| Thursday,
June 22, 2000 Home and cleaning up to
get ready to go to New York. Sigh. I am weary of travel. Anyway, here are
some items in my "to be posted" stack.
Here's an interesting one from Roland that I
missed last week. It's an interesting link to the economics of record
publishing:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html
I am no fan of Salon, but sometimes they sneak in
some interesting information.
Out of print they may be, but I find almost 200
copies of books by G. Harry Stine (including _The Third Industrial
Revolution_) available at the Alibris.com web site.
Klam
But then there is this:
> Out of print they may be, but I find almost 200 copies of books by
G. Harry Stine (including _The Third Industrial Revolution_) available at
the Alibris.com web site.
I suggest avoiding Alibris. They are basically a
broker. When you find an out-of-print book there and order it, they simply
turn around and order it from the bookstore that actually has it. That
bookstore ships it to Alibris, who then ships it to you. In addition to
paying more to fund Alibris's cut, you pay twice for shipping (directly or
indirectly), and the book takes longer to arrive. Alibris wants to make
sure, you see, that you don't know who the bookseller is and that the
bookseller doesn't know who you are.
A much better source for used and OOP books is
ABEbooks.com. They offer you the option to do it either way. If you'd
rather not trust a book dealer that you don't know, you can order the book
directly from ABEbooks and they'll have it drop-shipped to you. If you
prefer to deal directly with the bookseller, you can order it directly
from the bookstore which actually has the book you want. ABEbooks provides
contact information, including the web URL when available, for the folks
who actually have the book you want.
Back before they changed their name and ownership,
Alibris was a pretty good outfit. But I wouldn't order anything from them
now. ABEbooks is the way to go.
Bob
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com
In my case I generally deal with book stores, but
I HAVE most out of print books it turns out I want. Including all of
Harry's, most of them signed.
On Web Servers:
Building the server is the easy part. Designing a
good site is the hard part. You are familiar with our company site (I am
making search changes to make it easier to find stuff at the moment). We
have a dual PIII 650 with 256 MB ECC SDRAM, and a 26 GB striped set of
SCSI drives to serve up the data, running WindowsNT 4.0 and IIS 4. Many
people also forget the other needs besides a web server. You need a decent
name server and mail server as well. NT can handle this too, though my
recommendation is not to put all your eggs in one basket. So, I built a
Pentium 200 with 64 MB RAM and a 4.3 GB ATA HDD, running RedHat Linux 6.0
to be the name server and mail server. Building that was easy. The hard
part was site design. Eventually, we chose Homesite as our editor, and
also use Photoshop for images and mapedit for the few image maps I have
done. I am a little graphics challenged, but for the most part, site
coding isn't hard, it's the "killer design" that eludes me.
My recommendation (as a professional in this field,
which just means I get paid for it): if you have lots of free time, no
deadlines, and your time isn't too valuable to you- go ahead and build
your own. However, if you'd rather just have it done, or don't have the
time, on a deadline, etc., pay somebody to do it. One cannot swing a cat
anymore without hitting a "web designer", and even some of the
smallest communities have hosting services nearby.
George Laiacona III <george@eisainc.com> ICQ
37042478/ 28885038 "It's OK to abandon your principles, if you're
doing right." "If you have enough ammo, it doesn't matter how
badly you aim." -Axly Suregrip
Incidentally, that last little humorous blurb is
good thinking: one the answers to decoys in defense against ICBM: have
enough ammunition to waste them all, decoys, warheads, booster bus,
anything up there. With a laser have enough power to raster the threat
tube. Use directed debris (junk fired by a nuclear weapon) to sterilize
threat tubes (ICBM's have to travel through a quite predictable area if
they are to get from launch site to target).
If you have enough ammo, target discrimination
isn't very important. The software is simple, too: Over this area, if it's
there, burn it.
I seem to have got a lot of mail
on this. I suppose I should be flattered that an off hand comment to an
addendum to a letter generates that much comment, but it also means I
don't get to make off-hand comments.
If you have enough ammo: This can carry over into
other combats as well. Obviously I'd rather have troops who can shoot
straight and hit what they are aiming at, but in WW II only about 20% of
the troops in the front lines ever fired their weapons at all. Better to
have them spray and pray than do nothing. Better yet of course is
training to have troops who both fire and hit what they are aiming at. In
any event, I hadn't intended to start a philosophical discussion about all
forms of combat. When the goal is to take out something that might
cost 8 million lives, and the alternatives are to raster the target area
or do nothing, I know which I would do -- especially if I am in the end
target area.
For God's sake, it was a CONDITIONAL. I*F*
YOU HAVE ENOUGH ammo. Is there anyone in this world who thinks I am
so blooking dumb that I don't know there are logistics problems involved?
Or that any reader is that dumb? Fine.
Most of this mail quotes Jeff Cooper, on
"you can't miss fast enough." Well, for individuals in combat,
that is certainly true. Old gunfighters understood that the first aimed
shot was the one that won the fight. Usually. Unless you carried a shotgun
at close range. Carried to its conclusion the "don't fire for
effect" rule would preclude shotguns, no? The fact is that infantry
combat is quite different from individual or police combat and gunfighting.
Different tactics apply, and what is best depends on a lot of stuff.
Sure, the simple way to win is to take out all
the other guy's officers and non-coms and the few remaining heroes.
In war everything is very simple. Unfortunately, the simplest things are
very difficult...
The Army's problem has been for a long time that
getting a troop to the lines, keeping him there, feeding him, etc., is
expensive in logistics. If he doesn't fight at all, he's costing a lot.
That is the dilemma that led to some of the modern ammunition-expensive
tactics. I have about 200 books on the subject, and reams of data on
effectiveness, and that wasn't the discussion I wanted to comment on.
IF. IF YOU HAVE. IF YOU HAVE
ENOUGH. If you don't, you need different tactics. Gollies.
Duelling Macros:
I looked at the line count macro you put up. Very
interesting! He and I solved the problem two totally different ways.
Mine
is probably more efficient (although I suspect no one will ever notice
or care). Mine also has the feature that it warns you if you selected
text, so you won't think it is counting the selection.
But his could, with a little work, be made to count
the selected text, which is the way I think the macro should work: if
there is a selection, count lines in it; otherwise do the whole document.
My approach doesn't lend itself to that (hence the warning instead of a
count). -- Steve R. Hastings "Vita est" steve@hastings.org
http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
I did put up
a page for them, and I'll add to them as time goes on. There were
others, but these two ought to be Good Enough.
Due to a family tragedy Jim Baen, my sometimes
publisher and very long time friend, did a lot of research on the
"fountain of middle age". It wasn't what he started looking for,
but it is one of the things he found. I'm older than Jim but we are both
about the same physiological age which is perhaps 20 years younger than I
am. Here is one of his notes on the subject. Do understand you read this
as an adult, we give no medical advice, and if you kill yourself fooling
around with vitamins don't blame us: our official word is that if you do
this you will kill yourself. How long it takes may vary.
Sigh. Why does it take so long for the simplest things to be got
straight? I mean, it isn't really _the_ simplest thing, but it's a long
way from rocket (fuel) science.
For those who just tuned in, Homocysteine [HC] is one chemical step in
a four-step pathway leading to S-adenosylmethionine, the absolutely
required ingredient in over 40 vital (in the technical sense of required
for continued life) body chemical reactions. These include proper RNA
duplication (failure equals cancer) and myelin maintenance and growth
(failure equals paraplegia followed by death).
On the OTHER hand, while homo-cysteine is absolutely required for the
"SAMe Salvage Pathway," a super-abundance of HC (superabundance
equals more than is used by the SAMe pathway) acts as a poison, burning
into blood-vessel walls, among other things. One result of HC poisoning is
arterial plaque, which protects sore spots from more HC. Sometime the bits
of plaque come lose and cause heart attacks &;c. Another common result
of too much HC is that the blood-vessel walls get eaten away until they
are to weak to hold against interior pressure and they blow out. That's
called a stroke when it happens in the brain. I don't know what it is
called elsewhere in the bod.
So to oversimplify the dilemma: heart attacks &; strokes vs
neurological collapse and cancer. What to do, what to do. Simple.
Hype up the SAMe Salvage Pathway so that you use as much HC as possible
making SAM (Can't have to much SAM. Note also that the pathway becomes
less efficient with age, so if you are over 50 LISTEN UP!) The way to do
this is also really, really simple: take a minimum of one mg. of vit. B12
(the "regular" n-methyl-cobalamin, not the new sports type,
cobalamin-sylmethionine, which is nifty in other ways but IS NOT USED in
the SAM Salvage Pathway!), 1.6 mg folic acid, and (also important) 1.5
grams (sic) of Trimethylglycine, also known as the digestive aid, betaine.
Ok, got that? The rough and ready answer is to take daily 1 mg B12, one
mg folic acid, and one and a half grams of betaine, aka trimethylglycine
and forget about it. (Believe me, I have only touched on the benefits of
hyping the SAM levels in your system.)
Anybody who is feeling like a public benefactor, I request that both
before and after starting this regime that you have your HC levels checked
and report back. The reason for this is that I SUPECT BUT DO NOT KNOW that
the above is all you need to do to control HC, and I would like more data.
If it turns out that you do the above and still have an HC overage, you
should take progressively larger amounts of B6 and vit C. This chemical
duo acts to catabolize HC by turning it into cystathionine, which after
further processing crosses the mitochondrial barriers and in the process
is burned as food.
But NOTE: overdoses of B6 have been associated with
"mysterious" neurological symptoms, which you and I can easily
guess result from "stealing" HC that would otherwise be used in
SAM production. (Perfect Murder: overdose old person on B6 while
eliminating B12 &; folate from the diet. The medical fraternity
wouldn't even know it was a crime.)
See? I said it was simple. But seriously, down on the bottom line it IS
simple:
Take SAMe, folic acid and betaine (aka TMG) and you turn homocysteine
into an angelic substance that will not cause heart attacks but instead
will keep you sane and prevent cancer. Simple as that. :)
Hey! Who pushed my button??
Subject: Homocysteine in the News
There was an article in todays Star Tribune (MN) by
NY Times reporter Jane Brody about Homocysteine causing the same problems
cholesterol has been blamed for. Stuff discussed here years ago.
They're still getting it slightly wrong though. They
are blaming it on a high protein (meat) diet. Suggest cutting down sources
of Methionine. Duh...
They do mention using Folic B6 and B12 to hold it in
control. They also mention that the diets that are used to control
cholesterol tend to be very low in Folate.
Amounts of Folic are also increasing up to about 5
times the 400 ugs the government tells us is RDA.
JIM BAEN
To reply: mailto:baenlonglife.93591@bar.baen.com To
start new topic: mailto:baenlonglife@bar.baen.com To login: http://bar.baen.com/~Bar
June 22
Dear Jerry:
I'm experiencing a problem on my Dell desktop
machine that is identical to one you had years ago, I think; this goes
back so far into the mists of time BYTE was a print journal at the time!
I added 128MB of Crucial memory to my Dell Dimension
last summer, and started to get VERY occasional "Memory Parity Error
Detected - System Halted" errors. I'd reboot, and the problem would
go away for another few days or weeks. I never experienced a problem or a
system lockup once the machine fully booted into Windows, so basically I
didn't worry about it, until yesterday. Now I have to try three maybe four
times to boot my machine successfully - the Parity Error strikes more
often than not. I've run Norton's memory check - no problems reported,
same with SiSoft Sandra's memory benchmark. The machine still operates
normally if I can coax it through the boot process.
I seem to remember you had the exact same thing
happen quite a while back, but it's so long ago I wouldn't know where to
begin to search the archives. Can you remember what you did that solved
the problem? Was it a case of Tweak to the rescue, or did you clean the
memory chip pins somehow? I just can't remember, any help much
appreciated,
All the best--
Tim Loeb
I may have had that problem, but if so it's lost
to me; I don't recall what I did about it. It NEVER hurts to try Stabilant
22. Often that fixes such problems. Beyond that we'll have to defer
to the collective mind...
Tim Loeb writes:
> [...] I added 128MB of Crucial memory to my Dell Dimension last
summer, and started to get VERY occasional "Memory Parity Error
Detected - System Halted" errors. ...
I'd be very surprised if the Crucial memory were at
fault. It may well be that Mr. Loeb has an overloaded or failing power
supply, which often causes such problems. In particular, the power supply
is more heavily loaded at boot-time, with the need to spin up drives and
so on. Even though the drives are on the +12V rail, in a mediocre power
supply a sudden load on one voltage rail can cause another voltage rail
(e.g. the +3.3V used by memory) to drop under spec voltage. Dell doesn't
use bad power supplies, but they're certainly not industrial-strength ones
like PC Power &; Cooling sells.
--
Robert Bruce Thompson
thompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com
Thanks. That would be my guess: if Stabilant 22
doesn't fix it, then it's probably power. Pournelle's Laws: It's a cable.
If that doesn't do it, it's a bad connection. If that isn't it, look to
something else.
I haven't added "It's probably power"
because I have used PC Power and Cooling power supplies for nigh onto 20
years (and big Godbout linears before that!) so I never HAD a power
problem. But from my mail many do. Me, I pay the extra for PC Cool and
it's one less darned thing to worry about.
One problem with this place is that we get off on
tangents.
Subject: "If you have enough ammo" From:
Karl Lembke Date: June 22, 2000
You note that:
"...in WW II only about 20% of the troops in
the front lines ever fired their weapons at all."
I seem to recall reading that somewhere else. I
think it was in one of David Friedman's writings? There were two classes
of infantryman in WW II. One class had standard-issue weapons, which would
sometimes hit a target at a reasonable distance. If you were equipped with
one of those, firing one of those weapons was far more likely to make the
user a target than it was to damage the user's target. Better to remain as
unobtrusive as possible.
Some people had higher-quality weapons, and could
actually hit something at a decent remove. In this case, firing your
weapon would improve one's chance of survival, since this actually
decreased the number of people taking shots in one's direction.
As a result, the higher-quality weapons were far
more likely to be used.
..........Karl
That turns out not to be the case. SLAM Marshal
did extensive interviews with troops in the European campaign from
Normandy to the Bulge, as well as in Korea. Infantry front line units,
with troops armed with identical weapons, had very different patterns. A
few units actually got most of their troops engaged. Most didn't. Some of
the most decisive battles of WW II turn out to be won by a few hundred men
who actually fought and moved forward. The others were there. They weren't
cowards. They moved forward. They lent some moral support to the warriors.
But they didn't actually fight, and it had nothing to do with the weapon
they had.
In Viet Nam our troops carried that miserable
little Colt rifle (I am sure some people got rich out of that thing),
probably the worst infantry weapon ever given to US riflemen, and spent
more time in combat than many of the elite WW II units despite being
pipeline casuals undertrained for the job; yet most of them actually
fought and fired weapons. Perhaps not accurately, but then it takes an
enormous expenditure of ammunition to produce one enemy casualty anyway.
The difference was in training methods.
The old volley-firing infantry understood all
this. For a while we got away from it: the US, except in the War of 1812,
almost never had "Regulars" of the march into the face of death
variety. At Cowpens Morgan told his militia "Give me three volleys,
boys, and then you can run." They did, which was two more than
anyone expected militia to give. The charging Brits including Highlanders
saw the militia run, and charged forward -- to face Morgans few but
stalwart Continentals, who stood and fought and drove the Brits back.
In the Civil War Between The States rifles
outranged artillery in effective fire, and we got used to troops who
fought from a distance. Grant tried the old fashioned method at Cold
Harbor and lost more men per minute than in any US battle ever before or
since; Lee had his men in rifle pits, and they did all fight. The
Indian Wars were mostly fought by Legionnaires whatever we wanted to call
them. We had mixed results at WW I. But in WW II we were still
training individual riflemen to fight as riflemen, and Marshal found out
later that wasn't working so well.
It's easier to send up ammunition than food,
medicines, and general supplies to keep men going: if all the men fight,
even if they are not very effective, they put a hell of a lot of lead out,
and troops huddled in foxholes aren't doing too much good. Combined arms
doctrine makes use of suppressive fire, mobility -- the cavalry wants
their APC's mobile and able to fight mounted as BH Lidell Hart advised,
while the infantry wants more armor and less mobility -- all this goes
together with artillery that can sweep a position clean of unprotected
troops. Churchill (the Duke of Marlborough, not the Prime Minister)
understood much of this.
Yes, given my druthers I'd rather have a company
of men who hit what they aim at; but given what I'm likely to have, I'd
rather have men up on the firing step shooting, whether they hit anything
or not, than have them standing there watching. (Marshal didn't find
that most troops hid in the holes; many exposed themselves to enemy fire,
they just didn't shoot back.) That is, IF I have enough ammunition. And
the US usually does have the advantage in logistics. We're very good at
wars of attrition -- and Viet Nam was a Campaign of Attrition in the
Seventy Years War, and one we decisively won, and in fact was one of the
decisive campaigns of the Seventy Years War although we didn't recognize
it at the time. The Viet Nam vets can feel good enough: they were
absolutely vital to the end of the Cold War. But that's another story for
another time.
This essay by Trent Telenko should go into a special
report and probably will; but I'll put it up here now. I think of nothing
needed to improve it:
"MISSILE DEFENSE: WHAT ABOUT THE GAPS? Critics
of the pending US missile defense system have noted several flaws in the
system design that have yet to be addressed:
1) “There are no significant defenses against
cruise missiles. An enemy who finds his ballistic missile systems obsolete
might build or buy cruise missiles. Shorter-ranged missiles could be
launched from a cargo ship."
The reason for the lack of American cruise missile
defenses is the lack of a cruise missile threat. Russia is the only U.S.
adversary with long-range cruise missiles and the means to position them.
The collapse of the Russian submarine fleet is a fact. It is doubtful that
even a handful of Russian bombers and aerial tankers will be operational
10 years from now given the state of the Russian economy and the
corruption of its government (see below).
There are no intercontinental range cruise missiles,
be they subsonic, supersonic or hypersonic. Those have to be created and
tested first, as they require guidance systems, which function for from
hours rather than minutes. Such testing is difficult to hide from US
intelligence unless an adversary is willing to accept a high proportion of
operational failures in use, with consequent loss of scarce and expensive
nuclear warheads.
The USAF attempted to build a subsonic long-range
(possibly intercontinental) cruise missile called the "Snark" in
the early 1960's, with comical results. So many failed that the testing
staff called the Caribbean Sea, the "Snark infested waters." One
of the lost Snarks turned up in a northern Brazilian jungle during a
search for a downed light plane in the 1980's.
The only present means of consistently guiding an
intercontinental cruise missile, the Global Positioning System (GPS), is
controlled by the US military. The need to flight test missiles with an
alternative guidance system will warn us in time to develop and deploy
defenses for such long-range cruise missiles. Such testing is difficult to
hide from US intelligence unless an adversary is willing to accept a high
proportion of operational failures in used, with consequent loss of scarce
and expensive nuclear warheads. The latter is unlikely.
This leaves short and medium-range cruise missiles
launched from planes and ships by other than Russia. First, there are no
other nations with bombers able to reach America. Our distance from other
nations protects us now as it has in the past.
As for surface warships, the U.S. Navy regularly
tracks those near American waters. In times of tension a P-3 Orion patrol
plane will be maintain positive contact on such ships. During conflicts
they will sink them. Covert cargo ships and possibly conventional
submarines armed with short range, WMD armed, cruise missiles are the last
possibility, but on closer examination, those are more of a Tom Clancy
"techno-romantic fantasy" than practical threat. The concept
falls flat in three respects: technical execution, security and nuclear
control issues.
Steven Zaloga, a noted defense analyst, pointed out
recently that converting an anti-ship cruise missile to a short-range land
attack missile costs roughly the same as building a new land attack
missile, for an inferior and chancy product given Third World technical
personnel. And that is without the problem of "weaponization" of
a nuclear device to fit in one.
The most likely land attack cruise missile
candidates are converted target drones because of their range and
endurance. There are a much smaller number of drone designs and airframes
available to modify than fielded anti-ship missiles. However, target
drones are not designed for either nuclear delivery or sea launch, let
alone launch by covert freighters or submarines.
Typical 3rd world militaries are meant to look good
rather than be good. Buying target drones is an indicator they are
preparing to fight because they hardly ever, if ever, do so now. Their
purchase of drones large enough to carry nuclear warheads would be an
intelligence tipoff to the US, especially if those are not expended in
practice.
The proliferation of the Russian "Tomahawkski"
cruise missile design to China, or a Chinese copy of a Serb or
Afghan-captured Tomahawk, is the only possible significant mid-to-long
term threat. Those would be so expensive to maintain as to be limited to a
few nation-state players, and could be monitored via the usual
national-technical means.
Whatever missile is available; the Cuban Missile
Crisis exemplifies the biggest risk for such a system - what if American
surveillance catches the launch ships before they have achieved launch
position? Or before you have made the decision to strike?
And even if American surveillance systems could be
evaded, how long, in the information age, could security be maintained on
such a covert force? That is a major question for potential adversaries
given the human and electronic surveillance systems that the drug trade
and illegal immigration have spawned along the American coasts.
Then there is the nuclear control issue. Does anyone
think North Korea's "Dear Leader" or Saddam Hussein would trust
anyone with a shipload of his nukes not under the guns of regime security
forces?
In the final analysis the "covert cruise
missile freighter", or a freighter which carries or even is itself a
nuclear weapon, are only terrorist weapons, are not instruments of state
policy. Terrorism presents different problems.
If you are going to use a terrorist nuke, then you
put it in a freighter as a radiological weapon (see both editions of
Philip Wylie's _Triumph_), giving the suicide bomber a radio or cell phone
to listen to for instructions on when to ignite the trigger. This would be
lethal to a small state like Israel, but not to the US because of its vast
geographic size. It would only terminally infuriate the American people if
used on us.
Missile defenses cannot stop terrorism any more than
they can stop abortion or the common cold. People saying that they cannot,
therefore missile defenses are useless, are not to be taken seriously.
2) "Any SDI system would rely on satellites for
launch detection and target tracking. This may simply encourage potential
attackers to find a way to attack the satellites, perhaps with
lasers."
Saying that missile defense is hobbled by space
dependence is beside the point. It does not matter whether missile
defenses exist or not. American opponents are going to attack U.S. space
assets, if they can, given American conventional military reliance on
space.
In short, the problem of American military space
asset vulnerability is _independent_ of missile defense. It exists
regardless of other factors. The answer to that weakness is having robust
and quickly replaceable space assets. Getting there requires a fleet of
high flight rate, reusable, spaceplanes supporting a networked "light
satellite" constellation.
What is going on here is "Reality Check
101." For different reasons, the Clinton Administration and USAF
senior leadership are as much against a solution to this problem as they
are to missile defense. These issues are forcing both Democratic political
elites and senior USAF leadership to face a number of unpleasant truths.
Missile defense forces Democratic elites to deal
with several phobias simultaneously: its rampant anti-nuclearism, its hate
for Ronald Reagan and its 1960's anti-militarism.
The first is due to Ronald Reagan's use of SDI to
destroy popular support for the Democrat's 1980 era nuclear-freeze
movement. The Democratic nuclear phobia extends to weapons in space. Their
systematic and spiteful persecution of first SDI, then the DC-X Delta
Clipper, and then the military spaceplane in DOD budgets was an outgrowth
of this need to denigrate Reagan's legacy.
Second, deploying missile defenses with proper space
support will enable decades more of overwhelming American military power
as the nation which controls the high ground of space controls the future
destiny of the planet. The cognitive dissonance this causes former 1960's
peace activists sends them into irrational hysterics.
As for the USAF, it takes an act of both God and
Congress to force senior USAF generals to fund anything that isn't the
F-22. (See this URL: http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-20006921590.htm)
They have a pathological attachment to the F-22 that rivals the commitment
of US Army's Cavalry Branch to the horse in 1939-41. They view spaceplanes
as much of a threat to the F-22 as the tank was for the horse. It is my
opinion that an independent military space service will be required to
deal with this need as "Fighter Pilot Generals" are the
"Battleship Admirals" of the 21st century.
But that still begs the question: who is going to do
this? Russia? North Korea and the list of usual suspects? China?
Russia has a fatal corruption problem. Theft and
misuse of state property have been its national pastime for generations.
Reports from MSNBC and the NY TIMES show the full range of the problem -
from the Russian military using Il-76 to fly guns and drugs for Colombian
drug lords to local thieves stealing live power lines for their metal
content. (See http://www.msnbc.com/news/391623.asp) Russia is becoming a
kleptocratic state consisting of decaying 20th century city-states
surrounded by a 19th century, electrically powerless, countryside.
Russia won't be able to field 1,000 nukes in 10
years, let alone make the major investment in space control technology to
threaten American strategic space assets.
None of the "usual suspects" have the
means to vie for space control.
This leaves China, for which see below.
3) "The proposed missile bases in Alaska and
North Dakota could not protect the U.S. from missiles launched from the
Southern Hemisphere. This might encourage a rogue nation to launch an
attack from a ship at sea or from a temporary land base in the
south."
Trying to hide a clandestine cruise or ballistic
missile operation in an area of the world riddled with some of the most
numerous and effective U.S. (AKA D.E.A.) human intelligence networks busy
tracking the drug trade is a bad idea. Especially as those networks are
also supported by much of American signal intelligence apparatus trying to
justify their existence.
American or American-lead paramilitary forces
routinely raid or board suspicious facilities and ships near American
waters to search for illegal drugs. It gets even worse when you factor in
the impending arrival of commercial spy satellites being used by major
media to track US military forces for news ratings. The kind of furtive,
large scale and capital-intensive preparations necessary to establish such
a clandestine cruise or ballistic missile operation fits the overall
profile of a major drug operation. The differences would stick out,
attracting the wrong kind of U.S. intelligence attention.
4) "China has announced plans to build enough
missiles to overwhelm the US defense system. That larger arsenal is
seriously threatening India and other Asian nations. --Stephen V
Cole."
The question here isn't whether the Chinese will
want to build such an arsenal. It wants to build one.
The two questions that need answering are (1) does
the Chinese central government have enough cohesion to force the various
factions to pay for it and, (2) can they get their military procurement
system to produce missiles that work.
The answers are "No" and "No."
China, like all Third World States, is a thin veneer
of modernity stretched over a sea of abject poverty. It has to apply
central government discipline to extract the resources and apply them in
the right place. They've had trouble doing this for years.
The PLA has three competing military strategies
vying for funds. Strategy one is to compete straight up the USA. Buying
and license building ex-Soviet carriers (See http://www.usdefense.com/june2000/B/9/story1.htm),
destroyers and jets typifies this approach. My friend Tom Holsinger wants
to encourage the Chinese to try this by selling them the nuclear carrier
Enterprise (demilitarized) as a technological Trojan Horse. Because he
feels the Chinese have no chance of succeeding, while merely trying this
strategy will so drain their resources as to marginalize all other
potential threats.
PLA Strategy two is "asymmetric attacks', using
current technology against American vulnerabilities. Computer viruses, sea
mines, cruise or ballistic missiles and the Gerald Bull super-guns make up
this approach.
Strategy three is "Leap-ahead", where
Chinese researchers try to create military technologies that leapfrog
American capabilities, such as ground-based laser weapons to attack
American space assets. This assumes the Chinese economy develops to the
point where they can afford such toys.
The Chinese are pursuing, and inadequately funding,
all three strategies because NO ONE IS IN CHARGE. There is no
"Paramount Leader" to enforce the Chinese national interest
instead of the various factional interests, so each of the latter is going
its own way at cross-purposes.
Even assuming a "Paramount Leader" could
arise to control the factions in the near future, the Chinese still
couldn't pull off any of these strategies. The PLA Air Force is known as
the "Center of Corruption in the PLA," according to James
Dunnigan. The independent budget and testing oversight that force test
after test of American weapons is lacking in the PLAAF. Tests are
expensive and an embarrassing lost of face if they uncover failure.
Testing is kept unrealistic, and done as few times as possible, as a
result. A good historical analog is the performance of both American
torpedoes and the U.S. Naval Ordnance branch early in WW2.
Then there is the final threat to this scenario: the
Chinese version of the "DOT COM" brain drain. The foreign joint
venture companies are raiding the Chinese military industrial complex for
talented engineers and managers.
The brain drain of the "Dot Com" economy
is blamed for several recent U.S. space launch failures. Reports are that
the same is happening to the Chinese military in a much more threadbare
industrial economy, as its technological culture is "one deep."
That is a major drag on any Chinese military buildup and ensures what they
build cannot be maintained.
"Building missiles" does not mean,
"building missiles that work." This is a fact the Chinese are
well aware of in light of their reaction to the possibility of American
strategic missile defenses.
The wonderful thing about building ballistic
missiles rather than a large air force or navy is that you can parade junk
and it looks threatening. That is why American ballistic missile defenses
are so fundamentally unacceptable to the Chinese. They neutralize the
implied political threat those missiles represent, and destroy Chinese
illusions of power because they will believe our defenses work while their
missiles won't. When you combine the brain drain problem with the rampant
corruption loose in the Chinese PLAAF, and lack of direction above, the
odds approach certainty that any long-range missile built by the Chinese,
and launched by the regular military under combat conditions, will fail.
Remember that even in our checks and balance driven
procurement system, the USA did not build reliable SLBM/ICBMs during the
Cold War.
The Polaris missile had corroded safety interlocks
that rendered its nukes inert until the mid-1960s. A Titan 2 missile blew
up because someone dropped a tool on a fully fueled missile in the 1980s.
Only 3 of 7 "combat ready" Minuteman were successfully launched
from active silos in early 1980s realistic tests ordered by then Defense
Secretary Casper Weinburger - realistic compared to the standard phony
tests from Vanderberg AFB silos of carefully reworked Minuteman ICBM's.
Our MX Peacekeeper ICBM's were rendered unusable for half a decade because
of a defense contractor defrauding the government with faulty guidance
gyros.
The kicker here was that the Soviets missile
serviceability rates were half what American ballistic missiles were.
If we had such problems, and the Soviets' were far
worse, how reliable will Chinese ICBM's be? How much of drain on China's
economy will an attempt to build lots of land-based ICBM's be?
Overloading of an American SDI system should be
considered in light of Chinese capabilities, not Chinese intentions.
My sense of the missile defense issue is this:
Missile defenses can and will protect America from
missiles from China and other "rogue" nations, but their most
valuable service will not be protecting America. It will be in providing
political cover for our allies, like our Patriots did for Israel in the
Gulf War, so those allies can't be threatened if America deploys
conventional military forces in their jurisdiction.
China's fear is not that America will be protected
from Chinese nuclear weapons. It’s that Japan will be. Allowing the U.S.
to use it as a forward base for conventional forces to protect Taiwan.
This fear of American conventional military power
_undeterred_ is what is really driving opposition to American missile
deployment by the Chinese, the Russians and leftist elites in the U.S. and
Europe.
An excellent summary of the issues. I have also
put it up as a Special Report.
I have never thought it an evil thing for America to be able to defend
herself. I admit that Clinton's use of the military without Congress is
disturbing -- frightening, even -- but my guess is that a new
administration will come up with a new and far better War Powers Act to
curtail some of that.
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