Tag Archives: Military

The Machine Triumphant

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“FAST One, Con­tainer. Stand by for mis­sion start.“
The helms­man steps back from the con­trols, flicks the but­ton on the radio once to sig­nal acknowl­edge­ment.
On the dash­board, unseen, an LCD dis­play flicks over from “MANUAL” to “AUTONOMOUS”. Engines rev, water bub­bles and begins to surge, the air fills with smoke and the smell of diesel. And away we go.

This isn’t the first time; it’s closer to the hun­dredth. But it never stops feel­ing strange to be on a boat that has just dri­ven off on its own, humans rel­e­gated to babysit­ting duty as the AI takes con­trol. No mat­ter how many times you’ve seen the mis­sion on-screen, tweaked it, re-planned it; no mat­ter how much of the soft­ware you wrote your­self and how many tests you’ve run; at that moment you are out at sea and at the mercy of the machine.

The world’s Navies watch from afar, video feeds match­ing up with a lit­tle red icon mov­ing slowly across a chart of the har­bour. The AI does its thing. Tran­sit in, turn, deploy. Fibre-optic cable spools from its rat­tling drum. A long wait, trawl­ing slowly away from the har­bour walls. “End of mis­sion,” they radio in, then the cable is wound in, the boat kicks back into man­ual, and back home we go.

Later, words of con­grat­u­la­tion trickle down to the small office where we sit and code and eat bis­cuits between the coils of eth­er­net cable and the piles of heavy-weather gear. It was a world first, they say. The cut­ting edge of remote mine dis­posal is ours to wield.

The boat is put to sleep, and we adjourn to the pub to cel­e­brate another suc­cess­ful trial. No, the boat is turned off. When did I start to think of it as “sleeping”?

Dear America, Your Missile Defence is not Broken

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@CampaignReboot, mak­ing a good point as always, ear­lier linked to this CNN arti­cle which bemoans the state of the United States’ mis­sile defence pro­gramme after the fail­ure of a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor test.

Just to rein­force his point, let’s look at how insanely dif­fi­cult a task a Ground-Based Inter­cep­tor (GBI) mis­sile has.

An ICBM launch is first detected by detec­tors, usu­ally radar, at sea, on land, and in space. All this data must be fed back to the mis­sile base and analysed by a com­puter within a few minutes.

A GBI attempts to inter­cept it while it’s in its “mid­course” phase, which gen­er­ally lasts for around 20 min­utes — but it’s not as if the GBI turns around and tries again if it misses. You have one chance to inter­cept dur­ing that time win­dow. Dur­ing the mid­course phase, the ICBM is in space, over 1000 kilo­me­ters above the Earth. It’s mov­ing at sev­eral kilo­me­ters a sec­ond. In this test, it was over 4000 kilo­me­ters from the GBI’s launch point.

It’s around 10–20 metres long.

And you have to hit it.

This is, shall we say, not a triv­ial challenge?

Any­one assum­ing that their country’s mis­sile defence sys­tems entirely remove the pos­si­bil­ity of nuclear attack is kid­ding them­selves. Mis­sile defence is just a part of the great game of deter­rence played by the world’s few nuclear pow­ers. If any­one launches, the world is still screwed.

Luck­ily for any remain­ing Cold War doom­say­ers, the GBI’s 50% inter­cept suc­cess rate is pretty nicely matched by the Russ­ian Bulava ICBM’s 53% test suc­cess rate. And if your Red (/Green?) ter­ror of the month is North Korea or Iran, can you imag­ine their mis­sile pro­grammes hav­ing any­thing like the suc­cess rate of the Rus­sians’ or the Americans’?

So if all the ranty CNN com­menters could get over it, it would be appre­ci­ated. The US needs mis­sile defence, even though it isn’t per­fect and never will be. Aegis has a bet­ter record than the GBIs any­way, did you for­get that you had that too? North Korea is not going to nuke you tomor­row anyway.

In Which I Bemoan the Tech Level in the Navy

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My job, in the main, is to pro­duce HMIs (human-machine inter­faces) for equip­ment that’s mostly sold to the world’s Navies. Which is great — it’s a job I love, and appear to be rea­son­ably good at. We toil away for months or years, pro­duc­ing a nice GUI with lots of clicky but­tons, and usu­ally, cus­tomers love it. Often the rea­son they like it so much is because the inter­face it replaces, the inter­face of their old gear, is a bunch of giant battleship-grey painted cab­i­nets adorned with half the world’s sup­ply of lit­tle flicky tog­gle switches. In a lot of sit­u­a­tions, just being able to replace ded­i­cated hard­ware with a general-purpose com­puter is great.

But why are we stop­ping there?

The movie indus­try is often mocked for its por­trayal of com­puter inter­faces — so much so that there’s a “Hol­ly­wood OS” page ded­i­cated to list­ing their tropes. I sus­pect some peo­ple believe that, since mil­i­tary tech is thought to be sig­nif­i­cantly advanced com­pared to civil­ian tech, the world’s armed forces actu­ally have sys­tems like that.

Nope. They have Win­dows for War­ships. Same shit you run, only in a sar­dine tin with 128 nuclear war­heads on board.

But new recruits join­ing the Navy today come from a world of iPhones and Twit­ter and Layar and all the rest. They’re just as unim­pressed with Win­dows XP and a bunch of clicky but­tons as their pre­de­ces­sors are with a big rack of switches.

When the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion of the world can get push e-mail to their iPads, take lap­tops to a cof­fee shop and do every­thing just like they were at home, why do ships have so many func­tions that can only be done from one place? Tablet PCs aren’t new, even though it was only recently that Apple thrust them into the main­stream. Why doesn’t every crew­man on every ship have one? One that lets them do their job wher­ever they are on board? One that alerts them when there’s some­thing they need to look at, rather than the prob­lem just being indi­cated by a light some­where? One that con­tains illus­trated man­u­als for every bit of equip­ment they’ll ever see? And there’s plenty more that could be done.

This is Link 22. Link is pretty cool. It turns an entire fleet into a data-sharing mesh grid, so every­one can share a radar dis­play that’s a hun­dred miles wide. But the user inter­face looks like some early-90s Solaris hor­ror. Every fighter pilot gets enemy air­craft marked on their HUD, why not ships? It’s not like we don’t have the tech­nol­ogy to layer what­ever we want over the win­dows in the Bridge.

Why don’t we plan mis­sions and direct the fleet from Sur­face tables; real-time ship posi­tions over­laid on satel­lite maps? Every­one hypes up the inter­face in Minor­ity Report, that’s five years away, tops. Start the aver­age big project now, and it’ll be avail­able by the time we’re done.

Why don’t mine dis­posal oper­a­tors have VR gog­gles to see what vehi­cles see, rather than just lit­tle mon­i­tors? Why can’t they over­lay sen­sor data on their field of vision in real time? It’s no more expen­sive on the (explod­ing) vehi­cle end than what we already have.

With the world’s nose-dived econ­omy and the usual — under­stand­able — desire in the mil­i­tary to pick old and reli­able over new and shiny, I can’t imag­ine I’ll get my chance to do any of this soon. But you know, if there’s some rich fledg­ling nation out there that wants their ships to run Hol­ly­wood OS, I’m ready and waiting.

Politics, meet Videogames. Everybody Loses.

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On Sun­day, Britain’s Defence Sec­re­tary Liam Fox called for the upcom­ing Medal of Honor game to be banned by retail­ers (BBC). Appar­ently he finds it “hard to believe any cit­i­zen of our coun­try would wish to buy such a thor­oughly un-British game”, which shows quite a remark­able lack of under­stand­ing of the peo­ple he is sup­posed to rep­re­sent. And since when has there been an expec­ta­tion that Amer­i­can games should be “British” anyway?

Appar­ently it is “shock­ing that some­one would think it accept­able to recre­ate the acts of the Tal­iban against British sol­diers”. Well, in real life, maybe. But this is a game, and an 18-rated one at that, so it is played by adults that are fully capa­ble of dis­tin­guish­ing between fic­tion and reality.

And yes, you can play as the Tal­iban. It’s called mul­ti­player. Would Mr Fox pre­fer that the mul­ti­player was Amer­i­cans shoot­ing Amer­i­cans? Because that’s just as morally dubi­ous, and also kind of dumb. No, one team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys. That’s the way these things work. I don’t recall politi­cians los­ing their shit about Coun­ter­strike because zomg half the play­ers are being ter­ror­ists! How many games have there been where you can play as a Nazi sol­dier in multiplayer?

I won­der if the Defence Sec­re­tary ever got the chance to play Cops and Rob­bers as a kid, because, you know it’s no dif­fer­ent. One team plays the good guys, one team plays the bad guys, that’s how it works. Cops and Rob­bers doesn’t glo­rify vio­lent crime, just as Medal of Honor doesn’t glo­rify the Afghan insurgency.

So Mr Fox, it would be appre­ci­ated if you could please go back to get­ting our real sol­diers some MRAPs and some more heli­copters and guns that work, and leave the rest of us to enjoy our videogames. Thank you!

Preying on the Mantis

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In Dou­glas Car­swell MP’s blog post “Is Man­tis going to fly?”, he bemoans the amount of money the Min­istry of Defence have spent fund­ing BAE’s Man­tis unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle (UAV), sug­gest­ing instead that we should not have invested in it and should instead have bought exist­ing off-the-shelf UAVs, by which he pre­sum­ably means the MQ-9 Reaper. He goes on to pre­sume that a Man­tis pro­cure­ment con­tract must no longer be on the cards, based on the response he received to his ques­tion to the Sec­re­tary of State for Defence.

With all due respect to Mr Car­swell, I do believe he’s missed the point here. Not only has the Royal Air Force already bought 13 of the Reaper air­craft, but they have already seen oper­a­tional use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BAE's Mantis vehicle (picture from Wikimedia)

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle (pic­ture from Wikimedia)

BAE’s Man­tis vehi­cle is, as Par­lia­men­tary Under­sec­re­tary of State Peter Luff says, a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor — a one-off pro­to­type built in order to prove the tech­nol­ogy behind it. There never was a pro­cure­ment pro­gramme for the Man­tis. Sure, BAE received some fund­ing from the Min­istry of Defence, though as this Defense­News arti­cle sug­gests, it may not have been all that much. Mostly it seems like BAE and the other con­sor­tium mem­bers threw their own money into the Man­tis pro­gramme, and the MoD put some of their own research bud­get into it in the hope that the Man­tis would suit Britain’s needs bet­ter than the Reaper does.

As I write this post, Mr Car­swell has updated his own to address the com­ment of “an angry reader” (not me, by the way) who points out that “Man­tis is just a demo project… We’re just see­ing if we can do it bet­ter”. The MP’s response is to bring up the SA80 rifle and the Future Lynx and Eurofighter pro­grammes. Issues with the SA80 and with the Typhoon have been widely broad­cast in the press (though I can’t find any­thing par­tic­u­larly damn­ing about the Future Lynx from my brief online search). But the fact that the Man­tis is a tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor is still rel­e­vant here — the SA80 and the Typhoon are in active pro­duc­tion and use by our armed forces, the Man­tis is not.

Maybe with our glo­ri­ous 20/20 hind­sight, we should have aban­doned the Eurofighter project and bought F35s and F22s. Who knows — it’s not as if those are the epit­ome of suc­cess­ful pro­grammes. But shy­ing away from tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tors entirely, par­tic­u­larly ones that are largely privately-funded, would result in stag­na­tion. Britain is one of the few coun­tries that main­tains a high level of mil­i­tary research of its own, rather than com­mit­ting to buy­ing all our gear from the Amer­i­cans or the Rus­sians. While I don’t pre­tend to have any big num­bers to throw around, I would imag­ine that the defence sec­tor is rea­son­ably impor­tant to the British econ­omy, and it would be in poor shape indeed if the Min­istry of Defence no longer wished to invest in the kind of tech­ni­cal demon­stra­tor pro­grammes that fur­ther our country’s engi­neer­ing prowess.

(Dis­clo­sure: I’m a for­mer employee of Qine­tiQ, a mem­ber of the Man­tis con­sor­tium, though I’ve had no involve­ment with Man­tis itself.)

Morality, the Defense Industry, and What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

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My recent foray into pub­licly declar­ing my sup­port for a refresh of the UK’s Tri­dent mis­sile capa­bil­ity has got me think­ing once again about per­sonal moral­ity and the ethics of the defense industry.

Work­ing in this indus­try, it could be said that my job is depen­dent on the exis­tence of war, or at least the threat of it. And, you know, War Is Bad. So that’s not exactly a great sit­u­a­tion. If war became a com­plete implau­si­bil­ity, I would lose my job but human­ity would be vastly bet­ter off as a whole.

How­ever, that’s not going to hap­pen. Real­is­ti­cally, no chance, but even the­o­ret­i­cally — human brains seem to thrive on a ‘them and us’ men­tal­ity. From chavs and emo kids fight­ing in the school play­ground, to us and whichever group of brown peo­ple we’re bomb­ing this week, that kind of mind­set dri­ves us to con­flict. You and I, we can raise our men­tal view above that and see wars and play­ground scuf­fles for how stu­pid they often are. But can soci­ety as a whole? (Inci­den­tally, I don’t mean that other indi­vid­ual mem­bers of soci­ety can’t do this and that you and I are spe­cial — far from it. I’m refer­ring to our soci­ety itself, often quite a dif­fer­ent beast than the peo­ple that com­prise it.)

To erad­i­cate war com­pletely would be chang­ing what it is to be human, and there’s no way to do that on the scale of mil­len­nia, let alone years. Attempt­ing it is well within the realm of dystopian sci­ence fic­tion, far removed from reality.

With war inevitable, I feel no guilt for my pro­fes­sion — it’s not as if, if we all resigned tomor­row and found our­selves other jobs, we’d all go over and hug al-Qaeda and ride off into the sun­set on sparkly unicorns.

Did I grow up want­ing to be in defense? Hell no — I explic­itly decided at about age 10 that I really, really didn’t want to be an engi­neer. Whoops.

Do I specif­i­cally want to be in the defense indus­try now? No, I’m pretty much indif­fer­ent. But when I look around at the alter­na­tives, they just don’t stand a chance.

What do I want to be when I grow up? Assum­ing I should leave out the vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble (best-selling nov­el­ist, Michelin-starred chef) and the still mon­u­men­tally unlikely pos­si­bil­ity of becom­ing extremely rich through sheer geek­ery a la Bill Gates, I’ll pick this:

I want to make users delighted.

I want users to sit down in front of a com­puter, or pick up a phone, or sit at the con­trols for an autonomous vehi­cle, what­ever, and think “this feels great.” “This looks great.” I want them to use soft­ware I’ve cre­ated and think “this device is so com­plex, how can using it be this easy?” “I’m doing what should be such a bor­ing task, how on Earth am I enjoy­ing this?”

What jobs are avail­able locally?

I could work in finance, port­ing some vitally impor­tant COBOL app to VB.net for a £10k pay rise and a 90% loss of san­ity. I could do embed­ded tele­coms stuff, never delight­ing users, only annoy­ing them when it fails.

Or I could cre­ate some good-looking, usable con­trol sys­tems for autonomous vehi­cles. Then blast around the har­bour at 40 knots in a boat I helped to build.

Sure, in a war-free utopia I’d be handed my P45 on day one. But while noth­ing we can do will achieve that utopia, I can find noth­ing wrong with being one of those rare peo­ple that loves their job and is all the hap­pier because of it.

The Lib Dems and the Case of the Trident Missiles

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Last night, regard­ing the Lib­eral Democ­rats’ some­what neg­a­tive opin­ion of the Tri­dent pro­gramme, I tweeted:

God­damnit Lib Dems, I so nearly voted for you. :S http://is.gd/bd7B3

This, and the ensu­ing debate on Face­book, got me think­ing that I should prob­a­bly elab­o­rate on my point of view.

I work in the defense indus­try, specif­i­cally the naval part of it, and my main inter­est in a poten­tial refresh of the Tri­dent sys­tem is that it means upgrad­ing or replac­ing our exist­ing fleet of Vanguard-class sub­marines, and that poten­tially means more work for me and for my com­pany. That’s the only part that con­cerns me — I don’t really give a hoot whether they have nukes on them or not.

How­ever, I do believe the nuclear deter­rent is impor­tant, and if the Lib Dems really are angling to get rid of it, I’m not too impressed. It’s expen­sive, yes, but in my opin­ion it’s a regret­table neces­sity. Disarmament’s a nice goal, but I’m not sure we will or even should get there. If we lose the nuclear deter­rent, we must then main­tain a large enough con­ven­tional force to deter nations from devel­op­ing nuclear weapons in the first place — and look­ing at Iran and North Korea today, I don’t think that’s going to work.

It also gives us a guar­an­tee of being taken seri­ously on the world stage. These days we’re increas­ingly being seen as America’s lackey, and dis­man­tling our own deter­rent would inevitably come with an agree­ment for the US to ‘cover for us’, which wouldn’t help the sit­u­a­tion there at all.

If we are, then, to keep our own nuclear arse­nal, sub­marines are the log­i­cal choice sim­ply because we have the infra­struc­ture already. Even if the Van­guard fleet needs to be replaced under the Suc­ces­sor pro­gramme, we still have Faslane and Rosyth, we still have all the exper­tise in sub­ma­rine building.

A land-based bal­lis­tic mis­sile sys­tem is some­thing we don’t have the exper­tise in yet, never hav­ing done it before, and there’ll be the addi­tional prob­lem of NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard. Mis­sile silos don’t make great neigh­bours. And an air-delivered bomb is just not as good a tac­ti­cal solu­tion as the bal­lis­tic options.

So, cer­tainly I think the Tri­dent refresh should be included within the Strate­gic Defense Review — the Lib Dems are right to sug­gest that leav­ing out the country’s biggest defense pro­gramme kind of defeats the point. How­ever, I can’t see a way for­ward that makes more sense than mod­ernising or replac­ing the cur­rent Tri­dent mis­siles and Van­guard fleet.