined the British army today, am I joining it because I wish to fight for democracy? No, I’m not. Nobody in the British Army that I ever met was doing it for queen and country. They’re doing it because they see it as an exciting lifestyle and the money is okay. Sometimes, it’s the best job they can get. But the motivation is, at least in part, financial. It is unlikely, really, to be patriotic. That doesn’t mean to say that we’re not patriotic. But that is not the prime motivation.

He mentions Operation Storm and the war in Oman in the 1970s:

It was an insurgency coming through Yemen, a serious attempt to overthrow the ruler of Oman.

Nominally communist insurgents, right?

Nominally. The original ruler of Oman was not nominally, but actually a tyrant. Then he was replaced. It’s known as the British Foreign Office’s last coup d’etat. He was replaced by his son, who was much more reasonable. And then a long, hard-fought campaign was conducted against the insurgents. I was around at that time, and I very nearly did go to Oman.

Now, as a young officer in the British army, I could have been attending that conflict in three different ways. One, I could have been a British officer on secondment—an officer in Oman’s armed forces, but still a British officer. Route two: I leave the British army, and go to the Sultan’s armed forces as a contracting officer.

And route three, which actually happened: the SAS was secretly deployed in Oman to fight that engagement. In any one of those three routes, I could have found myself in exactly the same firefight. But is any one of those a mercenary? A lot of people will say that the second one, the contracting officer, is a mercenary. But really, he is contracted with the Sultan’s armed forces, the national military. And he’s just doing the same job as anybody else who is on secondment.

According to the 1977 Organization of African Unity Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Afric, he never quite qualified as a mercenary:

What I’ve done is, I was a general in the Angolan army for a short while when there was a war. We fought it and we won. That was for the recognized government of Angola, and I was enrolled in their armed forces. I’m quite proud of what we did. And I’m very proud of the guys that we did it with, both Angolan and South African.

In Sierra Leone, it was very similar. The RUF [Revolutionary United Front] were the masters of atrocities. If you’ve seen the movie Blood Diamond, you know that they used to go around chopping people’s arms off. They used to bet on whether a woman’s fetus was male or female and open her up to have a look. They were pretty easy to fight against, quite honestly. But again, we were part of the properly formed armed forces of Sierra Leone. So that technically is not a mercenary.

And then, I was involved with Papua New Guinea, remotely. But there was no war going on there. So it was more of a sort of civil contract.

The next thing is Equatorial Guinea, my attempt to overthrow the government—where again, no shot was actually fired. And the plan very much was that no shot would be fired. There was certainly no war going on. So again, if you go back to this convention, one of the things that is stipulated is that there has to be a war going on for you to be a mercenary. There has to be a war going on and you have to fight in it. If you’re a transport airplane pilot and you happen to carry a handgun for your personal safety, you’re not a mercenary according to that convention.

He describes his time with Executive Outcomes by analogy:

Well, look, if I’m walking along the street, and a guy’s house is on fire, I’m going to help him. He says, “Have you got some men, and some firefighting equipment?” and I say, “Yeah, I have got loads of them, but it’s going to cost you. We’re going to charge you because I’m going to get my men and equipment in here. And we’re firefighters, you’re gonna have to pay us.” But that doesn’t mean that I think that private little firefighting companies are the way to go. I think the municipality should produce a proper firefighting force and it should be them putting the fires out. And in this case, that should be the UN or somebody like it. But if the UN is there, as they were in Angola and in Sierra Leone, and they are absolutely and completely failing to put the fire out, then it’s better that we put it out rather than watch it go on burning.

He visited the famously chaotic Moscow of the 1990s:

I just came up from Angola with this shopping list. I didn’t really understand what was going on. But there were a lot of banking and high finance people in Moscow who were basically trying to buy things cheap. That is the process that led to the oligarchs, or people who basically managed to buy for rubles—play money—things that were real, hard dollar-earning assets. That is how the oligarchs, most of them, came into being. They basically stole extremely valuable assets, on the pretext that they were buying them with rubles.

Now, when I was there, I think the realization had dawned that other people were coming into Russia to do the same thing—foreigners, that is. There was a sense that they were being raped. And on the one hand, you had people who were all in favor of being raped, because they just wanted the money. But on the other hand, you had a real resistance building. Around 1993 or ’94, something like twenty Western bankers were murdered in Moscow. I mean, it was really not a good place to be. And it wasn’t safe, because the gloves were off. It was a sort of semi-anarchy, I think, whereby certain Russian agencies were on a mission to stop things. But as mavericks—I mean, I don’t think they’d been told to do this by anybody. They had decided whether this was going to happen, or this was not going to happen. And they were making sure of that, sometimes by recourse to violence. So this stuff was sort of going on.

We were there for several months, so we started to pick up the vibe. And it became really quite frightening. Then, when I met the general, he said, “Well, you know, you’re right to be frightened, because all sorts of shit is going on here. And foreign agencies are here. And they are operating in a way that is not appropriate in a foreign country. They’re taking the law into their own hands.” If you remember, at this time there were all these nuclear and chemical worries going on in the West, that weapons and capabilities could be going into the wrong hands. Everyone knew that Russia was for sale. And you know, it was a real mess. Very dangerous.

His Angolan operations ended up including diamond mining:

We had actually no intention of getting involved with diamond mining until we were asked to by the senior Angolans. And the reason they asked this was because the mining companies—especially De Beers—were applying force majeure to the mining concessions [not fulfilling obligations due to circumstances outside their control, i.e. the war]. So they were not mining.

And once we got to the end of the fighting, the Angolans were very anxious to try and get people back to work. They had to try and create jobs. And they were very anxious to get the mining industry restarted. So what they did was, they told us, “Look, we could set up a joint venture mining company with you. It will be very profitable because we’re the generals and we’ll make sure the company gets the best concessions. And we can then use you as a stick to beat up the other companies. Then we can say, ‘Hey, these guys are mining, so why can’t you?’”

[…]

Well, De Beers doesn’t want to do mining. They don’t want to produce diamonds. They want the price to go up. And that was why they wanted out. I mean, Angola is a very important country when it comes to diamonds. Ideally, no production at all from Angola would have suited them just fine, even though they were buying diamonds from UNITA. So it was better to continue the war. There were very powerful forces backing UNITA.

Executive Outcomes was racially mixed:

Well, there’s a very simple answer to that, which is that the black soldiers in Executive Outcomes were all ex-SADF. There was an organization called 32 Battalion. Very famous. They’re also known as Buffalo Battalion because their camp was called Buffalo Camp. And these were people who had been recruited by the South Africans to fight the Angolans, mostly. And they were very often of the Ovambo tribe. And so for those people, it was a very natural state of affairs that the officers they had would be the officers, and they were the men. That was normal for them. 32 Battalion was highly regarded during the South African frontier wars era.

[…]

We didn’t need to take other people. We didn’t take British people! I mean, I got flack from some of my old comrades-in-arms, who said, “Hey Simon, what the hell’s going on here? You guys have this amazing thing, and you’ve made all this money. You didn’t ask us?” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t need you.” Because the South Africans were much better and much cheaper. They know Africa, they know the climate, and they know the health issues. And they were pretty desperate, because it was a desperate time in South Africa.

And, you know, the thing with any kind of force is that, obviously, morale is an issue. And cultural cohesion is required. Now, if everyone comes from the same military background, the same army, then they all understand one another perfectly. And in fact, in Executive Outcomes, the recruits had to actually—when they signed up to say that they were joining Executive Outcomes—they had to sign up and agree that they would abide by the rules, traditions, and customs of the SADF. And if a corporal told them to get their hair cut, they had to go and get their hair cut. They couldn’t say “I’m a civilian now, you can’t tell me what to do.” No, no, you don’t understand, we will tell you what to do. This is the old way.

Posted in Business, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

The idea takes advantage of the higher lift and lower drag you get with longer, slimmer, high aspect ratio wings

February 16th, 2023

NASA has awarded Boeing US$425 million towards building and testing a full-sized prototype of its transonic truss-braced wing airliner concept, using long, thin, strut-braced wings to add lift, reduce drag, and burn an impressive 30% less fuel.:

The idea takes advantage of the higher lift and lower drag you get with longer, slimmer, high aspect ratio wings — the sort you might find on an unpowered glider. A concept Boeing was testing in 2016, for example, had wings some 50% wider than comparable standard aircraft.

Structurally, that kind of thing simply doesn’t work without reinforcement. So Boeing’s design hangs the wings from the top of the fuselage, and braces them with long trusses coming up from the belly of the plane. These too are carefully shaped airfoils, adding extra lift as well as strength and stability.

As a subsonic concept cruising at around Mach 0.70 to 0.75 (519 to 556 mph, 835 to 895 km/h), Boeing estimated these braced-wing airliners could burn 50% less fuel than a regular plane. In 2019, the concept was redesigned to cruise at the edge of transonic speed, around Mach 0.8 (593 mph, 955 km/h), and whether because of the added speed or simply from a better understanding of the aerodynamics, Boeing has walked the efficiency claims back.

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And then there’s the fact that the huge, thick, lower aspect ratio wings on standard airliners create a perfect hollow space for their fuel tanks. Keeping the fuel out in the wings places a lot of weight out wide, closer to the center of lift, reducing engineering stresses where the wings meet the body. It contributes to safety somewhat in a crash, keeping burning fuel further from the passengers. And from a pure brass-tacks perspective, it frees up room in the cabin for extra money-making seats. The truss-braced design uses such slim wings that fuel tanks will likely have to go back into the fuselage.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

Installing batteries is similar to high frequency trading (HFT)

February 15th, 2023

Installing batteries on the grid is similar to high frequency trading, Casey Handmer argues:

Mismatch between supply and demand in the grid is signaled via tiny shifts in frequency. Coupled to this, local energy spot price has historically been manipulated by gas peaker plants to maximize revenue generation. For example, in Australia prior to the installation of the Horndale (Tesla) battery, the spot price routinely climbed to the cap of $14000/MWh as gas generators delayed ramping up to maximize revenue.

Installing batteries is similar to high frequency trading (HFT) in that it exploits market inefficiencies to both improve the functioning of the market, provide liquidity, and generate revenue.

It is different to HFT in several important ways, however.

There is an advantage to geographic collocation for battery services adjacent to areas of variable supply and demand, due to the fixed and variable costs of long distance power transmission. It’s not quite as extreme as installing the HFT server directly adjacent to the stock exchange, though!

The fixed frequency of the power grid (60 Hz in the US) does not demand incredibly sophisticated high speed electronics, like that used in financial HFT. In other words, the fixed frequency of the grid means that the first generation of batteries will not be rendered obsolete by a subsequent arms race as seen in financial HFT.

Combined, these two key differences to financial HFT mean that there is a strong first mover advantage in the battery grid stabilization space. I contend that this advantage outweighs the risk of future battery systems delivered at lower cost. In fact, the EROI on battery system is so short, and their revenue so high, that the only practical constraint to their deployment today is, and has been for several years now, manufacturing capacity no matter how fast it ramps.

Posted in Business, Technology | 6 Comments »

We know that fungi can infect humans

February 14th, 2023

I haven’t watched The Last of Us (yet), but it seems to be based on a scenario I’ve discussed before of how a zombie outbreak could (semi-plausibly) happen:

We know that fungi can infect humans. We also know that fungal networks exist in most of the world’s forests. These mycorrhizal networks have a symbiotic relationship with trees and other plants in the forest, exchanging nutrients for mutual benefit. These networks can be quite large, and there are studies that demonstrate the potential for chemical signals to be transmitted from one plant to another via the mycorrhizal network. That, in turn, means that fungal filaments could perform both vascular and neural functions within a corpse.

This leads us to the following scenario: microscopic spores are inhaled, ingested, or transmitted via zombie bite. The spores are eventually dispersed throughout the body via the bloodstream. Then they lie dormant. When the host dies, chemical signals (or, more accurately, the absence of chemical signals) within the body that occur upon death trigger the spores to activate, and begin growing. The ensuing fungal network carries nutrients to muscles in the absence of respiration or normal metabolism.

Part of the fungal network grows within the brain, where it interfaces with the medulla and cerebellum, as well as parts of the brain involving vision, hearing and possibly scent. Chemicals released by the fungi activate basic responses within these brain areas. The fungi/brain interface is able to convert the electrochemical signals of neurons into chemical signals that can be transmitted along the fungal network that extends through much of the body. This signal method is slow and imperfect, which results in the uncoordinated movements of zombies. And this reliance on the host’s brain accounts for the “headshot” phenomenon, in which grievous wounds to the brain or spine seem to render zombies fully inert.

Posted in Media, Science | 3 Comments »

Directed Energy (DE) already plays important military roles in counter-air defense, target identification, tracking, counter intelligence search & reconnaissance (ISR), and electronic warfare (EW)

February 14th, 2023

Directed Energy Futures 2060 describes the advances we can expect to see over the next few decades:

Directed Energy (DE) is defined for military applications as the ability to project electromagnetic energy either broadly to provide information probing of the battlespace, or in a focused manner sufficient to produce a defensive or offensive effect at militarily relevant distances within the battlespace. The military significance of Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) has long been recognized for ability to engage at the speed of light, propagating vast distances with precision. Other benefits include potentially deep magazines, meaning the capability to fire many shots without need to physically rearm the weapon, and low cost per shot. DE can also actively probe targets and threats, i.e. laser pointers (commonly called designators), laser and radiofrequency (RF) tracking, also called radar. The final benefit worth mentioning, is the ability to cause scalable and flexible effects, to include destructive, damaging, disruptive, non-lethal, deceptive, and unattributable effects.

Today in the early 2020s, world-wide DE already plays important military roles in counter-air defense, target identification, tracking, counter intelligence search & reconnaissance (ISR), and electronic warfare (EW). U.S. military thinking on electromagnetic spectrum operations defines DE in the context of electronic attack systems designed to disrupt or degrade an adversary’s signals, deliver communications supporting cyperspace operations, or disable and destroy targets susceptible to high-energy electromagnetic radiation (U.S. Joint Chiefs’ of Staff 2020). Today there are historical definitions that delineate DE and EW weapons which are otherwise similar in function and form. Because the historical definitions are unlikely to be important 40 years in the future, in this report we considered DE and EW weapons to be synonymous, especially with respect to applications of information superiority that reply upon electromagnetic spectrum superiority to accomplish military missions.

[…]

Although today high-energy laser equipment is proliferated worldwide, the ability to create laser effects at vast ranges, for military purposes, is still limited. Today, for reasons that we will explain further, it
is thought that two of the most militarily relevant use cases for high-energy laser weapons are i.) high- altitude (greater than 30,000 ft.) operations where the stand-off range between shooter and target is up to hundreds of kilometers, or ii.) ground- or sea-based defensive purposes.

[…]

To understand the future technical trends in lasers system development, one must consider the drivers behind laser technology in the last 40 years. Technical trends over the next 40 years will be driven by both military and commercial interests, in addition to the lessons learned from previous laser weapon programs. Some of the lessons learned from the U.S. Airborne Laser Program, which began about 40 years ago and used gas and chemical laser architectures, were i.) the logistical footprint of a laser can create operational challenges; ii.) maximum powers in the range of Megawatts can be attained; and iii.) control of the beam is vitally important and nontrivial to achieve with highly accurate pointing. The challenges of beam control include propagation of light through potentially turbulent atmospheres, compensation of mechanical jitter from the host platform (in this case, the airplane), and C4ISR integration. Today the U.S. Air Force continues development of a high energy laser on a tactical airborne platform (Insinna 2020).

The U.S. DE community has made significant progress toward addressing the lessons learned from
early programs. Presently, the U.S. and Allied DE community uses a solid state and fiber optic laser architecture both because they learned the lessons about the logistical footprint of laser systems, and due to the industrial development and commercialization of fiber-optics and other solid-state laser technology. In fact, commercial development has revolutionized laser technology over the past 40 years. Solid state and fiber-optical approaches eliminate the need for large volumes of toxic chemicals in DE systems. Furthermore, fiber lasers can be combined to produce hundreds of kilowatts of power, with good beam quality (Anderson 2015), and have proven relevant in tactically suitable payload sizes, weights, and powers (SWAP).

[…]

Conservatively, following trends of the past 40 years of development up until now, in the future, solid- state and fiber laser technology can be projected to achieve extremely high energy levels in the range of Megawatts over a second, high enough to reduce timelines for laser engagement to less than 1s at tactical ranges by 2060. Optimistically, 100’s of Megawatt solid state laser systems could be possible. This technical trend is bolstered by current research in laser power scaling (Sherman 2019), to reduce dwell times and/or increase range of effects. For laser weapon technologies, these advancements represent an inflection point as they reduce the timescales of engagements significantly, enabling vital missions.

Once a sufficient amount of laser energy is created, the next challenge for laser weapons lies in the ability to propagate laser energy kilometers or farther distances, through the atmosphere, to targets at range. Trends in technology development over the next 40 years will be driven by solving such challenges. The challenge includes both tracking of moving targets at high levels of accuracy from moving platforms, and
being able to control the beam both accurately and precisely. Today, lasers weapons are powerful enough for missions against soft targets such as UASs (88th Air Base Wing Public Affairs 2020, Chuter 2019) and demonstrations of counter-missile applications (88th Base Wing Public Affairs 2019). State-of-the-art beam pointing from stabilized gimbal mounts permit hundreds of nanoradian precision pointing from stationary and slowly moving platforms, while tracking fast moving objects (Kwee 2007). Microradian accuracy is currently possible on large airborne platforms. In the future, by 2060, higher pointing accuracy, approaching 100s of nanoradians, could optimistically be possible on fast moving platforms.

Invention of solutions to technical challenges will drive future trends. For example, propagating laser energy through the atmosphere, becomes challenging in poor weather or turbulence. Turbulence causes both beam wander and brightness fluctuations in
high energy lasers. Weather deleteriously effects all weapons, but poses particular problems for all optical and infrared sensors, many of which provide cues and tracking for command and control of weapon systems. Inventions over the next 40 years may prove the ability to overcome weather effects. As an example, current research focuses on ultra-short pulse lasers that promise to burn holes through fog (Rudenko 2020).
A technology that today compensates for the deleterious effects of atmospheric turbulence is adaptive optics, invented and developed nearly 40 years ago (Fugate 1991). Sophisticated adaptive optical systems can today compensate for moderate levels of turbulence and atmospheric distortions. Conceivable improvements in the engineering of optical systems, even in the most pessimistic case for technology advancement, will further improve efficiency in ability to put up to Megawatts of continuous wave laser energy on target at tactically relevant distances. Gigawatts or 100s of Megawatts of laser energy propagated at tactically relevant and longer distances, would be an optimistic technical outcome by 2060. In the atmosphere, power levels greater than a few Gigawatts would undoubtedly suffer from self-focusing effects (Nibbering, et al. 1997). U.S. DoD and Allied military utility studies have been conducted, and will continue to be conducted, to objectively determine, in conjunction with kinetic and cyber weaponry, to what degree of effectiveness DE capabilities can achieve destructive effects for specific missions and scenarios that include weather.

An easy way to avoid the issues of weather and atmospheric propagation is to deploy DEWs at high altitudes, where the earth’s atmosphere is thinner. For this reason and others, high altitude military applications of DEWs will remain important concepts into the future.
Future trends in DEW technology will follow mission needs. The “holy grail” from a military utility perspective is a DE weapon system effective enough, favorable from a SWAP perspective, and affordable enough to provide a nuclear/missile umbrella. Although a concept often associated with science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE defense systems effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and relatively soft targets today. Airborne and space-based DE platforms could achieve a greater area defense and multipoint defenses, for a broader coverage missile umbrella. However, these concepts require significant technical advancement by 2060 to achieve the full range of power contemplated.

Albeit significant technical advancements are required in power, and range of power specifically, in the most optimistic case it should be physically possible to design a mission relevant concept of operations that permits nanoradian beam-control accuracy while tracking missiles up to hypersonic speeds, with a fast enough command and control loop and Megawatts of laser power (for more reading on this concept see Sec 2.5 and Appendix A: Vignette 1 and Vignette 3). By 2060 a sufficiently large fleet or constellation of high-altitude DEW systems could provide a missile defense umbrella, as part of a layered defense system, if such concepts prove affordable and necessary.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

DARPA Selects Aurora Flight Sciences for Phase 2 of Active Flow Control X-Plane

February 13th, 2023

DARPA has selected Aurora Flight Sciences to move into the detailed design phase of the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program:

This follows successful completion of the project’s Phase 1 preliminary design, which resulted in an innovative testbed aircraft that used active flow control (AFC) to generate control forces in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2 will focus on detailed design and development of flight software and controls, culminating in a critical design review of an X-plane demonstrator that can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.

The contract includes a Phase 3 option in which DARPA intends to fly a 7,000-pound X-plane that addresses the two primary technical hurdles of incorporation of AFC into a full-scale aircraft and reliance on it for controlled flight. Unique features of the demonstrator aircraft will include modular wing configurations that enable future integration of advanced technologies for flight testing either by DARPA or potential transition partners.

“Over the past several decades, the active flow control community has made significant advancements that enable the integration of active flow control technologies into advanced aircraft. We are confident about completing the design and flight test of a demonstration aircraft with AFC as the primary design consideration,” said the CRANE Program Manager Richard Wlezien. “With a modular wing section and modular AFC effectors, the CRANE X-plane has the potential to live on as a national test asset long after the CRANE program has concluded.”

The AFC suite of technologies enables multiple opportunities for aircraft performance improvements, such as elimination of moving control surfaces, drag reduction and high angle of attack flight, thicker wings for structural efficiency and increased fuel capacity, and simplified high-lift systems.

There are few details available now about how CRANE will stay stable in the air, Elizabeth Howell at Space.com notes, but a 2021 presentation by Alexander “Xander” Walan, program manager of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, provides some hints:

Active flow control (AFC) uses a variety of methods such as jets of air or even electric discharges to shape or sculpt the flow of air over the aircraft, the presentation notes. DARPA seeks to use commercial parts where possible to provide affordable alternatives and to “fully explore the AFC trade space,” meaning to seek technologies that could provide viable alternatives.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Hermeus designed, built, and tested Chimera in 21 months for $18 million

February 12th, 2023

Hermeus, a startup developing hypersonic aircraft, demonstrated turbojet-to-ramjet transition within its Chimera engine:

Chimera is a turbine-based combined cycle engine (TBCC) — which basically means it’s a hybrid between a turbojet and a ramjet. The ability to switch between these two modes allows Hermeus’ first aircraft, Quarterhorse, to take off from a regular runway and then accelerate up to high-Mach speeds.

The cost and speed at which the Hermeus team achieved this milestone is notable. Hermeus designed, built, and tested Chimera in 21 months for $18 million.

“This achievement is a major technical milestone for Hermeus,” said CEO AJ Piplica. “But more than that, it’s a proof point that demonstrates how our small team can rapidly design, build, and test hardware with budgets significantly smaller than industry peers.”

The testing took place at the Notre Dame Turbomachinery Laboratory which provides heated air to simulate high-Mach temperatures and pressures.

[…]

At low speeds Chimera is in turbojet mode — just like any jet aircraft. But as the temperature and the speed of the incoming air increase, turbojets hit their performance limit. This happens at around Mach 2.

[…]

At around Mach 3, Chimera begins to bypass the incoming air around the turbojet and the ramjet takes over completely.

A ramjet is a simple propulsion system which “rams” the incoming high-pressure air to create compression. Fuel is mixed with this compressed air and ignited for thrust. Ramjets are optimal between Mach 3 and Mach 5.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 6 Comments »

There is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself

February 11th, 2023

The use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision:

Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that’s what consumers want.

Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.

We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it’s at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut,” and the top answer among American kids was “influencer.”

If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. But, more importantly, if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles.)

Ironically, it looks like watching TV makes you smarter.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

He said he was going to do it, and he did

February 10th, 2023

Back in September, when the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were blown up, I saw, in my corner of Twitter, many explanations that the US was behind it. Now, Seymour Hersh — the 85-year-old investigative journalist who made his name in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up — has written his own unaffiliated piece explaining how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline:

There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership — the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.

President Biden and his foreign policy team — National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy — had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.

[…]

As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia.

[…]

Throughout “all of this scheming,” the source said, “some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, ‘Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.’”

Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group: “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, “If Russia invades…there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Twenty days earlier, Undersecretary Nuland had delivered essentially the same message at a State Department briefing, with little press coverage. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she said in response to a question. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

[…]

Several of those involved in planning the pipeline mission were dismayed by what they viewed as indirect references to the attack.

“It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

Biden’s and Nuland’s indiscretion, if that is what it was, might have frustrated some of the planners. But it also created an opportunity. According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”

The plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and 2 was suddenly downgraded from a covert operation requiring that Congress be informed to one that was deemed as a highly classified intelligence operation with U.S. military support. Under the law, the source explained, “There was no longer a legal requirement to report the operation to Congress. All they had to do now is just do it — but it still had to be secret. The Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.”

The Agency working group members had no direct contact with the White House, and were eager to find out if the President meant what he’d said — that is, if the mission was now a go. The source recalled, “Bill Burns comes back and says, ‘Do it.’”

Posted in Policy, War | 11 Comments »

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the West

February 9th, 2023

I was not expecting this recent piece on TikTok to segue from Wang Huning to Nick Land:

Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land rose to prominence by ranting about cyborg apocalypses while out of his mind on weed and speed. In the late 1990s Land moved into a house once owned by the Satanist libertine Aleister Crowley (half a mile from where I grew up), and there he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls. At nearby Warwick University where he taught, his lectures were often bizarre (one infamous “lesson” consisted of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.)

Wang and Land were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang would go on to be the top ideological theorist of the Chinese Communist Party, Land would become the top theorist (with Curtis Yarvin) of the influential network of far-right bloggers, NRx.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself.

Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached the singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay, “Meltdown:”

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

Land’s drug-fueled prose is overwrought, so to simplify his point, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer,” a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (i.e. commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short term goals leads to long term ruin.

Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

—A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism (2017)

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as accelerationism, and it’s become popular among anti-liberal revolutionaries of all stripes, but particularly among the far-right NRx, who follow Land due to his embrace of neo-fascism (he came to believe that authoritarian regimes can accelerate nations toward prosperity, but all democracies accelerate toward ruin.)

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he moved to Shanghai and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder

February 8th, 2023

Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard CornwellWhen I started listening to the audiobook version of Sharpe’s Tiger, the first novel of the series that inspired the show starring Sean Bean (Boromir), I was surprised — and a bit embarrassed — to learn that “loot” was one of many words the British plundered from India. How did I not know that?

I recently read William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, which offers a nonfiction account of “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire,” and it opens with just this fact:

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot.

It certainly seems appropriate. Sharpe’s Tiger felt quite a bit like an old-school pulp swords-and-sorcery novel or an early Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and The Anarchy had some of that feel, too.

Anarchy by William DalrymplPowis Castle in Wales houses a treasure horde worthy of a dragon:

There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi.

The riches include hookahs of burnished gold inlaid with empurpled ebony; superbly inscribed Badakhshan spinels and jewelled daggers; gleaming rubies the colour of pigeon’s blood, and scatterings of lizard-green emeralds. There are tiger’s heads set with sapphires and yellow topaz; ornaments of jade and ivory; silken hangings embroidered with poppies and lotuses; statues of Hindu gods and coats of elephant armour.

Posted in Linguistics, Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Eliminating decadent TikTok content is a matter of survival

February 7th, 2023

Chinese President Xi’s governance strategy has emphasized “core socialist values” like civility, patriotism, and integrity to ward off nihilism and decadence:

The creator of TikTok and CEO of Bytedance, Zhang Yiming, originally intended for the content on TikTok and its Chinese version, Douyin, to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing.

In April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog, the National Radio and Television Administration, ordered the removal from Chinese app stores of Bytedance’s then-most popular app, Toutiao, and its AI news aggregator, Neihan Duanzi, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then took to social media to offer a groveling public apology, stating: “Our products took the wrong path, and content appeared that was incommensurate with socialist core values.”

Shortly after, Bytedance announced it would recruit thousands more people to moderate content, and, according to CNN, in the subsequent job ads it stated a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity.”

The CCP’s influence over Bytedance has only grown since then. Last year, the Party acquired a “golden share” in Bytedance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials, Wu Shugang, took one of the company’s three board seats.

The CCP’s intrusion into Bytedance’s operations is part of a broader strategy by Xi, called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for the instituting of core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, a statement appeared across Chinese state media calling for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse.”

In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” like online gaming, and “toxic idol worship.” Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some, such as the movie star Zhao Wei, having their entire presence erased from the Chinse web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China.

Posted in Policy, Technology | 3 Comments »

Intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness

February 6th, 2023

Gallery owner Collier Gwin will be “charged with misdemeanor battery for the alleged intentional and unlawful spraying of water on and around a woman experiencing homelessness on January 9, 2022.”

He said this confrontation was the result of multiple attempts to get the woman help, after he spent days cleaning up her mess and letting her sleep in his doorway. He added that she often knocks over trash cans, and her behavior has scared off his clients.

Gwin said he and other business owners in the area have called SFPD and social services more than two dozen times in the last two weeks.

“I said she needs psychiatric help,” Gwin said. “You can tell, she’s pulling her hair, she’s screaming, she’s talking in tongues, you can’t understand anything she says, she’s throwing food everywhere.”

Gwin said on Monday, he’d had enough.

“I’ve been down here 40 years. I’ve seen tons of homeless people, we’ve helped the ones that we could, and I have not had any issues with people,” he said. “But in this case, I was very upset, that the city could not help, and their hands are tied too.”

Posted in Crime | 5 Comments »

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