One of the Ways Drones Have Changed the Battlefield

photog Current Events , , ,

FPV (first person view) drones have become ubiquitous over the battlefields of Ukraine.  And they’ve changed the way war is fought there.  These cheap and numerous devices can destroy a main battle tank or drop a munition in a trench without any reliable way of preventing these attacks.

So what’s a tank commander to do?  Well, so far the answer is to cover your tank with sheet metal and chicken cages (see photo below).

These ad hoc modifications sort of remind me of what was done to the Striker vehicles with wire additions used to catch RPG’s before they reached the armor.  The other change in tactics I’ve heard about is outrunning the drones.  Now we have infantrymen riding motorcycles and even golf carts in order to avoid the drones while crossing open fields.  So speed trumps armor for protection for now.

At a higher level what we are seeing is the beginning of automated weapon systems fighting each other on the battle field.  As soon as we have drones attacking drones we have to wonder where the humble foot soldier stands in this rapidly escalating clutter of deadly devices.

Update:

War Pig:

Infantry will be necessary for the foreseeable future. Urban fighting is still beyond drones. Furthermore, you do not own or control territory unless you have a soldier standing on it with a rifle and fixed bayonet.

Drones are a fine tool for some fighting and reconnaissance. They make good suicide weapons and you save casualties by using them. Our 6th generation fighters will have in-cockpit pilots as an option, not standard. But because of the reasons you stated about quantum mechanics and the human mind, drones/robots will not replace infantry/special ops/guerrillas. Humans can be darned unpredictable. In fact we can be crazier than a squirrel on methamphetamine. One way Bobby Fisher beat the supercomputer at chess was to make wildly unorthodox and apparently random moves. Confused the computer and he won.

Having worked on the ground where making life miserable for the other side by misdirection, dirty tricks and random acts of sabotage, I can say that the more random you go, the more the other side tries to analyze your acts and tactics until it takes up more and more of his resources and drives him to distraction. If humans have problems with that, given we’ve had a couple million years to improve our internal programming; what chance does an inflexible machine have?

Tales from the Van – Part 1 – The Sisterhood

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Many years ago, I commuted into Boston for work.  And because at the time there was no commuter rail from where I lived, I took a van in.  We all paid a fee and some of us drove the van on occasion and on those days, we’d get a day knocked off our fee for the next month.  And I’ll have to say that we had a very “diverse” cast of characters.  And I mean that by every definition of the word.  Not only racially, ethnically, careerwise and socio-economically but also philosophically and by personality type.  We were a motley crew.  We even had a guy who worked for one of the intelligence agencies (or so he said).  There were a few people who couldn’t stand each other and there were some very close friends.

But even though most of us didn’t know each other “in the real world,” for an hour in the morning and the afternoon we spent our time talking about the events of the day and the latest sit-com and our work day and our home lives and anything else to pass the time.  And it’s a funny thing but to the people on the van what we thought about the world was a pretty important part of our day.  We would argue politics and social trends.  And once in a while, the guys would even get together for a social gathering.   One time I had the boys over for a poker game and sandwiches.  It was a great success, meaning no one lost too much and everyone ate too much and drank way too much beer.  And this cemented the male camaraderie of the van immensely.  Once you’ve bluffed yourself to a pot with a broken straight it’s almost like you’re boyhood chums.

There was a feminist contingent on the van too and they would provide a united front when explaining why men were the cause of all the problems in the world.  That is until they needed help with a flat tire or an angry motorist on the road.  I remember a time when I was riding shotgun while one of the most strident feminists was driving the van through Boston street-traffic.  It was an awful ride.  We were in a bumper-to-bumper jam and she had lost all patience and was laying on the horn every other minute or so.  Finally, the guy in front of us in a brand-new sports car, throws his car into park, jumps out of his car.  He’s about six foot five and comes running over and bangs on her window with his fist.

Well, this champion of female equality, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the van like a shot.  Which I found hilarious.  Until I realized she had left the van in gear.  So of course we rolled into the back of the sports car.  Now I had to climb over the hump and get into the driver’s seat.  The engine had stalled out and I had to nurse it back to life and then throw it into reverse to separate us from the sports car.  All the while the irate driver is hopping up and down screaming over us hitting his car.  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I shrugged my shoulder and pointed out to him that traffic was moving and tried not to laugh.  After he convinced himself that his bumper wasn’t much the worse for the bump and realized that if he wanted to make an accident report of it, he’d have to tell a traffic cop that he had been threatening a woman driver for being a woman driver he slunk back to his car and we proceeded.

But that little demonstration had us laughing at the sisterhood for a good long time about having a concrete answer as to, “What good are men?”  But pretty soon the sisterhood had convinced themselves again that women were the only intelligent life in the universe.

There was another occasion when the gals were plotting their takeover of the world.  And they had managed to set off one of the less easy-going guys with their claim that a pack of five women could kill any man in a fight.  They badgered him for a good long time and they could see this talk got under his skin so they did it all the more.  They demanded that he tell them how he could possibly hope to fight against five opponents.  After all, they said, if all of them constantly pummeled him from all sides they’d eventually injure him enough to overwhelm him.

So finally, he said, the tactic he would use would be to get a strong hold on one woman and bash her head into the ground and then do the same to each of them consecutively.  He believed this would have a twofold advantage.  Firstly, finishing off one opponent completely would significantly improve his position in the fight.  But more importantly, he believed that psychologically women would be unlikely to continue attacking a man that had just bashed a woman’s head in.

His logic seemed to have been persuasive.  The gals gave up that thought experiment completely and the rest of the ride was very quiet.  After that they didn’t bother him about the war of the sexes, so to speak.  I think they were kind of scared of him.  What he said must have struck them as accurate.

But by the next day we had some new thing to argue about.  I think it was the Oscars.  The girls had a very long talk about that with very little help from us.  But at least things were back to normal.

Week Two of the Campus Hunger Strike Begins – Oh the Humanity

photog Current Events ,

If you pay attention to the young woman holding the speaker in front of the speaker you will notice that it will take at least a couple of months of fasting before she will be able to fit in her jeans without the use of a pry bar or the application of vaseline as a lubricant.

When we reach week ten I’ll be interested to see if any of the “hunger” strikers have lost any weight at all.

Princeton.  Must be great to be able to horse around on an Ivy League campus playing Che Guevera and still have Mom and Dad foot the bill.  And even better to then get a job at an Ivy League school or ABC News because of your connections.  Why didn’t I do that?  Oh, yeah.  Because I don’t have any connections.

 

 

Made in the USA

photog Current Events , ,

I remember when I was young, I got into a lot of discussions with family members who were union guys.  Cops and firemen and iron workers and other trades.  And they always said that the Republicans were bad for America because they were on the side of big business.  Now this was while the Big Three automakers were taking it on the chin from Toyota and Honda and I was claiming that the UAW was the problem.  I said the union workers were getting paid three times what auto workers made in Japan and because of that Ford couldn’t sell cars in America at a profit.

And maybe I was right about that.  At least maybe partially.  Maybe partially the Ford and GM engineers weren’t as good at making cars as their Japanese colleagues.  But whatever the case, American autoworkers priced themselves right out of a lucrative industry and Toyota ate Detroit’s lunch.

I guess American industry’s takeaway from this lesson was if you can’t beat’em, join’em.  And so, they decided not only to get rid of all those pesky union workers in America but also the engineers, the management and even the plant too and just have everything made in East Asia.  Whether it’s China or Vietnam or Thailand, the correct play was to make it over there at a fraction of the manufacturing cost via third world labor rates.  Well, you can’t say that our business leaders aren’t innovative.

Forty years of watching American corporate policy has cured me of cheering for the captains and the kings of industry.  I can see now that coordination between government, industry and labor is the correct way to maintain a healthy balance that benefits consumers, workers and capital.  In the post World War II era I think Japan is the model that I would point to as a workable model.  Of course, American government, culture and business practices differ substantially from Japan but I think that the American government’s handling of industrial policy has been demonstratively deficient in providing the American workers with gainful employment and has also failed to maintain a satisfactory minimum base of manufacturing capacity to assure independence in the case hostile governments withholding commerce in strategic materials.

So, over the course of these many years I have had a chance to reconsider my stand on labor/management relations.  What I’ve decided is that the government’s role is critical.  There must be balance that involves preventing a monopoly from existing on either the business or the labor side.  Competition should exist both between individual corporations and individual unions.  A union monopoly is just as detrimental to business as a corporate monopoly is to consumer concerns.  And one other union problem I see is that government workers shouldn’t be unionized at all.

Another government concern is that manufacturers of products required for national defense and other critical applications should be made domestically.  All of this requires minds that can think strategically and without prejudice for either side of the labor/management divide.  But we have nothing like that going on in Washington.

When I look at the situation as it currently stands for such critical manufacturing as high-end computer microprocessors and battle field munitions and our current dependence on foreign manufacturers, it makes me wonder if our political leaders are idiots or traitors.  We have allowed most of our industrial manufacturing capacity to be disassembled and sent offshore to China.  This disregard for the lack of gainful employment of their countrymen has to be discouraged in the only way these corporations understand; their bottom line.  It must be legislated that if their products are built by foreign workers then they will be tariffed and taxed the same as any foreign products brought into this country.

So, forty some-odd years later here I am saying where’s the “Made in USA” label on that MAGA hat?