Creative Retirement - Great Decisions 2014
1 . Defense Technology -- February 15, 2014
Pre-Meeting Notes
Kieth Alexander -- head NSA from Aug 2005 till March 2014. Also Commander, United States Cyber Command on May 21, 2010. West Point and four master degrees. He and his deputy were announced to be replaced with a Navy admiral.
The five pillars is the framework for the United States military strategy for cyberwarfare.
1. recognize that the new domain for warfare is cyberspace similar to the other elements in the battlespace.
2. proactive defenses to detect and stop a cyber attack on a computer network -- provide military tactics to back-trace, hunt down and attack an enemy intruder.
3. protection of critical infrastructure.
4. early detection and to incorporate them into the cyberwarfare defense structure.
5. technological change --computer literacy and artificial intelligence capabilities.
Patrick Bellinger -- flew over Vera Cruz, first man under fire in an aircraft (1914). Led the
Navy trans-Atlantic flight of seaplanes in 1919. Head of patrol craft at Pearl Harbor. I was he who sent the famous message: "Air raid. Pearl Harbor - this is no drill." Chief of staff USN, Aug'42. Commander Atlantic Fleet Air Forces from 1943, principally anti-submarine activities.
Dud torpedoes. Several innovations in technology were introduce in the early technology area.
The newest designs were to go under a ship and explode when massive metal was detected and break
the back of the ship. Too secret and torpedoes were too expensive to be tested. For example,
exercise torpedoes had a hollow warheads so they could be retrieved and used again. An explosive
warhead weighed a ton more and the torpedo ran in a nose down attitude and passed too far under the
target. There were four such defects so that virtually no ships were sunk with the new technology and it was mid war before these were all uncovered and fixed.
1. Navy war game in mid-1930s attacked Pearl Harbor by aircraft and won the game. It was considered a fluke and not acted upon. Japan read the reports.
2. Patton lead one team in the first mass exercise with tanks about the same time. He exited his side of the battlefield, traveled around country roads and hit the opposing side from the back.
3. An exercise in the Person Gulf about three years ago, I tried to monitor progress closely and there seemed to be a blackout. Seems the side playing Iran attacked with small boats launched from merchant ships coordinate with private planes too small to have any attention payed to them by our radars. Every body went home and the restarted the games to be fair to our side.
Budget restrains keep the defense of Pearl Harbor which needed 200 Flying fortress for 360 degree reconnaissance – had 12. Those available were sent to the Philippines where MacArthur did not understand aircraft and would not allow them to attack the Japan forward base at Formosa. The Jap planes from Formosa attacked and destroyed all of Mac's aircraft on the ground in the next three days.
The USN had biplanes as the front line fighter until 1940 when replaced by the Brewster Buffalo, F2A,.
which had too light of a landing gear and training was curtailed. That plane was used by Finland
in its 1939 war with Russia with a 40 to 1 kill ratio.
Italian air force joined in of the dissection of France. They used acrobatic bi-planes with highly skilled pilots. The RAF considered them fun to shoot down with all the aerobatics, but no threat to themselves.
Even in industry, new technology was considered as sitting closest to the door in case of a slowdown.
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