AC-130

I heard a story on NPR today about how the AC-130 gunship may represent excessive use of force in an urban environment such as Baghdad - that the power of the AC-130 is a greater danger to innocent civilians than a threat to insurgents.

And reviewing the armament of the aircraft, it's a tempting conclusion. The armament varies from subtype to subtype, but the most common modern variant the AC-130U, appears to be armed with a 25mm Gatling gun, a 40mm gun, and a 105mm howitzer (the difference between a "gun" and a "howitzer" in this context being that a howitzer has a shorter barrel and a lower muzzle velocity than a gun). TV documentaries usually talk about this with a certain amount of boyish vim, the announcers going on and on about the devastating impact of all this, a veritable testosterone-soaked buffet of gore and slaughter.

So the average citizen thinks about an airplane using a 25mm gun, a 40mm gun, and a 105mm howitzer in a city, reflects on the gore-and-devastation angle of the documentaries, and can't help but imagine that the AC-130 is a flying slaughterhouse.

And it certainly can be. Used as the limits of its firepower, the AC-130 is indeed a first-rate killing machine, but it need not always be used at the limits of its firepower. Unlike a lot of aircraft, the AC-130 has the ability to moderate its firepower by employing the smallest weapon that will achieve the tactical end. An AC-130 fire control operator could, in principle, elect to engage a target with a single 25mm cannon round, a projectile about the size of a human thumb (or at least my human thumb). Simply because it can fire thousands of rounds per minute from three different guns, one of them powerful enough to blow the average house flat, doesn't mean that it has to.

The use of aircraft in counter-insurgency operations is tricky, at best. Say you spot insurgents on a rooftop and employ aircraft to eliminate them. About the smallest guided weapon a conventional airplane can use would be a AGM-65 Maverick, which weighs about 550 pounds (some more, some less) at launch, and has a warhead of 125 to 300 pounds of high explosive, depending on the type. The next smallest but probably more common guided weapon would be a laser-designated bomb, anywhere from 500 to 2000 pounds in weight. This is a lot of bang, as they say, enough to flatten the insurgents, the house they're on, the houses around it, and earn the lasting hatred and distrust of the innocent people who survived the attack. (This problem has led the US military to consider developing a guidance package for the currently unguided 70mm Hydra rocket, which would reduce the effective bang to about ten pounds of high explosive. Another option being considered is making guided but inert bombs that have no explosive filling at all and destroy their targets simply by crashing into them - this weapon has been referred to as the "Mosque-saver" because it could conceivably pick off tanks parked next to mosques without damaging the mosques.)

The point is that using any kind of bomb or missile in an urban environment is made difficult by the fact that current bombs and missiles are way too powerful. They cause far too much collateral damage, and almost invariably end up killing large numbers of the population whose goodwill is essential in winning the counter-insurgency campaign in the first place. The same problem also affects artillery, and perhaps even more so because artillery rounds, being unguided, are less accurate than precision-guided aircraft weapons. How much more inaccurate is a matter of some contention. The case is less unambiguous for things like tank main guns and squad-level anti-tank missiles and rockets, which are more discriminating in effect because they are basically a lot less explosive than aircraft bombs. (During the Battle of Hue in Vietnam, the use of artillery and aerial bombs was prohibited because they would cause too much damage to the historic city, so the Marines relied extensively on 3.5-inch rocket launchers (Bazookas, basically), recoilless rifles, and 90mm tank guns for fire support because they simply couldn't do as much damage as the Big Stuff.)

What does this have to do with the AC-130? This. People imagine that the AC-130, with all those guns, could cover a city with cannon rounds. And it could, and it would cause horrendous casualties if it did. But it doesn't have to. The AC-130 fire control officer can scale the firepower back to the minimum required to deal with the target at hand. The AC-130, unlike an aerial bomb, has at least some hope of engaging a point target and destroying it without blowing half a dozen houses flat and filling the hospitals and morgues with innocent victims. I'm not saying that the AC-130 can always eliminate every target without killing innocent people, but I am saying that it has a much better chance of doing so than, say, an A-10 or F-15 (or a battery of 155mm howitzers).

Some of the things that make the AC-130 useful in night operations over cities include:

1. The ability to scale firepower to the target and situation.
2. The ability to see in the dark.
3. The ability to carry enough fuel and ammunition to stay overhead all night.
4. The ability to provide fire support for friendly troops even when closely engaged.
5. The ability, in principle, to engage a point target with affecting adjacent buildings.
6. The ability to help friendly troops in unexpected ways.

The last point was made to me when I read a book about US Marine operations during the two battles of Fallujah, where an AC-130 used its powerful infrared spotlight to help guide Marines through a confusing snarl of alleys and streets. The AC-130 didn't fire a shot, but it helped guide the Marines who simply had to follow the "bouncing red ball" of the infrared spotlight.

So let's imagine I'm an insurgent. I pick up my AK and a bag of magazines and slip out the back door, intent on causing mischief, and I pause when I hear the distant whine of a multi-engined turboprop airplane somewhere in the night sky. Odds are that the airplane in question is an AC-130, whose crew can see me in the dark. They can tell US forces where I am and what I'm doing, or if the situation is right, they can wax me with a handful of 25mm cannon rounds. And the plane has enough fuel and ammunition to stay up there all night (US generals sometimes call this "dominating the battlespace").

I conclude that I'm better off going back inside, putting my AK away, and delaying my insurging for a night less dominated by AC-130s.

Operation Desert Blunder

Here's a quote from globalsecurity.org:

The success of strikes against Iran's WMD facilities requires both tactical and strategic surprise, so there will not be the sort of public rhetorical buildup in the weeks preceeding hostilities, of the sort that preceeded the invasion of Iraq. To the contrary, the Bush Administration will do everything within its power to deceive Iran's leaders into believing that military action is not imminent.

The full text can be read at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-timeline.htm and it includes an interesting timeline of when President Bush might and might not authorize an attack on Iran.

I'm not griping about anything that was said on globalsecurity.org, which has over the years been fairly sober. What I'm griping about is the way we (read President Bush and his people) keep taking their eye off the ball.

Who declared war on the United States? Who brought down the World Trade Center buildings and attacked the Pentagon? Who blew a hole in the side of USS Cole?. Hint: it wasn't Iran. So why are we taking our eyes off the real objective in this so-called War on Terror, Afghanistan, and getting ourselves all wrapped around the axle with Iran?

Is it really just the nuclear issue? North Korea built and detonated a half-assed nuclear weapon, and we rewarded them with a package deal that gives them "energy supplies" (read oil) in return for suspending a weapons program they couldn't afford in the first place. Why is it that North Korea, a member of the "Axis of Evil", is rewarded for building a nuke, while Iran is threatened with war for merely enriching uranium? For the sake of consistency alone we should hold both countries to the same standard, it seems to me. And is a nuclear-capable Iran any more of a threat to us than, say, a nuclear-capable Pakistan? Pakistan is one revolution away from looking like Iran in 1979, after all, and where is that OBL fellow said to be hiding again?

I can't help but wonder if part of the US government's preoccupation with Iran these days has to do with the Big O - oil. I can't prove it, and just thinking it makes me feel a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, but there it is, all the same.

I have over the last decade become a firm believer in what I call the "China theory", even though good examples of it have been seen in the USSR and Vietnam. It works thus. You simply ignore what the allegedly hostile government does, maintain economic relationships, and wait for social and economic changes to render the allegedly hostile government irrelevant. Sure, there are still hard-line Communists in the Chinese government, but they have been almost completely marginalized by events. Attempts by the Communists to stop the changes taking place in China today would be akin to shoveling dirt into the Yellow River, and at some point the hard-liners will shuffle off to the great Stalinist Old Folks Home and leave the Chinese government in the hands of the new entrepreneurs (which opens a different can of worms, but a less dangerous can of worms).

The same thing can happen in Iran, assuming we don't attack Iran (note that we never declare war on anyone any more, which I think amounts to dereliction of duty by the Senate. We have votes to "authorize military action" but if you put a motion before the Senate to declare war on anyone, I bet those media hounds would head for the hills so fast the dust cloud wouldn't settle for three days). A policy of engagement will lead to economic and social changes inside Iran that will, at some point, render the existing leadership irrelevant. What, really, is the single thread that unifies the Iranian goverment right now? I would bet that it is a sense of being under siege by the West in general and the United States in specific.

Release that state of siege and engage with Iran and I suspect that sooner rather than later the hard-liners in the Iranian government will be rendered irrelevant by the facts on the ground. This is not to say that Iran will ever look like the United States. Iran will always draw inspiration from its rich Persian history and from its Muslim orientation, but I don't see that a proud and vigorous Iran has to necessarily pose a risk to the United States.

But, having said that, Bush will do what he's going to do. He's already called the Constitution, a document he swore to defend, a "goddamned piece of paper"*, and his signing statements often promulgate points of view that even to me seem to be wildly unconstitutional. So he'll do what he wants to do - he is the Decider, after all. But I, for one, am sick of bankrolling the wars he started for bogus reasons while the one war that I do think needs to be fought (that would be Afghanistan) gets no attention at all.

I will make you this bet. I will bet that there are more people in the US military working up preliminary planning for an attack on Iran than there are US infantrymen holding ground in Afghanistan. And I think that's criminal. This talk of the anticipated Taliban "Spring Offensive" shouldn't even be on the news. We should have sufficient manpower and money in place in Afghanistan to make any talk of a Taliban offensive ridiculous. But we don't, and that makes me mad.

*Consult http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12142005.html if you don't believe me.

Comic Opera

Now and then I try to read comic books, but I find that I do with relatively little conviction. When I was a boy I read comic books, though back then we didn't read comic books; we looked at them. Mostly I read the World War Two-based comics that were fairly common back then, most notably Sergeant Rock and The Ghost Tank. There was another one (I can't remember the name) that retold the stories of Medal of Honor winners in World War Two; the only one that really sticks with me is the story of a Marine machine gunner on Guadalcanal (my grandfather was a Seabee who served on Guadalcanal and the remainder of Halsey's drive up the Solomons toward New Britain and beyond, so anything having to do with Guadalcanal tends to stick with me. My father was an ordinary GI who served under Eisenhower and his contribution to the war effort was guarding German POWs. Not glamorous, but someone had to do it).

Anyway, I have reasonably fond memories of comic books, and I know a fair number of people at work who buy comic books with almost religious zeal, and now and then I try to catch the wave. But most modern comics don't appeal to me. I think what I miss is the idea of a comic book being about ordinary people. Sergeant Rock and his riflemen weren't mutants with super powers, or supernatural beings, or ninjas from shadowy organization that has developed techniques for mind control or anti-gravity. They were just ordinary guys, a squad of perfectly normal guys who had nothing but Garands, BARs, maybe a Bazooka, and their brains.

When I try to read X-men comics (of which there must be six or eight titles at least) all the mutants run together on me, and some of their mutations seem a little strange. Or a lot strange. Why is it that nobody has maladaptive mutations, like only being able to digest peanut butter, or having two left feet, or having one nostril large enough to house a teacup? The movie Men of Mystery parodied this - I especially loved The Shoveler, who, when his wife criticized his mutant power as being silly, just shrugged and said "It's what I do. I shovel." And then I get all wound around the figurative axle trying to make sense of some of them. Like Magneto. Can he only affect ferromagnetic metals, like iron? Or can he manipulate any metal, like aluminum? What about paramagnetic materials, like liquid oxygen? You see my problem. It gets even worse when I start to obsess about the various conservation laws. I once sat down to calculate how many Cheezit crackers Magneto would have to eat to generate enough energy to lift an airplane, but fortunately I came to my senses before I got very far along.

I found that I really liked the series The Red Star, with its odd mix of technology, magic, alternate history and brilliant artwork, but its creators seemed to stumble over their own egos and plans for a new line of The Red Star comics seem to have been scuttled.

I generally like The Punisher, which tends to be coarse and heavily R-rated, but at least harkens back to the moral clarity of Sergeant Rock (whatever else you want to believe about World War Two, it has to be admitted that there was a Good side and a Bad side, and it was imperative that Good triumph over Bad. Exactly how Good triumphed can and should be debated - was it necessary to nuke Hiroshima, for example - but whether Good should have triumphed is very much a closed question). But later runs of The Punisher seem to be falling into the same general trap that brutal death metal wandered into - the need to constantly one-up itself by constantly raising the brutality bar. It's not bad, really, since it is just a comic book, but I still get the feeling when I read certain panels that the writers sat around a table in a pizza shop saying "We need to kill this guy in a really cool way. Any ideas?" "Let's burn him to death!" "No, we did that in the last one." "Oh. Let's burn him to death with a plasma arc cutter!" "Yeah!" It's not the brutality that bothers me; it's the crass way brutality is exploited that bothers me. And you always know that no matter what happens, Frank Castle will get banged up, he'll grit his teeth, he'll emit some grim monologue, and then he'll mow down the Bad Guys. And then there's the backstory as shown in "Born" that suggests that the Punisher isn't really just a normal guy any more...

Frankly, I'd be just has happy with a new version of Sergeant Rock. No mutations, no god-like powers, no super-stealthy ninjas from obscure schools of martial arts, and no strange artifacts like the lasso that compels you tell the truth.

Not Even Wrong

I've been reading a lot of books about string theory lately, or more properly books about the failure of string theory to turn into anything like a real scientific theory that makes predictions that can be tested in the real world. String theorists often refer to it as the "theory of everything", since it (supposedly) unifies quantum field theory with gravitation, but its detractors sometimes call it the "theory of anything" because one can tweak the theory by altering the constants that define the Calabi-Yau manifolds and make the theory look like anything at all. Got an inconvenient experimental finding you can't explain in string theory? Heck, just perturb the six-dimentional manifolds for a while until the theory "explains" the experimental result.

It is said that there is no single string theory as such. Instead, there is a "landscape" of a huge number of string theories - according to one estimate, 10E1500 (that's 10 followed by 1500 zeros) distinct string theories. When pressed on the point, string theorists insist that the theory is right, even if experiments and common sense argue otherwise, and what is really faulty isn't string theory, but our understanding of what a fundamental theory should do.

I think all of this is nonsense. Granted, I'm no string theorist, but it seems to me that string theory fails several common-sense real world tests. The first is that it seems to make no verifiable predictions at all. This is like me theorizing that there is an invisible demon in my garage. It isn't provable either way, so it's can't be a theory in the scientific sense. Another is that the theory depends on supersymmetry to work, and I'm sorry, but I find the whole notion of supersymmetry kind of far-fetched. One would think, one would, that if supersymmetrical partner particles existed, at least some of them would be light enough to be seen in existing particle colliders. (Why, given that the electron has a mass of, what, a few hundred KEV, would its supersymmetrical partner is much, much more massive?) But no - they're all just a little too massive to be produced by existing hardware, and when CERN's Large Hadron Collider comes on line, I suspect they'll still be a little too massive to be seen. Is it reasonable to assume that all the supersymmetry partners are above the 14 TEV or so energy LHC can generate, or is it reasonable to assume that in fact supersymmetry is an elegant mathematic formalism that has no connection with the real world? Another thing that bothers me is that string theory currently exists in five forms, and some of them predict the existence of tachyons, which seems to me to be prima facie evidence that that particular theory has a problem. (But I'm also dubious of the Higgs particle, which is predicted by quantum field theory and yet remains slightly too massive to be revealed by existing particle accelerators. So in a sense, nothing pleases me, since if I wave a magic wand and make the Higgs particle go away, nothing forces symmetry breakage in the Standard Model and the universe would have to look very different than it really does. But I'm not as dubious of the Higgs particle as I am of supersymmetrical partners - one particle being too massive to appear I can roll with ; a whole menagerie of them being too massive to appear starts to tickle my erroneous zone.)

String theory (more properly supersymmetrical string theory) could still turn out to be right. But it strikes me that the super-smart people behind string theory want me to take an awful lot on faith, including a series of conjectures that haven't been proved, as well as the entire notion of supersymmetry and the existence of Calabi-Yau manifolds that curl up the 'excess dimensions' that the theory requires to work. All of this could be true, but from where I sit, firmly in the world of engineering where theories and mathematics have strong predictive power, string theory seems a little suspect.

It's also possible I have a personal bias. I once knew a fellow who liked to joust with me on intellectual matters. I am an engineer by trade and tend to believe fundamental laws and mathematics, especially ones like Newton's Second Law of Motion. He was much more accomodating in his view of the universe and believed, among other things, that entropy can be reversed, that perpetual motion machines can be built, and that Nazi scientists had built a working anti-gravity drive. So when he told me he understood string theory, I automatically lumped string theory in with all the other junk he believed, junk that I will, for the sake of courtesy, merely call highly dubious.

I don't know what the real "theory of everything" is. I am forced to agree with Leonard Susskind to the extent that if there is a "theory of everything" we simply may not be smart enough to understand it, let alone formulate its basic mathematics. But I am also loath to abandon Einstein, who believed that we would know we had stumbled on the "theory of everything" because it would be beautiful and simple. String theory is neither beautiful nor simple, and so I remain dubious.

His Royal Majesty

My cat, the Emperor Maximus, in more or less his natural state. I am more of a cat person than a dog person, truth be told. Cats are generally (but not always) quieter, cleaner, easier to take care of, and less emotionally needy. Dogs sometimes seem to be co-dependent; they require constant reassurance that they aren't about to be put on the spit and barbecued, whereas cats really couldn't care less what we think of them. Dogs seem insecure; cats suffer from self-importance that almost borders on the kind of hubris Greek playwrights used to talk about.

Maximus is especially prone to lying on my chest when I'm trying to read in bed. I probably have lesions on my liver and pancreas shaped like cat footprints, and Max had puffed so much hair in my face it's a wonder that I don't hack up hairballs.

We have two other cats, but they lack Maximus's savoir-faire. Baxter sleeps in the closet all day and only comes out at night to leap between my stomach and the windowsill. Poopie wanders around all day looking haggard and annoyed and acting like she wants to barf on something expensive.

What was I saying about cats being easier to take care of than dogs? Give a dog a piece of bread and she's happy. Give a cat a slice of bread and they call the Mother Ship and arrange to have you turned into a cloud of ionized gas.

Deputy Dawg

Oh heck, why not? Here's a picture of my dog, who I refer to with artful creativity as "Dawg" even though her name is Annie. She came from the pound and was scheduled to be put to sleep within a day or two when my wife saw her.

Dawg is trying very hard to look cute and mild in this photograph, but don't let that fool you. She goes through life emitting noise at an average of about 85 decibels. If it's not barking, then it's grunting or snorting or sneezing or stranger sounds yet. Still, the idea that she was within hours of being put to sleep just for being noisy appalls me.

But she means well, even if she sometimes does steal my cheesecake when I'm not looking.

And she's really not noisy. She's just having the best day ever, every day.

Chilling Irony

I feel the urge to put something new on my blog, but I can't think of anything serious to say. No, that's not quite right. I have plenty to say; I just don't have the energy to say it. So with that in mind, I present an old photograph of a model rocket accident that I find amusing.

Behold my shirt and my hands. In my hands is a gloss red Gemini DC model rocket. Note that the rocket has a hole blown through the side of the rocket, and that the rocket engine (and its retainer) have been blown halfway out the back of the rocket. In the Gemini DC, the two recovery parachutes are stowed in the "nacelles" on the sides of the main rocket and are driven out backwards by the ejection charge. In principle, anyway. In practice, the parachutes stuck in the tubes and the ejection charge blew out the side wall of the rocket.

Not too memorable, and not too amusing. But what gets me is that the blowout in my shirt is almost exactly the same size as the blowout in the rocket. That, to me, is chilling. (For the record, the blowout in my shirt was not caused by any kind of gas expulsion; I was grinding something with a Dremel tool and managed to grind a hole in my shirt.)

In the background is my Chevrolet truck, which I think has to go down in history as my favorite vehicle. It was stolen from the parking lot where I work, and when the surveillance video was reviewed, we discovered that it took them less than thirty seconds to make off with it. It still makes me so mad I could spit.

A clean workbench is a sign of... what, exactly? I'm almost embarrassed to put this picture on my blog, as it might give one the impression that I am, to say the least, an unrepentant slob. And the conclusion is tempting; who could blame one? But let me 'splain.

This was when we lived in the small house in town, and my 'workbench' amounted to an old desktop perched between a couple of two-by-fours in the closet that held the water heater. I had enough room to get into my chair and sit down, but that was about it. I had no room to store anything, so I said "Heck with it" and threw organization to the four winds and let myself go. Now that I've moved to a much bigger house, I'm somewhat more organized.

What can one discern about me from this picture, other than that at the time I was a slob? I smoke, and that's a bummer. I drink coffee. I take the occasional Alka-Seltzer. I wear eyeglasses, but remove them for close-up work. I use a lot of "craft paint". I have a hard time throwing plastic bowls away.

What's funny is that you almost can't see the project I was working on for all the mess. It's a pair of Andreas 54mm Roman legionaries.

Hmmm

Well, I guess that was harmless enough. I am now a Google-being. Somehow I expected trumpets.