Defence and Freedom

Everybody knows GPS, that satellite navigation system that allows even phones to determine the location with a few metres inaccuracy, and centimetres for military-grade GPS receivers (similar for Galileo, Glonass). It sure allowed for many new and relatively cheap guided munitions, made positioning for indirect fire weapons and ships on oceans much easier and also enabled systems such as Blue Force tracker, which help troops to stay aware of where comrades and subordinates or simply off-limits locations such as hospitals are.

Less well-known are inertial navigation systems (INS), even though they're older. It began with big, heavy and expensive black boxes like this (LN3)


LN3-2A, (c) Klu andre at en.wikipedia

and now we're down to this

and "This" actually includes a GPS receiver as well. It doesn't use the most accurate INS technology, though. Currently an error of 5 metres after one minute is achievable with such MEMS technology.

Such miniaturisation (and cost reduction) isn't uncommon; it happens often that new technologies are first used on ships (if heavy and bulky) or airplanes (if price is the greatest problem), then descend towards tanks and finally become portable. We've had this with radios already, and hard-kill active protection systems appear to follow a similar route.

INS already made it down to chip size, weight and cost - and thus qualifies for use in munitions even.

The accuracy of guided munitions can be summarized like this:

semi active laser (SAL) > GPS > INS

The combination of SAL + GPS + INS appears to become a widespread choice in guided munitions, in which SAL is only available if someone can illuminate the target (suitable for moving targets), GPS is sufficient for hitting stationary targets and INS is the backup to GPS in case GPS fails due to jamming.

So even perfect GPS jamming will only increase the CEP (circular error probable, a metric for shot dispersion) modestly.

The small size and low cost of modern INS is beginning to make itself felt, for such chips have been available for a few years only and development cycles for munitions and drones are frustratingly long.

We'll likely see such chips in individual infantry (and even more so scout) equipment, and even in perfect GPS/Galileo/Glonass conditions future troops may receive timely warning of incoming threats because their personal radio received a warning message and the navigation by INS allowed some tiny central computer chip to determine that the warning was relevant, creating an audio warning with the headphones.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2015/12/25

The economic case against OPVs

For mysterious reasons the idea of OPVs is incredibly 'sexy' and intuitive to many people. This nonsense justifies a dedicated post:

What do you need in war (and for deterrence of war)? Combat capability. Warships are built for it, OPVs are mere targets in combat.

What do you need in peacetime? Policing and rescue ships. Both warships and OPVs can meet this need.

Italian Coast Guard patrol boat U. Diciotti, CP-902 (c) A. Deligiannis

Scenario A: A fleet with warships, no OPVs.

Result: Enough warships for war's needs, enough ships for policing and rescue.

Scenario B: A fleet with OPVs, no warships.

Result: No ships for war's needs, enough ships for policing and rescue, least costs.

Scenario C: A fleet with many warships and many OPVs.

Result: Enough warships for war's needs, more than enough ships for policing and rescue.

Scenario D: A fleet with few warships and many OPVs costing as much as in scenario A.

Result:Not enough warships for war's needs, still more than enough ships for policing and rescue.

Scenarios A-D point to an all-OPV fleet (scenario B) being a decent (cheap) choice for countries that won't muster enough warships for war anyway.

Table: Comparison of expenses of a warship and an OPV for policing and rescue duties:

(naval warmaking capability required)

	warship	OPV
development	sunk costs	sunk costs
production	sunk costs	sunk costs
fuel	sunk costs	yes
manning	sunk costs	yes
munitions	negligible	negligible

Why the warships' manning and fuel expenses are sunk costs? Simple; the warship would be out at sea for training anyway.
Warship fuel and manning expenses may be (slightly or very much) greater in this case, but they're sunk costs!

Now a table about a situation in which warships are on duty and the purchase of an OPV is being considered:

	warship	OPV
development	sunk costs	yes
production	sunk costs	yes

The introduction of an OPV is not cheaper, but truly expensive if your country already has warships!

People who just L O V E the idea of OPVs fall for the sunk costs trap. They don't get that sending a 10,000 ton warship to deal with some illegal fishing boats is actually cheaper than to develop, purchase and send a 1,500 ton OPV to do the job. They don't get this because they look at total costs - including the costs that are not being influenced by the decision. That's about the most fundamental mistake you could do in an economic decision.

To avoid total costs (except in investment decisions) and look at the relevant costs only is extremely counter-intuitive to people in uncommon decisions and incredibly difficult to hammer into their brains.

After all, frigates and destroyers can easily do what the best and biggest OPVs can do:

Patrol, withstand severe weather at sea, search and rescue, boarding, sea search, ship identification, helicopter operations, launching and recovering small boats, treat minor injuries, tow a ship or boat, extinguish fires with water gun. A few policemen instead of marines on board would suffice to meet legal authority requirements.

Warship crew training would not suffer much from offshore policing duties: All those activities listed above need be mastered by a warship crew as well. Only the training of warship crews for combat as part of a battlegroup would differ, and this applies only to tactical centre and bridge teams. It can also be done in a small fraction of the overall time at sea.

In fact, navies did all those "OPV" jobs with warships for centuries. That's what the original "frigates" and later "cruisers" were for, albeit smaller sloops (useful as scouts and messengers in wartime) were used in even greater numbers for it during the age of sail.

Not convinced?

To take into account the costs called "sunk costs" above is the same as if you choose whether to ride the bus or your 30,000 $ car to the cinema and conclude that driving your car is too expensive "because its purchase price was 30,000 €".

The purchase price does not matter! Depreciation (wear & tear) and fuel costs matter only - the not-sunk costs!

Example U.S.Navy and U.S. Coast Guard: It's unthinkable to have a navy but no or hardly any Coast Guard, right? Yes, it's unthinkable because the U.S.Navy doesn't care about its home waters. They care about all other waters, it's the cult of "forward deployment" instead of "defense".

The U.S. Navy could easily replace all large USCG cutters in action with frigates and destroyers.

Even more stupid than adding OPVs to a fleet of warships is what Germany did and does:

It buys ships with hardly more than an OPV's capability at the price of real warships. K130 and F125 are outright scandals.

I can guarantee - GUARANTEE - that even if not today, some readers will still favour OPVs sooner or later. This irrational, intuitive nonsense will not die.

I arranged for Chuck at Chuck Hill's CG blog to prepare a pro-OPV rebuttal to this, so feel free to look at it. He's the coast guard expert in comparison to me. Comments are closed here, open there.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2015/12/24

How Santa Claus Ended Up on U.S. Military’s Radar

"How Santa Claus Ended Up on U.S. Military’s Radar"

Michael Beschloss, the Upshot

2015/12/23

Indirect fire shot dispersion

I noticed some of the things I wrote make more sense with some background knowledge about shot dispersion. Well, this is what the dispersion of artillery shells (and rockets or mortar bombs) looks like in practice, without trajectory correction or guidance:

shot dispersion pattern diagram from U.S.Army FM 6-40

"CEP" (circular error probable) figures pretend that the dispersion pattern is circular instead of approximately oval. It would be more interesting to have two figures; one for length and one for width of the dispersion.

Shot dispersion depends on range and elevation angle. An example dispersion of a 155 mm howitzer (M777):

"Range Precision PE: .35% (assisted), .30% (unassisted) of range
Deflection Precision PE: 1 mil (low angle), 2 mils (high angle)"

Depending on the fragmentation characteristics, there should be no friendly troops within 300-900 m to the left or right (wartime safety distance), somewhat less upper and lower side (of this diagram as shown here). This is usually defined by a combination of inaccuracy (mean point of impact deviation from the intended one), dispersion and how far the biggest fragments travel. Modern software-based artillery fire control systems can take into account that the wartime safety distance depends on direction of shot, range, elevation angle and munition and could thus correctly give a "go" for salvoes that would not have been permissible with the old simplistic rules.

Modern HE munitions with pre-formed fragments have less if any large fragments that are dangerous far from the explosion and thus have lower wartime safety distance requirements (see here, for example).

A further possibility is to reduce this wartime safety distance with the use of trajectory correcting munitions. These get aimed a bit too far, and then an airbrake deployed by the fuse at the right time to reduce the dispersion in range by very much (SPACIDO seems to be an extraordinarily versatile and GPS-independent example, but it depends on the use of a muzzle velocity radar and a directional radio data-uplink):

reduction of shell dispersion in range by trajectory correcting fuse

The aiming at a too far point ensures that overshot friendly troops are safe even if the airbrake doesn't engage.

Another possibility for firing more close to friendly troops is to not overshoot them, but to use flanking fires - to shoot at something in front of them from the side. This makes the use of multiple firing positions particularly useful, and thus the concept of horizontal cooperation in which one battalion battlegroup provides support fires to another one if its guns are better positioned. The dispersion in range can (occasionally) be exploited to good effect when firing smoke rounds in order to create a smoke wall at long ranges without adjusting the aim.

The Soviets used (among other artillery tactics) a barrage technique during WW2 in which they left a (relatively) safe path through the battlefield for their assaulting troops, which were protected against flank shots by the suppressive effect and dust thrown up by the shell explosions to the left and right. This required them to set up batteries of suitable types at the right places, so the path would really be quite safe. The knowledge of the ordnance's dispersion patterns was of great utility for this (and so was the knowledge about which batteries had the least worn-out barrels).

_ _ _ _ _

Artillery topics gain less attention than tank or infantry topics, but modern warfare (WW2 and later) has shown that more often than not indirect fires (by howitzers, rockets, mortars, cannons) are the biggest killer, and often more decisive than the supposedly decisive manoeuvre of tanks. The implementation of indirect fires in exercises has been difficult (albeit it should be easier now since radios and GPS receivers are widespread and infantry or tanks caught at the wrong spot at the wrong time could receive a "you were killed by indirect fires" message). To our (NATO, EU) disadvantage, the Russians were and still are very fond of artillery and indirect fires in general. Reports from the Ukraine indicate a 80-95% share of kills by indirect fires, for example. They didn't need to use many guided rounds or even only cluster munitions for this effect. Old-school steel-walled HE rounds without guidance or trajectory correction, often even without muzzle velocity measurement, appear to provide the most volume of fire in the Eastern Ukraine.

It's important for our deterrence to get indirect fires right, and this should also have much effect on procurement and force structures. We shouldn't want to use this firepower, but to have it is useful for deterrence. Moreover, the smarter we spend on indirect fires, the less we need to spend for the same military power and thus deterrence.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2015/12/22

"Preston"

From the UK:

The "Big Brother" comprehensive national database system feared by many MPs has been built behind their backs over the last decade, and even has a name for its most intrusive component: a central London national phone and internet tapping centre called PRESTON.

"Big Brother is born. And we find out 15 years too late to stop him"

Duncan Campbell, theregister.co.uk

The only way to keep intelligence services under control and working for the people appears to be to create a dedicated agency with directly elected officials* that have 100% access power comparable to a permanent search warrant and subpoena power against the intelligence agencies (and the authority to take the police with them to enforce this access by force if necessary). And of course they would need to be authorised to publish whatever they want, the intelligence services' ability to simply classify their fuck-ups is

related: 2013-09 Effective oversight over bureaucracies

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: With at least two elected officials of equal power, the one with the most and the one with the second-most votes. This way even a submissive, authority-believing public could end up having at least one true champion for civil liberties in that office.

2015/12/19

Bomb, bomb, bomb - bomb, bomb, Agrabah!

"Almost one-third of Republican primary voters would support bombing the fictional kingdom of Agrabah, according to a report released by Public Policy Polling on Friday."

theguardian.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBvIweCIgwk

2015/12/18

The three faces of Daesh

This is not going to be a comprehensive description of Daesh; it's rather an analysis that breaks Daesh down to an abstract level that's of interest from a particular perspective.

Daesh is commonly referred to as if it was a homogeneous entity, and from this fallacies such as the idea that bombing Daesh in Syria and Iraq would help fight errorism in Western countries stem from.

There are (as far as I can tell) three distinct faces of Daesh from the counterterrorism point of view:

(1) Daesh, the civil war faction and proto-state in Syria and Iraq

(2) The largely Daesh-indipendent jihadists (in the broadest sense, including loudmouths) overseas, and of particular interest:In the Western world.

(3) Daesh agents; charismatic zealots sent abroad by the Daesh leadership to build cells if not entire civil war factions in some Muslim country

It's noteworthy that #2 includes all those people who would have sworn allegiance to AQ and Usama Bin Laden only a few years ago.

Daesh has a problem in its civil war activities; it's killing almost exclusively Muslims, and at most some Muslims of a different sect or with less radical spirituality. This is bad from a Jihad point of view; from that point of view, they ought to kill non-Muslims, not followers of Muhammed. They're thus desperate to build the fight against such infidels into their brand, and category #2 provides the useful idiots who do this. The more attention they get for their activities, the better for Daesh recruiting of zealot mercenaries for the civil war forces in Syria and Iraq.

Category #3 is divided between those agents sent to Muslim countries and those sent to Western countries; so far the latter group is almost negligible. It's only this tiny latter group (and charismatic zealots who are not totally known to Western intelligence services are extremely rare) that's potentially going to cause trouble (errorism) to the Western world. The charismatic zealot agents sent to create a Daesh metastasis in a Muslim country are not the problem of the Western world, except potentially Turkey, Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia. And frankly, I don't think they would last long in Kosovo considering its powerful underworld.

The allergic reaction of the Western world to the murders in Paris is playing into the hands of Daesh. Daesh WANTS us to oppose them because they WANT to be seen as opposing us. Nothing would be worse to them than 24/7 news reports about how Daesh kills scores of devout Muslims in a perfectly secular struggle for individual power of its leaders!

The West's primitive allergic reaction also fails to reduce the threat from errorism (much less being efficient compared to other life-extending policies) because bombing category #1 means to bomb a civil war faction and proto-state, not bombing noticeable quantities of terrorists that would strike against the Western world.

Then again, it's not strategy what the Western countries do. It's the primitive, intuitive reaction of cavemen. They got and get played by a Daesh leadership that's smarter than them. Daesh will ultimately fail with its outright ludicrous exaggeration of the German mistake of accumulating too many enemies at war in parallel, but it does much more harm to us in the West in the process than is unavoidable.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2015/12/16

Study: Elite scientists can hold back science

"All this suggest there's a "goliath's shadow" effect. People are either prevented from or afraid of challenging a leading thinker in a field. That or scientific subfields are like grown-up versions of high school cafeteria tables. New people just can't sit there until the queen bee dies."

"Study: Elite scientists can hold back science"

Vox, Brian Resnick

Now consider this:

In military theory, most dominant documents are field manuals that don't die. They get revised after a decade or two, but usually only incrementally. The few dominant authors who publish independently (the likes of Jomini, von Clausewitz, Fuller, Mahan, Corbett) die, but in many cases they reach the greatest fame only after their death (CvC being the most obvious example) and many of them keep being famous and dominant after more than a century. In some cases it's the death of the originator that unleashes the teaching because the acolytes are then free to interpret vague ideas themselves and claim that it's still the real thing (examples Boyd, CvC).

Military theory "may" have a systemic innovation problem.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

2015/12/14

Mechanised forces and flat woodland

Woodland is largely considered to be no good terrain for tanks, but that's only partially true. Tank forces made much use of woodland (including the famous dash through the Ardennes in 1940) for resting, as marshalling areas and for concealment. ATGMs are no threat in woodland, for example.

Flat woodland with young trees offer little resistance to tanks 30+ tons heavy with 400+ hp power - particularly if the roots are deep. Flat roots may push upwards to the belly and cause trouble while deep roots stay in the ground when a tank rams the tree.

T-34 passing through woodland, 1945

These training videos show tests (mostly done with Leopard 1 tanks) about the ability of MBTs to pass through woodland, including the effect of slopes:

Stronger trees tend to grow with greater spacing, and often allow tanks to pass in between. Only a few of them would need be cut down to allow passage for MBTs or even cars.

Typical German forest aisle

Eastern European woodland is very different from Central European woodland, with greatly different consequences for mechanised forces' manoeuvres.

Central European woodland is often very hilly (typical German woodland is on hill top and crests), has many unpaved forestry roads and to limit fire hazards there are many forest aisles.

Eastern European woodland meanwhile is largely flat, and as the videos above showed, this makes a huge difference. There are different trees as well, but I'm not well-informed on which exactly.

So the relevance of Eastern European woodland as obstacles may differ greatly from Central European ones'.* I'm not aware of any doctrinal or equipment adaptation to this on part of the German army. Maybe we should pay much attention. The following video is interesting:

There is actually such a thing as a forestry mower.

A kind of lawn mower on steroids, to cut through woodland:

It is imaginable that armoured engineers could cut through most Eastern European woodland at a walking pace or more, leaving behind an unpaved (or even paved!) road for combat and supply motor vehicles of all sorts. Even plain tank battalions might be quipped to move at a bicycle's speed through woodland with stems of up to 30 cm diameter (deep roots).

Such efforts would be loud and may attract artillery fires, but they're nevertheless really bad news for everyone who hopes to gain any defensive effect from woodland in the Baltic countries, for example.

Maybe the tank and engineer troops in NATO countries should be equipped and trained differently in order to adapt to Eastern European woodland characteristics, but this might take a long time. The West German army's requirement for a mine sweeping tank (using a technology improvised in 1942!) took almost 35 years to produce an operational capability and that need was much more self-evident.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Similar with rivers and lakes: Those tend to freeze over and allow even vehicles to pass much more in Northeastern Europe than in Central Europe.