It's time once again for the biweekly open thread. Talk about anything you want, including things not naval-related, so long as it isn't culture war.
The security certificate has been updated, so life should be back to normal on that end.
July 30, 2018
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As a heads up, your SSL certificate expired yesterday (screamed my browser).
I was hoping to edit the top post before anyone posted about that, but I seem to have failed.
I've been reading An Army At Dawn, by Rick Atkinson, which is about the US/UK Invasion of North Africa in 1942. It focuses on how amateurish the US Army was at first, and how it learned from the campaign.
In the point I'm at, which is the initial landings on the North African Coast, the landing craft basically all get lost, or end up miles from where they intended to be.
Does anyone know how amphibious navigation works right now? Are there any advances from the WWII era besides GPS for landing craft navigation?
Not really. There are a few other electronic navigation aids, but they've mostly been replaced by GPS. If you're asking what we'd do in a GPS-denied environment, most aircraft and the larger landing craft are going to have inertial systems which cut how far off they can be.
This website is sometimes really slow. Can you also see if that's fixable?
At least some of the confusion during the Torch landings was because they took place at night. Night vision would have helped some of the problems they had.
@humanbean
It's been raised several times. He hasn't figured out what's going on.
@all:
The expired certificate is now renewed, and should now properly auto-renew, preventing similar future issues.
I have made a small change that should improve page load speed for many visitors (specifically, for repeat visitors). It is still much slower than it should be in many cases, and I am working on improving that.
At night you could use the stars, assuming you've got an accurate watch.
Night vision would help once you get close to your destination but won't help you get close.
Anyone have an opinion on the novel "Ghost Fleet", by P.W. Singer and August Cole? It depicts a near-future global war with a large naval component.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B012H00Q3G
@Said Achmiz
Thanks. I appreciate your work on this.
@Anonymous
That's not really going to help, for several reasons. First, watches in that era weren't very accurate. Synchronizing watches as a component of military operations was done because of how much watches drifted. Even a minute off will throw you at least 10 nm off at the sort of latitudes common in WWII. More like 15 nm in most of the Pacific. This is fine if you're trying to navigate a lifeboat to a large chunk of land, but significantly larger than the typical error during an amphibious landing, which was 2-3 nm.
Second, keep in mind who's running the landing craft. Your typical LCVP coxsun during Torch was probably about 21, and had been in the Navy maybe 2 years. He doesn't have the training or equipment for celestial navigation, and he has to worry about not hitting things, the rest of his crew, and the 30-odd guys he has aboard. He should be following a control boat of some sort (can't remember how they did that in Torch, it's been a while since I read the relevant Morison) who should have the crew to do decent navigation. The bit where they screwed up isn't really solvable by watches.
@Johan
There are rules on microchip use in the US military, so it's not a particulalry likely scenario. As for reactivating the "Ghost Fleet", what fleet? We have a couple of carriers, run hard and put away very wet, (Kitty Hawk was known as S*** Kitty before her retirement, and Kennedy wasn't in any better shape) a handful of Ticonderogas, with combat systems that haven't seen any of the upgrades of the past decade and obsolete missile launchers, and some Perrys that had their missile capabilities removed well before they left active service. As cool as the whole "broken-backed war" is, it's really not practical these days.
@Johan
Ghost fleet was pretty terrible. It was definitely not "hard" military fiction - and the depiction of hacking was just cringeworthy.
Speaking of book reviews, what do people think of Generals, by Thomas Ricks? I feel like the main hypothesis that the top brass is insufficiently accountable and not sufficiently strategic in their thinking is broadly true, and the Army could use a major shakeup in terms of both the people in senior leadership roles, and broader personnel policy. However, I can't shake the feeling that it's a bit too just so and one sided, so I can't recommend it whole heartedly.
bean:
Not in WWII, but today it might be workable (with a digital camera and some image processing software) and would work when GPS is jammed.
There have been ICBMs using stellar nav to provide a bit more accuracy than inertial alone so it should be possible for such a thing to give good accuracy (though I think inertial provides the accuracy you said is needed).
Reactivate the museum ships!
Make sure the order authorizing this is broadly worded, and then a cheeky officer can have a bright idea for some fuel-economizing team cohesion/morale-building that unexpectedly runs into trouble and long story short Constitution takes something out with a broadside.
That's a very different thing. The problem with that kind of stellar is that it only works at night, when the stars are clearly visible. You can't do it during the day, or if it happens to be cloudy. Also, I'm not sure a typical digital camera is going to give enough resolution to make that work. But yes, I could see some form of automated celestial system popping up as a GPS alternative for medium to large platforms.
I'm reading a book about ICBM guidance, and while I don't want to get into all the technical details, ICBM guidance is of no relevance here. Stellar-inertial works by using the stellar to compensate for minor flaws in the inertial. They look at only one star, by using fancy math to make that observation compensate for most of the error in their initial solution, which is pretty good. Non-missile inertial has rather different requirements, and non-missile stellar doubly so.
That's almost worse. Even a good museum ship is totally unready for sea. You're looking at a couple of years, and a ton of money.
Constitution's cannons are dummies, and not particularly good ones, either. It was one of the many things I didn't like about the way they presented the ship. Making a good fake out of iron (not necessarily workable, but one that looks right) would be pretty easy. It's textbook sand casting, which is not hard.
Alas. I suppose she'll have to settle for surviving a hit so well that the enemy concludes they've reinforced the armor somehow.
I was knocking around the internet, and ran across this.
I'm not even sure what to say about that. Beyond the fact that the picture is of either North Carolina or Washington, neither of which would exist for another 80 years.
@RedRover said
I don't think that Ricks is wrong, but what he says about the army is more or less true of any large bureaucracy. All such institutions reward conformity with institutional culture and priorities and dole out accountability inversely with rank. The US army is larger and older than almost any other bureaucracy out there, so the problems are probably worse, but problem is one that can only be managed, never solved.
I don't recall Ricks particular suggestions well enough to comment on them, but I'm sure that personnel system is worse than average and could use a shakeup.
I have a request for you guys. I'm trying to put together a list of top posts for new readers, as I figure that the topical index has gotten a bit too imposing for that to be a good place to send them. But I also am very much not sure of my calibration on these matters. What would you recommend as the best couple of things I've written here?
Why the hell not?
Because I have limited amounts of time, and I'd rather spend it writing about ships instead. Also, I didn't have it on hand, and I didn't want to trust my memory. The book, Inventing Accuracy, is pretty good.
bean:
Obviously, but having it work half the time is still better than none of the time, inertial nav system accuracy degrades with time, not distance so it could re-calibrate every night.
bean:
But during the day the sun and sometimes the moon are out.
bean:
Nothing you to stop you putting the camera at the end of a telescope (well, except the telescope size and mass but even 30 cm catadioptic 'scopes aren't that big.
bean:
I wonder how much you'd have to modify a warship radar to be able to pick up pulsars (or do they already pick them up and have to be programmed to ignore them?).
Bean, your "Why Carriers Are Not Doomed" series definitely belongs in any list of your best works.
Sure. I’m mostly pointing out that having a stellar system to update the inertial one is rather different from using it as a cheap GPS substitute. And again, I point out that you need a method which isn’t thwarted by clouds. It would work great in LA, but not at all in Seattle.
That would give some data for a more sophisticated system. My first thought was something simple, with a fixed lens, which might be able to do the math based on a random patch of sky and an artificial horizon. Including tracking is a much bigger problem.
Depends on where you put it. On a landing craft? No way. On a full-size ship? I suspect you could just use the existing optics and update the software.
I don’t think that would work. Google says pulsars emit their peak power around 400 MHz, which is B band/UHF (depending on which system you use). These days, that’s almost entirely used for communications. I’m sure there’s some active naval radar which uses it, but it’s probably on some ancient ship in South America. All of the major modern radar systems operate at much higher frequencies.
@Johan
That was already at the head of my list.
Speaking of Why the Carriers Are Not Doomed, Bean, have you noticed that in all your captions for that series you've mislabeled "Lake Erie" (CG-70) as "Lake Eire?"
You're the first one to pass that particular test. Good job.
@cassander
I read Ricks's book years ago, and I'm pretty sure I'm including some follow-on articles he wrote in my recollection of it. His contention was less about institutional conformity (although that is part of it) as that lots of peacetime generals don't have the goods for war, and the Army failed to shift gears into any sort of wartime mode. GOs continued to conduct "business as usual" (basically: keeping the metrics up) without even making a serious attempt to evaluate themselves/each other on performance/progress in the war. Seeking victory in war ought to serve the same purpose in the Army as the profit motive in private industry, and has in the past, but did not in Iraq. I particularly remember one analysis he posted on his blog, that a combat deployment as division commander had a minor negative effect on the odds of getting the next star.
Ricks's basic solution was to fire more generals for failing to get results, citing examples from previous wars up to WW2 and of course MacArthur in Korea. I think he's correct about identifying a lack of accountability, but he underestimates the depth of the problem and overstates the effectiveness of his proposed solution.
bean:
True, but a system that only works some of the time may still be better than nothing.
The pulsar system would work in clouds, but the low power of pulsars means they might be even easier to jam than GPS.
bean:
If it can mount a 12.7 mm machine gun it should be able to carry a telescope, whether the crew would want to swap a machine gun for a telescope is another matter.
bean:
How much in the way of optics do modern ships have anyway?
bean:
Though it might be picked up by antennas meant to pick up communications so re-purposing ELINT equipment then (and you'd want that stuff to be pretty sensitive).
sfoil:
I don't think it was failure to get results that got MacArthur fired.
That depends heavily on how much of the time it works, and what the drawbacks are. I suspect that those are considerable, and that other systems are considered superior.
That's outside my field of expertise. I don't know how easy pulsars are to detect, but very few ships carry radio astronomy equipment.
It's not simply the ability to place the telescope aboard, or even mount it on the upper deck. First, it might need stabilization, and will definitely have power and possibly cooling needs that an M2 doesn't. This is going to need a good artificial horizon, which is not cheap, and might be fairly large. (I don't know what state of the art on that is.) Second, it has to survive in that environment. An M2 is pretty simple and rugged. It has no optical systems or electronics. Small boats are not kind environments. Lots of ship motion, salt water everywhere, and a decent chance of it accidentally getting bashed. What happens when someone forgets to put the lens cap back on and the thing gets doused by a wave?
A reasonable amount, although they get very little press. The Mk 46 Optical Sighting System on the Burkes is probably a good example.
bean:
Power needs are pretty modest and a telescope and the imager can be passively cooled (consumer digital camera sensors are probably good enough).
bean:
Modern solid state gyros aren't that big.
I'm aware of that, but I don't think they're good enough for the job. Most have zero-rate errors in single-digit degrees per second. That's fine on a cell phone, but keep in mind that each degree of error is 60 nautical miles when you're trying to navigate. Even the better ones are in the tenths of degrees, which is sufficient for most civilian uses, but probably not for navigation.
I'm not talking about phone sensors, more aircraft systems and inertial nav systems (which do need to know the orientation of the platform they're on).
Making just taking a lot of images over time and averaging them out could reduce the error without even needing a horizon (assuming the boat sways the same amount each way).
But aircraft-style inertial systems are still expensive, and moves this out of the realm of things I can usefully use to replace GPS on tanks and landing craft. I'm sure it's feasible to build such a system, but I don't think it's going to fill a particularly useful niche.
That's a bad assumption. Roll is complicated, and unlikely to be exactly uniform, or remain so over time.
An interesting piece of news recently from Washington: Congress is revising the rules for military officer promotion. This looks to be very good news. They're adding the option to get highly-skilled officers from outside at higher ranks, loosening the up-or-out rules, and making it a lot easier for officers to take breaks and then come back into uniform. I'm not sure why this is happening now, but it's definitely a good thing.
Why did anyone ever think up or out was a good idea?
As for direct entry of highly skilled people at higher ranks, wouldn't that be what US style warrant officers are for?
It wasn't just anyone who thought up or out was a good idea, it was Congress.
In theory, maybe, but that's not how warrant officers are selected and used today. With the exception of the Army's aviator program, warrant officers are exclusively long-service enlisted men who continue to do what they did when they were enlisted, but at a higher level and in charge of people. To a first approximation, a warrant officer is doing the same thing as a junior officer, but it's a specialist job you wouldn't let a junior officer do because he wouldn't have the skills. For instance, all the food service on America is managed by a warrant officer. I got to talk with him during Fleet Week, and he was very nice. But if you want someone to be managing large groups, they're going to need a commission, and a lot of the skills they need are in cybersecurity management.
There's another problem, illustrated by the following transcript of a Navy attempt to recruit SP, a 30-year-old cybersecurity specialist currently working in Silicon Valley:
Navy: We'd like to discuss you joining the military. Don't worry. You don't have to come in as a new seaman. We'll make you a warrant officer.
SP: Is that even a real thing? (Checks wikipedia.) OK, I guess that's real. But what does it mean?
Navy: It means that you're a technical specialist, between officers and enlisted men. You'll be in charge of a small group.
SP: I guess that makes sense. Do I get promoted to a real officer later?
Navy: No, that's not how it works. You'll stay a warrant officer.
SP: Why would I do that? I have a college degree, and a team I run right now. And if I stay where I am, I'll get promoted and get a bigger team. But this sounds like I'm going to a career dead-end. And I'll have to explain to everyone what a warrant officer is. No thanks.
SP went back to his employer, and the Navy had to assign a Surface Warfare Officer to fill the slot. He made a complete hash of it, and nude pictures of several members of Congress fell into Chinese hands as a result.
Here's the alternative, where they make him an officer:
Navy: We'd like to discuss you joining the military. As you know, the cybersecurity threat from foreign powers is increasing rapidly, and we've set up a program to bring in outsiders like yourself to bolster our ranks in that area. Based on your experience and skills, we'll skip you a couple of ranks and make you a full Lieutenant.
SP: Isn't a Lieutenant at the bottom of the hierarchy?
Navy: Not in the Navy. It's the equivalent of a Captain in the Army.
SP: OK. And will I be a Lieutenant forever?
Navy: No. You'll start out with a team a bit bigger than you have now, and you can definitely look forward to a promotion to Lieutenant Commander after a few years. If you like it and stay in, you can make Commander, possibly Captain. As I'm sure you understand, your chances of making flag rank are pretty slim, but I wouldn't rule it out.
SP: Flag rank?
Navy: Becoming an Admiral.
SP: While it would be cool to be an Admiral, I can see why that's unlikely. But I'm also not sure I want to make the military a career.
Navy: That's fine. We'd love to have your skills for even a few years. If you sign up, there's a 4-year service commitment.
SP: Well, I'll think about it, and look over the literature you gave me. Pleasure talking with you.
SP went on to join the Navy, and did actually make Rear Admiral, although only as a 1 star, before retiring. No nude pictures of Congresscritters were leaked to China.
bean:
Quite true, doesn't mean it was a good idea.
bean:
But how many of those they're trying to recruit managed large groups or would be assigned to do so?
bean:
Why should it work that way? Someone who demonstrates command ability in a technical role should be able to transfer to being a real officer with the possibility of commanding a warship or getting to flag rank, possibly after taking a course to fill in the stuff the real officers would've learned at the Naval Academy or as a Junior officer.
@Anonymous
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that the fact that it came from Congress meant it was a good idea. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Potentially quite a few. Honestly, it would be hard to recruit college-educated professionals without making them officers, and particularly if you want those with managerial experience, you have to commission them. Also, it’s not jsut for cyber. I suspect that they’re going to get lots of project managers this way, too.
That’s not quite what they’re doing. The officers who enter in this manner are going to be commissioned as restricted line officers or maybe limited duty officers, not unrestricted line officers. They won’t be able to command ships, and if they do make flag rank, it will be in the Cyber Corps or something of that nature. The whole nature of the restricted line officer program is explicitly a statement that some people need the position and status of officers without needing to be capable of commanding a warship. You'd put the direct entries there, or maybe in limited duty status.