Posted on 11/24/2007 11:36:14 AM PST by John Jorsett
ROAD TO PERDITION: In early 2005, engineers stationed in Iraq were inspecting this road when an improvised explosive device went off. An officer and his interpreter died in the blast. At the upper right is an iRobot PackBot used to investigate IED sites.
On the afternoon of Thursday, 8 April 2004, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq deployed a small remote-controlled robot to search for improvised explosive devices. The robot, a PackBot unit made by iRobot Corp., of Burlington, Mass., found an IED, but the discovery proved its undoing. The IED exploded, reducing the robot to small, twisted pieces of metal, rubber, and wire.
The confrontation between robot and bomb reflects a grim paradox of the ongoing conflict in Iraq. The PackBot's destruction may have prevented the IED from claiming a soldier's lifeas of 31 August, IEDs accounted for nearly half of the 3299 combat deaths reported by coalition forces. But the fact remains that a US $100 000 piece of machinery was done in by what was probably a few dollars' worth of explosives, most likely triggered using a modified cellphone, a garage-door opener, or even a toy's remote control. During the past four and a half years, the United States and its allies in Iraq have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed. But they are still not winning the war.
Although there has been much debate and finger-pointing over the various failures and setbacks suffered during the prolonged conflict, some military analysts and counterterrorism experts say that, at its heart, this war is radically different from previous ones and must be thought of in an entirely new light.
What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war, says John Robb, a counterterrorism expert and author of the book Brave New War (John Wiley & Sons), which came out in April. While the concept of asymmetric warfare dates back at least 2000 years, to the Chinese military strategist Sun-tzu, the conflict in Iraq has redefined the nature of such struggles [see photo, Road to Perdition]. As events are making painfully clear, Robb says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing small groups to declare war on nations.
Excerpt. For full text of article, click here
The great war technologies often initially start out in hobbyists garages, for example the airplane and the digital computer.
With most of America screaming for troop withdrawl, I am not yet convinced that sectors of rebelious Sunnis aren’t intentionally reducing their number of attacks until we do withdraw. Then they will have an almost unresisted freedom to slaughter the Shiites with their homemade cheap, but seriously effective IEDs knowing that our Congress will never permit a return of our troops.
As long as a $30 IED will destroy a $100,000 robot this war can continue.
>>They're using a huge variety of cheaply available stuff. One recent innovation is IED detonators made from battery-powered doorbells. The doorbells consist of crude 400-kilohertz transmitters and receivers. They're sloppy as hell, but they are really hard to jam, Husick says.<
IEDs are not a particularly effective weapon against people who are willing to drive Sunnis wholesale out of particular areas. Once the Sunnis are gone, so are the IEDs. Just ask Sheik Samarrai.
btt
There's nothing particularly magical about IED's - they're glorified land mines. They're the modern equivalent of the ancient technique of digging concealed pits with sharpened stakes at the bottom. The Sunnis can't win the war using IED's against Shiites because the Shiites - in the absence of Uncle Sam's restraining presence - will simply kill everyone and destroy every structure within some distance of the IED. This kind of strategy has worked in every military campaign in which it has been deployed. We are too squeamish to use it because we are Americans. I guarantee you that Iraqi Shiites don't share our moral qualms.
I wasn’t saying jam them, I was saying send out the doorbell freq signal and blow them up ourselves, a distance away (if there are any) in the upcoming road.
I’m not talking about jamming frequencies.
Have either of you ever been in combat?
Most of that price is to pay for R&D, engineering, testing, certification. That doesn't get blown up with the robot. The money doesn't disappear down a black hole, it's circulating in the economy back home. Your personal stake in that robot cost you about 1/30th of a penny. Don't lose sleep over it.
Initially a single solid-state transistor cost $1,000 and only the military could afford them. The large volumes they bought dropped the price forever.
A soldier that gets blown up costs in the 7 figure range, not to mention the huge political cost. How often does a blown up robot even make the news?
I haven't been in combat. My question to you is do you know what percentage of the Iraqi population is Sunni-Arab and what percentage is Shiite?
Spoken like a Geek.
Until we kill him.
I read recently that 40% of the terrorists are foreign Arabs. I have no way to verify that.
>As long as the U.S. has the intelligence advantage, the enemy will continue to find themselves outmaneuvered and out of luck<.
I’m not as confident in our Intel as you are. I’m just thinking about Robert Hanssen, Aldrich H. Ames, and the Walker Family. Then there’s the Muslims in the FBI that are being investigated.
15% of the population of Iraq is Sunni-Arab and approximately 60% is Shiite with the remaining 25% being mostly Kurdish. Given those numbers, I think the Sunni-Arabs are going to have a very hard time ever trying to take the country backover.
I don't speak from personal experience, if that's what you're wondering. It's all stuff gleaned from historical accounts of guerrilla suppression campaigns*. In antiquity, guerrillas were pretty rare because the standard method for dealing with them was to destroy both the structures and the inhabitants in the area from which the guerrillas were operating. This meant that the locals usually gave up rebels rather than face massacre. This stuff is pretty specialized, which is to say unless you're genuinely interested in history, you're not going to run across it much.
Arabs aren't known for their squeamishness, either in antiquity or in the modern era. The Syrians had a Sunni guerrilla problem in Hama in the 1980's. Syria is ruled by Alawites (a Shiite heresy), but is 75% Sunni. The Alawite solution to the Hama revolt was to bomb it flat using heavy artillery. Anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 residents of Hama were killed. After this incident, Syria ceased to have a Sunni guerrilla problem. It's not that Sunnis preferred having Alawites rule, it's merely that they found life under Alawite rule preferable to the great danger to their kinfolk that an armed revolt would bring.
* Not stuff I specifically looked out for, but material I noticed in passing while reading about formation of kingdoms, empires and states throughout history. (I tend to smile at the breast-beating that goes on here over the treatment of American Indians during winning of the West. If the Chinese of that era had fought the Indians, they would have killed the leaders after their defeat and sold the survivors off as bonded slaves). Modern histories are much more touchy-feely - there is a tendency to see wars as a result of misunderstandings. As compared to the ancient, and timeless, understanding of wars as a struggle over resources and ideologies.
It’s tough to win with open-source when you are dead.
This is just so much nonsense. It’s like the IED and the suicide attacker was a new discovery. The German Werewolfs and Japanese Kamikazes of WWII never happened.
All life began when you were born, for the self centered generation ... reading history is so boring. It’s akin to finding out that the Vikings were in Greenland farming 1000 years ago.
Crazy idea time...
Cell phones have to periodically “register” with the local cell. Basically say “I’m here, this is my ID, etc.” That way they can get incoming calls. ie. when you call it, the cell system’s computer says “Oh, Habib? His phone is in cell xyz.” and routes the call out that cell tower. Hence the “cell” system, instead of broadcast.
So at any given time, the cell system knows which phones are by which towers...
So suppose I’m sending a convoy down the road from the airport to the green zone. How about I ask the cell system to ring every phone in range of every tower along that route? You, me, and the rest of the normal people get a non-caller-ID ring and hang up... Habib and his buddies placing the IED get toasted when it prematurely detonates...
Seems like it could work...
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