Wow…who would have every envisioned this happening?

Note to kids still trying to decide what to major in in college: Make a note that easy to make it through majors like Engilsh and History sure won’t help you land a job like the one discussed in the linked article…

Isn’t that interesting??????

The Information Age certainly has it’s advantages for the private business sector, but, as I blogged before, the Government seems to find ways to shall we say “leverage” advances in technology before there is law to regulate some things…call it a fallout of unintended consequences.

I admit, it’s an exceptionally fine balance between safety of the people and the ability to experience freedom, as intended, by our Founding Fathers…..

Anyhow, I just found Space Daily yesterday, and then when scanning the infosphere this morning, I found this article…..

Just stash it in your memeory banks for another time.

Operational Security (OPSEC). Important stuff for the Cold War, and even today. PatriotVoices has a great post on the topic, taking us back to another time (at least for us older ones who had to face the “Evil Empire” while wearing a uniform. I concur with that post and vouch for it’s accuracy. The bad guys had incredible intelligence gathering organizations, and even if today’s enemy doesn’t have those resources, they have the web. It’s a great aggregator of info….

While we make our posts, the world reads them. It’s quite satisfying to get a good comment. Good doesn’t mean as in how wonderful a post was (yep, those are nice), but one that adds to the issue, or corrects an error, or critically debates the info, (debate here meaning what the ancient Greeks would recognize as debate, not just a bunch of personal opinions presented with truth). As the posts propagate out via trackbacks and links sent around by others to friends and associates, more information on the topic can be aggregated. In a dedicated intelligence collecting environment, this becomes powerful. By accident it the same thing can happen. This morning I saw this very example. The topic is the physics and chemistry of state changes of water, but it you read the post and comments, you’ll follow my point.

I found the post via the Open Post for 7/8/2005 on Mudville Gazette. Ma Deuce Gunner posted a science question Friday 7/8/2005 @ 6:31PM (I assume that’s sandbox time). At 8:25 PM, Owen had answered the question, with a correction to the actual naming by John of the phenomena by 4:43 AM 7/9. That is some serious application of knowledge in my view.

Think for a moment how a moment of typed pondering of any one of the Milbloggers, regardless of when we served, might have a similar effect? Consider a situation where the comments were not fed back to the author, but to others who could use the description of a tactical concept to their advantage. It’s like the breaking of atomic bonds…it can light up a city, or decimated it. Same principle, different logic behind the application. We know the military is a plodding beaurarcy, and some things don’t change. We also know the basics of warfare haven’t changed from it’s very beginnings, but then many of us have been present when some new tactical or strategic concept came to be. Some us may have been actively involved in the birthing of something that made the organization more militarily effective. Some times, it’s the assemblage of several old, well known concepts that make a new tactical break through. Just before WWI, some german scientists came up with a process to create fertilizer. It was expensive and the process shelved. When WWI came along, and the sea lines of communications were restricted and bird guano, rich in nitrates and used in the production of explosives, as well as being used on the farms was cut off, the process was pulled of the shelf, so explosives could be made…The 1 year supply of natural nitrates in 1914 should have limited Germany’s ability to fight any longer than that. Application of an old idea killed many of the youth of Europe and the US for four years, thanks to modern living thru chemistry.

A few years ago, a couple of math guys speculated the we are all connected to each other by at most, six people, hence the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation.” The business world knows of this and I have a friend who has leveraged off this concept, and while he is a civilian, with military like efficiency. Using a network, intentionally, or unintentionally, yields a large amount of information quickly. Throw in the ability to search the web, once you have been “tipped off” for other knowledge on the subject.

While I was in the Navy, there seemed to be a constant low level battle waged about what had to go into the “burn bag.” Some said all naval messages, regardless of classification, others said only classified ones. Given the massive stack of paper I routinely dealt with in my operations department tours, and having been the communications officer, I thought it far too easy for a classified message (of which many were Confidential, could accidentally end up in a trash can, mixed with the unclassified ones, so I preferred the burn bag for messages. Those who had to store the many red and white striped bags, and those who had to actually take them to the shore based incinerators, disliked that idea. Both sides of the battle had legitimate reasons for their choices.

There are things I have great sea stories about, and some of the things have come out in open source, but I still refrain.

Summary;

It’s a double edged sword out here with information on the web. Be mindful of what you post

Or: What do the terrorists, the Japanese in WWII, cell phones, CAP actions in Vietnam and recent Army recruiting woes have in common…

Point of Pondering #1.

As I sat in traffic today, a few things came to mind that may be the reason we are seeing some shifts in the attack patterns of al-Qaeda this past few months.

I guess the thinking on the topic began with this post over on Chapomatic’s blog. It was a one-liner, which ends with:

“That much effort indicates to me that these guys don’t currently have usable WMD.”

That struck me as not necessarily correct under the circumstances, so I left this comment:

“or…alternatively, they still think they may not be ready to be completely exterminated, after being hunted down like rabid dogs. They may see this “level of violence” can still get them a pass from those who keep saying it’s all illegal. I’d bet even the nay sayers, well, maybe half of them, would come around to GWB’s view and measures as acceptable if a dirty bomb, or bio/chem agents are released…which would put the polls at about 75% saying “kill the bums!” Kind of hard to say there isn’t a “mandate” when your polls are that high…the gloves would come off at that point, and I suspect they know they cannot stand a full court press.

A real, no kidding WMD, complete with destruction of “Biblical proportions,” would most likely shift the World’s opinions completely against them.

(I’m no intel guy, but) The exact opposite of this briefing may not be discounted…. “

These terrible, yet small scale attacks, we have been seeing are noteworthy in that they hits the media like the tsunami last Dec 26th, and get the attention up, yet the outward sentiment of the world still stays latched on the “Bush Lied, People Died” and “Where are the WMDEEEEEEEEESSSSSS???????” themes.

As I noted above, I think the use of a WMD, of any degree, would suddenly cause a reaction they know they can’t afford.

Point of pondering #2:

Until the comment today about how the London bombs appeared to have all been triggered by cell phones, I hadn’t really stopped to think about the fact that this is a common tactic of the terrorists in Iraq right now. The news reports of the military finding a bomb or IED making lab, usually in a house somewhere, contains cell phones in the listing of materials found. One picture I saw a few months back was a soldier’s hand holding a cell phone with the annotation “1 Missed Call” on the phone’s LCD. The phone had wires hanging out of it that weren’t for better reception. They use this triggering tactic regularly.

Why the interest in the cell phones? Well, simple. If you see the masses, or the attendees at the videoed beheadings, there is usually plenty of indication they are willing to die for Allah. We have repeatedly heard, and can find it supported in the Koran, that to die in a declared holy war for Allah will get you admitted to paradise. If that’s the case, we know jihad has been declared in about 4 hundred and eleven different ways against “The Crusaders” (which would literally include England, and never did include the United States of America, as were just hadn’t found the place yet), so why are they not lining up and saying: “Mohammed, put me in! Come on, put me in, just this time, you know I can do it for the team!”

Simple: The use of the cell phones allows them to keep the trained fighters for another day.

It’s all about resource management, which is mostly what a commander in the field does. It’s nice to have a plan, and then gather the logistical support for the execution, but if the bad guys don’t follow your plan, you may come up a little short. In this case, I think there are two dynamics at play here.

Point of pondering #2A.

The first condition is I think the terrorists have seen the opinion tide shifting in their favor. I won’t belabor the world media’s love affair here, but they, as does anyone, gather strength to endure by seeing they and their cause being praised. The problem is, there aren’t enough “resources” (read people willing to blow themselves up to head for paradise), coupled with the fact that the media hasn’t caused the US and it’s collation countries to capitulate. They have to hang on. It’s sort of like the point in many war movies, when the platoon/company is surrounded and the enemy is chomping at the bit to overrun them, and some cigar chomping master sergeant or company commander yells for everyone to conserve ammo and only shoot what you know you can hit. In this case the ammo is a humanized version of the smart bomb (smartness may be debatable, but let’s leave that to another post). I think they are running low. Using cell phones improves the possibility of having more seasoned fighters around for the final push.

Point of pondering 2B.

So, what’s up with that? Well, let’s take a short trip to the near past, like two months ago. What was the almost daily screeching from the papers and HBM about? Yep, you got it: “Army Not meeting Recruiting Goals.” War is a tough business and it’s not just some of the youth of America that sometimes balk at the call. Where are the demanding headlines in the world press, demanding to know what the actual numbers targeted (sorry, but we use that word about our recruiting plans) to get signed up and how many actually did. I want to know if their recruiters are treated to an un-video taped beheading if they fail on a monthly goal. I bet there’s a massive cover-up on this issue amongst the jihadis…

The “recruiting numbers” may be lower (assuming my analysis that they are missing their numbers is correct) based on another reason. In “Our Own Worst Enemy” by William Lederer, the author tells the story of a Marine unit that gets assigned to work security for a Vietnamese village. They model their interaction with the villagers from the guidance of the “Small Wars Manual” the Marines figured out after having served in Central America in the early 1900s. Anyhow, the Marines not only provided protection, they showed the villagers how to farm and grow livestock more effectively, then there is surplus over the families needs, so they form a little co-op and take the surplus to market and then they had extra hard cash to use to then do more and make more. Great story.

This links in with this discussion because, as we have also seen in Iraq, over time, the villagers start “ratting out” the VC, telling the Marines when the attacks are coming. The village bonded with their Marine protectors and mentors. The best part of the story is what I think applies here. The Viet Cong locals would slip back into the village at night. Their friends would tell them all the things the Marines had helped them to learn, and how they actually were improving their farms and making some money. The VC had been promising this type of thing for a long time, but it was the young men of the USMC that delivered on the promise.

As we see Iraq rebuilding itself, with commerce developing, and people being able to speak and interact freely, I’m sure some of the “recruits” are having second thoughts. When we hear stories of al-Qaeda recruiters killing off family members in order to get people to come and join the jihad, I’d say they are pretty well beat. The VC ended up doing that, and that sort of recruiting has an exceptionally low “1st Term Retention” number associated with it…like about 0% in any one’s armed force.

Point of pondering #3.

Maybe the jihadis took some time to look into the whole suicide bomber deal by reading up on another recent example in world history. I am assuming they did some course work in the “Divine Wind” work of the Japanese in WWII. If they studied this well, they would see a few interesting things, not the least of which was JAPAN LOST! (that’s a no cost clue). Another real issue in Japan was that some senior and middle grade officers strongly (well, as strongly as they could) lobbied against the concept, the dissenting side largely being the pilots. Their argument was, if you took enough time to train them to fly (and it was kind of like the 2001 bombers, very little, just enough to get you to the target), then you should use them as a “reusable resource.” Using them once was only going to help so long, then the Chop (supply officer) is saying “sorry, no got!” That’s what happened to the Japanese Navy. By the Battle Off Samar, the Japanese aircraft carriers had pretty much been relegated to being just large targets for the Navy bombers, as they had no pilots to fly from them. They were the decoy to get Bull Halsey to leave the area, while Admiral Kurita went with his surface battleships, cruisers and destroyers to try and spoil MacArthur’s landing at Leyte Gulf.

I think the jihadis have come to understand this lesson: Manage your resources conservatively from the Japanese example.

Summary: I think the boys are on the ropes, but still have the fight in them. I think they are good students of the technical aspects of killing, with some mastery of phsychology and public relations. I think they are very weak historians, as they someone how seem to be repeating many of the mistakes of the past.

Got all that? Clear as mud? Comments?

Thanks to Mudville Gazette for the Open Posts!

Update 11:50PM EDT:

If you’d like a detailed analysis of the London Bombing itself, get your coffee and then click on this link…good stuff from Kung fu Kat…

Scientific American for May 2005 says on the cover “Do-It-Yourself Black Holes: Physics Gets Ready.”

For the loyal blog readers here, you’ll recall that physicists decided a earlier this month that Black Holes didn’t exist. I guess the Scientific American writing staff and editors didn’t get the word. And, for those of you in the military, we know it’s not an excuse when you don’t know, you just get nailed for “Failure to get the word.” I’ll admit it, I’m confused as to what’s the truth here.

Ok, it looks like if you get out to the garage and dust off your particle accelerator (or head down the community center to use theirs), you know, the one you built as from a Heathkit project, a model of the accelerator at CERN near Geneva, you can possibly make microscopic Black Holes, so you can play in the quantum particle physics field.

Don’t worry, these “small” Black Holes won’t rip stars apart (they didn’t mention what it will do to the Harley you also keep in the garage).

Once you produce a hole, you should be able to make discoveries to enhance our understanding of the universe. Just make sure you keep your prized Craftsman tools, the golf clubs and your Harley at a safe distance (just in case), to make sure they aren’t taken to a parallel universe.

I like science stuff, in fact I was loaned the CDs for “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. If you like books on tape (CD) and are facinated how our speices figured out all the stuff we have, I recommend this.

As a long time skydiver, I’ve studied a little physics. That also facinates me. By, today (and please pardon the pun), I’m crushed, as I just found a weblog that led me to an article that says Black Holes don’t exist.

Besides having to drop all refernecs to such things as “singularlity” and event horizon” from my vocabulary, just hink of all the scifi that will have to be rewritten…

As Engineer Officer in a surface ship, the maintenance and operation of the ships gyroscopes fell under my purview. We were in the South Atlantic Ocean, operating with one of the South American navies for a surface gunnery exercise.

The Weapons Officer was having a bad day, as the fall of shot from our main guns (5
“/54 caliber) wasn’t landing near the towed target. The CO, being the warfighter he was, as well as being a gunnery expert, asked Weps what the problem was. Reportedly, without much hesitation, he proclaimed the signal amplifiers for the gyros weren’t operating properly and therefore, the gun orders from the fire control system was off.

Gee, thanks, John, is really all I could think about as Captain Maxiner chewed on me about equipment not operating to specs. I called Ensign Hale and got him to work running checks. After a few hours, Nolan came back, showing me the sync amp outputs were all within specifications. I reported this to the Captain. What I found out later that day was that while we were scratching our heads and checking the gyros, the fire control division had been madly swapping out circuit cards in the MK 86 Gunfire Control System. If my sync amps were the problem, it was odd that they would be doing this kind of work on their system, particularly if you didn’t know where the problem was.

It turned out Weps hosed me, but I did get a dig in a few days later when we were doing another gunnery shoot. I wandered up to the bridge, and stood behind the Co and Weps, as the guns pounded out round after round and got calls back over the radio from the tug that was towing the target sled of “Alpha Mike” over and over. “AM” is the report that the round hit within close enough proximity to the target sled that it would have been a direct hit on a real ship.

I waited for several of the reports of success to come over the radio, then, when there was a lull in the firing, said loudly “Those sync amps sure are shooting good!” All I got was two hard, cold stares from the Captain and the Weapons Officer. All I could do was stand there and smile.

One small victory for the Engineering Department was racked up that day.

YouTube has some great stuff….

Since I know the retired paycheck of a Navy Capt is not good enough to allow Neptunus Lex to have

an F/A-18 in his garage for weekend jaunts, maybe he’d be satisfied with doing what the guy in this video did….

And, oh, yeah…he already understands the management of powered flight systems, so he’ll pick it up in no time and can be down at Skydive San Diego real

soon now…

I’m a computer game fan. I’ve played plenty of flight simulators and first person shooters over a few decades. The more realistic the simulation, the happier I am. I like as real as it can get.

Now, a “your tax dollars at work story.” In the Mid-90’s I was sent to a command where we were maintaining various computer programs, mostly all for Navy combatant (Crusiers, destroyers and frigates). We also had some tasking for development of new programs, but that wasn’t the main mission of the command. We had 60 military and 300 civil servants working there.

One of the projects that was in development, different from the vast array of ones being maintained was Battle Force Tactical Trainer (BFTT). The goal of this program was to allow ships, planes, submarines and shore bases to run realistic training scenarios. It was a unique project for its time, as the program manager had a the foresight to find out what other developed, or in development, programs were around that contained parts that could be woven together in order to save funds by not re-inventing the wheel, as it were. That was unusual at the time, as program managers for just about anything else being developed, jealously guarded their developments, and their funds, being afraid that they would have to admit a weakness in their organization, if they couldn’t do it themselves. I’m also convinced that they were scared that if they showed some of the working details, someone else may tell them (or worse yet show them) a better way, which would make them not look all knowledgeable.

Anyhow, BFTT was an ambitious project, in funding and schedule, and I watched, at close range, some incredible innovation to make it happen. The project has been absorbed at the joint level, so all services can share in the technology development, and subsequently, save lots of money (and that’s a good thing that has been done for us taxpayers, in the name of reason). The BFTT was essentially a central control system, that would interface with simulators and real equipment to present a coherent picture to operators, so their reactions would be properly developed. In this scheme, units could be connected via the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI) and live radio signals, while BFTT managed the responses of the many training modules, imbedded in various systems.

The way information was conveyed between units was via data “packets” which were in the Distributed Information System (DIS) format. The “packet” would define an entity in the battle space, to include the characteristics to allow the training systems portray it properly to the operators. An entity could be a .50 caliber machine gun bullet, a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier, or a SCUD missile. The idea was to put sufficient information in a format that a sensor display would show the operator what he may see if the entity would have been real.

Pretty innovative, and complex engineering went into this, all in the name of creating a virtual reality to train war fighters. Somehow, and I’m not sure how the connection came to be, the console game developers caught wind of the work the Department of Defense was doing in this “virtual reality” modeling. Since they were also trying to replicate the real world in their game consoles and computer games, they ended up at the DIS protocol meetings and became active players in helping design the standards for the DIS data packets.

This interaction between game developers and the military training simulating community has helped to provide us with the richness of the games we see in the Xbox, Play Stations and PCs today. The military training is superior as a result as well, resulting in tremendous reduction in training costs, and an increase in realism.

To take the synergism a bit further, after I completed the tour with the software development command, I reported to the Navy Operational Test Force, where the mission was to design and run test programs to make sure the top level procurement programs had in fact created systems that did what the military contracted them to do. As systems were becoming more complex, and budgets getting tighter, I walked into the early stages of the development of the use of modeling and simulation to verify equipment met the design specifications. The prior work of the BFTT and associated training programs became a building block to leverage from to help move more testing from the real world ranges to the internals of computers, at a quality to assure systems worked.

The next time you load up your simulation games, know some far sighted military and civil servants helped put your tax dollars to use to make your games really rock.

It’s called a “data port” and I believe it began to he standard equipment in cars about 1995. Don’t quote me on that but, suffice it to say, it’s a development we know took place.

Ok, here we go. This data port enables mechanics to connect computerized diagnostic computers to your car quickly. Not only can they “see” into your engine quickly they can, theoretically, identify and quickly correct problems in the automobile. That has the benefit of saving on labor hours for the consumer, as well as giving the mechanics the ability to handle a greater volume of customers.

Invented by the automobile industry by the hybridization of electronics and mechanical devices, some other people come along and come up with a way to further their work, at no significant cost. Enter the law enforcement profession. The data port is not merely an interface into your vehicles “propulsion” system it has been fortified by being given a short, but telling memory. Like the sibling we had that reveled in reporting our egregious acts of immaturity and boundary testing to our parents the data pat retains a constantly refreshing memory of what you had the vehicle doing for the last 30 seconds.

30 seconds? That’s not long you think. Just for fun, stop doing anything else and watch your watch via clock for 30 seconds. This will recalibrate you as to how long 30 seconds is. With things like speed, acceleration and breaking being recorded, quite an accurate picture can he quickly reconstructed, completely unbiased by people with agendas. When an accident occurs, an information recovery specialist will use specialized equipment to record the vehicles last 30 seconds of data. Certainly this type of information retroviral will or must have been judged as legal, as is permissible to search based on “probable cause,” when a crime has occurred. If there was an accident, it certainly follows that a warrant-less search is in order. “They” now have what you did (and did not do) for permanent record. I would hope this would cause one to consider this, and to meditate on whether personal driving habits should be changed.

It gets better. Look how far we’ve come in less than 10 years: From the automobile engineer to the mechanics to law enforcement. Just where can we go next? Enter an industry that grew from the premise of sharing risks to the one that has become risk adverse and “currency–philic:“ Insurance. About a month ago, I caught the last portions of a news report on how an insurance company in the northern mid-west is experimenting with having customers place a device on their car’s data port to record not just the last 30 seconds of data as they roll into their driveways at the end of the day, but all day long. When you get home, you remove the data collection module, hook it up to your computer and upload your day’s driving to the insurance company’s computer. Once your data (provided voluntarily) is there, the insurance company software will take over and analyze your driving.

How could a same person volunteer to do this? It’s simple, the insurance company offers an attractive incentive: a 15% discount. I’d be willing to bet this “project” is presented as a way to collect live data for the actuaries to review and analyze, So the company will be able to mitigate the isles farther. That certainly Sounds fair, but the real question is in which direction is the risk being attenuated? It’s not in your favor.

As time passes, some incredibly compulsive math managers (actuaries) will sit down with computer programmers and discuss which combination, data points from the daily data capture files will indicate an unsafe (read: someone who we think will cost us money) driver is. The programmers will return to their cubicles and begin coding the proper “algorithms” to apply to received data. This process, in and of itself, is working material for an entire other post but that will have to he done later.

Just close you eyes for a brief moment, get in touch with your inner child and imagine your flood of emotions when, as you have your first cup of coffee, you find an email from your wonderfully protective, good neighbors type insurance carrier subject line: “You insurance is canceled.” Oops, that’s traumatic. Try this line: “Your insurance rates have been raised.” Sin confident your blood pressure is higher as a result and you may even have wondered (in the first scenario), “how will I get to work today?”

Ina perfect world, a perfect set of computer code will be able to weed out aggressive drivers from the pack. On the other hand, were far from a coherent problem solving program. In the January, 2005 issue of “Scientific American,” pages 36 through 37A have an article discussing robotics and Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University and Seegrid Corporation fame, figures a Mac G5 (dual processor) 2Ghz computer is sort of at the top of current mainstream computing ability and he rates it’s intelligence above a guppy and below a mouse. The news is computing power is improving, but it won’t be until about 2040 until computing power reaches that of humans. In the meantime, that means the fate of your driving record will be determined by either a smart fish, or a less than smart rodent. That, I submit, will jump start your heart better than a portable defibrillator.

All of this reminds me of the BBC produced series ”Connections” of about 20 years ago. This started as a way to service a car more efficiently and it ends up being the sibling that always ratted you out, and all at no cost to anyone except the original designers of the data port.

As a porting thought, consider the current Rush Limbaugh prescription drug “shopping” charges and how the Police collected Rush’s medical records from his doctors, without a warrant. That issue is presently headed for the Florida Supreme Court to determine the legality of this type of evidence seizure. Put that in the context of personal daily driving statistics being stored in the information systems of insurance companies. Will insurance companies willingly turn over information demanded by someone with a badge? It’s probably much clearer to assume that a “doctor-patient privileged relationship” would be upheld, but I doubt that few people would think to apply that quality of protection to information held by the insurance firms.

As the computing power of the insurance companies computers grow, so will the capabilities of vehicle computers. With “On-star,” callers are electronically located by GPS. Cell phones have a GPS locating feature in ones produced in the last few years. You can bet that all vehicles will soon be fitted automatically with such equipment, and interfacing it to the data port will he a simple thing. When this occurs, Sin sure downloaded data from this pat will include position reports. As with the mechanics into it will quickly become a mandatory thing, and it could even be used to write speeding and other traffic violations automatically.

We will accept this story creeping, penetration into our lives without a thought, other than how it enhances am lives on a minute-to. Minute basis, being concerned little about the threat to personal privacy this will beget.