Jay Manifold

Speaking of voting — well, not really, but anyway, via AtlanticBlog, I found this from Will Allen, in a comment over on Matthew Yglesias’ blog: “Politics in a republic with democratic processes is an ugly little business about building a large enough coaltion of factions to force opposing factions to submit to one’s will …”
Reminds me of the greatest political speech ever made:

Can you count, suckers? I say the future is ours if you can count ….
You’re standing right now with 9 delegates from 100 gangs. And there’s a hundred more. That’s 20 thousand hard core members! 40,000 counting affiliates, and 20,000 more not organized, but ready to fight. 60,000 soldiers. Now there ain’t but 20,000 police in the whole town. Can you dig it? Can you dig it? CAAAANNN YOUUUU DIG ITTT! (Roar)
Now here’s the sum total. One gang could run this city. One gang. Nothing would move, without us allowing it to happen. Tax the crime syndicates, the police, because we’ve got the street, suckers! CAAAANNN YOUUUU DIG ITTT! (Roar)

A while back, I wondered: “How long can the equilibrium of technically incompetent rulers lording it over technologically advanced societies be maintained?”
Possibly not much longer at all. Via InstaPundit, we find Robert X. Cringely’s diagnosis of the touchscreen-voting … uh, situation (emphasis added):

In the case of this voting fiasco, there was a wonderful confluence of events.  There was a vague product requirement coming from an agency that doesn’t really understand technology (the U.S. Congress), foisting a system on other government agencies that may not have asked for it.  There was a relatively small time frame for development and a lot of money.  Finally, the government did not allow for even the notion of failure.  By 2004, darn it, we’d all have touch screen voting.
Oh, and there are only three vendors, all of whom have precisely the same motivation (to make as much money as possible) and understanding (that Congress would buy its way out of technical trouble if it had to).  This gave the vendors every reason to put their third string people on the project because doing so would mean more profit, not less.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, somehow expecting a different outcome.  In this instance, the issue isn’t whether Diebold and the other vendors were insane (they aren’t), but whether the government is.

Cringely’s analysis is worth reading in its entirety for its insight into how project management in IT usually works, which is to say, not well.
Returning to the problem at hand, here’s your geeky analogy of the day: if this doesn’t get fixed in the next few months, the effect on American democracy will be analogous to acid rain from a cometary impact turning Earth’s oceans into vitriol — the annihilation of the base of the marine food chain. The reliable exercise of the franchise is the base of the electoral food chain. Cast enough doubt on enough results and the legitimacy of every elected officeholder dissolves like the calcareous shells of so much phytoplankton doused in nitric and sulfuric acid. Publicly-funded bureaucracies suddenly and explicitly become the tools of an arbitrarily-chosen oligarchy, and one that doesn’t even know enough to demand elementary accountability, at that.
Others have suggested that the election of 2004 may be pivotal, as important as, say, 1860 or 1932. Since most such 72-year cycle arguments rely on astrology or numerology, I remain unconvinced. But unless the homeostasis characteristic of American society operates on the voting security issue, universal suffrage could become, at least temporarily, a bad joke in the next eleven months. Not knowing who’d been elected President until December 13th last time around was one thing. What if we didn’t know who’d been elected to anything 5 weeks after the election, and had no good way to find out?

So, okay, suppose the bad guys start using these. What do we do about it?
To explain a bit further — if I were a Bad Guy™, here’s how I’d do it: develop a design optimized for range, payload, and accuracy, deprioritizing things like speed and small size; conduct a few test flights of > 5000 km; set up numerous (10+) manufacturing facilities in northern South America, each of which included only one person who added the payloads to the finished airplanes; set up many more (100+) launch sites in the same general area; begin launching the airplanes around the clock, but concentrated to arrive at their targets (mostly bridges and busy stretches of urban highways) near the morning and evening rush hours. Ramp the launch rate up to 100 per day or more. If possible, add terminal guidance systems to the airplanes just good enough to pick out the largest vehicle on the bridge or highway they’re flying over and aim for it.
Each plane carries a kilo of explosive, sufficient to demolish any non-armored vehicle and, in heavy traffic, cause a massive pileup. Some of the trucks are bound to have hazardous cargoes (typo in article — it’s I-29, not “I-20”), resulting in high death tolls. Imagine ten of those every day for a month, in cities all over the country. Highways closed — sealed off — for half a day at a time. For every incident, tens of thousands of people unable to get to work — unable to get home — unable to get to day care, hospitals, you name it. Imagine the downward economic spiral, the public panic, the hysteria and scapegoating, the growing despair.
This does not happen now only because massive nuisance attacks and (relatively) low body counts do not give the Bad Guys™ enough thrills. But suppose they become about 5% more rational and start working on ways to really hurt us. Then what?

My stock answer is that we get nanotech and build an active shield defense. And we will, but we’re not there yet. Besides, that’s a little bit like saying we’ll just scale up a bottle rocket to get a moon rocket. Some steps are missing.
I’d be delusional if I said I know what the missing steps are. But I’ve got a couple of ideas, and what’s blogging for if not to share half-formed ideas with total strangers?

1. So, OK, I’m lazing around the in-laws’ house over T-day weekend and watching The Life of Mammals, and Attenborough is talking about bats, specifically vast colonies of them that live in caves in Texas (not to mention the Congress Avenue Bridge crowd, which has to be seen to be believed). Since said in-laws’ house is in central Texas, I perked up a bit at the local-chiroptera-makes-good angle.
   These critters show up on radar:
   In the spring of 1995, “bats aloft” came to full boil when the U.S. Weather Service’s new Doppler radar was turned on at New Braunfels, Texas, only a few miles from Bracken Cave. Every night the Doppler radar detects the huge numbers of free-tailed bats that come out of Bracken Cave and other major roosts. It documents their dispersal over the Texas landscape, and it plots the altitudes and directions from which they return every morning.
   The McCracken study also mentions another method of detection:
   This summer, working with John Westbrook and his colleagues from the USDA, we placed radio microphones on weather balloons that floated freely with the moths. The radio microphones recorded bat orientation calls as high as 3,900 feet (1,200 m) and feeding buzzes at 2,400 feet (750 m), proving that free-tailed bats are indeed flying and feeding at the same altitudes and locations as the moth migrations.
   But the analogy I’m drawing here isn’t between the bats and the Model Airplanes From Hell. It’s between their prey — on the order of a million kilograms of corn earworm moths, “the number-one agricultural pest in America,” every night — and the MAFH.
   We need the mechanical equivalent of Mexican free-tailed bats. And it doesn’t need to be nearly as capable as the MAFH. The historical analogy would be to the galleons of the Spanish Armada, which had to be general-purpose assault vessels, versus Drake’s galleons, which only had to be able to stop the Spanish ones. The mechanical Mexican free-tailed bats (MMFTBs) wouldn’t have to carry any armament at all; they would be purely kinetic-kill weapons, destroying their opponents by ramming them in midair.


2. Not only that, the MMFTBs could get their target area assignments from a decentralized network of amateurs. The Feds could just dump the raw Doppler radar (or weather-balloon microphone) data out there and let anybody use it. Via Virginia, I wandered into the MIT Technology Review weblog and found this post, which in turn points to this Fast Company article, from which I excerpt:
   Rob McEwen, chairman and CEO of Goldcorp Inc., based in Toronto … triggered [a] gold rush by issuing an extraordinary challenge to the world’s geologists: We’ll show you all of our data on the Red Lake [Ontario] mine online if you tell us where we’re likely to find the next 6 million ounces of gold. The prize: a total of $575,000, with a top award of $105,000.
   From concentrations of MAFH, the amateur network could begin tracking them back to their points of origin — though of course the final identification of launch areas would, in my scenario, require operations overseas, in other nations, with all the complications that implies. But at least we’d be able to make the things crash in the middle of nowhere without killing anybody.

“A pack, not a herd.”

(Ref this earlier post.) Coincidentally, “… the Something Awful Forum Goons … recreate historic moments in the guise of classic video games,” and Chicago Pile 1 is one of them.
For lots more, much of it breathtakingly tasteless, graze on over to Photoshop Phriday.
I’m being really vulnerable here. I had no idea when I started guest-blogging that I’d be sharing my private vices so quickly …

As the old U of C cheer goes: “We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!” Well, not exactly, of course, but I cannot imagine that this event will ever be surpassed at Chicago.
In last year’s anniversary post over on Arcturus I concentrated on the prospects for nuclear power, and some of the risk-management issues associated with it. There are other points of departure … far too many for one post: it was the beginning of Big Science, the beginning of the Atomic Age, the beginning of the first true weapon of mass destruction, the beginning of the end of Imperial Japan, and the beginning of the first real check on Soviet power. Were it not for Project Apollo, it would have been remembered as the greatest milestone of science and technology in the 20th century.
And in spite of Apollo, what happened in Chicago that day has led to a thus-far-inextricable association of military rockets with WMDs. We can project indiscriminate military force to any point on Earth’s surface in three-quarters of an hour. We have had this capability since before I was born, and I am well into middle age. Any use of an intercontinental missile necessarily means mass death; the development of even intermediate-range missiles by authoritarian regimes is among the greatest existing threats to civilization.
Conversely, conventional military capabilities take much longer to act on their targets. Whereas nuclear missiles can be dispatched at a moment’s notice, travel at speeds of the order of 10 km/sec, reach targets anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and involve energetic events of tens of kilotons or greater — non-nuclear weapons, by contrast, may require days to months to prepare for use, are delivered at (low) hundreds of meters per second over many hours (more than a day, in the case of B-2s flying out of Whiteman AFB to Kosovo), cannot reach some areas at all, and pack a punch of, at most, a few metric tons TNT equivalent.
The graph below is a crude representation of this duality (quadrality?). In quadrant I are the WMDs, characterized by energies of up to 10²² ergs or thereabouts, and deliverable in timeframes as short as 10³ seconds. In quadrant IV are the much less destructive devices, down to less than 1 kg TNT equivalent, deliverable only over much longer periods, up to months.

At present, quadrant II weapons do not exist. But what if it were otherwise, that is, if we could deliver non-nuclear weapons (and other military assets) onto targets with the ease and at the speed of weapons in quadrant I? What if rockets could somehow be used to apply discriminate force, to conduct the kind of precise, nonlinear operations that are the centerpiece of US military strikes?
This is not a remotely original idea. Here is a diagram from Bono & Gatland’s Frontiers of Space:

This vehicle, proposed over 30 years ago, was intended to deliver two battalions of soldiers halfway around the planet in less than an hour. A smaller version was to carry 200 troops. Other configurations were to carry heavy weaponry and materiel. But the best present-day application might be something that could deploy a squadron of these.
Just as I was drafting this post, Mike Daley earned “regular contributor” status on Arcturus by sending along Speed Kills, Military Wants More, in which we read that

Speed is becoming an increasingly crucial component of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. military to identify a target and put a bomb on it. In recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as little as 20 minutes, in some cases.
But this quick response only happens when there are bombers and cruise missiles in the immediate neighborhood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that terrorists are in a part of the world where they don’t have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that information.
With its proposed speed and range, the Falcon project — co-sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm — aims to make just about the whole world a dangerous place to be a bad guy.

(You can read more about Falcon here, and thumbnails of graphics are here. Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of thing was, of course, Project Thor. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I wrote the rest of this post before reading the Wired News article.)
In general, quadrant II weapons would greatly ease the constraints of time and expense imposed by the need to have bases located within a few hundred kilometers of the target area. With an array of such vehicles in place, we need no longer spend precious days and weeks in negotiation with jittery allies, or spend billions laboriously staging the relevant weaponry just over the border from an obnoxious regime’s territory. One more reason to keep an eye on the X Prize.

What about quadrant III — slow WMDs? As originally conceived, nuclear weapons fell into this category. Obviously, they don’t now — for us. But terrorist WMDs might fit Einstein and Szilard’s description all too well: “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”