Never confuse effort with results. Brian is confusing 20 years of professional effort with global results. According to Brian, decades of his professional effort were driven by a staunch belief that this effort was "protecting the environment", but now Brian no longer holds this belief, citing a supposedly "utterly failed" government contract with his company and three bullet points that highlight lackluster progress on the whole of the market and the supposed missed opportunity of nuclear power.
None of these results are materially affected by Brian's effort over the last 20 years. Federal and local government regulation and investment as well as corporate business decisions are responsible for reducing coal plants, constructing nuclear plants, and incentivizing "utopian energy". Brian's effort mostly falls into the corporate business decision category, but all we see of this in his article is a statement that his company failed to fulfill a $60M government contract. This experience really stands out as Brian's real inflection point, but the results of this effort are not only NOT discussed, they are--by his own admission--completely opposite of the government's perception of the results.
I thought this was the purpose of warrant officers. By design, they have a separate hierarchy and charter for all intents and purposes. Sure, you don't get paid as much as the private sector, but you do get a lot of autonomy and mastery. There should be plenty of people who want to accept this challenge.
I jumped to the comments first, and my initial thought was, “what would Nathan Marz think of all of this...and what is he investing in these days?”
I was honestly skeptical, reading all of this clojure-macro criticism (constructive for the most part), but trust was restored when I saw the author. Well done, sir! Excited to see the details.
When the Google community deprecates something as stable as PGP for reasons like "don't have common enough subset" or "can't reach the bar of safe-by-default" or "require a maintainer with deep knowledge" or "some packages are simply not used enough", be afraid. As soon as they have their moat, they will return with statements like, "you shouldn't build your own crypto library, use something stable, something tested in the wild; use our library"
All I see are people listening. Scores of legal professionals, attorneys, and judges have read through thousands of pages of serious arguments made by the right. Election officials have burned the midnight oil over and over again searching for issues after listening to complaints from the right. Journalists have spent countless hours chasing down people to listen to, only to find deception. After all of this listening, all we ever seem to find is deception. If the right doesn’t change their tune, then all the listeners can do is see them as a group he’ll bent on deception. You make your bed, and you sleep in it. Period.
As a former armor officer, I worry that integrating tech in the warrior kit is a complacency risk; not a problem, just a risk. For example, tank platoons rely heavily on communication devices, and when those fail, I believe teams have not trained hard enough on the analog (hand and arm signals, flagging, IR signaling, etc.). If you power communication and AR from a cable, does the soldier now carry battery backups? Does the soldier now train to two levels of contingency: digital, radio, physical? The soldiers kit is heavy enough and we barely train to one contingency so the ROI here is really important—and I don’t mean money.
>> For example, tank platoons rely heavily on communication devices, and when those fail, I believe teams have not trained hard enough on the analog (hand and arm signals, flagging, IR signaling, etc.).
That's the change in the modern military. Having the communication system fail is the equivalent of having the main gun fail: you are no longer an effective fighter. The communication system should protected, hardened, and as reliable in combat as a soldier's rifle.
Air forces are at the front of this. There are countless mission-critical information systems for which there is no 'analogue' option. If the bomber doesn't have a data link with the spotter on the ground, the bombs are not dropped. If the IFF system on the helicopter isn't working, there is no takeoff. Technology is no longer a "nice to have" but an essential part of warfighting.
Former Marine officer, disagree here that this is the change in the modern military. What you are describing is a major weakness of that type of air support.
Fighting certainly doesn't stop because you can't get comms with the bird. You just lose that as on option to deploy.
I think what gets abstracted away when people think about military operations is that it's not a chess board back at the Pentagon. They only are accomplished by physical deployment of force. You always plan for the back up contingencies because the mission still needs to get done if all the systems aren't online.
Long hard experience has taught us the way you make operations resilient is always know how to fall back on a physical signal like popping a smoke or sending up a flare.
--Perhaps that take is a bit too simplistic, so take it with a grain of salt from a ground combat element guy. I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.
>> I get it that there a large portions of the military who don't show up to play when their widgets stop working.
Ya. Air Force and Navy are defined by their widgets. If the aircraft cannot fly, the air force cannot air force. If the ships don't float, the navy doesn't navy. That's the cultural difference. The army has trouble dealing with 100% reliance on anything. For pilots and sailors such reliance comes natually.
But if the radio doesn’t work the Navy even today can fall back to light signals or even semaphore or flag codes. That’s the point, there isn’t just reliability, there is also redundancy.
If the tanks cannot tank, the army can’t army against a near-peer enemy either...
Are you trying to suggest that a ship without BVR comm is in any way, shape, or form an effective warfighting asset? Take away radios, radar, and satcomm and that ship just became nothing more than the USS Target.
As former enlisted 91A, dont worry about it! I remember being used to putting up with all kinds of absolutely shit ideas from command and this ones no different. We didnt even have functioning body and vehicle armor in the last conflict. Spare parts took months to get if they ever showed up at all. Batteries were either left in the sun in crates until they popped, quit charging after a week or so due to the heat, or the chargers broke down.
So if ive got a buddy who needs wiring for the antenna array on the back of an HMMV or if im short on power cables for something, the first thing im going to do is find a few legs who hate their vests. those little connectors with the boots on them look real sturdy too, and im sure those cables wont be missed by guys who havent had the ammunition or the battery packs to fire those space age senator kickbacks for months.
Start improving the army at the parts of it that arent sexy. Supply chain, and the VA system.
This is more of a risk-reward trade off that comes with anything that is more performant but more sophisticated. The same can be said about guns, but obviously the reward of having a gun is vastly greater than the risk of it malfunctioning.
But on this same point, the military favors very simple firearms for good reason: they don't malfunction nearly as often, and are robust enough to survive very harsh conditions without much change in firing characteristics. A good analogy is to website availability: if you run a personal blog, it doesn't matter if your uptime is ~100% or 80%. If you run a remote monitoring site for a power grid however... You don't gain anything if you lose reliability. See the F-35 JST for a good case in point.
What makes you think the military favors simple firearms? American forces use small arms that require a fairly high degree of service compared to alternatives like the ak-47/akm variants. It's not a problem because the maintenance requirements can be adequately accomplished by a single disciplined soldier and the performance gains over simpler alternatives are substantial.
Because I've used them. The most complicated firearm the average grunt will use is an M249, which has fewer moving parts than many handguns. Production inertia and poor accuracy keep the AK series out of the US armed forces, along with a preference to 5.56 over 7.62. Basic maintenance for an M16 is nearly identical for an AK-47, the M16 is lighter and has smaller/lighter ammunition, and has better mid-range and long-range accuracy. So let's say that there is a very slow curve to complexity vs convenience up to a certain point. But we have been using the M16 since the 60's; plenty of newer, more complex rifles have come out in that time, many with better range, accuracy, stopping power, cyclic rate, etc... But we haven't moved away from a simple, fairly reliable rifle.
How many people on the boat do you need that know celestial navigation? Sounds like something you could have someone go to school for to specialize in and then make sure you've got at least one on every boat rather than make everyone learn. We've got plenty of ways to defeat jamming, the newest block of GPS satellites have ways to increase signal power in certain areas and anti-radiation missiles can blow up a jammer. GPS only comes from space so it's pretty easy to find someone on the ground messing with it. We also have things like star trackers that are used on satellites to determine position without GPS that could easily be implemented on a boat if not already on there. These systems could be hardened against EMPs and only brought out in case of absolute emergency. I don't see the need of every navigator having their own sextant.
How many people on the boat do you need that know celestial navigation?
Easy. The same number that know how to use a GPS. Your one guy may be the first casualty.
We've got plenty of ways to defeat jamming, the newest block of GPS satellites have ways to increase signal power in certain areas and anti-radiation missiles can blow up a jammer.
What do you do when your enemy dumps a load of sand in orbit?
I don't think it was ever the case that everybody on board was taught astronav. It's very much a thing that's taught to the people who need to be able to calculate where the ship is.
That's about 4 or 5 people on a typical warship, and then you can add to that pool the number of people who did hold a job that required the skill but have since been promoted.
There were recent exercises in the Baltics where US forces were exposed to learnings from the Ukraine conflict. Very different than fighting ISIS.
Turns out GPS jammers, proper drones, etc. can wreak havoc. The IDF got smoked in Lebanon for the same reason, the game has changed. Well prepared state-level adversaries are not the same as militias in pickup trucks and SVBIEDs.
"The common thread running through the paper is the challenge posed by Russia’s jammers and other electronic warfare tools.
An enemy equipped with these “could effectively neutralize a GPS system from 50 miles away using one-fifth the power of a tactical radio,” the report estimates, so “we should assume that GPS will be either unavailable or unreliable for the duration of the conflict if the [brigade] faces a near-peer threat or sophisticated non-state actors.” "
Others can speak for the military, but among civilians, it seems almost nobody learns orienteering anymore.
I only have anecdata, but the last several times I've been on remote camping trips, I've taught folks the basics myself. And a relative's son, a Boy Scout, was told by his troop leader that the Orienteering merit badge was obsolete, don't worry about it.
None of these results are materially affected by Brian's effort over the last 20 years. Federal and local government regulation and investment as well as corporate business decisions are responsible for reducing coal plants, constructing nuclear plants, and incentivizing "utopian energy". Brian's effort mostly falls into the corporate business decision category, but all we see of this in his article is a statement that his company failed to fulfill a $60M government contract. This experience really stands out as Brian's real inflection point, but the results of this effort are not only NOT discussed, they are--by his own admission--completely opposite of the government's perception of the results.