Pearl Harbor Day 2019

If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you will have noticed that the attack on Pearl Harbor is a particular interest of mine. Partly that’s because my father was there, and partly because it is a classic Indications & Warning problem, the bedrock of half of my professional military career. As per an old family tradition, we were watching the movie Tora, Tora, Tora this afternoon — that’s how one knows that it’s the start of Christmas season in our household — and some thoughts occurred to me about the technology available in those days, and its impact on military operations.

Pre-war military technology was primitive by our standards, or by immediate post-war standards for that matter. Communications were by telephone (if local, and you had to go through the operator first), or by hand-keyed Morse code over HF radio for long range communications, radio that was susceptible to degradation by fluctuations in the ionosphere. A submarine cable linked Hawaii with the Mainland as early as 1902, but it was low-bandwidth telegraphy only — there were no telephone cables until after the war. In the movie, when the military couldn’t get a signal through to Pearl because of “atmospherics”, they gave their war-warning message to AT&T Western Union for cable transmission as a telegram.

Telegram to the Governor of Washington State. Presumably post-attack.

Similarly with radar. The Opana radar site had only been established ten days before the attack. The equipment used, the SCR-270, had been operational elsewhere on the island for about six months, but few people were trained in how to use it, and the chain of command was clueless on how to best employ it. In addition, the equipment did not operate the way radar does today. The user interface was crude, producing an oscilloscope display rather than the PPI scope of later systems.

See? Those are enemy planes. Or maybe echoes from the mountains in our backlobe

There were a lot of issues with the limitations of the technology of the day. The interesting thing is that as primitive as the tech was, it was still new to the military, and they were still figuring out how to use it. One key shortfall was lack of a proper organization to handle the new capabilities. I will talk about that, and the lack of a proper war-fighting mentality when I write about Pearl Harbor again, next year.

 

Memories of my youth: Technology progress

Times change. Technology changes. Most everybody looks at computing power as an example. If you want another example (albeit computer-related), look no further than our worldwide communications network, and how it’s changed in my adult lifetime.

1970: I am a young USAF lieutenant, based at RAF Mildenhall, in the UK. My mother, recently divorced and on her own, was going through a bad patch. How can I provide her some moral support? What about a phone call?

There was one phone in the BOQ that you could book international calls on. It was at the front desk, and normally behind the glass of the teller’s cage. To make a call, you first booked it with the international operator, who would call you back when the circuit was available. Then you stood next to the cashier’s cage, with the handset cord snaked out through the hole in the glass, and held your conversation while the rest of the world was cashing checks and paying for dinner. Cost was $1.00 a minute.

1980: I’m a USAF major at the Alert Center at DIA, in the Pentagon. There was an incident where a US carrier, enroute to a port visit in Yugoslavia, violated Yugoslav airspace on the way in to port. There was a discussion between the US ambassador, in Belgrade, and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) duty general on one phone line, and the NMCC duty general talking to the captain of the carrier on a different line. I stood by in case there was a need for Intelligence input. There wasn’t.

It was interesting, and exciting, to have real time communications halfway around the world, even if it had to be on two different phone lines. Based on recent reports, things haven’t changed in the cross-Department area.

1990: I’m a contractor, working on a then state of the art geographic information system, installed in the Alert Center at DIA. It’s the start of the Kuwait war Scud missile attacks and I’m helping chase them. A missile would launch from Iraq, and the plume would be detected by a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. The satellite would radio the detection to the ground site in Colorado, which would report it to the NMCC in the Pentagon. DIA was also on that circuit, and we’d input the launch coordinates to our database, pull up possible hiding places, like bridges and overpasses, and send that on to the Scud Cell in Saudi Arabia. They’d pass the data to the F-15E’s and the fighters would try to find the launchers.

What with intermediate hops, the signal had to travel a good 120,000 miles, from detection to target assignment.

1997: Meanwhile, Cordelia has her own wireless phone. All you have to do is pull the antenna out.

2016: I am a college professor enroute to a conference in Hokkaido, Japan. While travelling along at 90mph on the Shinkansen bullet train, I call my brother in Utah on my pocket phone. The next year he returns the favor by calling me from Graz, Austria, on his phone, using full motion video.

 

Requiem for the GOP

Steve Jobs famously said about Microsoft that

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

What we’ve just seen in the 2012 campaign, the elections and the GOP reactions to their loss tells me that if you replace “taste” with “clue”, the statement applies to today’s Republican Party.

Since before the election, World+Dog have been writing about how the demographics of the country are trending against the GOP, that the party’s core support group is dwindling. That’s a problem for the GOP, but it’s not the big problem. The big problem is, the GOP leadership has no idea what to do about it.

Future Technology Survey

Energy website Do The Math wants your opinion on twenty futuristic technology questions At Survey Monkey. Earlier results here.