Open-Source Warfare. Terrorists are leveraging information technology to organize, recruit, learn

IEEE Spectrum ^ | November 2007 | Robert N. Charette

[Reeses]

The DARPA Grand Challenge prize competition is a great success. They get a huge amount of R&D for a few million dollars in cost. They should extend this winning formula to smaller robots, such as sniper nest robots, surveillance mines, even writing viruses to get into the terrorists computers.

The great war technologies often initially start out in hobbyists garages, for example the airplane and the digital computer.

[B4Ranch]

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.

[B4Ranch]

As long as a $30 IED will destroy a $100,000 robot this war can continue.

[B4Ranch]

Did you read the article? Catch the comment about the doorbells?

>>“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.<

[vbmoneyspender]

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.

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.

[Cacique]

btt

[Zhang Fei]

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.

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.

[Secret Agent Man]

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.

[B4Ranch]

Have either of you ever been in combat?

[Reeses]

$100,000 robot

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?

[vbmoneyspender]

Have either of you ever been in combat?

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?

[vbmoneyspender]

Kafir Magic

November 19, 2007: U.S. casualties in Iraq are a third of what they were earlier in the year. One obvious reason is the sharp reduction (over 70 percent) in the use of roadside bombs. A less obvious reason is the increased use of explosion resistant trucks (MRAPs or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected). Over 1,000 of these vehicles will be in Iraq by the end of the year. There are already over two thousand MRAPs in use, mainly by bomb disposal troops, and units operating in areas almost certain to have lots of roadside bombs. People in these vehicles are much less likely to be killed or injured if they encounter a roadside bomb. Thus if all the troops who encountered these bombs were in a MRAP vehicles, casualties would be about 65 percent less. Over the past year, nearly two-thirds of all casualties in Iraq are from roadside bombs. Thus the army and marines want to use these vehicles in areas most likely to have bombs, and reduce overall casualties by about a third.

Thus the combination of fewer roadside bombs and more MRAPs produces a sharp reduction in casualties. The bomb resistant vehicles cost about five times more than armored hummers. The extra money buys more metal, and technology. In part, MRAPs depend on sheer heft to protect their passengers. An armored hummer weighs about four tons, while the average MRAPs are 16-19 tons. The V shaped underbody of the MRAP deflects the force of an explosion. The pressurized passenger cabin also keeps out blast effect, as well as a lot of the noise.

But there's another reason for the lower casualties, one you rarely hear about. It's all about intelligence analysis. It works like this. Analysts constantly examine casualty and IED (improvised explosive device, the milspeak for roadside bombs) patterns to insure that the MRAPs are assigned to units most likely to suffer bomb attacks. This makes it easier to put the right drivers through a week or two of training with the MRAPs, which handle differently than any other vehicle the military uses. It also makes sure that more IEDs encounter MRAPs, rather than more vulnerable vehicles.

The intelligence analysts have played a largely unheralded role in keeping casualties down. The army doesn't like to publicize what their geeks are doing, but those databases and analysis systems produce more than impressive 3-D graphics of who is doing what in the combat zone. These systems have been very accurate at predicting where the enemy will strike next, who the enemy is, where they live and what shape their morale and combat capability is. These predictive systems make sure that the limited supply of MRAPs are used in areas where there are the most IEDs. Captured terrorists are perplexed at how the Americans manage to be one jump ahead. Most attribute it to some kind of "kafir (non-Moslem) magic." It certainly can't be "God's will." Iraqis are more inclined to believe in magic, than people in the West. But there are Islamic radicals on the many pro-terrorist message boards, who have advanced degrees in math and statistics, that know quite well what the Americans are doing. So far, these savants have not been able to convince their fellow radicals of the importance of trying to spoof the Americans predictive tools. Spoofing isn't easy, and you need a skilled and disciplined force of troops to carry it off. The terrorists have neither. Setting off roadside or suicide bombs remains the favorite terrorist weapon, even as these tools become less and less effective.

As long as the U.S. has the intelligence advantage, the enemy will continue to find themselves outmaneuvered and out of luck.

[Redleg Duke]

Spoken like a Geek.

[Czar]

"One man with the will to fight can keep it going."

Until we kill him.

[B4Ranch]

I read recently that 40% of the terrorists are foreign Arabs. I have no way to verify that.

[B4Ranch]

>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.

[vbmoneyspender]

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.

[Zhang Fei]

Have either of you ever been in combat?

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.

[Tarpon]

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.

[CodeMasterPhilzar]

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...