War(ship) Driving For 802.11b Controlled Destroyers 343
Jason Straight writes "There's a story at pcworld, that describes how navy warships will be equipped with 802.11b networking to allow the captain to control the ship from anywhere on the ship.
" The point of the article also gets into the issue of cutting manpower for the ships - going from 300 people on each to destroyer to 90, and makes the point that the only way to do is through automation.
Great... (Score:4, Funny)
Good news for Al Quaida (Score:3, Redundant)
Re:Good news for Al Quaida (Score:3, Insightful)
Might not really be 802.11b with WEP (Score:5, Informative)
You are right about WEP. The thing is that nobody said anything about WEP so I would imagine that they are not using it since it is well known to be easily compromised. I would place my bet on them using either TKIP (better than WEP but not best) or AES. The problem is that I think AES is in the 802.11i spec not 802.11b. I wonder if they are really going to use 802.11b as the article states or if it is a proprietary 802.11x implementation?
Note: This [80211-planet.com] article is a really good primer on 802.1x excryption techniques. They state that AES is now a Federal Information Processing Standard, FIPS Publication 197, that defines a cryptographic algorithm for use by U.S. Government organizations to protect sensitive, unclassified information. The Secretary of Commerce approved the adoption of AES as an official Government standard in May 2002.
So no, WEP is not likely.
Re:Might not really be 802.11b with WEP (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just broadcast a stronger, interfering signal on the same spread spectrum. They could probably use a home cordless phone (some of which seems to pretty much kill 802.11b in many residences) and a pringles can.
Re:Great... (Score:5, Interesting)
the standard 100mW WiFi transmitter is nothing against an 1100W microwave oven with the door open.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Funny)
I can imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Encryption... (Score:5, Funny)
Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Funnily enough, a lot of people predicted the coming of 'war boating' just three months ago here on Slashdot. [slashdot.org]
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thankfully, the military brass doesn't make the technical decisions - there ARE people in technical positions who definitely know what they're doing, and will ensure things like that don't happen. I have faith in our military =)
-Berj
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:2)
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Funny)
It's called Buzzword Bingo, and everyone's playing. That will be the main reason for this; it sounds cool, it sounds like a neat concept, and we'll be the only players, right? We don't need to worry about The Enemy building a 15dBi omni, and at least listening in, and at most actually taking over? Surely not. Never. They'd not do that. Nobody has that capability.
Lo and behold, what was designed and implemented as a battlespace advantage quickly becomes your biggest battlespace disadvantage.
Given the military's strong chain of command - and the near heresy of so much as thinking questioning thoughts, the techs implementing this won't dare mention what a Bad Idea it is.
But hey, it's not as if I have any experience in large defence projects. Oh, no. Definitely not.
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Interesting)
That is one example. Another is the basic infantry soldier. As part of basic training, they are taught the differences in security of radio (least secure), direct land line (More secure), and person to person (most secure).
The challenge/response authentication used by the military for voice communication, to my knowledge, has never been broken by an enemy either.
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:4, Interesting)
We were not even allowed to run code in the computer! They were so paranoid that the only way we could build the device was to put probes on all I/O lines (parallel I/O in those days), and literally decode the entire action from watching the primitive I/O.
The military is a lot more careful about combat systems than they are about publicly accessible systems on the
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, "stealth" is important, and when a carrier group goes dark to be more invisible, the last thing we want is the enemy sniffing out a little walkie talkie somewhere.
Take that little walkie talkie times a thousand repeaters and you are looking at quite a bit of radiation. They literally have to make sure that only one is operating at a given time on a given frequency. In a ship with 5000 occupants, this is quite difficult.
Then again, this is just a little destroyer the article is talking about. I imagine 802.11b is probably alright still, but they will probably use something like bluetooth--lower power--and then putting a tranciever in every room. Still, interesting to think about..
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Plenty of repeaters will be needed! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that each compartment on a warship is a reasonable approximation to a Faraday cage, and many of the C3I spaces are Faraday cages.
One of the things that any electronic warfare specialist or tactical action officer learns is that your radar signals can be detected several times as far out as you can detect a return bounced off a target; EMCON (EMissions CONtrol) is a major concern for warships in a combat environment. If the crew complement of a warship is reduced, and the crew needs to use the wireless network to run the ship, then that's an electronic emission that can't be turned off. How far away from the ship can the wireless signal be detected? To be used to localize a target, you don't need to be able to connect via the network signal; you just have to be able to detect it and tell what direction it's coming from.
Remote controlled ships? (Score:5, Insightful)
So you have some terrorist who jams things or sends confusing orders to the ship. The crew is trying to figure out what is going on when WHAM the strike takes place.
If weapon systems are under control of such a remote control pad then it is even scarier.
Re:Remote controlled ships? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tor
Re:Remote controlled ships? (Score:4, Interesting)
and we should keep using flags and pigeons which are all but impossible to interrupt and intercept
This (humourous) rebuff to the people who are worried about wireless control of warships is misplaced. The danger is partially social as well as technological. You know when a pigeon has been intercepted - you don't get the pigeon or because you see it is a physical medium like the post you are familliar with the possibility of interception and thus treat the message with appropriate scepticism.
With 'hi tech' the user is usually a 'poor knowledge' user and will accept the results blindly. How many times have you questioned the results of a pencil and paper calculation vs. an electronic calculator even though a slip of the finger can make the calculator result useless but accepted blindly? A communication blackout on a wireless network on board a ship may just be accepted as 'normal' because, after all, the Windows PC at home screws up sometimes. Humans (mostly) nowadays blindly accept the results (and failings) of computers and don't understand the failure modes. This is the biggest risk.
Is this a good idea? Really? (Score:5, Funny)
Great, just what the crew wanted: Their captain giving orders while he's in the head.
Re:Is this a good idea? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this a good idea? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this really is about letting the captain command from anywhere. It was mentioned in the article, but most of the article talks about automating the monitoring of the ship's systems: using a computer to listen to a bunch of sensors, rather than having a crewman 'sense' manually by patrolling the systems and checking readouts. This is entirely different from controlling the main functions (weapons and propulsion) of the ship.
These days, a captain would spend most of his time (at least when the ship is in action/at war) in the Combat Information Center. There, he's surrounded by 5-30 specialists, who each have a console with 2x21" screens and two radio channels (one in each ear). These people supply all the information the Captain needs to deploy his ship.
There's no way you can do this with a laptop, as some posters have suggested.
that happened at my old job (Score:5, Funny)
Navy Stuff (Score:5, Informative)
To begin with, the captain ALREADY has "contol" of his ship wherever he is, even while in the shower. At the same time, the captain of a ship NEVER has "control" of his ship even when on the bridge. The point is what you mean by control. The ship is always under the captain's command, but he does not execute those commands himself. The captain never takes the helm, takes over damage control efforts, or actually uses any weapons systems himself. He gives the commands to see that those things are done, and is responsible for the training and performance of the people who do it. The article makes an unnecesary jump from wireless networked remote mechanical sensors and controls, to operational command and control.
As an example, the article mentions tying in the Integrated Condition Assessment System (ICAS), which is a system I know something about. This system is used to track the material condition and readiness of the ship, and to track damage control and engineering plant information. Wireless remote sensors might be a big improvement to that system, but is not going to result in steering the ship from Damage Control Central or the Chief Engineer's stateroom.
A good point is made about automation being a required step towards smaller crews on Navy ships, but that is not the only requirement by far. For example, a ship has a certain number of exposed square feet of steel and aluminum that require a certain number of man-hours per month to maintain. Sticking with damage control items - every water tight door, emergency light, and fire extinguisher/hose/nozzle on the ship gets weekly inspections and monthly maintenance. Automated "rust sensors" won't change those efforts a bit.
When a ship is in port overseas, usualy one third of the crew is "on duty" at time. The other two thirds can go ashore and see the sights. That leaves only 30 out of 90 onboard to man a dozen or so Quarterdeck and security watches through six four-hour watch periods. When half of a crew of 350 is on Christmas leave, you can still get enough people together to bring onboard the truck loads of milk, bread, printer paper, and spare parts that just arrived on the pier.
The scary thing in this is the possibility that the Navy will reduce the crew size without finding ways to reduce or outsource all these low-tech mundane tasks too. But I have reason to believe they are considering this issue, so I think the most likely change would be a reduction from 350 to 250, with high-tech wiz-bang stuff providing half the reduction, and marine contracting of some low-tech paint roller action providing the rest.
Oh, how bad can it be? (Score:3, Funny)
Dumb and Dumber (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:5, Interesting)
Navy ships dead in the water [gcn.com]
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:4, Insightful)
The application crashed on a divide-by-zero, if I remember correctly. The underlying OS was nothing to do with it. Or would you rather the OS trapped that error and just substituted in a random number? With the source to the Linux kernel, I'm sure you could do that
Proper operation (Score:5, Informative)
But in that SmartShip debacle, the OS trapped the error and killed itself instead of the errant application... Starting a chain reaction that caused EVERY MACHINE on the control network to crash. Not just one small routine, but the ENTIRE NETWORK.
It's all about damage compartmentalization. Something the Navy knows quite a lot about in the mechanical world...
Re:Proper operation (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, I've worked with a bunch of OSs, including NT4 and guess what: if you set up a few hundred NT servers and workstations in a domain, and one bluescreens, it doesn't take all the others with it!
So this wasn't NT's fault, it was the Navy's.
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:5, Informative)
The ship had to be towed into the Naval base at Norfolk, Va., because a database overflow caused its propulsion system to fail, according to Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk.
So obviously it had nothing to do with NT4, it was due to a database problem, that's completely independant of the OS underneath.
They could have run their ship with QNX or whatever else, had there been an overflow in the database software, the result would have been the same.
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:2)
Except that 'traditional' Navy computers, including their OSes have been designed to fail gracefully, unlike Windows NT where it's "OnError Goto Hell".
Things like distributed processing (where a program can run on any of the dozens of processors in a ship's network, and be shifted around if a processor fails) and multiple network links aren't unusual.
The database overflow fried the LAN, and crashed a number of 'remote terminals'. All things that should be protected by the OS.
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:2)
What, like a programmer too lazy / overburdened / forgetful to check for valid imput data before passing it on?
If the "Human Error" mentality is pervasive in the Navy, I can see why they would have problems. In certain circumstances it may be important to alter values in such a way as to push equipment dangerously beyond its limits. On the other hand, you should never accept a value, under any circumstances, that will simply result in a locked up system.
This probably isn't NT's fault, but it certainly doesn't bode well for the kind of code created by the Navy's Canadian contractor.
Re:Dumb and Dumber (Score:3, Interesting)
It appears to me that right there it specifies that more than just the databse software was FUBAR. Sounds fishy to me, I don't believe it, especially not with the phrasing they're using, but there it is...
Isn't the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply, if a whole bunch of people get killed on the ship, then there are still enough left to run it. This is not insignifigant, after all who wants to have an undermanned ship after 1/4-1/2 the crew dies?
Re:Isn't the point... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or when the smurf attack occurs in the middle of the lightning storm, during the "battle" (if you can still use the term in modern naval warfare, where there usually aren't even any enemy ships involved). When you are on a boat, there are so many things that can go wrong, all at the same time usually, I'm not sure you want to have to count on your laptop and your wireless setup to survive.
Re:Isn't the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that they are reducing the people that are "strictly necessary". They can then reduce the manpower, and still have a reserve.
Do you know why warships are expensive? No, the main part is actually not building them. Over the life-time of the ship, the far biggest cost is salaries to the people on board. The navy has realized this and it is very wise to reduce the number of sailors and increase automation.
Furthermore, in these days the public is very sensitive about casualties (rightly so); it is thus good to reduce the numnber of people exposed to risk.
Tor
Warboating (Score:5, Funny)
shall we play a game... (Score:5, Funny)
sit right back... (Score:3, Funny)
WarShipping? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WarShipping? (Score:5, Funny)
Wet ones?
Running a ship from your laptop? (Score:5, Funny)
fire-fighters (Score:4, Interesting)
After a while, I came to the conclusion that there are probably a lot of shipboard fires during naval combat.
So, my point is, is it such a good idea to reduce the complement from 300 to 90?
But what do I know. I'm just a shuttle driver. Or I was just a shuttle driver, anyway.
MM
--
Re:fire-fighters (Score:5, Insightful)
Reducing a ship's compliment by over 2/3 is a Bad Idea. When one of these ships gets hit with something the size of the bomb that hit the USS Cole, or the missiles that hit the USS Stark, I guarantee she will go down like a two dollar whore. The Stark is an especially good example, because when the missiles struck, one hit near her primary magazine. One lone individual kept the powder cool with a fire hose until he was found hours later. Considering his job was one of the ones likely to be eliminated by this "advance" in technology, the ship would almost definitely have gone down if she had been outfitted with it instead of a well trained crew.
Couldn't you automate the firefighting too? (Score:2, Insightful)
For instance, if the ship's smaller (fewer bunks, fewer supplies required, more fuel efficient so smaller fuel tanks, more space-efficient and lighter electronics, etc. etc.), wouldn't that inherently make it easier to fight fires? More armor around the magazine and the fuel tanks?
On another topic, why do you say that you "didn't want to miss this war?" Whilst, if the need really arose, I would do my duty to defend my country, and I do understand that fighting wars is something you've trained for years to do, I can't understand why you'd be anxious to fight a war (which is the only interpretation I can place on your comment). Lots of people are likely to die, indirectly through your actions, if a war happens. Some of them will be Iraqi civilians. Most of them will be Iraqi conscripts who probably don't want to die defending Saddam's leadership. Some will be fellow Americans, the odd Pom and maybe a few Aussies. It's possible some could be your friends and acquaintances. There's a small but real chance one could be you. WTF would you *want* to be in a war?
Re:fire-fighters (Score:3, Informative)
Bah. Noone mops floors on a ship. They swab decks.
And saying you're a "fireman" does sound better than the truth ("I'm a lowly snipe.")
gimp (Score:5, Funny)
Officer Reluctance... (Score:5, Funny)
An anonymous officer complained "I've got 10 pounds of circuitry on my head now...first the anti-homosexuality halo, now this!"
Radio Controlled Trains (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a bit of a rail buff and I from time to time I like to go down to the yard and watch them assemble trains. Nowadays the engineers have a large remote control, in the form of a strap-on breastpack. From this control they can pretty much operate all of the primary functions of the train (IE throttle, brake, horn, bell, etc.) This makes it possible for the engineer to build the train essentialy unaided. He can drive the locomotive up to a switch, jump off, drive the whole train past the switch, throw the switch, then back the train all the way down untill the locomotive clears the switch, throw it back and jump back on the locomotive. In the past this operation would have either required two people, one to drive the loco and one to throw the switch, or else the engineer would have to walk the length of the train twice (not really a viable proposition when you've got a mile-long train on a busy line.)
Is it dangerous? Working on the railroad is always dangerous. But in reality it's probably safer than otherwise. Fewer people to keep track of. It's a pretty neat system.
Now IMHO it's fucking retarded that they are planning to use 802.11 for this. BTW the article link is 404 so don't bitch at me for not reading it.
Re:Radio Controlled Trains (Score:5, Insightful)
trains pretty much have two directions to go in normal operation
trains do not carry armed cruise missiles
trains get additional signalling from devices embedded on the track which could override internal commands
This is a far cry from controlling a warship...
Re:Radio Controlled Trains (Score:5, Funny)
Both horn and bell? Is there anything you can't do with computers these days..
Re:Radio Controlled Trains (Score:2)
Another link & are they mad ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not exactly sure what the us navy is up to, but I can guess. The big items of military equipment are getting too expensive to buy, even for the us. The only alternative is to make extensive use of COTS hardware and software to push down the prices. The aim is to modify cheap stuff to deliver what you need, with the idea that at least that way you can have a lot of them, even if they might have some compromises.
NT & 802.11b are just two examples of this, I'm sure if people do a little digging they will find more - in particular the computer hardware.
After all, a destroyer is just a platform for missiles and a radar. And a target, of course. Never say that to the navy though, they are kind of sensitive to that type of thing.
The question of /. readers is, how could they be supported in doing this better ? As usual, they get a load of contractors in who sell them the advice that Microsoft is a sure bet. What would an open source warship look like? Even better, how could you retro fit an existing hull to provide a cheap platform that be some use?
One thing is for sure, other countries have picked up on the same idea.
Re:Another link & are they mad ? (Score:2, Funny)
open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
The military could and should go with software that is based on open standards: UNIX/POSIX, X11, etc. And in their implementations and deployments, they should then stick as much as possible to those open standards. They can then buy software and hardware from many different vendors and have a choice among multiple implementations, including some open source ones.
Re:open standards (Score:2)
A good part of the problem is that Microsoft likes people to "upgrade" quite frequently. By the time any of their software made it through testing they'd probably refuse to support it anyway.
Bad Idea (Score:2)
The Navy is very authoritarian, and this model doesn't work well in modern warfare. Often the captain leaves orders and goes somewhere. Then the situation can change suddenly and the responding officer not only has to decide what to do, sometimes he has to decide if it's ok to violate the captain's orders to respond to the unforeseen. And he might have just minutes or seconds to respond. That's bad enough. With this high-tech, the captain may have the remote control, but he won't have all the information available as quickly as on the bridge. It would be like channel-surfing while looking at the TV Guide instead of at the TV. The subordinate on the bridge will have to factor in all the uncertainty about where is the captain, what does he know, is he sober and awake, ... Too confusing.
War takes plenty of brains, but peace takes even more.
Yeah, right (Score:5, Informative)
For starters, the idea is to reduce emissions and radar signatures, not enhance it. Since a $200 parabolic antenna can pick up WiFi at 20 miles, and get enough of a signal to make use of it, 802.11b has a problem here. Of course, on a subsurface plaform this is not an issue.
Second, huge sections of Navy ships are RF quarantined, with no emissions allowed. Sometimes it's for security, sometimes it's because they don't want RF signals popping up around weapons with very sensitive electronics. Even the captain has to follow these rules. I said the first paragraph wasn't an issue for submarines, but this paragraph is, in a big way.
Third, 802.11b enabling the captain to "run the ship" from anywhere presupposes that the captain can "run the ship" whenever he or she has a network connection and... what, a PDA or PC? Again, nope. The captain has a staff, external communications, and a ton of sensor data. About the best the captain can do with a PDA is to see what's for dinner and check email.
In other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Capability Threshold (Score:5, Interesting)
My first objection to this concept was to wonder what would happen to all this automation when it gets things shot through it. But then I recalled that modern ships are not designed to withstand attack and still be effective. With so many kinds of modern weapons, if you're hit, game over.
Our existing naval ships were designed like this so much that they could beat off an attacking air squadron, but could not get a shot off at four men attacking the ship from a rowboat.
Modern ships are a curious mix of outmoded ideas, window dressing, high technology and ludicrous "cost cutting" measures. It is a wonder they function in their missions at all. Replacing the expensive human element with more weird hardware by the lowest bidder will not make them perform their missions any better. We all know how hard it is to get complex distributed systems to work 24/7 - and that is when they're sitting in some purpose built office block. The only thing comparable to naval service for those systems would be a +7 earthquake. Anyone like to take bets on being able to print out a document on the 7th floor East printer 20 minutes after a nice big earthquake?
But this is not about making capable, survivable, robust ships. It is about trying to fight better and cheaper wars. It's a numbers game. If you "need" 25 ships to accomplish your mission objectives worldwide and you can only get them to work 50% of the time, then you need to buy 50 of the things. How much money do you save by eliminating sailors vs. how much do twice as many ships cost?
By turning over the world to bookkeepers we've done away with style, service, elegance, and quality. Maybe, if we turn war over to them they will succeed in making it so efficient that it also ceases to exist.
The relevant naval saying here is: "Ships don't fight, men do." ...even if they don't use Windows.
Now we know why Microsoft was attached (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I distinctly remember that the navy used to be proud of their lack of automation. This allowed warships to survive severe amounts of damage without perishing. If a radio operator is severely wounded, you can replace them. If your transmitter board is damaged, you can throw in a new one. If a jolt takes out the hard drive on your software radio, you're screwed. Perhaps the US hasn't been in a real war for so long they forgot how to design for damage?
I'm not saying I want a war, or that I dislike the idea of warship automation, but the original stated intention of the Navy seemed somehow admirable in a way that installing 802.11b wireless helm control just doesn't. Increased automation does tend to increase the fragility of a device, and the amount of problems that might occurr. What happens when the captain walks out of range of a transmitter? What happens if the laptop is stolen, or comandeered? What is stopping someone from dropping little 802.11b jamlets onboard?
And what OS, praytell, will this system support? Will the Navy solicit imput from BMW?
-c
Re:Now we know why Microsoft was attached (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps. Certainly we haven't been in a real war for so long that we've forgotten that war sucks.
Re:Now we know why Microsoft was attached (Score:2)
What stops you from throwing in one of the spare harddrives ?
Seriously, your "problem" is a problem of too little redundancy, not a problem of modern technology.
802.11b (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:802.11b (Score:2)
Another possibility is jamming, it's even been known for warship radars and satcomms to jam their own systems.
Being on the ocean, one big reflective antenna, you could probably extend this distance to miles with a decent antenna, obviously with great latency, but it would work.
Latency isn't an issue if the aim is to guide a missile. Is this fancy radio network still going to work when the ship has a big hole in the side and is most likely on fire too...
screen door on a submarine? (Score:5, Funny)
-world's most insecure networking technology...check!
-world's most insecure, unstable, practically-end-of-life'd operating system....check!
(remember, WINNT is the OS of choice in the navy, despite that whole dead-at-sea-had-to-be-towed-in incident)
I think we've hit upon the Destroyer equivalent of "screen door on a submarine". Only way this could get any better is if they use ColdFusion for the web interface with a MS-SQL backend(and, of course, Exchange for email.)
Still, that's going to make for some fun dialog boxes:
"Searching for newly installed hardware- Found, AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense System. Please insert vendor CDROM"
Better hope you don't have an IRaQ conflict!
Wait wait, I'm on a role.
PocketPC:"oooh yeah baby, oooo[pop click click DING!]
Captain: "#$@!%$"
[wham! Clink clink clink clink...]
"CAPTAIN IN THE GALLEY!"
Captain: "SEARGENT! HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU, MICROWAVE OVEN USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED WHILE I"M TRYING TO DOWNLOAD PO...uh...TECHNICAL SPECS!"
Seargent: "SIR, SORRY SIR, I WILL FINISH MY POPCORN IN THE AFT GALLEY!"
Oh, but there's more.
"Anyone up for a fireworks display?"
"Oh, the USs Potshot back in port?"
"Yeah, grab the pringles can."
Sunk by Windows NT (Score:4, Interesting)
Official comment (Score:3, Insightful)
What are you all looking forward to when you finally have 802.11b?
-C
Re:Official comment (Score:2)
Mineral insulated cable will work until it melts. A radio repeater will be useless when the first component fails, including things like backup batteries.
Redundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Redundancy (Score:2)
In contrast the US Navy has always prefered to take twice as many ships as it needs.
Seriously - this is what you do if you have a sack load of money, but want to fight with a smaller number of more highly trained personel, and minimise casualties. You never use more people when you could just spend more money on hardware.
Re:Redundancy - excess crew (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people have been pointing this out, but it seems to me to be largely irrelevant in this day and age - any kind of combat an armed surface ship is going to encounter is going to either do so little actual physical damage as to be irrelevant, or it's going to straight-up sink it (look at the Sheffield, the oversize crew was just that many more people to die). Basically, here just don't seem to be that many weapons systems left these days that have the capability to do severe damage to a ship, killing half the crew, and leave her in any shape that the surviving half is going to want to try and stay aboard - it's either a skiff full of C4 attacking you in harbor, or an Exocet missile blowing you clean in half, there's no middle ground anymore.
The author had no clue, or was being mislead... (Score:5, Informative)
First off, there is no need for the captain to be "instantly reachable". It's not like he's the only one which can make command decisions on a ship. It's been a while, but IIRC the title of the person who is in control of the ship is the Officer of the Deck. Should neither the captain nor Executive officer be on the bridge, one officer is designated the OOD and has effective command of the ship. Now, in a crisis, the XO and Captain almost always attempt to return to the bridge to reassert command, but the OOD can make all decisions (including breaking previous captain's orders, should the OOD deem it necessary) until relieved. So, it is silly to design a system to allow the captain to controll the ship from anywhere. Someone in the chain of command is already doing that from the place most suitable to do so, the bridge (or CIC, as appropriate).
Second, virtually all ships have a voice intercom systems set up throughout, which can relay orders back to the bridge far faster and more efficiently than some silly handheld WAP thingy. They're hardwired, so no emissions. They are invariably redundant, and far more likely to survive damage than a WAP system.
Finally, reduced manpower is a great goal, but generally is highly driven by putting in machinery which requires fewer operators. Communications systems are not really any manpower saver. And, as noted by others, you need twice as many people on a ship as it takes to operate all machinery: remember you have to run the ship 24x7, so you need at least two shifts (there's a little overlap, but 2x is a good rule of thumb), and you better have some extras for damage control and casualty replacement. So, you'll get manpower savings by automatic ammunition loading systems, better fire-supression, more efficient engines, better EW weapon systems, but not by adding WAP points.
Dumb idea.
-Erik
Re:The author had no clue, or was being mislead... (Score:2)
You also need people to look after these shifts, cooks, doctors, command officers, etc.
So, you'll get manpower savings by automatic ammunition loading systems, better fire-supression, more efficient engines, better EW weapon systems,
You still need people on board who can fix these systems and to be able to handle the situation of automatics not working when they are needed.
Re:The author had no clue, or was being mislead... (Score:4, Insightful)
The article explains the need for wireless here:
So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of the sensors.
If you take a closer look at the article you will also see just how better communications combined with a new set of sensors (etc) is expected to reduce manpower needs:
The wireless LANs will change the way crew members perform their jobs. "Today, they have to do rounds, every 45 minutes or two hours, for example," says Benga Erinle, director of government operations for 3ETI. "They're checking equipment, machinery, and filling out and signing paper logs." The TSM system is intended to do all this automatically. "It goes beyond simply gathering information," Erinle says. "We also use programs for diagnostics and prognostics, based on the data. If a critical system is going to fail, we'll pick that up and alert the chief engineer that this is pending." The TSM system also will change the Navy's long-standing practice of time-based maintenance--of replacing or tearing down machinery after so many hours or days of use.
In other words, on top of all the people who actually man the weapons and run the ship, you need a whole bunch of people who are just doing maintenance. This new system should reduce the number of those people.
All makes sense to me.
Re:The author had no clue, or was being mislead... (Score:4, Informative)
Keep people awake and busy
Keep records of equipment performance
Force people to walk around and keep an eye on things
Provide written proof that the first three things are being done It would cost thousands of dollars per compartment to monitor everything that could go wrong.
During normal working hours we did maintenance. That includes fixing whatever broke and preventive. There aren't any extra people on board that just fix stuff. Whoever is qualified to operate the equipment usually maintains it too.
Also, if someone sees that a critical system is going to fail, the EOOW (Engineering Officer Of the Watch) is the person to notify. The ChEng will know soon enough when he hears the ECC alarm, the lights go out, and he senses that soothing feeling of the ship bobbing helplessly along in the middle of the sea.
MM3 CheezyDee (U.S.S. Mauna Kea)
wired networks (Score:2)
Great (Score:3, Funny)
'Wh00h D00d! 1 5c0red 4 84TT7E5H19 !"
As a sailor... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can bet that if the thought occured to me, it had occured to someone else already as well.
Cutting manpower on ships is not a "bad" idea, but one that should be explored with extreme caution. It's important that there be a certain level of redundancy and cross-training among the ship's crew. By making each man more significant for the ship's operation, each man becomes less expendable. It would take less to cripple a ship or even prevent it from going to sea at all.
I'm not sure they're thinking this thing through well enough.
important things to remember (Score:2, Insightful)
Automating the ship to reduce manpower is a great idea for peace time, but in a heavy war you want 4 guys to every station... how do you get the engines running while you are still floating but have a 20 foot gaping hole in the center of the ship from an excocet missle that ripped out 99% of the computer communications systems? you use muscle power... the surviving crew does it all manually.
New terrorist rallying cry (Score:3, Funny)
All your ship are belong to us!
A Wise General once said (Score:2)
So how will they counteract, oooh, say, EMP? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a factor to be considered - you can shield physical wires and whatnot quite well, and harden your electronics, but those pesky radio waves are awfully hard to manage once they've left the transmitter. Does anyone know how this might be dealt with, asside from accepting the fact of periodic connectivity loss? I'd assume that critical systems would be physically wired, but one can't be sure - I saw some pretty stupid design in my military days...
For non-critical systems (i.e. anything that gets turned off/left alone in combat), though, I agree that this has the potential to cut workloads quite a bit.
Logical progression (Score:2)
Why automation may not be good.... (Score:2)
This automation would be fine but man it better be rock solid...I would hate for some script kiddie to hack into a destroyers system and use a destroyer to create all kinds of havoc. In any case, the automation systems would take less space then 200 some odd crew and the 90 that are left would have nice sized cabins.
Various replies. (Score:5, Insightful)
Firstly, the journo has obviouisly gone way over the top when talking about the captain controlling the ship from anywhere. Further down the article, it makes it clear that this is basically about health and condition monitoring. A warship is stuffed full of gizmos. If the shis is to function, all those gizmos must be working. People long ago found that it is much better to monitor gizmo status and fix it when it is only ill than wait until it dies - and possibly breaks something else. A warship wants everthing to be better than 90% peak performance, not somewhere unknown between perfect and broken. So lots of gizmos have monitoring points, and lots of men walk around checking them and monitoring trends. This is a classic case for computer optimisation.
So why not do it with a wired network? Because even within one compartment, there are likely to be a lot of gizmos and a lot of wire. And you can't just wire something up in a ship like you can in an office with raised flooring or cable ducts - you have to design in each cable. So a wireless soluution is much easier.
801.11b inside a metal ship? Sure - probably a base station inside each compartment, with the power tweaked to suit that compartment. Run one wire to each compartment and you can instrument every gizmo in there. Normal 802.11 pumps out whatever is the legally permitted power; you don't *have* to do that. (Actually, since you are inside a steel comparment, couldn'tr you over-power if you needed to).
Emissions: three points: detection, reading, jamming. Only one of these makes sense, detection. The article says that the transmissions will be DES encrypted. You aren't going to break that on a battlefield. Jamming: as I said, a metal ship. You are not going to blast enough jamming power through that metal to harm the signals - see also next point. And they are only monitoring signals anyway, not Command and Control.
Detection. Well, possiby. This is probably why they are doing the experiment. Somebody said that you can detect 802.11b at kilometres with a disk. Sure - for an basestation which is doing its best to spread its coverage as wide as it can. But a modern nave ship in battle conditions is *sealed tight*. They don't want fallout to come in, they don't want RF from all the other machinery inside the ship to leak out. Surely aeven a cheap radar could see a ship at the same sort of range that, even with a disk, one could detect the 802.11 leakage from a badly sealed door in what is otherwise a faraday cage. I would place a bet at reasonable odds that thay can seal the ship. But I wouldn't like to be certain about it - and neither would they, which is why they are trying it out on one ship. Good engineering practice - try a safe experiment before committing to it.
Crosstalk to other devices. Sure. So you can't use it in one or two specially sensistive compartments. You still win in the other hundreed or so. Again, experiment will tell you if it works.
Probably easier to fix battle damage, too. If compartment gets damage but is not obliterated, dozens of cables may be damaged in a wired installation. Run in a mobile base station, and you "repair" all the connections in one go.
Think different (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a reson subs don't use active sonar (Score:3, Insightful)
Repel Boarders? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's an awful lot of deck to defend if your enemy can get in close.
Give it a proper security test! (Score:3, Interesting)
If the opportunity to crack into a battleship's control systems isn't enough to draw people in for the challenge, offer a couple of prizes. Second-place winner gets to, say, fire a surface-to-surface missile into a Yugo. First-place winner gets to use another Yugo as an artillery projectile.
Re:That's nothing! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:not just wep (Score:4, Funny)
I further bet his pringles can won't be much of a match against three marines in scuba gear.
Re:COOL!!! (Score:2)