| 05 August 2006 A Shield Against Heaven There really aren't any new abominations in the world. They are just endlessly recycled. War is as old as the species, though we have put some spectacular wrinkles on the technical side of it. Still, as Mr. Zarakawi demonstrated prior to his timely demise, there are some acts of personal brutality that hark back to the visceral times of Genghis Khan that resonate remarkably in the age of the internet and CNN News. There is nothing new under the sun. There is just fashion. At the moment we have a perfect demonstration of the wheel of ying-and-yang in the heavens from Galilee to Beirut. Zealots in Lebanon are firing unguided missiles south into Israel, hoping to hit something, or anything. Gravity always wins in this game, and the payload comes down and detonates. If it does not hit anybody or anything made by the hand of man, it can cause fire in the parched hills. This is effects-based warfare at its most fundamental. The rockets are intended to cause uncertainty and discomfort; death is only incidental to their function. The Israelis, for their part, are being ruthless in the application of precision force. They are applying the "shock and awe" techniques that their US and domestically-built weapons give them. The rockets, of course, are being fired from places that force abominable casualties on the civilians of Lebanon, who are quite irrelevant to the process of the ultimate cause, which is the destruction of the Jewish State. Or not precisely irrelevant. Rather, they are necessary props. So that is where we are. The Israelis are forced into a corner. This moment of unilateral action will end presently, as the eighteen-year occupation did. Their military planners must accomplish as much as possible in the moment, hence the destruction of basic infrastructure like roads and bridges and power plants. Anything to set the enemy back in time, and buy a little breathing room against the inevitable next assault. This march through the abominations is all a clockwork sort of thing, inevitable, unless it is somehow put off track. Being just a minor functionary in a large concern, I sat down at the computer this week and was quite stern with my bosses. I have a modest pension and sometimes I just don't care about security. I typed furiously that this latest war was an abomination, quite understandable on both sides, but preventable. I wrote that the company had some tools that could be used to break the current cycle of violence, and at least force things into a new path. I told them that we had done considerable work on piece parts of the overall abomination. We have worked on countermeasures for improvised explosive devices, and rocker propelled grenades, and man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS. They all had prospects for success, but the government money to fund the integration danced off to combat other abominations, real and imaged, leaving the science high and dry. MANPADs are rockets. Quite speedy ones, and when well-maintained, effective against ungainly airliners. We did quite a bit of work in the area, devising some novel ways to detect the pre-launch chemical reaction of the tubes, and adapting innovative optical systems to recognize their path of flight, and hooked them all on a world-class low-latency open-architecture network the like of which the world has never seen. Then we could apply our stand-alone cell networks to provide alertment to firing batteries, and then apply a kinetic or energy-based solution to kill them in flight. We would have to shop for the last part, I typed, but for goodness sakes, we can solve this abomination. Existing tracking systems for mortar rounds work on radar and capitalize on the high apogee of the trajectory for detection. They do not work in the light regime of the Katyusha rocket. Our solution does, or at least it could, if we put it together properly. Our technology is ready to be integrated against the low-flying rockets, since the Katyusha is a relatively lumbering rocket, as are the somewhat longer legged brothers that are falling this morning in Galilee. What we have to do, I declared, is take the piece-parts of our nascent solution and field a shield against the rockets. We have it in our power to create a mini-Star Wars defensive system that would permit Israel to deploy a barrier in the sky, and stop the rockets in flight before they land. It would not even have to be perfect. A sixty-percent solution might be good enough to start. Something practical and useful might give enough confidence for the Israelis to abandon shock and awe, and cause the Hezballah to cast about for some new abomination to demonstrate. I ended my memo with a flourish: "The larger and grander Star Wars ended communism, after all," I wrote, "and it has not worked yet." I mashed the button on the computer and sent it off into the ether. Time to act, I thought, wondering what abominations the Iranians will consider when the missile shield goes up. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |