Core Dump

Kelly Johnson was a legendary aeronautical engineer who ran Lockheed's famous Skunk Works d3evelopment shop. They were responsible for many famous aircraft, including the U-2 spyplane and the SR-71 Blackbird, still the world's fastest aircraft. Aviation Week and Space Technology has a profile of Johnson's career, and it's quite fascinating, and it's worth reading even if you're not necessarily an aviation buff, as the history of the Skunk Works has many parallels with modern software companies.

I found this part especially notable, in which the article describes Johnson's management style, which is eerily akin to agile programming.

Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works was a revolt against the formalities of conventional industry. It was a throwback to a time when airplanes were created by small teams who all broke for lunch together. Johnson crammed a small number of capable people into close proximity, so that “engineering shall always be within a stone’s throw of the airplane.” He believed in the freewheeling inventive genius of individuals—particularly himself; he resented the intrusions of committees of government bureaucrats with their meddlesome meetings, and rebelled against their minutely detailed specifications.

He pared away procedural dross: Whatever used up time without advancing the project was banned—even visits from the customer. Finished drawings were not required; shop men were encouraged to work from sketches and when possible to develop parts directly on the airplane. Decisions, once made, would not be second-guessed; good enough was good enough. Meetings were limited to two or three essential participants. Initial flight tests would be conducted by the builders—not, as was usual at the time, by the customer’s pilots.

Labels: history, military, technology

If you've seen Dr. Strangelove, then you might have the idea that nuclear weapons designers and their military bosses might be just a little bit crazy. Confirmation of the idea is provided in the book To Inhabit Our Solar System (PDF), by Tony Zuppero, reviewed in this Register article.

Zuppero's dream begins in 1968 with the scientist inspired by one of Freeman Dyson's well-traveled crackpot ideas - that of powering a spaceship to the nearest star at one per cent of the speed of light, using atomic bombs. (Sci-fi authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle famously employed one in their alien invasion novel, Footfall.)

Working for a government lab, Zuppero asks to view the classified plans, called Orion, for the Dyson space ship.

"I was scrutinizing the drawing [of the space ship]," he writes. "It showed a really dinky and clearly horribly inefficient atomic bomb propulsion device. Nothing like what Freeman Dyson drew... The design seemed to be really dumb, like something one of my fraternity brothers would draw up inbetween periods of getting drunk."

With the bloom only slightly off the rose, Zuppero visits a bunker full of thermonuclear bombs to see the basis for his dream's propulsion. But the bombs are way too big, he observes, and there's no way to get three million of them on a spaceship to the stars. Freeman Dyson should have seen the bomb room, Zuppero writes.

I've only taken a quick skim through it, but it looks absolutely fascinating, and it's a reasonably quick read, despite its almost 400 page length. You can download or view the PDF at the link above - it's free.

Labels: military, science, space, technology

National Geographic has a TV documentary about the Horten 2-29, a stealth fighter that the Nazi's were prototyping at the end of the war, and which could have changed the course of WW II if they'd had time to produce it in quantity.

With the engines buried in the fuselage, exterior surfaces blended together, and plane constructed almost entirely out of wood (possibly to prevent radar from penetrating the skin, or possibly because Germany was facing a resource shortage), it's easy to look back on the 2-29 with hindsight and say the Horten brothers were developing a stealth fighter to subvert British radar, but we don't know for sure.

In another article on it, Gizmodo points out that the Germans had a design for an even more advanced plane:

The Horten brothers had another design based on the Ho 2-29. A design for a intercontinental strategic bomber, the Ho 18.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling, thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo 004B turbojets. As the documentary shows, had the Nazis extended the war in 1946 and developed the atomic bomb as planned, the Ho 18 could have been their Enola Gay.

Labels: history, military, technology

I've seen cockpit video of the Canadian Snowbirds aerobatic team, but this is the first cockpit video from the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels team that I've seen. It's pretty amazing. I get vertigo just watching it - I can't imagine how they do it, considering they must be pulling many Gs during the maneuvers.

Labels: military, video

With the end of the cold war, many people stopped worrying about the possibility of a world-wide nuclear war and the accompanying nuclear winter. But although tensions have eased somewhat between the superpowers, there are still hot spots, like India and Pakistan and the middle East, that could spark a smaller nuclear exchange. Recent studies show that even a smaller, regional nuclear war could have devastating global consequences.
The intense heat generated by the burning cities in the models' simulations lofted black smoke high into the stratosphere, where there is no rain to rain out the particles. The black smoke absorbed far more solar radiation than the brighter sulfuric acid aerosol particles emitted by volcanic eruptions. This caused the smoke to heat the surrounding stratospheric air by 30°C, resulting in stronger upward motion of the smoke particles higher into the stratosphere. As a result, the smoke stayed at significant levels for over a decade (by contrast, highly reflective volcanic aerosol particles do not absorb solar radiation and create such circulations, and only stay in the stratosphere 1-2 years). The black soot blocked sunlight, resulting in global cooling of over 1.2°C (2.2°F) at the surface for two years, and 0.5°C (0.9°F) for more than a decade (Figures 1 and 2). Precipitation fell up to 9% globally, and was reduced by 40% in the Asian monsoon regions.

This magnitude of this cooling would bring about the coldest temperatures observed on the globe in over 1000 years (Figure 1). The growing season would shorten by 10-30 days over much of the globe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. This cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse. However, the cooling effect of this eruption only lasted about a year. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors found that the smoke in the stratosphere cause a 20% reduction in Earth's protective ozone layer, with losses of 25-45% over the mid-latitudes where the majority of Earth's population lives, and 50-70% ozone loss at northern high latitude regions such as Scandinavia, Alaska, and northern Canada. A massive increase in ultraviolet radiation at the surface would result, capable of causing widespread and severe damage to plants and animals. Thus, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger sevejavascript:void(0)re global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation.

Labels: Another thing to worry about, military, politics

The US nuclear weapons program has run into a small problem. Lack of documentation has held up a program to refurbish U.S. Trident nuclear warheads. The warheads use a substance called Fogbank that may have been used to separate the fission and fusion components of the bomb. But now, nobody knows how to make it.

For the first time, the report described the difficulties faced by the NNSA in trying to make Fogbank. A new production facility was needed at the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, because an old one had been demolished in the 1990s.

But vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.

To John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was "astonishing" that the Fogbank blueprints had been lost. "This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them," he said. "Perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept. The British warhead is similar to the American version, and so the problems with Fogbank may delay Aldermaston's plans for renewing or replacing Trident."

Labels: military, technical communication

Karl Schroeder has managed to parlay his experience as an SF writer into a government job of sorts, writing novelizations for the Canadian military.

In 2005, the army contracted Karl Schroeder, a Toronto writer, to pen Crisis in Zefra, a 27,000-word book set in a mythical African state 20 years in the future.

"The popularity of the book is amazing because we’ve run out of copies," Lt.-Col. Mike Rostek said Thursday in Halifax.

Now the army plans to hire Mr. Schroeder again to write Zefra II, another sci-fi book about what Canadian soldiers may face in 2040, said Lt.-Col. Rostek, one of a small team of soldiers who advise the army about what may come to pass three decades from now.

If you want to read Crisis in Zefra (and you should), you can download it for free from Karl's site. It's a PDF that's about 150 pages long, and includes some supplementary discussion material.
As for why the military is hiring an SF writer, he says: "In other words, foresight is responsible management every area of endeavour. And don't forget, it was the difference between planning for the last war and planning for the next that led the French to build the Maginot line, and the Germans to develop the Blitzkrieg."

Labels: military, SF

Rolling Stone has a long first-person article by a reporter who managed to get inside the Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan. It's a tense, gripping read, as well as making a pretty good case that the current NATO-lead coalition is doomed to fail in their plan to pacify the country.

But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban were beginning their reconquest of Afghanistan. The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the countryside before the Taliban imposed order. "The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys," says a senior aid official in Kabul. "They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits — they're abusing people and filling their pockets.

By contrast, aid for rebuilding schools and clinics has been paltry. In the critical first two years after the invasion, international assistance amounted to only $57 per citizen — compared with $679 in Bosnia. As U.S. contractors botched reconstruction jobs and fed corruption, little of the money intended to rebuild Afghanistan reached those in need. Even worse, the sudden infusion of international aid drove up real estate and food prices, increasing poverty and fueling widespread resentment.

Labels: military, politics

Charlie Stross points out something interesting about the current conflict between Russia and Georgia - it's turned into a full scale cyberwar.

At this point, cyberwar is merely a new adjunct to traditional communication blockades and attempts to jam enemy propaganda channels; I haven't seen any reports of attacks on SCADA systems or attempts to crash enemy logistic infrastructure (although if such attacks were ongoing it's likely that we wouldn't hear anything about it until afterwards). It's still at the stage of air war in 1914.

If you're not familiar with the RBN, read the wikipedia article. Then if you want some more technical information, look at the RBNExploit blog. And don't underestimate its importance, just because it's a bunch of hackers kicking over other folks' routers. This stuff is going to shape the coming century, just as the early experiments in using stringbags for aerial reconnaisance led to strategic bombing and shock'n'awe campaigns.

Labels: military, technology

First there were major problems with updating the aviation control system in the US. Then the FBI's communications and data warehousing project went south. Now it looks the the U.S. Army is joining the list of billion dollar (plus) IT boondoggles, as their Future Combat Systems is nowhere near where it should be.

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the Army's effort to use software and computer networks to turn itself into a quicker, lighter, more-lethal force by 2017. The vision is for fleets of new armored vehicles, ground robots and flying drones to be linked together by a wireless internet for combat, and by a common operating system. But FCS has been in trouble, almost since the day it began, with slipped deadlines, bloated budgets, unproven technologies and unrealistic expectations.

The picture may be even more bleak than has been previously been understood, however. A soon-to-be-released Government Accountability Office report, first obtained by Inside the Army, notes that FCS' core software programs are now slated to take up 95 million lines of code, nearly triple the original estimate. Only two of Future Combat Systems' 44 key technologies are where they should have been -- at the beginning of the program. Things are so bad that the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, is now recommending that the Pentagon start “identify[ing] viable alternatives to FCS." That's government-speak for chopping the program into bits, and starting over again. And the Department of Defense "concur[s] with [those] recommendations," according to the study.

Labels: computing, military

China recently destroyed one of its aging weather satellites by hitting it with a ground-launched missile. Popular Mechanics has an article examining some of the military implications.

At 5:28 PM EST on Jan. 11, 2007, a satellite arced over southern China. It was small — just 6 ft. long — a tiny object in the heavens, steadily bleeping its location to ground stations below, just as it had every day for the past seven years. And then it was gone, transformed into a cloud of debris hurtling at nearly 16,000 mph along the main thoroughfare used by orbiting spacecraft.

It was not the start of the world's first war in space, but it could have been. It was just a test: The satellite was a defunct Chinese weather spacecraft. And the country that destroyed it was China. According to reports, a mobile launcher at the Songlin test facility near Xichang, in Sichuan province, lofted a multistage solid-fuel missile topped with a kinetic kill vehicle. Traveling nearly 18,000 mph, the kill vehicle intercepted the sat and — boom — obliterated it. "It was almost just a dead-reckoning flight with little control over the intercept path," says Phillip S. Clark, an independent British authority who has written widely on the Chinese and Russian space programs.

Labels: military, space

Flying Magazine has an article describing a carrier pilot's first night landing - probably the hardest task in military aviation.

I stand still for a second after securing the hatch to let my eyes adjust to the darkness, and the hint of yellow sodium vapor lighting from the island. It takes a minute to realize there is no adjustment. It’s dark. The middle of the ocean under a moonless sky is like the inside of a bottle of ink inside a sealed vault. The best way to describe it is to walk into your closet with all the lights in your house off, at night, then blindfold yourself.

As I step up the catwalk I realize the tail-end of a Superhornet is over my head, as well as a 70-foot drop to the water to my left. They’re packed like sardines up here. They’re also turning, and I need to get to the other side of the deck. My senses peak out of pure self-preservation. I’m instantly aware of everything going on within 50 yards of me, and it’s a lot. I don’t need to walk into a prop or a tailpipe. Something else becomes readily apparent. I’m getting wet. “What the .... ?” Well, if we’re gonna do this, might as well pull out all the stops.

Labels: military