The problem is always expectation, anticipation and experience.
With any new technology we expect certain performance - we get this from the “The Economist effect” - where the simple one paragraph explanation of a complex field enables us to have a grasp on a concept but not the full difficulties.
So we expect the nuclear missile to hit its target whereas the thing about nukes is they were designed to be used despite being horribly inaccurate.
Anticipation is time bounded - we get depressed when the thing we expect is not done today - we can imagine it so why can’t we have it. This is the problem behind all crunch development times, all VC funded CEO replacements and every lying progress report ever.
And experience is what tells us where we really are - it is looking at a Trident missile spiralling round in front page photos and saying … what have we missed.
Weapons operate always at the frontier of what is possible. Nuclear weapons probably are not really there - we can fly the prototype over unchallenged airspace but launching rockets is hard.
The problem is always hubris, which leads to a distorted
conceit of "progress" which can actually be regressive.
Whether it's weapons or civilian technology like smartphones,
automobiles, or a "cashless society" we know there are side effects,
and unknowns. But we choose to focus on only the rosy, optimistic
side.
For most of us that is pandering to laziness, convenience, low-effort
and less thinking. For those involved in making money, the negatives
are far away in space and time, so they can always kick the can down
the road.
This is how supremacy becomes weakness.
Money buys a louder voice and drowns out cautious minds with
better vision of the long-term future and marginal scenarios. They are
Cassandras. Luddites.
Those with experience are dismissed as old and irrelevant.
Hubris leads to absolute dependency and complacency.
In a long enough time-line we'll always encounter an accident or
enemy using older "low-tech". The greatest threat to our security
is always our own hubris. Sadly I see buckets of it here on HN.
If we assume the 80/20 rule to hold about most things in world (80% profits from 20% customers, 80% of benefits to society from 20% workers), then we can assume the same 80/20 rule applies to the bits left over - ie the remining 20% of profits will have 80% of those generated by 20% of the left over 80% of customers)
Roughly speaking then 96% of all good stuff comes from 36% of stuff we do
We could say then that if we could find the 2/3 of useless activity that only generates 4% of good stuff we can for example cut carbon emissions by 2/3 - and only need to lose the crappy plastic toys on front of magazines, or most peoples commutes or …
What I think I am saying is that 2/3 of the jobs people do are useless - and yet in any organisation they are the majority and hence bend the organisation
Don’t worry dear reader I am sure like me you are one of the non useless ones … like me , like me
This seems like an absolute genius idea, but I can't imagine us considering trying it, even if climate change really started to get bad.
China or maybe Japan though, I could see it being able to maybe catch on there though, it could be very beneficial to the problems they're facing with their aging populations and abysmal and worsening (heading to ~zero?) reproduction.
I think your premise is sound, but your example is unfortunate. SLBMs are less accurate, but still much better than "horribly inaccurate". And American ICBMs started out with poor accuracy, but are now quite accurate(1), and were by the 1970s. If you're standing in the target building, you are already dead.
(1)I'm being a bit coy here because during Uncle Ronnie's administration, I had a job and security clearance involving this.
The thing is, well there are lots of things and I do t mean to impune your work some forty years ago but
1. We have learnt not to trust untested equipment
2. We have learnt that under pressure well meaning people will demonstrate equipment that while kind of representative of the reality are honed, improved and generously helped to perform well on test
3. Only repeatable performance under active competition is a real measure. It’s why sane people like open well designed markets. And it’s why weapons that get battle tested tend to be reliable
I am sure that overall if we read the red button nukes will fire and land and kill millions.
It’s just the day after I expect that the auditors will find a large number failed to fire, or failed to leave the tube, went the wrong way or simply otherwise went wrong
The point of credible threat is not one shot one kill, but so many shots we can basically guarantee a kill.
In other other words, both sides hold enormous number of nukes ostensibly to ensure they have some to fire after a first strike - but the effects of an enemy first strike are indistinguishable from poor engineering and beauracracy
Military nuclear programs are completely unlike civilian programs. Rigorous, repeated, varied testing, no expense spared. Our ICBMs are far from untested. We used to fire 2-3 per year to insure their reliability. Pulled out of the field, launched from Vandenberg, and carefully analyzed. I never once had any bureaucracy interfere with doing an excellent job, and money was never a limit. In the event of WW3, at least 96% would have struck their targets. We know that from decades of expensive research, testing, and incremental improvements. We spent over 5 trillion dollars on our nuclear program and received our money's worth.
It’s just … given something like 30k warheads (I know not same as rockets) but taking 2 or 3 for testing (and notably, taking, checking, scrubbing down, repairing … improving?) and then saying that represents the whole fleet, and leaving in the field for years between expensive retrofitting cycles on decade timescales
I mean maybe the USA was a on it’s A game for fifty plus years … us in the UK well …
Worth noting that UK missiles (but not warheads) are taken from a joint pool with the US. They have completely shared maintenance, so any reliability concerns are shared. Similarly, the testing is also joint so this should be seen as two failures out of all trident tests rather than two UK failures.
Not that that is a fun headline of course.
Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.
The flaw exhibited by the losing side was "retrofitting" effective and functional ships in the middle of a war. A similar attitude happens that I've seen countless times in live applications where decisions were made to allow the existing system to stagnate because a new shiny rewrite was going to come online "by the end of the year". Four years later, the new system isn't ready, and the "old" one (i.e. the one in production) is hitting scaling cliffs because it wasn't kept up to date.
But I suspect this post was in response to the "it's obsolete" comments on the F35 post earlier today, with lots of calls for work on drones.
The warning in Clarke's story is not that we shouldn't build new tech, however. We should absolutely build new tech, and have skunk works and the like. But we shouldn't stop building the existing tech as long as it is effective in battle. The concern comes when we don't have the capacity to build "what's next" because the most important piece is made in a little island off the coast of another continent full of potential adversaries.
Any way we go about it, the unfortunate fact is hindsight is the only way to tell what the right choice was.
In some cases the old system is outclassed so badly attempting to keep using it would be a fatal mistake (cavalry charges at machine gun nests). Other times a new system can be way better, but the rate of production is so far behind the old model you can't make enough fast enough to make a difference. And then other times the new systems have such terrible weaknesses they can be a risk to the entire nation state.
It's incredible how Arthur C Clarke foresaw the downsides of full codebase rewrites and putting all organizational weight behind untested and cutting edge technologies all the way back in 1951. Truly prescient sci-fi writing.
It could be argued that German military technology in WW2 illustrated some of the same issues, and perhaps gave ACC the idea. They had the V2, TV-guided missiles and operational jet fighters, some of which had massive development / opportunity costs, but none of which materially changed the outcome of the war. The ME262 jet in particular had engines that only survived a few flights because by then German industry couldn't access the specialist metals required.
"Professor-General Norden" might be a dig at the Norden Bomb Sight, an American high-tech wonder weapon that under-performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6D5rXbMBKo tells the tale.
Yes - the German armaments industry was very quick to respond to emerging requirements, leading to a proliferation of platforms and versions that were logistically difficult to support, especially as the supply chains were disrupted. Some mass-produced weapons (e.g. the Panzerfaust) were widely distributed and well supported, but the higher-tech ones weren't.
I believe that they also had growing quality issues due to sabotage from slave labour and shortage of materials and alloys. I remember from Wages of Destruction and Albert Speer's memoirs that the loss of certain mines in the East were devastating to them because they could no longer produce certain alloys.
There are organisations that have been following the rewrite strategy for 2 decades that are running 5 or more parallel systems and teams all doing a lot of common things with each with unique properties often in entirely different languages and a lot of integration hell. They will quite happily be starting a 6th such project rewrite this year to solve the problem of the previous 5, this time surely it will work.
Another organisation I know of replaced its "old" .net desktop client with a nice shiny Microsoft derived web solution using some customised COTs and it would solve all their maintenance issues. Sigh its a disaster as expected made all the worse because they fired the developers before the switch was even really done.
Over and over this mistake is made to rewrite and replace instead of refactor on the assumption the old code is crufty rather than battle hardened and that writing new code is easier than editing old. Never do these organisations learn to develop more maintenance friendly systems along the way.
Nowhere is the zero-sum nature of research vs materiel clearer than in real-time strategy games. The fundamental choice is actually three-fold: you can spend your economy on growing the economy, researching better units or building units. It's like choosing a constant in front of a first- versus second-order DE. Of course the choices vary over time, and the curve is complicated and interesting, at least in well-made games.
The obvious parallel right now would be the introduction of AI (a known flawed technology, IMHO), replacing jobs of experienced engineers and experts in most fields, in a moment of social and political instability...
> During the Second World War from 1941 to 1946, he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning radar defence system, which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on ground-controlled approach (GCA) radar
> Although GCA did not see much practical use during the war, after several years of development it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949.
I think he must have had some pretty good first-hand experience WRT deploying new tech during a war!
The US also famously had the whole Mark-14 torpedo fiasco, the torpedo issue in the story is not quite similar but there might be an echo.
I’m surprised not to see any comments on Ukraine here yet.
USA and the west focussing on ‘super weapons’ like f22, f35, super carriers etc etc. and Ukraine is losing the war because they don’t have enough bullets and mortars, and we don’t have enough factories to increase production.
Even f16s are too fragile to give to ukraine. They can only land on perfect runways because their engines are slung low.
Most of the modern USA weapons only work under condition of being totally dominant and being able to have your supply chain work perfectly. This story really is a very good analogy.
One further point - and this is what makes this war even more tragic - say Ukraine do get all the super weapons annd they do work as expected, and are on their merry way to Moscow, what would Russia do? Most likely their military doct9rine of dropping some tactical or not-so-tactical nukes.
As Sean Bean knows, one does not simply invade a nuclear power.
It's a tough problem. It's not very palatable to just fold either. The Russian government can always wave the nuke card, it's not going away, but neither will their ambitions.
Yeah. The 70s equipment that was due for decommissioning. Like the M1 Abramses that are being destroyed by drones right now. Or the Challengers. Or the Leclercs.
In Iraq those tanks were already old and crucially didn’t have night vision so they just blew them up in the night.
We did give them long range missiles. And now quite a lot of tanks. But - and this a has been admitted to by the pentagon - they didn’t think though or provide for servicing them. The poor buggers have all these different western tanks with parts that don’t match. And the Abram’s is powered literally by a jet engine and needs constant servicing. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so completely tragic.
The most basic problem is that Russia have treated it as an existential threat. Mobilised their entire economy, and it turns out, had been planning for this for years. The west just gave Ukraine all their spares and didn’t make any kind of plan for what to do next. It’s a complete failure of leadership and forthought and we’re really just lucky that it _isnt_ an existential threat for us, because we’d be really screwed if it was.
Yes and no. To some degree with the US this is true, but the US also produces enough small arms to keep several small scale wars going, just ask Mexico and South America.
Europe on the other hand unilaterally disarmed after the Berlin Wall fell because they couldn’t anticipate a world where Russia reverted to historical form and the US wasn’t carrying NATO on its back.
Now they’ve got Putin on one side, potentially Trump pulling out of NATO on the other, oops.
The problem is that neither Ukraine nor Israel are small scale wars. They’re both dropping crazy amounts of bombs and needing crazy amounts of anti air missiles. Meanwhile the US is still meant to be ‘pivoting to Asia’ so wants ammo for that.
It’s an established fact that Ukraine is running out of everything and we can’t make more.
Hey. The point is that the USA focussed on that. At the expense of keeping basic factories running making mortars and bullets - something Russia has not done. They still have all their soviet era factory capacity running. And it’s those basic things that turn out to matter a lot in a long multi year war.
I remember reading a saying that the Germans fought WW2 with the weapons of the 1950s, while the Allies fought it with the weapons of the 1930s. Guess who won.
"The Russian-manufactured Geran-2 is believed to have a "state-of-art antenna interference suppression" system that suppresses jamming of the GNSS position signal, designed by Iran using seven transceivers for input and an FPGA and three microcontrollers to analyse and suppress any electronic warfare emissions.[39]"
With any new technology we expect certain performance - we get this from the “The Economist effect” - where the simple one paragraph explanation of a complex field enables us to have a grasp on a concept but not the full difficulties.
So we expect the nuclear missile to hit its target whereas the thing about nukes is they were designed to be used despite being horribly inaccurate.
Anticipation is time bounded - we get depressed when the thing we expect is not done today - we can imagine it so why can’t we have it. This is the problem behind all crunch development times, all VC funded CEO replacements and every lying progress report ever.
And experience is what tells us where we really are - it is looking at a Trident missile spiralling round in front page photos and saying … what have we missed.
Weapons operate always at the frontier of what is possible. Nuclear weapons probably are not really there - we can fly the prototype over unchallenged airspace but launching rockets is hard.