Mystic weakness

Mystic weakness is extraction from novel Alien in a foreign sea 1 by Aleksandr Rozov.

At the beginning of century 21, the "near future" Is described. So, the article may refer to years 2020-2050.

Mystic weakness by Sam Hopkins

Ordinary citizens of developed countries live in complete ignorance of how ineptly they spend huge foundation allocated to the military programs and how defenseless their countries will be in a military conflict with a cruel and pragmatic enemy.

Take for starters such an important part of the armed forces as the navy.

In the mid-1980s, Douglas Lenat developed the EURISCO expert system, which could use human knowledge of practical sense (so-called heuristics) and generate its own new heuristics, improving the experience of solving problems. Among the episodes related to EURISCO, there was this: in the staff game simulating a military conflict at sea, it was required to determine the optimal composition of the flotilla. The expert system chose only small ships capable of conducting a quick attack and very small ultra-high-speed vessels. This approach ran counter to the fundamentals of military theory, but the EURISCO flotilla over and over again for three years won in virtual battles flotillas, compiled according to the usual principles. The vexed organisers of the game tried to prevent this, changing the rules. EURISCO responded with a minor change in the parameters of its flotilla, and again won. The conclusion was that the principles on which the fleet was traditionally organised today serves to nothing.

The piquancy of the situation was also in the fact, that the flotilla in the style of EURISCO (be it built realistically and not virtually) would cost of order of one percent of price of the traditionally organised flotillas, that it won in the staff games. The American and British press began to leak some data about the scandalous game. The newspapers published articles with unambiguous allusions to the fact that the military budget should be reduced by an order of magnitude, or even more. There was a real threat that a lot of serious guys in the military-industrial complex would be removed from the feeder. In the face of this obvious threat, the allied military headquarters of the alliance decided to stop the virtual military games with EURISCO, to abandon the expert system itself to the civilian sphere, and to delete the data on scandalous games, - those, that have not yet been published.

The military-industrial complex continues to build floating dinosaurs (each - for a billion dollars), that can only turn out the pockets of taxpayers, and in a sea battle will be ineffective against much smaller, technological and high-speed warships which cost less than a million dollars apiece.

Similar, but even more dramatic wasting is observed in military aviation. Modern jet attack aircrafts and fighter planes cost ftpom 10 to 20 million dollars each, and at least a billion is spent on developing the next (even more expensive) model. In support of these exorbitant prices, the taxpayer is told tales of some super effective tracking and controlling computers, which are crammed with such aircraft. But these are the same computer systems used in ordinary civil (and even everyday) technology. Their price nowhere exceeds 10 thousand dollars. As for the jet machines themselves, the estimate for their construction, as proved by the amateurs, can be reduced to 50 thousand. Even the price of light business jet jets (comfortable, safe, extremely automated and very simple to manage) is only a million dollars.

But the main thing here is not even that the taxpayer cheats with prices 20 times, at least. The main thing: for a combat aircraft operating at speeds of 3 or more times higher than the speed of sound, the time for making decisions drops to hundredths of a second, the pilot in the cabin is a burden, a piece of useless and fragile protoplasm. For the sake of accommodation of the pilot, the designers sacrifice the compactness of the machine. In addition, in order to prevent this protoplasm from becoming a steak, it is necessary to abandon a number of extremely effective maneuvers simply because the acceleration in the bends exceeds 10g. During the demonstration of the Australian Steal-Storm system, it was convincingly shown that a compact and cheap unmanned vehicle, due to its maneuverability, would destroy in the air a manned military aircraft of price of 20 million dollars in 20 seconds: it would be simply shoot out by a high-performance machine gun from a short distance. Due to the limited acceleration of maneuver, the manned plane is difficult to escape from the attack of a very cheap missile launched from the shoulder and guided by thermal radiation.

What is the point in an expensive combat aircraft, while it is practically defenseless against a thousand times cheaper devices? What is the sense if, in addition, each take-off of this aircraft costs a hundred times more, than all the targets, that it could potentially destroy?

A few years ago, the whole world got around the caricature. In the photo, the F-119 attack aircraft strikes an East African pirate with an air-to-sea missile. Next to each object (attack aircraft, missile and boat) are the prices, and below the question: Who won?

Let us rise even higher. The space fleet (if the shameful show of technical absurdity that state corporations arrange in space, can be denoted with the beautiful word "fleet") is the most mediocre economic project in history, since the time of the pyramid of Cheops. At the end of the XX century, the X-prize fund announced a competition for a private space shuttle, and in just 7 years there were 23 aircraft projects of this class, each of which was an order of magnitude simpler and more reliable, and two or three orders of magnitude cheaper in construction and operation than any of NASA's Space Shuttle. Competition won SpaceShipOne company Barta Rutana. It seemed that now everything would fall into place, and the shuttles would be built for reasonable projects, for commensurate money. But nothing of the kind. State aerospace agencies have a different logic. For them, the rapid achievement of goals for small money - this is pure ruin. It is more profitable for them to blast billions for new replicas of German missiles, which Werner von Braun came up with in 1943 to satisfy the unwholesome ambitions of Adolf Hitler.

Let's return from heaven to earth, to the technique of war. The most striking example of the dementia of the military policy of the developed countries is the attitude towards nuclear weapons and measures of protection against it. If you count in dollars per unit of destruction, nuclear weapons are fabulously cheap. It did not supersede other types of heavy weapons only because of cultic reasons. After the application of two A-bombs of 13 and 22 kilotons of TNT in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a global god-bomb cult emerged. In the era of the Cold War, the use of bombs of 10 megatons of TNT in the densely populated areas (purely religious, devoid of military meaning) was advertised. This led to nucleophobia (the irrational horror of the population of the so-called West before the A-bomb and generally the energy of the atomic nucleus).

In 1955 - 1995, many promising models of A-bombs with a capacity of 0.1-10 kt of TNT were developed, but none of them was used (although the A-bomb owners participated in this period in hundreds of local wars). All practical considerations were swept aside by the cult fear of the A-bomb, and instead of the A-bomb, much more expensive non-nuclear warheads were used. The cult attitude to the A-bomb was also expressed in the neglect of cheap means of delivery. At the beginning of the 21st century, not a single one of them went to the series from a whole series of the A-bomb projects delivered to the goal by cheap planning mines or short-range missiles. In the late XX - early XXI century, only A-bombs of high power (0.1 - 10 megaton TNT) are mass produced, delivered by extra-expensive ballistic and cruise missiles.

In the field of anti-atomic defence, by the beginning of the XXI century, all the systems are focused on intercepting of just such a pair, bomb-carriers. The cult motifs clearly dominate practical considerations. Even the developers of defence systems (not to mention politicians and voters) do not believe that the "weapons of the apocalypse" - rockets with megaton ammunition - will ever be practically used. The industry of means of nuclear attack and defence became a simple machine for dividing the budget money of developed countries. In the meantime, nuclear technology is rapidly becoming cheaper. At the beginning of the 21st century, obtaining low-power A-charge is no longer a particularly difficult problem, and the control over the spread of these technologies and fissile materials suitable for the production of A bombs has long been lost irrevocably by the "atomic club of great powers."

Now imagine an A-bomb of the order of 1 kiloton of TNT, which is delivered to the target by a very simple and cheap small-sized carrier. Even if this carrier is at a technical level half a century old, none of the modern super-expensive protective systems can effectively stop it. It simply is not designed to combat such primitive devices, it does not see them. A developed country, attacked by such a weapon, is doomed to failure, not so much due to the ineffectiveness of the available technical protection, but because of psychological factors. Real destruction from A-bomb of a 1 kiloton is not so terrible. In 1944, London was bombed by 2,000 FAU-2 missiles, which in total carried almost 2 kilotons of explosives, and hit not one but different points of the city. As you know, this did not have fatal consequences. On the other hand, the bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 with conventional incendiary bombs caused the death of more than 100,000 people - the same order as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 (even taking into account the victims of radiation that died before 31.12.1945). In the West, only historians remember that bombing of Tokyo, and everyone knows about the explosion of the 13-kiloton A-bomb in Hiroshima (the bomb's capacity for cultic reasons is rounded to 20 kilotons, and the blast is blown to a world catastrophe more horrible than the Second World War itself).

From this excursion into history (more precisely, into the modern interpretation of history), it is clear that the society in the so-called. "Developed countries" perceive the A-bomb not as a weapon (comparable in destructive power with other means of warfare), but as an all-destroying divine wrath that is not measured in numbers. The decisive factor in the defeat of a typical developed western country in a possible conflict with a technically weaker (but more practice) enemy would be a volitional unpreparedness to fight against the God-bomb, i.e. against a phenomenon to which socio-political myth attributed not physical, but supernatural destructive power.

Keywords

Aleksandr Rozov, Art, Meganesia, Nuclear weapon

Меганесия, Розов Александр Александрович, Фантастика,,,,