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Home » Archives for March 2003
Archive for March, 2003
Monday, March 31st, 2003
The U.S. military is growing increasingly reliant on satellites to direct precision bombs, relay soldiers’ orders, and give a picture of the battleground. But such dependence is only the beginning, the New York Times reports.
12 national-security space launches are scheduled for 2003; only one was conducted last year. On March 10, the military launched a $200 million satellite for relaying voice and data communications. An Air Force GPS satellite is set to be sent into the skies later today.
Posted in Space | No Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2003
BusinessWeek doing a cover story on “The Doctrine of Digital War?” Cool. BusinessWeek using headlines like “Point, Click…Fire: Awesome technology gets a helluva field test?” Puh-leeze.
Why do hyper-skeptical editors suddenly fall to their knees when military hardware is rolled out?
Go read Drew Park’s expose of EDS (in the same issue) instead.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2003
Turn on the tube, and the only drones you’ll see operating in Iraq are the Predators and Global Hawks. But there are at least ten different types of unmanned planes being used by the U.S. military in Gulf War II, according to Aviation Week.
Drones listed by the Pentagon included the Army’s Hunter, Pointer and Shadow; the Marine Corps’ Dragon Eye and Pioneer; and the Air Force’s Force Protection Surveillance System, Global Hawk and Predator. The brand-new Silver Fox, first reported here, was not mentioned.
In Afghanistan, only three types of drones were used.
THERE’S MORE: “In the Army of the future, a (3000–5000 person) brigade would bring to the battle no less than 200 unmanned aircraft, ranging from small platoon-class vehicles to larger, high-endurance aircraft equipped with heat-seeking missiles,” according to National Defense magazine.
Posted in Drones | 54 Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2003
U.S. Central Command has told reporters embedded with military units in Iraq to shut off their Thuraya satellite phones, Reuters says. The phones could be used to zero in on where troops are — they’re equipped with GPS, and have a location-finding system that’s accurate to 100 meters. Phones from Thuraya’s military-backed rival, Iridium, aren’t as precise.
(via /.)
Posted in War Update | No Comments »
Monday, March 31st, 2003
The hacking of al Jazeera’s website has many Defense Tech readers wondering: “Is this (the work of) a new breed of patriotic, nationalistic hacker? Or is some tenuous propaganda arm of our own government involved?“
Neither. It’s a cry for attention by a couple of no-skills “script kiddies” trying to show off to their sunken-chested pals.
“Every time there is a political target of opportunity, some kiddie will use it as justification for a (website) defacement or DOS (denial-of-service attack),” security researcher Robert Ferrell tells Wired News’ Michelle Delio.
“This kind of thing goes on constantly. The only reason it’s news at all is because…we happen to be at war with Iraq,” he adds. “Al-Jazeera may be a major news service, but a website is a website, whether it belongs to Billy Bob or Time Warner. Knocking one off the Internet isn’t a difficult proposition.“
But it’s a crime, nonetheless. Last year, 18 year-old Robert Lyttle defaced dozens of government websites, supposedly to show how easy it would be for terrorists to gain access to our national electronic infrastructure. The government thanked him with an FBI raid and a house arrest.
At the time, veteran hacker Oxblood Ruffin called Lyttle and his partner “pimply nitwits from the ‘burbs out looking for some rep.“
He added, “It’s just this kind of stupidity that gives hacking a bad name.”
Posted in Info War | 25 Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2003
The U.S. military’s battle plan for Iraq began as “a what-if session over beers among a handful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago,” the National Journal reports in a must-read article.
They were all students at the Army’s School for Advanced Military Studies, known colloquially as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army’s most promising planners take a graduate course in strategic campaigns. The young majors brainstormed about a march on Baghdad to dispose of Saddam Hussein. In its earliest versions, the plan envisioned a 125-day campaign by a U.S. force nearly twice the size of that now in Iraq.
Maj. Kevin Marcus, a SAMS graduate now attached to V Corps headquarters, helped develop the plan from a back-of-an-envelope exercise into a PowerPoint presentation that within days of being finished ended up on the desk of the president of the United States. Though any military campaign plan of the size of Iraqi Freedom has many midwivesand for this one, they include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, who prodded planners to think outside the box]Marcus saw it develop from infancy to fruition.
From the very beginning, he says, the need to synchronize a rapid, combined-arms campaign to seize the initiative with “shock and awe“roughly the modern-day equivalent of armored blitzkrieg warfareoleapt out at planners determined to limit the opportunity for Iraqi forces to employ chemical weapons, wreak environmental havoc, or organize a coordinated defense. In bullfighter parlance, they wanted to go for a quick kill before the bull learned the trick of the cape…
Changes to Marcus’ plan may have undermined its effectiveness, however.
Right up until the launch of the war, the plan kept changing… Just days before the war began, U.S. commanders had also seriously considered changing the battle plan to allow for a strategic pause at the key southern crossroads city of An Nasiriya. Such a pause would give U.S. forces time to accept the expected surrender of the 11th Division of the regular Iraqi army that defends that city, and give Republican Guard forces near Baghdad an opportunity to capitulate as well. The plan was dropped at the last minute…
By far the most dramatic and disruptive change to the battle plan, however, was Rumsfeld’s decision last November to slash Central Command’s request for forces. This single decision essentially cut the size of the anticipated assault force in half in the final stages of planning, and it had a ripple effect on Central Command and Army planning that continues to color operations to this day.
Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or “TipFid,” by which regional commanders would identify forces needed for a specific campaign, and the individual armed services would manage their deployments by order of priority. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launching the war, forces identified for the fight continued to pour off ships in Kuwait, and not necessarily in the order of first priority.
Posted in War Update | 1 Comment »
Friday, March 28th, 2003
For the first time in Gulf War II, the U.S. Air Force has hit downtown Baghdad with “bunker busting” bombs. A B-2 stealth bomber dropped two of the 4,700-pound, satellite-guided GBU-28 munitions on a major communications tower on the east bank of Tigris River, according to Ha’Aretz.
The bunker-busters were parts of massive coalition bombing effort last night. Combat aircraft dropped bombs “just about as fast as we can load them,” Capt. Thomas Parker, aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf, told the paper.
Posted in War Update | No Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2003
Just because they’re called “unmanned aerial vehicles” doesn’t mean they don’t have a crew. StrategyPage looks at the assignments for the three-person team assigned to operate the Predator drone.
Posted in Drones | No Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2003
The Iraqi troops claim to have shot down and captured a British Army Phoenix drone near Basra, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly.
The truck-launched, 5.5 meter wide Phoenix unmanned planes have been used for nearly five years as reconnaissance planes; they put in over 2,000 hours of flights over Kosovo.
But in Gulf War II, the drones took on a new mission: to identify targets for British artillery, like the AS90 155mm self-propelled howitzer and Multiple Launch Rocket System.
Unlike the Afghan conflict, we haven’t heard much about drones getting shot down in Gulf War II. Why not? My guess is that the slow, steady bombing of Iraqi anti-aircraft positions in the months leading up to ground combat have given unmanned planes like the Predator unfettered access to the skies. And, of course, the Iraqis have tens of thousands of soldiers on the ground to worry about. Maybe they can’t be bothered with a few robots in the air.
Posted in Drones | 8 Comments »
Thursday, March 27th, 2003
Nature accomplished earlier this week what Iraq’s Republican Guard could not: Blinding sandstorms paralyzed the American air campaign, grounding helicopters and cutting bombing runs by as much as 85 percent in some areas.
But there’s an Air Force program in the works that may enable pilots to plow through just about any foe — even an Iraqi sandstorm.
The solution is an onboard computer that digitally renders the pilots’ surroundings when they can’t rely on the real one to guide them. It’s called “synthetic vision,” and its backers are promising that the system will let pilots see in nasty weather, just like night-vision goggles let troopers roam around in the dark.
Read all about it in my latest Wired News story.
THERE’S MORE: An Air Force source believes that synthetic vision will be used more for drones than for manned aircraft. Seeing through a UAV’s eyes is already tough; using them in a sandstorm is pretty much impossible. But operating a UAV while looking at a rendered world? That could work.
Posted in Gadgets and Gear | 4 Comments »
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