[fa.arms-d] Arms-Discussion Digest V0 #141

C70:arms-d (07/13/82)

>From HGA@MIT-MC Mon Jul 12 22:39:18 1982

Arms-Discussion Digest                            Volume 0 : Issue 141

Today's Topics:
                        Firepower or Manpower
                         Expensive vs. cheap
                           Bigger is better
                  Software Safety in weapon systems
                           Brazil in Space
                     World-wide effects of N war
                      Studying peace: disarmies
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Date: 11 Jul 1982 1212-EDT
From: Eric M. Ostrom <ERIC at MIT-EECS>
Subject: Firepower or Manpower

As a student of both military strategy and military tactics (not to
mention history), it is obvious to me that it is NOT firepower rather
than manpower that wins wars.  Even a moderate knowledge of current
affairs makes this clear.  Who had the firepower in Vietnam?  Who had
the will to win?  How about the "6-day war" between Israel and Egypt?
How about Alexander the Great (10,000 men) against the Persians
(500,000 men) using the same weapons?  Sure, you can "nuke 'em till
they glow" with mere firepower, but who needs that much radioactive
glass?  When push comes to shove, it's the Grunt out there and his
will to fight that really makes the difference.  Note that I am
talking about the quality of the manpower, not the quantity.

Mini Bibliography:

"The Prince" Niccolo Machiavelli, Bantam 1971

"The Rise of the West" W.H. McNeill, Mentor 1963

"Guerrila Warfare" Che Guevara, Vintage Press 1968

"Coup d'Etat, A Practical Handbook"  Edward Luttwak, Fawcett 1969

"The Marine Corps Handbook" (Inquire at the GPO)

"Combat Training of the Individual Soldier" US Army, GPO, FM 21-75

"Special Forces Operational Techniques" US Army, GPO, FM 31-20

Remember, there's going to be a pop quiz in the morning...

	Eric

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Date: 11 Jul 1982 23:09:29-EDT
From: csin!cjh at CCA-UNIX
Subject: Re: expensive vs. cheap

   That sort of simplification has a very high likelihood of
invalidity.  It has been pointed out that one of the reasons the
defending Argentines in Port Stanley had to surrender to half their
number of besiegers was the relative qualities of the officers and
enlisted men in the two armies; would anyone care to guesstimate the
relative qualities of Libyan and American flight training programs?
   There's a number of holes that can be found in that sort of
statement, so I'll just point out the most obvious one: it has been
demonstrated that some of the current/newest generation of American
fighter planes are so expensive that we could have three times as many
cheaper planes---and in assorted combat simulation the cheaper planes
regularly stomped the high-price spread given that 3-to-1 edge. (This
also doesn't allow for the amplification of fighter effectiveness by
directrixes like the Z9M9Z\Z\9\M\9\Z E2C.)

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Date: 12 July 1982 01:53-EDT
From: James A. Cox <APPLE at MIT-MC>
Subject:  expensive vs. cheap

Let's have references on the 3 to 1 simulation you mentioned.

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Date: 13 Jul 1982 0008-EDT
From: Rodger D. Osgood <RDO at MIT-XX>
Subject: Re: Bigger is better

    I would like to make a few comments on the idea stated by earl and
others that bigger and more expensive aircraft are "better". I fully
agree that building inferior aircraft that are unable to complete
their mission is a silly way to "save" money. However, I feel that
much of the complexity and expense of some planes comes from trying to
make every plane be able to fly every mission.

    A case in point; the F15 and F16 were originally billed as a
high-low combination, the F15 as an air superiority jet capable of
outperforming anything in the sky and to complete difficult attack
missions through stiff enemy resistance. The F16, on the other hand,
was supposed to be an inexpensive, lightweight, and highly
manueverable air to air fighter. It also carried passive radar
detectors and a small radar profile making it hard to detect by other
aircraft.

    Now the Air Force brass has added quite a bit of sophisticated
active radar counter-measures and bomb racks for ground attack
missions, adding to the weight and expense of the aircraft. This has
degraded the F16's manueverability and while active radar jammers make
an aircraft harder to target they make it easier to detect and
therefore avoid.

    Thus by trying to make an aircraft perform multiple tasks (ground
attack and enemy penetration) its ability to perform its prime mission
(air to air fighting and providing air cover for our ground troups
against enemy air attack) is degraded. I think that considerably more
bang for the buck could be achieved if the military consentrated on
building aircraft that are optimized for a few related missions,
instead of lots of general purpose aircraft that do everything
mediocrily.

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Date:      12 Jul 82 11:05:04-PST (Mon)
From:      Tim Shimeall <tim.uci@UDel-Relay>
Subject:   Software Safety in weapon systems

I am with a research group working on techniques to reduce latent
software errors which lead to failures in systems which could cause
catastrophic effects.  Certainly weapon systems can be considered too
critical to allow to fail unsafely.  Are there techniques which are
currently used to ensure that software errors will not lead to safety
problems with these systems?
				Tim Shimeall

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Date: 11 Jul 1982 2325-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: Brazil in Space

That nation has announced that they will try to put a man in space on
their own by the end of the decade.  Since we plan on providing space
for spacers of most other nationalities on the shuttle, their promise
that the technology will be "used for peaceful purposes only" does not
ring true with me.

Jim

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Date: 12 July 1982 09:09-EDT
From: Gail Zacharias <GZ at MIT-MC>
Subject:  Brazil in Space

Indeed, why would they conceivably want to do something on their own
if they can be dependent on us instead!

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Date: 12 Jul 1982 1728-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject:  Brazil in Space

Indeed, why would they?  For commercial transport they should depend
upon us (or rather hopefully US companies) just as people do for most
high tech services.  The only real justification for having an
independent capability, especially one developed at a cost of billions
of dollars, thousands of man-years of scarce scientists and engineers,
and decades behind other nations, is for military reasons (national
pride does NOT justify such a fantastic outlay - a smaller one
dedicated to joint missions with the US or the USSR is another matter
of course).  In particular such technology can be used for ICBM
development.  Given that Brazil is ruled byy a military government, I
really doubt they are going to expend all those resources and expect
no new militaryy capabilities in return.

Jim

PS note that the same can be said of the US auto and steel industries,
although here at least we make no bones that a major reason for having
such large domestic capacity is to supply the military in times of
crisis.  I object to Brazil's blatant falsehoods about "peaceful" uses
of space (along with India's about "peaceful" atomic "devices"), since
misinformation is something that should be reduced whenever possible.

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Date: 11 Jul 1982 1238-EDT
From: Eric M. Ostrom <ERIC at MIT-EECS>
Subject: Maximum N-War destruction

A friend of mine (of the "I'll just lay down and die if it happens"
school), and I recently spent an afternoon with "The Effects of
Nuclear Weapons" and an HP-45 and came up with the following
interesting numbers:
	
	There are approx 3.5*10^6 Sq Miles in the US.
		("Times Atlas of the World")

	The Soviet Union has about 10*10^9 Tons of nuclear warheads
		(This includes aircraft dropped bombs)
		("The Effects of Nuclear War" 1979)

	This equates to 3 KT per sq mile if evenly distributed
		(an unlikley but educational hypothesis)

	This will blow a hole 37 feet deep in solid rock, 42.5 in dirt

	The radius would be 153 in rock, 184 in dirt.

	If we assume only the SS-18's and the SS-19's are fired, 
		we get a 1.5KT/sq.mi.

	27.5 deep, 116 radius in rock, 35 deep, 137 R in dirt.

"cheers"
	Eric

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Date: 11 Jul 1982 1827-PDT
From: CAULKINS at USC-ECL
Subject: World-wide effects of N war

The two references on this subject best known to me are:

"The Effects of Nuclear War"
Office of Technology Assessment
Congress of The United States
May, 1979
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 79-600080

"Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear-Weapons Detonations"
National Research Council
National Academy of Sciences
1975
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-29733
Available from:
NAS Printing + Publishing
2101 Cnstitution Ave, NW
Washington, D.C. 20418

Perhaps the most serious (and least well understood) planet-wide
effect of large numbers of megaton range nuclear explosions would be
the increase in uv-B at the surface of the earth due to the
destruction of stratospheric ozone by NOx released in the explosions.
This has the potential for causing damage to plant species and
possibly producing blindness in diurnal animals.  It will certainly
raise skin cancer and crippling sunburn rates in humans.

The OTA document (P114) summarizes the NAS document as follows:

"It is possible that a large nuclear war would produce irreversible
adverse effects on the environment and the ecological system."

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Date: Mon Jul 12 12:07:39 1982
From: decvax!pur-ee!purdue!pur-phy!els at Berkeley
Subject: End of the world

     Radiation isn't the only killer in a massive East-West exchange.

SCENARIO:  1) For global entertainment, the war of the week presents:
           NATO vs. Warsaw Pact.

           2) Some moron initiates an exchange of tactical nukes.

           3) Some other MORON initiates a strategic exchange.

           4) Let's be pessimistic here and say 500 megadeaths immediate.

           5) With US out of the way, think how many other wars start,
           Arabs vs. Israelis, Black Africa vs. South Africa, India vs.
           Pakistan, China vs. any Soviet remnant+Vietnam+India.  All
           of these are potentially NBC wars.

           6) Dozens of other wars start as the poor nations fight for
           what little arable land is nearby.

           7) Without US food shipments, FAMINE, probably of a scale
           never before seen.

           8) With all the dying and dead and weak from starvation,
           you pick your favorite disease and I'll bet it kills 10
           million people at least.  The biggies like typhus might
           get many 100 millions.

           9) Ozone layer partially or totally depleted.  Deaths due to
           skin cancer possibly on the order of several 100 million.

     Here we have it: Deaths due to radiation are only a small (though
still appriciable) fraction of world population.  Deaths due to all
the rest would possibly be a vast majority of those remaining.  This
is the way the world ends, with a bang AND a whimper!


     (My numbers are merely guesses intended to be ballpark figures.
Nowhere have I seen any detailed analyses of the combined results of
the secondary effects I've postulated.  If anyone knows of one I'd
appreciate your response.  I'd like to know where the civilized world
will be centered as we muck around in the rubble!)


        els
        purdue:Physics

[Note from the Moderator: The probable centers in your scenario would
be South America, Indonesia, and Australia (and I imagine South Africa
would also survive.  - Harold]

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Date: 10 July 1982 09:55-EDT
From: Zigurd R. Mednieks <ZRM at MIT-MC>
Subject:  Arms-Discussion Digest V0 #139

>From UNIFIL in Lebanon to the continued Soviet domination of Poland
there are current examples of how "disarmies", as Jef Poskanzer called
them, don't work. Would that they could.

Cheers,
Zig

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Date: 12 July 1982 05:49-EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM at MIT-MC>
Subject: Studying peace: disarmies.

It seems to me that the principle feature of the military is that they
are armed trained and organized to carry out war. Anything else they
do is a fringe benefit of their discipline and organization. Thus your
ten examples of unarmed military actions would see to me not to be
military, but to be merely disciplined&organized action.

I checked my dictionary for "military" and found:
  Adj. Of or relating to soldiers or to the army.
  N. Armed forces; the army.
I looked up "soldier" and found:
  N. A person serving in an army.
  N. A brave or skillful warrier.
I looked "army" and found:
  A large organized body of men armed for military service on land.
It looks like military-->soldier-->army-->military is a circular
definition except for the insertion of "armed" in the loop. I conclude
that a large organized body of men who aren't armed, aren't soldiers
and aren't in an army and aren't military.

(I assume by "men" they mean to include women also, as in Israel, and
just hadn't yet updated their terminology in 1975 when the dictionary
was written.)

Note, after the definitions of "soldier" above, the last one is "one
who serves a cause loyally". That would include so many random people
(Ralph Nader, Linus Pauling, Jerry Falwell, ...) that obviously that
wasn't the meaning of "soldier" that was intended in the definition of
"military".

So, is it reasonable to speak of setting up a whole organization based
on unarmed actions and yet referring to them as "military"?? <no> Is
there some better term for them?? <??>

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Date: 12 Jul 1982 13:01:19-PDT
From: jef at LBL-UNIX (Jef Poskanzer [rtsg])
Subject: Studying peace: disarmies.

I think you are quibbling over words when there are much more serious
concepts to be discussed.  Bear in mind, however, that some of the
examples in the article are \existing/, \unarmed/, \military/
organizations.

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End of Arms-D Digest
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