Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. John Richardson, gives a keynote address during the Naval Future Force Science and Technology (S&T) Expo, July 21, 2017. This is a slide from his presentation.
Patrick Tucker, Defense One: The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System
Service chiefs are converging on a single strategy for military dominance: connect everything to everything.
Leaders of the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines are converging on a vision of the future military: connecting every asset on the global battlefield.
That means everything from F-35 jets overhead to the destroyers on the sea to the armor of the tanks crawling over the land to the multiplying devices in every troops’ pockets. Every weapon, vehicle, and device connected, sharing data, constantly aware of the presence and state of every other node in a truly global network. The effect: an unimaginably large cephapoloidal nervous system armed with the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.
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WNU Editor: A must read on what could be the weapon systems of the future.
I'm sure they've thought of this, but what if the enemy gets inside?
ReplyDeleteJames without knowing the details of the system, your question cannot be answered fully. Without just saying "it's gonna be bad" let's look at how you might design such a system, then we can try to answer your question - at least theoretically.
ReplyDeletePrudence would dictate that you'd have separate - physically separate - systems within each of these drones. For simplification we'll call one "independent target and destroy"(the weapons part) and the other would be the fail safe system. The fail safe system must work independently and its sole function would be to recall itself, disarm or self destruct, given conditions only it can measure*. The fail safe system cannot be reached through networks. It is completely separate and powers itself etc. If it would be powered down by external influence (emp), the absence of it would have to lead to a disablement of the drone. Now the idea would be that if those drones are not operating within normal parameters (eg attack vectors*, gps coordinated*, etc) measured by the fail safe, it would prevent the drone from eg attacking its owners.
You could harden* the system further with eg quantum spins to reduce likelihood of successful tampering by quite a bit. But as we all know in technology we keep getting surprised by what's impossible this decade is possible in the next.
So in short: it would be bad, James :))
I was just kidding around. Of course you can influence/"hack" it.
And the * shows you where each of these can be tampered with even if the fail safe is the one measuring. You can influence the external environment, change GPS from satellites etc etc
To my knowledge there's no fail safe that never failed :) so the boring answer remains: it would be bad
Anon, I agree with you, that is why I said; "I'm sure they've thought of this". The problem I see is the "putting all your eggs in one basket" approach. I have no doubt this is the future (and my complaint I'm sure has been made throughout time by those who had belief in their system which no longer exists). Even if a portion of this system fails does it negate the whole? The recent naval problems in the Pacific are an illustration of this problem. Is going back to the pencil an aberration of the existing system of navigation or an indictment?
ReplyDelete"To my knowledge there's no fail safe that never failed so the boring answer remains: it would be bad" Nor to my knowledge either. No matter how smart you are there is always someone smarter. Oh well, it's the direction we're headed, it had better work.
Oh yeah, a great historical example of the separation (bulwark) theory would be the Titanic. It was considered unsinkable, but it did.
And just one nuke in space, its all gone.
ReplyDeleteHans,
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought of that, but yeah.
Nah, nukes in space are overrated and have been hyped in order to strike fear into the citizenry. Starfish Prime and other tests showed that most electronics did just fine - and that was back when electronics were much less robust than they are now, and more likely to fail under EMP. There's no way that the physics of a space-based nuke EMP or atmospheric nuke EMP will destroy electronics in a wide area. Affect them, yes. Temporarily, in 99.9% of cases. But render them inoperable or cause then serious damage? No way. Physical laws rule it out.
ReplyDeleteThe things likely to suffer under a high altitude EMP nuke are power lines and street lights. Your computer will be just fine, and so will the rest of your electronics. You'll need to reset circuit breakers in the house and maybe change some fuses if an EMP occurs – but your chips, circuit boards, hard drives etc. are innately hardened against EMP by virtue of grounding, shielding, electrical fuses, and electronic components' small sizes being a fraction of that required for an EMP's wavelengths to affect them.