the experimental gameplay project

It never happened in an exercise before

The Washington Post recently obtained Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper‘s report about the Millennium 2002 war game in response to a Mandatory Declassification Review request:

I first learned of this classified document by reading a 2002 Army Times article in which Van Riper criticized Millennium Challenge 2002 as “rigged” and mentioned “a 20-page report” that he had submitted to his superiors. With this information, I filed the declassification request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2013. At the time, I was working for the National Security Archive, a nonprofit based at George Washington University that fights to make government records of historical significance public. Eleven years later, I got my answer — an email explaining that the record I had requested had been declassified in part. The released report demonstrates why it is important to push back against government secrecy: Unearthed records may reveal to the public critical information omitted from official government narratives. Van Riper’s write-up contradicts portions of an official 752-page final report on Millennium Challenge 2002 released by the military more than a decade ago that called the war game a “major milestone” and described the loss of an entire carrier group as only “moderately unsuccessful.”

The story of what happened definitely got out:

In the exercise, Van Riper played the “Major General” of a country resembling Iraq or Iran that “possessed natural resources critical to the world community.” His report notes that he used a strategy of ambiguity, asymmetry and denial of territory to have his forces, known as “Red,” defeat the superior U.S. military. He wrote that because the U.S. forces, designated “Blue,” appeared determined to go to war, he “saw no option except to strike Blue first.” To plan his attack, Van Riper wrote that he “employed a command and control methodology specifically designed to thwart” American technological advantages, including the ability to intercept electronic and phone communications. He relied on couriers to relay sensitive messages and communicated to aircraft with lanterns to avoid radio chatter. After his surprise attack simulated the destruction of the carrier group, the atmosphere at Norfolk command, where Van Riper led his team, was “shock,” he told The Post in an interview. “It was just quiet. It never happened in an exercise before. … I don’t think [Joint Forces Command] knew what to do.” Van Riper wanted to continue to attack U.S. forces, pressing forward with his asymmetric advantage, his report notes. Instead, a war game adjudicator determined Van Riper’s successful attack “wouldn’t have happened” in real warfare and ruled that all but four of the virtual U.S. ships would be “refloated” and the war game would continue, according to his report. […] After the U.S. carrier group was “refloated,” other restrictions were imposed on Van Riper, he noted in his report. His forces could not initiate combat, but U.S. forces could. Van Riper’s forces were also forbidden from using chemical weapons against the United States, which he considered his country’s “most significant” asymmetric military strength.

Posted in Policy , War | No Comments »

Manson taught them that people in the straight world were like computers

On the witness stand, Paul Watkins outlined the near weekly orgies that Manson orchestrated at the Spahn Ranch. The leader would hand out drugs, personally deciding everyone’s dosages. And then, as Bugliosi writes in Helter Skelter , Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.”

If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”

Tex Watson, in his 1978 memoir Will You Die for Me? , tells a similar story. “There was a room in the back of the ranch house totally lined with mattresses,” he wrote, essentially set aside for sex. “As we had any inhibitions we still weren’t dead, we were still playing back what our parents had programmed into us.”

Having made them feel freed and wanted, Manson would isolate his followers from the world beyond the ranch, giving them daily tasks to support the commune and forbidding them from communicating with their families or friends. His was a world without newspapers, clocks, or calendars. Manson chose new names for his initiates. “In order for me to be completely free in my mind I had to be able to completely forget the past,” Susan Atkins testified. “The easiest way to do this is to have to change identity.”

Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions — often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks — during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan.

Paul Watkins believed that Manson wanted to use LSD “to instill his philosophies, exploit weaknesses and fears, and extract promises and agreements from his followers.” And it worked. Watkins recalled an instance in which Manson told Susan Atkins, “I’d like half a coconut, even if you have to go to Rio de Janeiro to get it.” Atkins “got right up and was on her way out the door when Charlie said, ‘Never mind.’” Manson excelled, Watkins said, at “locating deep-seated hang-ups.”

Ironically, as his followers became more and more robotic, Manson taught them that people in the straight world “were like computers,” the Family’s Brooks Poston wrote. Their worldviews were simply a matter of society’s programming, and any program could be expunged. On the stand, Susan Atkins described Sharon Tate as an “IBM machine — words came out of her mouth but they didn’t make any sense to me.”

For a Family novitiate, the goal was to burn yourself out, to take so much LSD and listen to so much of Charlie’s music that you returned “to a purity and nothingness” resembling a new birth, Tex Watson wrote. This was called going “dead in the head,” and it let you incorporate into the collective, sharing “one common brain.”

What no one brought up was how someone like Manson, with little formal education and so much prison time under his belt, had mastered the ability to control people this way. Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case.

How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies — among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess — into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

Your A student is average

Your A student is average , David Blobaum explains:

The most common refrain from parents is that their child “is a good student but a bad test-taker.” This comment reveals a fundamental disconnect between what parents understand about grades from school and standardized test scores. […] In most cases, an alternate explanation is true: Despite having a sky-high GPA in honors classes, the student is actually just an average student. According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute Freshman Survey, 86 percent of the surveyed students at BA-granting universities had A-averages in high school. Thus, A-averages are not rare at all. They are, in fact, average. […] The median SAT score is 1020. The median ACT score is 18. […] “SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high school grades.” “Test scores are the single largest predictor of a student’s academic performance at Yale, and this is true over all four years, and it’s true even when we control for every other available variable that we can.”– Mark Dunn, assistant director of admissions at Yale, on the Yale Admissions Podcast “Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” – Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, quoted by the New York Times (2024) “SAT scores have significant predictive value for academic achievement over and above other measures such as high school GPA.” – Dartmouth Admissions Research Dartmouth puts numbers behind its statement: “High school GPA by itself explains 9 percent of the variation” in the first-year GPA of Dartmouth students. An SAT score by itself explains “about 22 percent of the variation.” Thus, at least for Dartmouth students, SAT/ACT scores are about 2.4 times more predictive of academic success than high school grades.

Posted in Education | 2 Comments »

The ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat

Russia is second only to the United States as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports. On average, 25 percent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent. About half of Germany’s gas supply comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticize the Kremlin for aggressive behavior than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 percent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply. […] In the north, via the Baltic Sea, is the Nord Stream route, which connects directly to Germany. Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline, which feeds Poland and Germany. In the south is the Blue Stream, taking gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. Until early 2015 there was a planned project called South Stream, which was due to use the same route but branch off to Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy. South Stream was Russia’s attempt to ensure that even during disputes with Ukraine it would still have a major route to large markets in Western Europe and the Balkans. Several EU countries put pressure on their neighbors to reject the plan, and Bulgaria effectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as Turk Stream. […] Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then benefit not just from American liquefied gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East. The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps off. […] LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue, Russia is planning pipelines heading southeast and hopes to increase sales to China. […] A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $ 50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget—and predicted spending for 2017—was based on prices of $ 50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $ 2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark. […] The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan. […] What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean. Beijing’s push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe. Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast. In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples. […] The average life span for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea). […] It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist — the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.

Posted in Economics , Policy , War | 5 Comments »

Is this fair? Is this useful?

The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north. Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth. His first and most important task was to unify France’s forty-two legal codes into a single system. For this monumental undertaking Napoleon had an invaluable ally in Cambacérès, who had been the secretary of the committee which had been given the task of overhauling the civil law code back in 1792 and was the author of the Projet de Code Civil (1796). ‘If the whole Code were to be mislaid,’ Napoleon once quipped, ‘it could be found in Cambacérès’ head.’ […] Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’ […] The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading. The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society. Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution. The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within. (‘One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’) It guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state. It allowed all adult men to engage in any occupation and to own property. Laws had to be duly promulgated and officially published, and could not apply retrospectively. Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law. Fearing the disintegration of the family as the basic social institution, the framers of the Code gave the paterfamilias almost total power, including over the property of his wife. Under Article 148 the father’s permission was required for the marriage of sons up to the age of twenty-five and daughters to twenty-one, and the marriage age was raised to fifteen for women, eighteen for men. Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one. The major criticisms levelled at the Code over the past two centuries have been that it was socially conservative, too supportive of the middle classes, of the individual and of the paterfamilias, that it made wives too dependent on their husbands, and that its inheritance provisions were damaging for an agrarian economy. […] The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was only one of several legal reforms promulgated by Napoleon, though undoubtedly the most important. By 1810 it had been joined by the Code of Civil Procedure, the Commercial Code, the Code on Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code. […] It was this body of law together that came to be known as the Code Napoléon. […] It survived in the Prussian Rhineland until 1900, and Belgium, Luxembourg, Mauritius and Monaco, as well as France, still operate it today. Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

Satellites had an inherent limitation in the world of espionage

This would forever negate any element of surprise. The average satellite took ninety minutes to circle the world, and overflight schedules were easily determined by analysts at NORAD. The ironically named Oxcart was an attack espionage vehicle: quick and versatile, nimble and shrewd, with overpasses that would be totally unpredictable to any enemy. But most of all, in terms of clear photographic intelligence, nothing could compete with what Oxcart was about to be able to deliver to the president: two-and-a-half-foot blocks of detail made clear by film frames shot from seventeen miles up.

Posted in Policy , Technology , War | 4 Comments »

It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre

It is one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa and is considered to be the genesis of the lost world literary genre. It is the first of fourteen novels and four short stories by Haggard about Allan Quatermain.

I was shocked by how little I remembered from reading it decades ago, and then I checked my bookshelves. I’d only read the first sequel, Allan Quartermain , and H. Rider Haggard‘s other famous work, She . She is one of the handful of books that Tolkien explicitly acknowledges as an influence , but King Solomon’s Mines is obviously an influence too — and on Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, etc. Any D&D player will nod knowingly at our hero following an old scrap of a map to an isolated kingdom with a mine full of treasure.

The isolated kingdom does not belong to dwarves or elves, in this case, but to Africans, the fictional Kukuana tribe:

Indeed, in Kukuanaland, as among the Germans, the Zulus, and the Masai, every able-bodied man is a soldier, so that the whole force of the nation is available for its wars, offensive or defensive.

I got a chuckle at that comment about Germans.

Anyway, Quartermain’s role in the big battle reminded me of Bilbo’s in the Battle of Five Armies:

All I can remember is a dreadful rolling noise of the meeting of shields, and the sudden apparition of a huge ruffian, whose eyes seemed literally to be starting out of his head, making straight at me with a bloody spear. But — I say it with pride — I rose — or rather sank — to the occasion. It was one before which most people would have collapsed once and for all. Seeing that if I stood where I was I must be killed, as the horrid apparition came I flung myself down in front of him so cleverly that, being unable to stop himself, he took a header right over my prostrate form. Before he could rise again, I had risen and settled the matter from behind with my revolver. Shortly after this somebody knocked me down, and I remember no more of that charge.

As you may recall, Bilbo spots the eagles before suffering a similar fate:

“The Eagles!” cried Bilbo once more, but at that moment a stone hurtling from above smote heavily on his helm, and he fell with a crash and knew no more.

Later, Quartermain’s companion, Good, gets brutally stabbed with a spear:

Before we had gone far, suddenly we discovered the figure of Good sitting on an ant-heap about one hundred paces from us. Close beside him was the body of a Kukuana. “He must be wounded,” said Sir Henry anxiously. As he made the remark, an untoward thing happened. The dead body of the Kukuana soldier, or rather what had appeared to be his dead body, suddenly sprang up, knocked Good head over heels off the ant-heap, and began to spear him. We rushed forward in terror, and as we drew near we saw the brawny warrior making dig after dig at the prostrate Good, who at each prod jerked all his limbs into the air. Seeing us coming, the Kukuana gave one final and most vicious dig, and with a shout of “Take that, wizard!” bolted away. Good did not move, and we concluded that our poor comrade was done for. Sadly we came towards him, and were astonished to find him pale and faint indeed, but with a serene smile upon his face, and his eyeglass still fixed in his eye. “Capital armour this,” he murmured, on catching sight of our faces bending over him. “How sold that beggar must have been,” and then he fainted. On examination we discovered that he had been seriously wounded in the leg by a tolla in the course of the pursuit, but that the chain armour had prevented his last assailant’s spear from doing anything more than bruise him badly. It was a merciful escape. As nothing could be done for him at the moment, he was placed on one of the wicker shields used for the wounded, and carried along with us.

This might call to mind Frodo’s experience in the Mines of Moria:

But even as they retreated, and before Pippin and Merry had reached the stair outside, a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber; behind him his followers clustered in the doorway. His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear. With a thrust of his huge hide shield he turned Boromir’s sword and bore him backwards, throwing him to the ground. Diving under Aragorn’s blow with the speed of a striking snake he charged into the Company and thrust with his spear straight at Frodo. The blow caught him on the right side, and Frodo was hurled against the wall and pinned. Sam, with a cry, hacked at the spear-shaft, and it broke. But even as the orc flung down the truncheon and swept out his scimitar, Andúril came down upon his helm. There was a flash like flame and the helm burst asunder. The orc fell with cloven head. His followers fled howling, as Boromir and Aragorn sprang at them. […] ‘I am all right,’ gasped Frodo. ‘I can walk. Put me down!’ Aragorn nearly dropped him in his amazement. ‘I thought you were dead!’ he cried. […] ‘I am all right,’ said Frodo, reluctant to have his garments touched. ‘All I needed was some food and a little rest.’ ‘No!’ said Aragorn. ‘We must have a look and see what the hammer and the anvil have done to you. I still marvel that you are alive at all.’ Gently he stripped off Frodo’s old jacket and worn tunic, and gave a gasp of wonder. Then he laughed. The silver corslet shimmered before his eyes like the light upon a rippling sea. Carefully he took it off and held it up, and the gems on it glittered like stars, and the sound of the shaken rings was like the tinkle of rain in a pool. ‘Look, my friends!’ he called. ‘Here’s a pretty hobbit-skin to wrap an elven-princeling in! If it were known that hobbits had such hides, all the hunters of Middle-earth would be riding to the Shire.’ ‘And all the arrows of all the hunters in the world would be in vain,’ said Gimli, gazing at the mail in wonder. ‘It is a mithril-coat. Mithril! I have never seen or heard tell of one so fair. Is this the coat that Gandalf spoke of? Then he undervalued it. But it was well given!’ ‘I have often wondered what you and Bilbo were doing, so close in his little room,’ said Merry. ‘Bless the old hobbit! I love him more than ever. I hope we get a chance of telling him about it!’ There was a dark and blackened bruise on Frodo’s right side and breast. Under the mail there was a shirt of soft leather, but at one point the rings had been driven through it into the flesh. Frodo’s left side also was scored and bruised where he had been hurled against the wall.

Earlier in the story, our heroes must impress the natives with their magic, and they threaten to put out the sun. The old eclipse trope? I had to look it up, and King Solomon’s Mines was published in 1885, four years before A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , so add Twain to the long list of authors inspired by Haggard.

The audiobook I listened to was apparently based on an early edition of the book, because Haggard went on to change it to a lunar eclipse in later editions, after realising that his description of a solar eclipse was not realistic.

Posted in Media | 4 Comments »

The Manson Family intended to escape from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9.

When Paul Watkins, a former Family member, took the stand to elaborate, O’Neill explains, the details were even more jarring:

Watkins spoke of “a big underground city,” secreted away in a hole wide enough that “you could drive a speedboat across it.” From the book of Revelation, the Family knew the city would have no sun and no moon, and “a tree that bears twelve different kinds of fruit.” Subsisting on that fruit in their subterranean Elysium, the Family would multiply into 144,000 people.

It gets worse.

After they were found guilty, and the trial moved to its death-penalty phase, the three convicted women from the Manson Family — Atkins, Krenwinkel, and Van Houten — took the witness stand:

One by one, they explained their roles in the murders, absolving Manson of any complicity and proclaiming their utter lack of remorse. […] To kill someone, the women explained, was an act of love — it freed that person from the confines of their physical being. Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.” Patricia Krenwinkel said she’d felt nothing when she stabbed Abigail Folger twenty-eight times. “What is there to describe? It was just there, and it’s like it was right.” Why would she kill a woman she didn’t even know? “Well, it’s hard to explain. It was just a thought and the thought came to be.” “‘Sorry’ is only a five-letter word,” Leslie Van Houten told the courtroom. “It can’t bring back anything.” She’d helped stab Rosemary LaBianca forty-one times. “What can I feel?” Van Houten said. “It has happened. She is gone.”

The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires

With his usual thoroughness, Genda reported the highest dive-bombing hit rates in the past seven months of practice, by the Japanese Navy’s best carrier pilots, is only 40 percent. […] “There is more than one path to get to the top of the mountain,” Yamamoto replies. […] “The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Here, the path of life and death, victory and defeat, is clear.” […] “It will take only six days to adjust the aircraft and we can do this while we are underway. With this new means, we will destroy the four American aircraft carriers, eight battleships, two heavy cruisers and the six light cruisers in the first wave. Conventional attacks will focus on attacking enemy airfields and destroying American planes on the ground. The second wave will target the dockyards and oil facilities. The third wave will involve conventional bombing and will hit any remaining targets.” […] “We will lose 80 of our 353 aircraft through direct strikes,” Genda replies. “Ten percent more if the enemy antiaircraft and their pursuit planes are alert … but I believe we will achieve surprise, so I estimate our losses at 107 aircraft.” […] “Yes, it is the only way to annihilate our enemy with one swift blow. It is a hard choice, I know, but these strikes will be like a Divine Wind that will blow the Americans from the Pacific.” […] “Put your new plan into motion. We will hit the Americans and destroy their power in the Pacific with one strike of the sword. We will use your 80 kamikaze aircraft to change the face of war.” […] The Japanese would only resort to kamikaze attacks in 1944, when their strategic military situation was dire, as they grasped for any means to strike back and delay the inevitable tide of defeat. […] But what if Yamamoto’s forces had conducted the kamikaze strike strategy at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the US Navy was much smaller and unprepared for such a ferocious assault? What if the Japanese had realized they had to play their one roll of the dice differently? […] The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires: missiles, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and loitering munitions.

Posted in Technology , War , Weapons | 5 Comments »

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

The Bolt-M from Anduril is, David Hambling explains, a high-end American take on the hordes of FPV kamikaze drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia :

In Ukraine, such drones are often assembled at kitchen tables from commercial components from China. Though unsophisticated, they are efficient engines of destruction, and at around $500 apiece are destroying tanks, artillery, trucks and foxholes at a high rate. […] While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare. […] An Anduril spokesman told Breaking Defense that “In round numbers, typical Bolt configurations are in the low tens of thousands of dollars,” depending on the exact payload and configuration. Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon? […] Ukrainian journal Defence Express was quick to criticize the Bolt-M, stating that, like other American designs, it fails to incorporate the key lesson of FPV warfare “they are, first of all, cheap and produced at scale.” Instead they suggest the design might be adapted into a reusable, AI-enabled light bomber for conditions of intense jamming.

Posted in Technology , War , Weapons | 4 Comments »

President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine tried to play both sides

He flirted with the West, but paid homage to Moscow—thus Putin tolerated him. When he came close to signing a massive trade agreement with the EU, one which could lead to membership, Putin began turning the screw. For the Russian foreign policy elite, membership in the EU is simply a stalking horse for membership in NATO, and for Russia, Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red line. Putin piled the pressure on Yanukovych, made him an offer he chose not to refuse, and the Ukrainian president scrambled out of the EU deal and made a pact with Moscow, thus sparking the protests that were eventually to overthrow him. […] In the east, crowds came out in support of the president. In the west of the country, in cities such as L’viv, which used to be in Poland, they were busy trying to rid themselves of any pro-Russian influence. By mid-February 2014, L’viv, and other urban areas, were no longer controlled by the government. Then on February 22, after dozens of deaths in Kiev, the president, fearing for his life, fled. Anti-Russian factions, some of which were pro-Western and some pro-fascist, took over the government. From that moment the die was cast. President Putin did not have much of a choice—he had to annex Crimea, which contained not only many Russian-speaking Ukrainians but most important the port of Sevastopol. This geographic imperative and the whole eastward movement of NATO is exactly what Putin had in mind when, in a speech about the annexation, he said “Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. You must always remember this.” […] The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited-supply and replenishment base, not a major force. […] Having annexed Crimea, the Russians are wasting no time. They are building up the Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol and constructing a new naval port in the Russian city of Novorossiysk, which, although it does not have a natural deep harbor, will give the Russians extra capacity. Eighty new ships are being commissioned as well as several submarines. The fleet will still not be strong enough to break out of the Black Sea during wartime, but its capacity is increasing. In July 2015, Russia published its new naval doctrine and, there, right at the top of the list of threats to Russian interests, was NATO. It called NATO’s positioning of troops and hardware closer to its borders “inadmissible,” which was just short of fighting talk. To counter this, in the next decade we can expect to see the United States encouraging its NATO partner Romania to boost its fleet in the Black Sea while relying on Turkey to hold the line across the Bosporus. Crimea was part of Russia for two centuries before being granted to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in 1954 by President Khrushchev at a time when it was envisaged that Soviet man would live forever and so be controlled by Moscow forever. Now that Ukraine was no longer Soviet, nor even pro-Russian—Putin knew the situation had to change. Did the Western diplomats know? If they didn’t, then they were unaware of rule A, lesson one, in “Diplomacy for Beginners”: When faced with what is considered an existential threat, a great power will use force. If they were aware, then they must have considered Putin’s annexation of Crimea a price worth paying for pulling Ukraine into modern Europe and the Western sphere of influence. A generous view is that the United States and the Europeans were looking forward to welcoming Ukraine into the democratic world as a full member of its liberal institutions and the rule of law and that there wasn’t much Moscow could do about it. That is a view that does not take into account the fact that geopolitics still exists in the twenty-first century and that Russia does not play by the rule of law. […] Approximately 60 percent of Crimea’s population is “ethnically Russian,” so the Kremlin was pushing against an open door. Putin helped the anti-Kiev demonstrations and stirred up so much trouble that eventually he “had” to send his troops out of the confines of the naval base and onto the streets to protect people. The Ukrainian military in the area was in no shape to take on both the people and the Russian army and swiftly withdrew. Crimea was once again de facto a part of Russia. […] No one rode to the rescue of Ukraine as it lost territory equivalent to the size of Belgium, or the state of Maryland. Ukraine and its neighbors knew a geographic truth: that unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near, and Washington, DC, is far away. For Russia this was an existential matter: they could not cope with losing Crimea, but the West could. The EU imposed limited sanctions—limited because several European countries, Germany among them, are reliant on Russian energy to heat their homes in winter. The pipelines run east to west and the Kremlin can turn the taps on and off. […] It is no surprise that, after seizing Crimea, Russia went on to encourage the uprisings by pro-Russians in the Ukrainian eastern industrial heartlands in Luhansk and Donetsk. Russia could easily drive militarily all the way to the eastern bank of the Dnieper River in Kiev. But it does not need the headache that would bring. It is far less painful, and cheaper, to encourage unrest in the eastern borders of Ukraine and remind Kiev who controls energy supplies, to ensure that Kiev’s infatuation with the flirtatious West does not turn into a marriage consummated in the chambers of the EU or NATO. Covert support for the uprisings in eastern Ukraine was also logistically simple and had the added benefit of deniability on the international stage. Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions and, more important, doesn’t want concrete proof in case he or she has to do something about it. Many politicians in the West breathed a sigh of relief and muttered quietly, “Thank goodness Ukraine isn’t in NATO or we would have had to act.” The annexation of Crimea showed how Russia is prepared for military action to defend what it sees as its interests in what it calls its “near abroad.” It took a rational gamble that outside powers would not intervene and Crimea was “doable.” It is close to Russia, could be supplied across the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and could rely on internal support from large sections of the population of the peninsula. […] In the case of the three Baltic States, NATO’s position is clear. As they are all members of the alliance, armed aggression against any of them by Russia would trigger Article 5 of NATO’s founding charter, which states: “An armed attack against one or more [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and goes on to say NATO will come to the rescue if necessary. Article 5 was invoked after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, paving the way for NATO involvement in Afghanistan. […] At the beginning of 2016, the Russian president sent his own signal. He changed the wording of Russia’s overall military strategy document and went further than the naval strategy paper of 2015. For the first time the US was named as an “external threat” to Russia.

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The simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope

‘The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign’, wrote Jean Chaptal, ‘was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.’ Napoleon wanted to ensure that no independent Church would provide a focus of opposition to his rule, and the simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope. Anti-clericalism had been a driving force during the French Revolution, which had stripped the Catholic Church of its wealth, expelled and in many cases murdered its priests, and desecrated its altars. Yet Napoleon sensed that many among his natural supporters – conservative, rural, hard-working skilled labourers, artisans and smallholders – had not abjured the faith of their fathers and yearned for a settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Consulate they were growing to admire. Any settlement, however, would have to ensure that those who had acquired biens nationaux previously owned by the Church (known as acquéreurs ) should be allowed to retain their property, and there could be no return to the old days when the peasantry were forced to pay tithes to the clergy. Napoleon had for some time respected the Pope’s ability to organize uprisings in Italy, telling the Directory in October 1796 that ‘it was a great mistake to quarrel with that Power’. […] Napoleon appreciated how invaluable it would be if the person who played an important social role as the centre of information in those communities, who was often the most educated person and who read out government decrees, was also on the national payroll. ‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’ His treaty with the Papacy has been accurately described as attempting ‘to enlist the parish clergy as Napoleon’s “moral prefects” ’. […] ‘Jesus should have performed his miracles not in remote parts of Syria but in a city like Rome, in front of the whole population.’ […] ‘Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the sun – the source of all life – the real god of the earth.’ […] ‘I like the Muslim religion best; it has fewer incredible things in it than ours.’ […] A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’ […] ‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor … Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’ […] ‘If I ruled a people of Jews, I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon!’ […] Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’ ‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’ ‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’ […] ‘One should render unto God that which is God’s,’ Napoleon was later to say, ‘but the Pope is not God.’ […] Although the Concordat was officially signed in July, it wasn’t ratified and published until nine months later, once Napoleon had tried to calm the deep opposition to it in the army and legislature. ‘The Government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens,’ the Concordat began. ‘His Holiness, in like manner, acknowledges that this same religion has derived, and is likely to derive, the greatest splendour from the establishment of the Catholic worship in France, and from its being openly professed by the consuls of the Republic.’ […] Ten archbishops (each on a 15,000-franc annual salary) and fifty bishops (10,000 francs each) would be appointed by Napoleon and the Pope together; bishops would swear to do nothing to ‘disturb the public tranquillity’ and would communicate all information about those who did to the government; all divine services would include a prayer for the Republic and the consuls; although the bishops would appoint the parish priests, they couldn’t appoint anyone unacceptable to the government. The Concordat cemented the land transfers of the Revolution; all former Church property belonged to the acquéreurs ‘for ever’. […] The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rest; the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1806; children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names; salaries were paid to all clergy; orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit. Meanwhile, the Church would sing Te Deums for Napoleon’s victories, read his proclamations from its pulpits and depict conscription as a patriotic duty. […] Generals scraped their spurs and sabres on the floor of the cathedral, refused to give up seats to the clergy and talked during the ceremony, making plain the anger of the very anti-clerical army over the Concordat. Augereau requested permission to be absent, which Napoleon refused. Moreau simply ignored the order and smoked a cigar ostentatiously on the Tuileries terrace. When General Antoine-Guillaume Delmas was heard to remark, ‘ Quelle capucinade [what banal moralizing], the only thing missing are the one hundred thousand men who died to get rid of all this!’ Napoleon exiled him 50 miles from Paris. […] In the hamlets and small towns across France it had its intended effect. ‘Children listen with more docility to the voice of their parents, youth is more submissive to the authority of the magistrate, and the conscription is now effected in places where its very name used to arouse resistance,’ Napoleon told the legislature in 1803, illustrating that he primarily saw religious reconciliation in terms of propaganda and public discipline.

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Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses

According to his biographer Randall B. Woods, Johnson also liked to keep a loaded shotgun in the seat next to him, which allowed him to pull over and shoot deer easily. On the night of October 4, 1957, the then senator was entertaining a group of fellow hunting enthusiasts at his rural retreat, in the dining room of his forty-foot-tall, glass-enclosed, air-conditioned hunting blind that Johnson called his “deer tower.” All around the edge of the lair were powerful spotlights that could be turned on with the flip of a switch, blinding unsuspecting deer that had come to graze and making it easier to kill them. It was an important night for Johnson, one that would set the rest of his life on a certain path. October 4, 1957, was the night the Russians launched Sputnik, and the senator began an exuberant anti-Communist crusade. That very night, once the guests had gone home and the staff of black waiters had cleaned up, Johnson retired to his bedroom with newfound conviction. “I’ll be dammed if I sleep by the light of a Red Moon,” he told his wife, Lady Bird. […] “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from Freeway overpasses.” […] The orb was seen as ominous and foreboding, a visual portent of more bad things to come from the skies, with 4 percent of Americans claiming to have seen Sputnik with their own eyes. In reality, explained historian Matthew Brzezinski, “What most actually saw was the one-hundred-foot-long R-7 rocket casing that [Sputnik’s designer Sergei] Korolev had craftily outfitted with reflective prisms. It trailed some 600 miles behind the twenty-two-inch satellite,” which in reality could only be seen by a person using a high-powered optical device. […] Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected. Johnson seized on one detail in particular: the aircraft’s speed. At the time, the world was under the impression that the Russians held the record for airspeed, which was 1,665 miles per hour. When Johnson learned the men at Area 51 had repeatedly beaten that record, he wanted to make that fact publicly known. What better way to begin a presidency than by one-upping the Russians? […] Through a veil of half-truths, he would out the Air Force’s interceptor version of the Oxcart, the YF-12, as the speed-breaker. The YF-12 would be given a false cover, the fictitious name A-11. Respecting McCone’s national security concerns, the actual A-12 Oxcart program — its true speed, operational ceiling, and near invisibility to radar — would remain classified top secret until the CIA declassified the Oxcart program, in 2007. Three months later, on February 29, 1964, Johnson held a press conference in the International Treaty Room at the State Department. “The world record for aircraft speed, currently held by the Soviets, has been repeatedly broken in secrecy by the… A-11,” President Johnson declared from the podium, thrilled to give the Russians a poke in the ribs. […] Two YF-12s belonging to the Air Force but being tested at Area 51 were quickly flown in from Groom Lake and driven into a special hangar at Edwards. The airplanes’ titanium surfaces were so hot they set off the hangar’s sprinkler system, which mistook the high-temperature metal for a fire. When the press junket began, the aircraft were still dripping wet. Never mind; no one noticed.

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Even SpaceX looks like small potatoes next to an industry like global logistics

Cargo airships could be big , Eli Dourado notes, because the performance of an airship gets better as it gets bigger:

If your airship performance isn’t good enough, just double it in size. The lift will increase by a factor of 8, the drag will increase by a factor of 4, and the lift-to-drag ratio will therefore double. Still not good enough? Do it again. To do cargo airships right, we need to make the biggest flying objects ever created. A modern cargo airship would make the Hindenburg puny by comparison. […] According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, average revenue per domestic ton-km is about 83¢ for air freight, 11¢ for trucks, and 2¢ for water transportation (in spite of the Jones Act). […] What we observe under these conditions is that, domestically, most of both the tonnage and value of cargo is transported via truck. Trucks are neither the fastest nor the cheapest mode of transport, but they provide a great value proposition—you get your stuff in a few days for much cheaper than air freight. […] Let’s say airships captured half of the 13 trillion ton-km currently served by container ships at a price of 10¢ per ton-km. That would equal $650 billion in annual revenue for cargo airships, notably much bigger than the $106 billion Boeing reports for the entire global air freight market. If one company owned the cargo airship market, taking only half of only the container market, it would be the biggest company in the world by revenue. […] If each airship can carry 500 tons, cruises at 90 km/h, and is utilized two-thirds of the time, that adds up to around 260 million ton-km per year per airship. To produce 6.5 trillion ton-km per year would require 25,000 such airships. This is about the number of airliners in the world today. […] When I initially started thinking about cargo airships, I thought it would make sense to take a cue from Hindenburg, which cruised at 125 km/h. As I will discuss below, maybe that is still the right choice, but even at that speed, you are on the wrong side of some unpleasant math. The power needed to drive an airship is proportional to velocity cubed. Because the mission takes less time when the ship is moving faster, the total mission fuel required is proportional only to velocity squared. The net effect is that transport efficiency decreases quadratically with cruise speed. […] Cargo airships would probably be among the easiest vehicles to make unmanned. The sky is big and empty, but it’s especially empty over the ocean at the lowish altitudes, below airliners’ Class A airspace, where airships would fly. […] The USGS estimates the private sector price of helium to be $7.57/m³, while hydrogen is sometimes available for $0.11/m³. It would cost almost $8 million to fill our 500-ton airship with helium, and just over $100k to fill it with hydrogen. Lifting gas doesn’t get used up the same way as fuel does, but through leaks and venting, it wouldn’t be just a one-time charge. Hydrogen is cheap enough that you can design to vent it to help keep the ship trim. […] The USGS estimates that the entire planet has helium reserves of around 40 billion m³. Global helium production is only around 160 million m³ per year, enough for about 141 airships. […] Ideally, airship fuel would be neutrally buoyant, the same density as the surrounding air. This would ensure that as the fuel burned off throughout the journey, there would be no need to vent lifting gas. You could do this by using as fuel a mixture of the slightly heavier-than-air propane (C?H?) and the slightly lighter-than-air ethane (C?H?). […] With real-time wind data, it should be possible to plan a route that uses winds to minimize fuel burn and increase overall performance. It would be bringing a form of sailing back, only using tons of atmospheric data and autonomous route planning to do it in modern style. […] We’ve been assuming a cargo airship can do 260 million ton-km/year at 10¢/ton-km for annual revenue of $26 million/airship. The fuel cost of doing 260 million ton-km would be around $4 million, leaving $22 million/year for other costs including insurance, capex amortization, ground support, maintenance, and profit. This depends on a lot of assumptions, but if you can build the airship at rate production at a cost around $100 million, the math is getting close to working. […] In my experience, once you start thinking about giant cargo airships, it’s hard to stop.

Indeed, he kept thinking about airships :

You can cross the Pacific in a plane in less than a day. You can pay for parcel service that will get you your package in 2 to 3 days. But for air freight service, end-to-end delivery takes a week or more, involving multiple parties: in addition to the air carrier and freight forwarder, at both the origin and destination, there is a trucking company, a warehouse, a customs broker, and an airport. Each touchpoint adds cost, delay, and the risk of theft or breakage. Once you account for all these delays and costs, the 4 to 5 days it takes to cross the Pacific on an airship starts to look pretty good. If you can pick up goods directly from a customer on one side and deliver them directly to a customer on the other, you can actually beat today’s air freight service on delivery time. This changes everything. Since airships are, after all, competitive with 747s on delivery time, you can earn the full revenue associated with air freight, not just the lower trucking rates I had assumed. Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized. Today’s 747 freighters have almost no margin. They operate in an almost perfectly competitive market and are highly sensitive to fuel costs. They simply won’t be able to compete with transpacific airships that are faster end to end, less subject to volatile fuel prices, and operating with cushy margins. A cargo airship designed to compete head to head in the air freight market could take the lion’s share of the revenue in the air cargo market while being highly profitable. […] Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX. Bring me another SpaceX! the reluctant investors might say. But even SpaceX looks like small potatoes next to an industry like global logistics. For a Falcon 9-sized investment, instead of revolutionizing a $2 billion/year (10 years ago) commercial launch market, you could transform a market that is at least 30 times bigger, with similar unit economics to SpaceX

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