Looming military disaster: GPS hacking and Boomerangs
Certain things must be attended despite our revulsion or dislike. One of these is military power. I have not seen much written in c99 acknowledging military preparedness or efficiency. Today I hope to redress this deficiency.
Re-posted from Community Forum: https://www.thecommunityforum.life/post/hacking-gps-signals-military-disaster-9645673?pid=1303167774#post1303167774
Military topics, other than the illegal, immoral, wasteful, inhumane U.S. wars of exploitation are rarely discussed in this Forum. This is not unexpected since the majority of communitarians are anti-war and wish not to know the details of military matters other than how to extricate ourselves from the foreign entanglements George Washington so wisely advised us to eschew.
50 plus % of GDP goes to a bloated, corrupt, inefficient military-industrial complex (MIC). Of that, cost over-runs (= fraudulent billing) skim much of the cream off the top. But even after military hardware is delivered, there is yet huge thievery of funds (and armaments) in the DOD, sometimes estimated at 6.5 Trillion dollars. For those who like numbers, that is 6,500,000,000.
Yet military doctrine as how to actually fight wars in the insurgent war era is still inadequate. Premier case in point is Afghanistan, a botched military endeavor if ever there was one. Multiply the stupidity which caused the debacle at the Civil War Battle of the Crater times 100,000 and you have Afghanistan, a clusterfuck of mind-boggling proportions. But that isn't the only one.
For an alleged military superpower, our military is fucked up in more ways than one. Let me just mention a few: Russian and probably Chinese submarines operate noiselessly underwater. Russia and probably China have electromagnetic pulse (EMP) devices which can paralyze and / or destroy the most sophisticated electronic equipment in a fraction of a system. Thanks, perhaps in part to Bill Clinton who may have provided North Korea (NK) with uranium, combined with presidential idiocy as well as Chinese enabling, NK now has nuclear capable ICBMs capable of hitting Western Hawaii and Alaska.
I have previously written of under-reported cold war incidents on Causus99percent (c99)
https://caucus99percent.com/content/initial-skirmish-world-war-3-battle-...
https://caucus99percent.com/content/world-war-3-second-front-opens-colli...
https://caucus99percent.com/content/uss-fitzgerald-1-month-later-haze-li...
These articles deal with the sorry state of the US Navy, particularly the 7th Fleet which is based in Japan. The first of the 3 citations deals with the undisputed Russian use of EMP to disable DDG Porter, an Aegis class destroyer costing about $1B. Aegis system missiles are designed to shoot down ICBMs and shorter range missiles. There are (were) 7 destroyers and 6 other naval vessels armed with the Aegis system (total 13). Some of those ships are disabled by collisions with cargo ships (container and oil) and one occasion by an island with the temerity not to move out of DDG Antietam's way.
By far the most puzzling incident was the collision DDG Fitzgerald with a huge contained ship ACX Crystal, registered in Japan and crewed by Filipino merchant sailors.
I have been following this particular incidents since the day after it happened, June 17, 2017. There was a rotten smell to the whole affair from the very beginning, with the Japanese Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy not even agreeing on the timeline of events. The U.S. timeline was initially one hour different than the Japanese. Inexplicable course changes by the Crystal and lack of course changes by the Fitzgerald contributed to the crash. But why did they happen?
YouTuber Florida Maquis has been diligent in pursing the line of inquiry into the obvious bogus official explanations--plural--by the Navy. He and his subscribers (of whom I am one) have cooperated communally to unravel the mystery or mysteries. Many theories have been discussed from EMP, submarines, pirates aboard Crystal, and other mechanisms.
To be considered in this melange are the subsequent collisions of DDG John McCain and USS Lake Champlain, both of which met with collision disaster off the coasts of Japan.
Could so many commanders and crews be so incompetent as to impair the effectiveness of the 7th Fleet? By the way, the Porter was posted in the Black Sea. All the other collisions were off the coasts of Japan-China-NK. Why only there?
As the saying goes: "You know you're over the target when you're taking flak".
Without considering the whodunnit and why aspects, this essay concentrates on the HOW it was done and implications for military--and non-military installations both foreign and domestic.
Here is a recent Florida Maquis video (2/6/18) 18 minutes long giving rise to a frightening possibility: GPS hacking by foreign powers. The first 60 seconds or so, audio is played at double speed but then the rest is perfectly usual inits presentation.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8l91Cqv4kY]
The basis for this allegation is given in supporting citations, of those listed are cited below; another one having been removed from the net.
https://www.geek.com/geek-pick/chinese-hackers-took-control-of-nasa-sate...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/09/26/gps-spoofing-makes-s...
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/asia-14/materials/Balduzzi/Asia-14-Balduzz...
The first of these three deals with Chinese hacking of a U.S. satellite. Scary, eh?
The second citation mentions GPS spoofing, making ships in one location look as if they're at an airport runway. The Florida Maquis in the cited video, even mentions the total disappearance of a huge oil tanker off the coast of East Africa--not a sinking, casualty of inclement weather or running aground somewhere.
The third citation shows how GPS hacking can be done with rather inexpensive equipment to mislead ships, or any object, appear to where they are not and could never be. This citation is quite technical, beyond my knowledge, but does illustrate the mischief (including very real damage) such GPS interference could lead to.
AIS is Automatic Identification System, a GPS-based means of identifying any and all merchant ships locations, bearings, speed. Typically military vessels do not appear on AIS screens, presumably for mission confidentiality.
Other capabilities enabled by this GPS deception are false weather reports, including tsunamis, cyclones, tornadoes, snowfall, etc.
Without much stretching of even my non-technical imagination, it would seem that such spoofing could direct ICBM to land on unintended targets anywhere within the range of that missile. Think of that a moment. Not only would our entire nuclear missile system be rendered useless to us, it could be the direct means to our own destruction--even without a retaliatory second strike.
Comments
GPS Boomerang
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuPtOtGF4TY]
Not to quibble
But you are short three zeros on that 6.5 Trillion.
Doesn't really matter though. Either number is beyond my comprehension.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Further review
Something I posted at Commondreams
Well lets see.
In the early 50s we bombed the NK to pulverization. As General Curtis LeMay ordered, leave no brick sitting atop another. Nearly half the civilian population perished in the bombings.
We fought them to a standstill. And still could not force a surrender.
Then we tried to starve them to death, with sanctions and blockades.
Still, no surrender.
Aftet 60 years of feigned invasions, all at harvest time or planting season, we still could not bring NK to heel.
But our military leaders would not give up. They persisted no matter the cost. They continue the hostile actions to this day.
Them came Cuba. After a bloody nose at the Bay of Pigs, we surrounded the little island with warships and blockaded its ports. 50 years later, we are still treating them as hostiles, because our military leaders will not stop.
Then we invaded Vietnam. And again , we would not give up. We escalated and escalated. We expanded the war into neighboring countries and bombed them to smitherines too.
After losing 58,000 of our finest young people, we were routed.
Afganistan, the same. After 17 years the Taliban still control 70% of the country. And we are escalating troop numbers AGAIN.
Iraq, same thing. We still have thousands of troops there still.
Are you sensing a pattern here?
Now we have invaded Syria and have actually told the world we are not leaving until Assad is toppled. And we are still getting our asses kicked.
The last war the United States has won was WW2, and all those military leaders are now dead.
This current crop of leaders are a complete failure. They have failed their country. They have decimated our national treasure. They have failed their countrymen.
I call on our military leaders to do the honorable thing.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Several valuable lessons in your comment
We have not won a war since WW2 and the main reason we won is by taking pressure off the Russians so that they could and did actually win the war (if it can be said that anyone wins).
Part of the reasons for military failures involved in the wars we should never have fought, are micromanaging presidents and purely political command decisions.
Furthermore, just like the Democrats, these wars were never meant to win, just to keep on fighting, sucking up money from the people to the psychopaths that be.
Soviets
I recently read that 90% of German casualties in WWII were on the Eastern Front. I don't think there's any question of who did the lions share of beating fascism. We get dribs and drabs of info about that meatgrinder which killed so many millions, but there's really not much we hear about the Soviet side of the war. There are people still alive who experienced that. Just think of what that legacy does to a country: mechanized war, disease, starvation, cannibalism, famine, invasion and occupation.
I say Soviet rather than Russian, to distinguish between the communist govt and the kleptocracy like ours which is currently ruling there.
Fall on their sword?
In all of those "wars"
the MIC pretty much got what
they wanted, .
Perpetual war.
I'm sure LBJ wanted to win in Vietnam.
The MIC had other plans. Besides, short of nukes there was no winning that war. The U.S. dropped more bombs in Southeast Asia than they did in all of WWII in Europe and the Pacific. And still got beat.
Of course we know by now that the point is Not to win, but to keep feeding the MIC by not winning. Winning means stopping (the wars) which means losing (if you're the MIC). And we know losing isn't in our vocabulary.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Good Lord, What Would
we do without those $2,000 toilets and $100 plungers?
I served in Germany in a grunt M.P. unit, which meant we essentially escorted grunt units (tanks and such) from point A (home base) to point B (some god forsaken training hell hole), and stood guard over the commander's (usually a full bird colonel) tent HQ once we got to point B. Oftentimes that meant 2 hours of standing guard and 10 hours of playing with your d!ck. Rinse, repeat for 3 or 4 days. Or longer. Pretty much our existence "in the field."
On many an occasion (as we had 4 or 5 of these "exercises" per year) I would say outloud to no one in particular, "if the Ruskies knew this is the $h!t equipment we got (and it WAS $h!t equipment, hand-me-downs from 'Nam and elsewhere), they'd be coming across that border quicker than a bull sniffin' some come-n-getit!" I was just hoping and praying those worn out p.o.s. would make it home, becuz we didn't get home until the grunts did. A cold beer waiting when we got there.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Mil budget
The press treated revelations about $100 toilet plungers, etc., as a grim joke about "military intelligence". Now there's headlines about $800 mil unaccounted for, and there was that pallet of cash that went missing in Afghanistan.
Hey, these aren't accidents, how do black ops get funded?
A $Billion in 100 dollar
bills - that's 10 million $100 bills -
sitting on a pallet in Iraq
somehow "disappeared" and was never recovered.
To spend a $Billion you would need to spend $30,000 a day, every day, from Day One when the Dr. whacked you on the ass 'til the day you died on your 88th birthday. With a couple bucks for the kids left over. Every day you wake up there's a stack of 300 $100 bills on the night stand. Go spend them and there'll be another stack there tomorrow. That's a lot of cash.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
A billion here,
a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money (grin).
Yeah, I have a habit of dividing all these big numbers by 300 million, to get a rough idea of what could have been returned to the people as services: med, infra, whatever.
BTW, what's the text say in your avatar?
progressive media?
I think we progressives need to
build our own network, fight fire
with fire. Now that I'm mostly retired
I have the time. But, like a lot of us,
lack the funds.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Ah, yes
The Chronofiscal Indeterminacy Principle: you can have money, or you can have time, but never both at the exact same instant.
Thanks for the translation!
Mil tech
In the 60's a MIG pilot defected and everyone crowed about how "primitive" the MIG tech was -- it had vacuum tube circuits. Prepping for EMP, way back then? Vacuum tubes, and to a lesser extent clunky bipolar transistors, resist EMP. Just about everything on a chip will fry. Were they sending a message of readiness?
The MIC is focused on profits and dividends, not results, so a lot of fragile flashy costly tech gets deployed. The ideal market: product gets destroyed and must be replaced, so demand is endless.
Yes, but let me give my version of it
The defection happened in 1976, and the plane was a Mig-25 Foxbat - which had been touted quite widely as a fearsome threat, in order to gin up more money for the AF.
When the vacuum tube story came out, the PR boys were at a loss for a few weeks. Then some bright boy came up with the EMP story. Until that point, EMP hadn't moved the needle as a scare story, even though the phenomenon had been known since the 1960s (
IIRC,> some pre-test ban, above ground, high altitude (400 km) nuke test in the Pacific (Starfish Prime) had blown out some power circuitry in Hawaii.)In the mid 1970s, circuit integration was still in diapers, if not in utero. I mean, the Intel 8008 (circa 1972) had two thousand (not two billion) transistors, and you could see the circuit traces on the chip with the naked eye. (I actually have one, which I got at a computer conference.) The only chips that were common in weaponry at the time were the TI logic family - like 12 NAND gates on a chip. Most military gear had discrete transistors. I'm not sure that an EMP would blow out discretes, although it sure would scramble them for a while.
Bottom line: the hype about the EMP weapons threat was after the fact bunkum and CYA.
I think I was "remembering"
this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Kum-sok
I associate talking about it in grade school in the 60's, though the defection happened in the 50's. I don't recall anyone mentioning EMP at the time; all I recall is people talking abut how primitive the electronics were, which they would have been in '53: nothing more advanced than discrete transistors. Printed circuits were hot tech then. But those memories are very old and could be faulty and conflated with the '75 defection you cite.
I've worked on equipment with some old RTL (resistor transistor logic) chips; the logic levels were fuzzy and unlike TTL, which came later. RTL was 60's tech. The RTL transistors were bipolar, IIRC. Even those ancient chips got killed by surges from nearby lightning strikes -- I had to put surge devices on all the inputs: RC circuit parallel with MOV. Anything using MOS or FET tech or later is much, much more fragile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistor-transistor_logic
The Soviets had good scientists, and a lot of experience with aboveground tests - it's very possible they were aware of the pulse and planned for it, with at least some survivable units. My main point: they were focused on functionality, not profit. Case in point: the AK. Robust and reliable. Ack, I'm not praising killing machines, just pointing out the difference between profit-driven and result-driven industries.
Your point about rugged and reliable is pertinent.
The Soviet T-34 was the best battle tank in WW2. It was powerful, relatively cheap, made without the precision of German tanks--because the average life of a tank on the Eastern Front once committed to battle was only 19 hours, so why build a tank to last forever when it won't even survive a full day?
I think I have mentioned, a few times,
, that I flew KC-135s during the Cold War. I may have mentioned a few of the games of Tag we played with the Soviets. I know I haven't mentioned a friend of mine, who happened to be the Navy test pilot that tried out Belenko's MiG. He was impressed enough...it's hard to argue with something approaching Mach 3. And more importantly, I don't think I have mentioned how us SAC warriors navigated.
Pretty much like a sailing ship of the 18th century, with a sextant . It sounds primitive and antiquated, but the Inertial Reference Systems of the time took a long time to 'align', and had to be immobile while they did so. We needed to launch within a few minutes, because the Soviet nukes would be incoming. GPS was out of the question, because the Soviets had the technology to take out those satellites, and the standard for civilian aviation at the time, ground based radio beacons, were obviously susceptible to EMP. Out trusty sextant would always be able to find the sun, or some prominent stars, or as a last resort, the wobbly moon. We navigated like that all over the world, all the time. I am afraid that it is a lost art, now.
I fly under more peaceful conditions now, 737s, back and forth across the 48 states. Radio navigation is going out of style quickly, and everything is done by GPS. And every flight, I get a map showing me where GPS accuracy is unreliable, due to (our) military practice jamming, or poor satellite coverage, or other reasons.
I was a peacenik Military History Major, Ed
The T-34 was astounding. And astoundingly simple.
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
The Su-17, another dog that refuses to die
The Syrian AF is still flying theirs, which are approaching 40 years of age. They've been flying them in the sandy desert, which is hell on engines and moving parts; and they still keep them in the air.
Thanks for your input
An interesting comparison. The U.S. is dominated by oligopolies. Russia is dominated by oligopolies. Greed is the sole motivation for U.S. oligopolies--and only greed. Russia allows the oligarchs to make lots of money--but with limitations.
Except for the War of 1812, the U.S. has never been invaded.
Conversely Russia has been invaded many times, usually with disastrous results. The Vikings established a 200+ year reign over Russia about 1000 years ago. They were not defeated, they were assimilated. 200+ years ago a Sicilian megalomaniac invaded Russia and was defeated soundly by General Winter, but the Russians paid heavily for this. Then along come the Romanovs, successfully running their already impoverished nation into the ground until the Mensheviks routed them (only to be replaced soon after by the Bolsheviks), with great detriment to the civilian population. Most recently Russia came within one city (Stalingrad) from total annihilation. Finally, they won The Great Patriotic War. The assault on Berlin alone cost the Soviets 300,000 soldiers. Overall they lost 20,000,000 soldiers and 30,000,000 civilians.
The Russians have seen and tasted war. They never want foreign troops on their soil again. Hence, though they spend lots of money on defense, it is far less both in terms of GDP and absolute terms than we spend. Yet they got a lot more bang for their rubles than we get for our petrodollars.
EMP and satellite hacking aside, they have a more competent fighter bomber than the U.S. in the SU 37, as compared to the F22 and especially the F35. Here's partial proof: note the maneuverability of the SU 37 (obtained by clicking a link in Wikipedia's section on SU 37.
We don't have anything that can approach this.
You forgot about the Mongols
They smashed the southern part of Russia (what is now Ukraine) and put the northern part firmly under their thumb paying tribute. This also went on for about 200 years, until they lost their grip.
Strictly speaking the Romanovs didn't *invade*, they finally came out on top after years of very messy and bloody power struggles. It all started because Ivan IV (the Terrible, although a better translation is probably "the Feared" or "the Dread") murdered his ablest son and left a feeble wimp to succeed him, and one Boris Godunov (Ivan's son-in-law, another mistake on Ivan's part) wound up winning the ensuing Game of Thrones, temporarily. Boris got to keep his throne until he died, but then it was Round Two - and it got a lot messier and went on and on and on.... (At one point the Poles *did* invade and forced a Polish heir onto the Russian throne, but nobody paid much attention to him.) And, by the way, all this was long *before* Napoleon (who was Corsican, not Sicilian - different island, different side of Italy, and under French rule).
The earlier Romanovs were reasonably competent - it was the later ones who were real losers.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Thank you for correcting my version of history
like Swiss cheese, mine, as you have illustrate, had lots of holes.
They were rugged, but balky
I read that the driver carried a hand sledgehammer, which was sometimes needed to shift the gears. Then again, the tank survived having the crew beat it with sledgehammers.
Interesting. And interesting that its before my time!
Thanks for the info. I never heard of the Korean defector.
I also never saw any RTL. By the time I was doing logic, TTL had been around for a while; and everyone had a TI TTL data book on their desk. (The nerds had the pinouts memorized.)
But its news to me that discrete bipolar transistors could be trashed by EMP. I always thought of those things as pretty bulletproof, being so physically large. I would have to google how deep the diffusion layers were, but I suspect they were much deeper (and therefore more robust) than in the later MOS chips. Interesting.
My phrasing was poor
I meant to indicate that bipolars were rugged and could withstand EMP (though maybe not as much as vacuum tubes). I met someone in the 90's who said he was designing emp-resistant circuitry using bipolars. The big difference is that bipolar is current-operated, whereas MOS circuitry and later technologies are voltage-operated. Less current, less power dissipation, less heat, smaller size in voltage devices, but greater sensitivity to electrostatic fields, noise, and heat. On the other hand, bulky current-operated devices are inherently better at shedding heat (part of normal operation), and the voltage gradient in an electrostatic field doesn't affect it as much. Industrial wired instrumentation used and probably still uses a current signal; the robustness is one reason. I'm sure this is way over-simplifying things; I'm no engineer, and my knowledge is obsolete.
Thank you for making me think!
edit -- now that I've _actually_ thought (smile), I realize that my remarks about protecting RTL inputs made it seem that I was indicating RTL was sensitive. My point was that despite being relatively robust, even those chips could be fried by surges on the inputs due to nearby but not direct lightning strikes, which might be comparable to EMP pulses. Vacuum tubes and discrete bipolar transistors are far more emp-proof.
I want Donald to get his biggest bestest military parade
And I want Aaron Mate, Larry Wilkinson and others to do a "color commentary" of the whole sorry spectacle detailing how much money this empire has squandered on each piece of hardware, and detailing what that money could have bought for taxpayers in health care,education, preparation for climate disasters ,remediation of toxic events, etc. The F 35 will have to be towed of course coz that 400 billion dollar lawn ornament cant fly. People really need to see on their big screen just what the trade off has been.
Though I don't follow
it closely, it seems that our military strategy is to get every phase of war-making as dependent on highly vulnerable electronic systems as possible. If it came out that our top military planners were serving a combination of Al Qaeda the Russians and Chinese, things would make more sense than they do now.
Orwell: Where's the omelette?
jim, the cheaper the better--but higher price as the old stuff