Leadership and Laziness

I got this one from Jerry Pournelle. It's worth reading as an analysis of how leaders are selected (or rejected) in the armed forces. There are lessons for the civilian world as well.

In classic military science, officers are divided into Brilliant vs. Stupid, and Lazy vs. Active. Now understand, these are relative terms: we are assuming that this is not Lake Wobegon, and even the Stupid can be pretty smart compared to the general population; stupid is probably the wrong word although it is the one generally used in these discussions. You will see what I mean in a moment.
This produces four classes of officers. What do you do with them?

First, the commanders, from company to regiment to division to army to army group: which class do you want as commanders? The answer is that you want them Brilliant and Lazy. Then for their Chief of Staff you want the Brilliant and Active. The reasoning is simple enough. The Active tend never to leave well enough alone. They drive the troops mad with new schemes for improvement. Your units go to hell.

However, you need the Brilliant and Active in the picture, just not as commanders. Someone has to recognize problems and look for solutions and agitate for improvements. You want the man at the top to understand this, and select among the various recommendations those which are needed – and which are affordable. But you want the agitation for improvement, else things atrophy.
So far so good. Now what do you do with the Stupid and Lazy? Why, that’s the bulk of your officer corps. They follow orders, and if they come up with awful ideas they aren’t so active as to try to implement them. As to the Stupid and Active, you encourage them to get out and go away. You have no place for them.

Thoughts on War in Space

Proof that I do take requests...Lin suggested I write on this topic, so what the heck.

Let me start with this: I'm against war in space for a whole number of reasons. But first, I should lay a little groundwork for what I'm talking about.

Space During the Cold War
The US and the Soviet Union put up surveillance satellites almost as soon as they knew how to do so. The primary reason for these satellites, of course, was to track troop and naval movements as well as spy on any activity involving nuclear weapons (intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs). ICBMs themselves are long-range suborbital rockets that briefly leave the atmosphere before reentering and striking their targets with fission or fusion warheads.

While we were neck-deep into the Cold War, the U.S. was feverishly looking for ways to defend the nation in ways that didn't call for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Developments included massive radars, high-speed ground-based missiles, and other classified toys, most of which were scrapped or declared illegal by the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed by President Nixon in 1972.

In the midst of all this military activity, the Space Race was born. That the US and USSR (look it up, kids--I'm not going to explain ALL the history to you) were engaged in a contest for military supremacy was obvious to the whole world. However, in the wake of World War II, both sides were also trying to win hearts, minds, and allies through peaceful means because legions and empires are expensive. If you can "win the crowd," you just might win a few converts. Thus did Russia and America race to launch satellites and then men into space and, eventually, toward the Moon. We won that race through a supreme effort of national will...and through the fortunate circumstance that the Russians' moon rocket exploded. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, and America won the great Space Race of the 1960s.

After the Space Race
It would take another 20 years before the US won the Cold War (and some folks will still dispute that, including Vladimir Putin). In the meantime, space was still "up there." We still had nuclear missiles and satellites and a large NASA infrastructure for sending human beings into space. In Kazakstan, the Russians were still launching rockets and, eventually, space stations. We launched our own space station, Skylab, and eventually even a symbolic joint manned spacecraft docking with the Russians in 1975. After that came a long drought, out of which was born the Space Shuttle, the system we have today.

But meanwhile, back in the defense world, the generals and other technological dreamers saw all the cool hardware we had built during our race to the Moon and thought we could use some or all of it to defeat a massive ICBM strike before it ever hit the US. In an essay titled "How to Save Civilization (and Make a Little Money)," science fiction writer Larry Niven describes how a group of generals, physicists, and science fiction writers gathered in Niven's home proposed a series of technologies born out of the Space Race to defeat Russian missiles. This proposal eventually became formalized as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). SDI included an extensive series of ground- and space-based missiles and lasers to knock down ICBMs upon launch, during boost and cruise, and during reentry. Other defenses included kinetic energy vehicles (KEVs), which were guided, non-nuclear missiles that would strike missiles in flight and destroy them. The laws of physics dictate that force = mass X acceleration, and a small mass flying at tens of kilometers a second was more than enough to take down an ICBM.

So Ronald Reagan bought off on the idea, and preliminary work began on all of it: interceptor missiles (you might have heard of the Patriot Missile System, or PAC-3, which defended Israel and US troops during Desert Shield/Storm), particle weapons, guided weapons in space (Brilliant Pebbles), and the rest. SDI was a staggering concept, so staggering that Mikhail Gorbachev offered to eliminate nearly all of his nation's ICBMs if Reagan would give it up. Reagan wouldn't do it, and SDI continued.

Space After the Cold War
Jerry Pournelle, one of the writers in the Niven house when SDI was first proposed, has claimed that SDI helped win the Cold War, as the Soviets could not hope to keep up with Reagan's conventional military buildup, the MX Peacekeeper Missile system, and SDI, so they shifted to glasnost and perestroika instead.

Regardless, the end of the Soviet Union, like the landing of Apollo 11 on the Sea of Tranquility, did not end our nation's military problems in space, though efforts had been made during the Cold War to contain the problem. The Test Ban Treaty of 1963 had restricted above-ground testing of nuclear weapons and forbade the use of nuclear weapons in space. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty tried to eliminate another potential source of conflict by stating that no nation had the right to claim or own territory in outer space. The 1979 Moon Treaty (defeated by the L5 Society, predecessor of the National Space Society) would have banned private property of any kind from the Moon. All these treaties aside, the potential for conflict in space is still possible, especially now that there are more nations capable of reaching space and sending up payloads capable of damaging or destroying others.

The US reconfigured Space Station Freedom to become the International Space Station as a way to subsidize non-communist Russia's space program and keep that nation's aerospace engineers ("rocket scientists") from going off to build rockets and missiles for unfriendly nations like Iran or North Korea. And while the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia delayed the construction of ISS, the station is nearly complete now, and soon the Shuttle will be retired, to be replaced by Russian, European, Japanese, and eventually US commercial crew and cargo vehicles.

War in Space, 21st Century Style
There are now nine nations or entities capable of building a rocket that can launch unmanned payloads into space: US, Russia, China, Japan, China, the European Union, India, Israel, and Iran. North Korea and Syria have ballistic (suborbital) rockets, as do many other nations. There are also many more nations now in possession of nuclear weapons than there were in the 1960s, and not all of the rocket-launching or nuclear-weapons-building nations are parties to the treaties signed 40+ years ago.

We are a long way off from troops battling it out with lasers in orbit (see Star Wars or the silly-but-fun James Bond film, Moonraker). But damage can still be done. A bucket of sand launched in a retrograde (opposite direction) orbit toward one of our satellites or (heaven forbid) manned spacecraft or stations would cause catastrophic damage. Of course another nation need not be so blatant as to launch kinetic weapons like that. China shot down one of its own satellites a few years ago, and a decommissioned Russian satellite collided with an Iridium commercial satellite after that. Neither of these acts is blatantly hostile--and the Russian satellite mishap was written off as an accident--but they do demonstrate what sorts of capabilities exist to create damage to space-based assets.

Accidental debris ranging from tiny flecks of paint up to full-size rocket stages and decommissioned satellites is still flying around in ever-increasing swarms along the most common orbits (700-800 kilometers/km and 35,888 km, to pick two) needed to conduct what is now basic economic activity. There are around 20,000 objects up there that we can track from the ground. That's just the stuff we can see, generally anything bigger than a baseball. The small stuff, more numerous, might be an even bigger hazard. Ever have a pebble crack your windshield after hitting it at 60 miles per hour? Then imagine how much damage that same pebble would cause to a spacecraft in orbit traveling at 10-20 km/second with no air resistance!

While this essay has focused primarily on military hardware, the fact remains that we depend very heavily upon satellites for a range of critical services, including communication (phone, TV, radio, internet), weather, environmental monitoring, search and rescue, global positioning systems, and yes, commercial and military surveillance.

It is that infrastructure that is at risk if anyone--us, our allies, or our enemies--start making messes up there deliberately. How effective would the Weather Channel be without satellite coverage of hurricanes? How many lives would be lost if floods or landslides were not detected? What sorts of mischief could unfriendly nations do with their armed forces if we were unable to detect their movements or transmit their activities on TV "via satellite," a new phenomenon just within my lifetime?

Long-term, there are other downsides to orbits full of junk left over from a destructive war in space: we might not be able to launch human beings or scientific instruments into orbit if the chances of impact and damage were 100%. If an asteroid were heading our way, we wouldn't even be able to launch anything to stop it. We would be stuck, as a species, on our one planet for the remainder of our lifetimes unless we were willing to wait years, decades, or even centuries until gravity cleared the skies for us--or we could hope for a friendly passing alien willing to clear our skies with a few orbiting bolt catchers. Regardless, we must continue to protect our nation's critical space infrastructure, hopefully without triggering the very conflict capable of destroying it.

Book Reviews: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike

For a few years now some space entrepreneur friends have been trying to get me to read the Heritage Trilogy by Ian Douglas, as they see the story as their in-house vision of what they'd like the future to be. Semper Mars, Luna Marine, and Europa Strike are adventure stories that show gradually escalating and challenging U.S. Marine combat scenarios on other worlds, paralleling with equally challenging space-alien archaeology puzzles.







What I liked about these books is that they took the unique environments of Mars, the Moon, and the Jupiter satellite Europa seriously--from the thin air and unique soil chemistry of Mars to the low gravity of Luna to the high radiation and (presumed) glacial environment of Europa. While I'm not a rocket scientist or astronomer by any wild stretch, I appreciated that the author at least takes some time to do some calculations and put actual numbers into his work. This is particularly evident when he describes the trajectories of spacecraft or capabilities of various space-based weapons. The details aren't intrusive, however, and don't slow down the story.

I do not know if the author was ever in combat (neither was I), but the battle sequences move along convincingly and briskly without some of the technobabble that can slow down Tom Clancy novels. While not a Marine, his HarperCollins bio notes that he's a former Navy corpsman with obvious respect for the breed.

These being action/combat-oriented vehicles, the Heritage trilogy stories don't expend a great deal of page space on characterization; but they throw in enough that you find yourself caring about the main characters' fates. Douglas also takes time to show the "bad guys" (often U.N. or other U.S. political adversaries projected 50 years into the future), though puts his thumb on the scale enough to let you know who the good guys are. And I must say that compared to the last space combat story I read (The Machinery of Light), Douglas's books were infinitely more readable and his lead characters more likeable.



One thing I should point out about this trilogy is that it was written in the late '90s/early '00, when we didn't have the same high-definition images of the Cydonia "Face on Mars" mesa that we do today. This becomes important to the reading, as that Face turns out to be an actual artifact with serious implications for human history (and, presumably, our future as there is another trilogy after this one set in the same universe). If you can get past that bit of "alien astronauts" mythology, the rest of the xenoarchaeology picture is put together pretty convincingly. Douglas mixes ancient astronaut theories with mythology to put together an intriguing "what if" alternate past of Homo sapiens.

The places where Douglas's trilogy stumbles most often is back on Earth. Somewhere around chapter three of all three books there's a gratuitous and wince-inducing sex scene, none of which are rendered well. Fortunately those scenes appear once, and are soon replaced with good old fashioned war stories.

I believe the reasons my space entrepreneur buddies like these stories is because they depict a multi-layer technological world, where everything from personal electronics to commercial aircraft (air-breathing hypersonic craft, more to the point) to spacecraft and weapons all show parallel development. Marine weaponry ranges from lasers to hypervelocity kinetic weapons. Personal electronics move from stuff slightly ahead of what we have today up to artificial intelligence programs. Spacecraft advance from fission to fusion to anti-matter-powered continuous-thrust vehicles. And while I'm not sure I buy the realism of most of it, political alignments shift over the course of the three books as the Marines win battles and archaeologists learn more secrets and technologies from long-ago visitors to our solar system.

One last aspect of these books that cannot be overlooked is their reverence for the U.S. Marine Corps. If the reader has any doubts on that score, the characters will set them straight every few pages on the courage, dedication, and fabled tough history of the Corps. Douglas seasons the books with several battles or anecdotes from USMC history to help the reader see connections between all this space stuff and the Marines of today. The message from the author is clear: The Marines are a good, important thing to have now, and they will be in the future! I won't argue the point, as I happen to agree with the author. However much like John Scalzi on Atlas Shrugged, the Heritage Trilogy is a pulpy, fun read, but not very good as a foundational document for a philosophy of life.

Rereading the Constitution

I'm really not interested in recounting the sins of the previous administration. I can watch CNN or MSNBC for that. The Bush Administration was neither completely wise nor brilliant in its handling of the War on Terror. Fine. Moving on. Obama is President now. What he's doing matters, both in the present and for the future of this nation's efforts to prosecute the GWOT (oh, sorry, the Overseas Contingency Operation) abroad and ensure politcal comity and stability here at home. President Obama needs to reread the Constitution, which is somewhat surprising, since he reputedly taught constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

Let's start with Article I, which states:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

A bill of attainder, according to TechLawJournal.com, is:

A legislative act that singles out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.

An ex post facto law is a law that subjects individuals to criminal penalties for actions that were legal at the time they were committed.

The Founders had several reasons for including bills of attainder and ex post facto laws in the Constitution. They had read history. They knew that Rome began to shift from a Republic to an Empire with a winner-take-all political system when winners of elections would attempt to prosecute their predecessors after the fact for just such things. It became increasingly important to hold onto power because if you ever lost it or retired, you'd soon find yourself executed under some new law. That is where we're heading now with allowing CIA agents to be prosecuted--here or overseas--for interrogations performed in pursuit of terrorists.

The military and CIA interrogators had strict guidelines on what they were and were not allowed to do during their interrogations of people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and they got actionable intelligence that saved lives. If we subject them to ex post facto laws, we're violating our own Constitution. And we're also putting past, present, and future CIA employees and other Americans at risk from international prosecution. The war is still going on, after all, and Obama is showing signs of continuing the Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He certainly hasn't withdrawn our forces. In any case, once the Obama administration comes to an end, as all regimes do eventually, the President is leaving his own people vulnerable to the very thing he's threatening to do to President Bush's people now. This is why we have ex post facto laws and also why the President is empowered to pardon people--to prevent junk like this from happening.

Let me guess: the next thing I'm going to hear is, "Torture is a violation of our Constitution, too." Awhile back I was scolded by a liberal friend for accepting or being indifferent to the use of waterboarding or other non-lethal, non-flesh-damaging, non-bone-breaking, non-permanently-harming interrogation techniques on terrorists caught on the battlefield. I believe the exact phrasing was, "Come on, Bart. You wouldn't accept your mother or sister being subjected to that." To which I'd respond, then as now, "No, I wouldn't. But then my mother or sister wouldn't have been caught on the battlefield in Afghanistan, shooting at our troops and hanging out with people planning to kill Americans."

So, seriously, I have another question for my liberal readers: how do you get information about imminent terrorist activities from very bad people who have no interest in helping you and every reason in the world (to them) to harm you? Let's say, for argument's sake, that I'm wrong, that torture is in fact unreliable as a means of obtaining informaiton. Then what? Rather than take the "you wouldn't let your sister be waterboarded" angle, I would ask the reverse: your sister is being held captive by people known for beheading their prisoners and posting the videos on Al Jazeera. You've captured a guy that you know is high up in a terrorist organization. You know his group plans to strike again, soon, and possibly behead your sister. Now: would you forbid waterboarding if you had the lead bad guy sitting captured before you? Repeat playings of Barry Manilow records? Jimmy Carter "national malaise" speeches? How do you get the information? I don't know, either.

However, Americans who have been in the very rough and serious business of fighting this nation's enemies deserve at least the benefit of the doubt. More than that, they deserve the protections of the Constitution they've been fighting to preserve.

Potpourri XI

Rockets could destroy the ozone layer. Waiting to see if this line of argument catches on in the U.S. while the Chinese and Indians continue to go forth boldly.

Morgan Freeman is going to host a Science Channel show on space exploration. Huzzah!

NASA has a presence on FlickR.

Chicago is rated is #1 by AskMen.com as the best city "for dating and sex, sports and entertainment."

India is looking at building its own space shuttle.

A mockup of the Orion crew exploration vehicle's crew module is on display on the National Mall.

The Ares I-X test flight is shifting to August. This is starting to infringe on my trip to Europe. My request to alter the launch window around my vacation was not accepted, unfortunately.

The U.S. is falling behind in cyber-warfare. That's probably because all our IT has been outsourced to Bangalore.

Interesting site on Antarctica and global warming...and another site offering an alternative theory on how ice ages affect the shapes of continents and oceans.

G20 protests turn violent, surprising no one.

From the "If Bush did this" file, President Obama gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod. It was later revealed that she already has one.

Jeff Krukin from the Space Frontier Foundation posted an April Phule's Day press release on behalf of President Obama. Will Watson at SFF had another PR regarding space. Doc's response was priceless: "It was hard to hear the joke over the sound of all those axes grinding."

As I mentioned yesterday, the ISDC is coming up. I got my leave approved today, so I'll be booking my registration this evening.

And, on a lighter note, North Korea is fueling up its latest rocket. Japan, China, and the U.S. are all on alert, at one level or another. (Okay, I'm kidding. That's not a "lighter note." I'm just snarky this evening.)

Potpourri VII

The Airborne Laser (ABL) is finally ready for its first test, and is likely to get cut. Go figure. http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/budget-latest.html

Need a REALLY big HDTV? Check this out: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/ny-yankees-new.html

An F-22 Raptor has crashed at Edwards AFB. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hmfwSyhmPuqX414lfoKORbnZN9sAD9757L8O0

Here's a letter of resignation from an AIG vice president that got turned into a New York Times op-ed. I admit to being surprised that they published this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

A British member of the European parliament took it to the UK's Labour Prime Minister. The direct talk of this man's speech makes me realize why the UK Parliament is much more entertaining and enlightening than C-SPAN's coverage of the U.S. Congress: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs

The Teaching Company was giving away a freebie today. Thought I'd share: http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/figs.aspx?FigsID=FIG0166&ai=34743&WT.mc_id=FIG20090325

Should White House employees keep their bonuses? Here's my simple answer, for the sake of clarity and consistency: no. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/should-white-house-employees-keep-bonuses/

Is technology a threat to liberal society? An answer from Irving Kristol: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.12624/pub_detail.asp

I've been meaning to post this grid for awhile. It's Jerry Pournelle's take on political positions--"beyond left and right," as it were. Its components are a person's or nation's attitudes toward the state and the person's or nation's attitudes towards rationalism. I can be found in the "Various Libertarians" oval, for what it's worth.

Respect for the Fallen

Short entry tonight because I had a rough day at the office. However, I thought I'd share this link about an artist painting portraits of our fallen military heroes: http://www.militarytimes.com/hancock

This is a sad but simultaneously touching thing for her to do. I wish her well.