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War, 2001/09/14:19:40

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History respond responses

I've got a lot more to say, as my thoughts slowly develop. The thing about history is there's so much of it. More ramifications become apparent as time passes and you make more connections. It's easy to see too much, of course, to see parallels and possibilities that aren't there, because history too is full of singular events, strange co-incidences that seem inevitable in Baysian hindsight but whose prior probability was in fact negligable. Arms in the Air There will be no more hijackings. At least not in the United States, and probably not anywhere else in the civilized world. I guess it's possible that there might be one more attempt. Hijackers are, after all, not very smart. Armed or unarmed, the passengers, knowing what might come of it, will kill the hijackers, regardless of risk to themselves. I'm not too keen on the idea of flying on planes where people are allowed to carry guns--aircraft are delicate machines and accidents and idiots all too common. But even if passengers are not allowed to carry arms they will still kill anyone who attempts to hijack a plane. They already have, twice--it seems likely that the passengers on the two aircraft that failed to hit their targets overwhelmed the hijackers because someone learned of the WTC attack via cell phone. At that moment, we entered the post-hijacking age. It's worth pointing out as well that at least some of the passengers were bound to be armed. I myself am never without a knife (I was a Boy Scout: Be Prepared!) and on one occassion got on a plane with a lock-blade knife that security wasn't too sure about. I guess I look peaceable. It would be very surprising if a few of the people on the flights involved in the Tuesday's murders weren't armed in some way or another. It wasn't lack of arms but lack of knowledge that let the attacks proceed. The only thing that prevented the passengers from acting was that they didn't realize, couldn't realize, what was going on. In the two cases where it seems they did, the terrorist attacks went rapidly awry. Americans have many faults. Lack of courage is not amongst them. The Strategy of Technology When I was a graduates student I one day realized that every piece of technology I was using except lasers was either invented or given an enormous boost by the Second World War. The world looked very different in 1945. Not only was it covered with rubble, but all sorts of things were technologically possible that were almost undreamed of in 1939. A lot of these things were designed for the purpose of reducing things to rubble, but a lot of them weren't. Microwave technology, which now warms our food and runs our cell phones, had been given a huge boost, as had radar, sonar, and a host of other detection and communications technologies. Rocketry had become a serious business and nuclear power had gone from moonshine to delirium tremens. Jet aircraft were not very far in the future, and a group of Allied cryptographers had proven a bunch of academically interesting theorems about automatic computing devices. World War III, which was declared Tuesday and will be fought until total victory has been achieved by Western, secular, liberal powers, will also be a technological war. The technological front will likely give a huge boost to autonomous vehicles, because in this long, persistent effort our ability to send machines in to survey and ultimately to kill will provide huge advantages. The difference between warfare and policework is one of control--war is an environment where everything is out of control, and massive forces contend by night against each other, neither knowing much about what the other is doing but simply lashing out indiscriminantly in the hope of killing something. Policework is precise--police work very hard to harm no one but criminals, and mostly they work to catch criminals, not harm them. Autonomous vehicles are going to make war look a lot more like police-work. We are going to be able to spy on people, follow people and arrest/capture/kill people in a much more methodical and precise way than ever before. If anyone in Canada, the U.S. or Britain wants someone to work on this sort of thing, drop me a line. I have robotics training as well as a mechanical engineering degree, electronics experience, software engineering expertise and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. The first raids won't use this sort of technology, but the U.S. military has already gone a long way toward its development, and will be going further, faster now. It will enable the relentless, systematic destruction of the individuals involved, often by capture rather than killing. It will be expensive, but a lot cheaper than doing things the old fashion way. War is the product of inadequately selective technology. The technology of the new war will be so selective it will, by the end, be possible to kill one person and leave the person next to him unharmed, all while posing no threat at all to the operator, who will be far away, possible in low Earth orbit. Sound like science fiction? Call it moonshine. Conspiracy Theories The Militant Muslim press after the U.S.S. Cole attack accused Israel and the United States of carrying out the attack themselves to create a justification for an assault on the Arab world. No such assault, as I noted earlier today, occurred. It seems unlikely, therefore, that that was the purpose behind the attack, or that those were the people behind the attack. I have no doubt, however, that the same people will be saying the same thing this time around as well. Let's give them all the credence they are due: none whatsoever. This is clearly a stock line they parrot at times like this, and we should take it as seriously as we would any other utterance of an idiot bird. Deniability Readily available background on bin Laden and his fellow-travellers indicates a couple of things. The first is that they are organized loosely but with a common purpose: to destroy the West. The loose organization is not just a security measure, but also a deliberate ruse to allow any given individual to deny responsibility for any given attack. bin Laden probably never ordered anyone to do anything. He may well have suggested, and helped out with a little money and organization here and there. But he is nothing like a "mastermind" directing events. For a start, he'd have to have a mind to be a mastermind, whereas he's demonstrably the stupidest man since Hitler. Deniability is not something terrorists have wanted until recently, and this is a measure of the difference between what we are now facing and what we have faced in the past. These terrorists are at war--they are not "reacting" to any particular event or policy of the United States or other Western powers. They are pursuing a long-term policy of destruction. They cannot be appeased or bargained with--they can't even be clearly identified if they have their way. They aren't seeking the release of prisoners or satisfaction of demands. They are seeking our destruction, the destruction of our society, our way of life. There is, to my knowledge, only one appropriate response to this. Perhaps others, who know more and see farther than I do, will see other responses, and will be able to justify them in the full light of the facts. I would like that, but I don't think it likely, and until it happens, I, for one, am at war. Until victory.

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