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Darpa Pushes ‘Mosaic Warfare’ Concept
- Mizza 8y agoThen why the hell did we build the entire next generation around the F35? It's like we went all in on production to build carriers but our base is already full of zerglings.
- sahin-boydas 8y ago+1
- HankB99 8y agoAren't parts of the F35 built in all congressional districts? That provides the major motivation for anything related to building more of them.
- Phlarp 8y agoI've always hear this applied to the B-52 but the F35 may be similarly dispersed.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoNot quite, at least not according to Lockheed's propaganda page. No "economic impact" listed in Hawaii, Nebraska, Wyoming or Alaska. https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map https://www.f35.com/about/economic-impact-map Edit: this source says ~350 districts build components for the F-35. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/article207050669.html https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/artic...
- HankB99 8y agoMy recollection was in error. A little searching confirms your information.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoBecause every weapons program is also a jobs program .
- chii 8y agoWhy not just create a jobs program directly, rather than inefficiently and with many middleman taking their cut?!
- Apocryphon 8y agoNot palatable to 20th century American cultural mistrust of government aid.
- mtremsal 8y agoSee also the TSA?
- wnevets 8y agohow else would well connected people become rich?
- zitterbewegung 8y agoBecause it also ensures that your weapon systems are made in this country .
- peteretep 8y agoBecause decades of propaganda that it’s socialism if the owners of capital don’t get a cut in the middle
- PavlovsCat 8y agoIt's a taxpayer subsidy to the military-industrial complex. That some of that money ends up in the pockets of workers is a sad reality that cannot yet be avoided, but it's hardly "the reason". That would imply a level of care that is completely incompatible with a lot of things. Take the use of low-IQ troops in Vietnam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J2VwFDV4-g But the defense budget is so people can "put food on their family"? It doesn't even begin to add up.
- adventured 8y agoBefore we get around to building half the planned F35s, they'll cancel the program and move on to the next shiny new program. That's how every big defense project works. Here's how it works. You start out with a giant estimate, for 3,000 planes. That giant estimate is mostly caused by the lifetime cost of maintaining 3k planes. As the years roll by, you start chopping production numbers off, while trying to get some cost inflation per unit somewhere. You end up spending 1/3 less, for 1/2 the planes in the end. 20 years after the first F35 flight, you've moved on to the next big thing. Conveniently justified by an inevitable, possibly dramatic, change in what the military needs.
- nradov 8y agoIf "mosaic warfare" actually becomes a thing then the F-35 is actually pretty well suited to participate in it. At least better than legacy platforms which are increasingly difficult to upgrade.
- jorblumesea 8y agoThis actually feels similar to Russia's hybrid warfare doctrine, albeit without some of the more sinister political manipulation parts. But there is a fair amount of influence here, I think.
- azernik 8y agoExcept not at all - it's more about cooperation between different branches of the military (a problem America has more severely than most other countries) than about combining "civilian" and military tactics a la Russia.
- vkou 8y agoSo, someone at the DoD re-discovered the Combined Arms doctrine?
- all2 8y agoCombined Action/Arms Groups are stupid effective. Armor working with Infantry and Cavalry (light armor) that also have close air-support is a thing to behold. The thing is, the US military re-tools its organization every 10 to 20 years or so, looking ahead at the conflicts to come. In the late 80s that re-tooling began and the result was methodologies that came to fruition in Iraq and Afghanistan. We take notes from past examples (see Russian occupation of the latter), examine the fight we see coming (insurgent warfare in WWII), and rebuild doctrine to fit. The special operations groups were part of the process. While we were creating our own future enemies in the 60s and 70s (mujahideen turned into Al-Qaeda and others) we were also getting a first hand look at guerrilla warfare and how ineffective symmetric war concepts were at facing a guerrilla opponent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare [edit]grammar![/edit]
- eaandkw 8y agoI don't know. The Marine Corps seemed to figure a lot of that out in its Small Wars Manual from the 1940's. Here is the FMFRP 12-15. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/FMFRP%2012-15%20%20Small%20Wars%20Manual.pdf https://www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/FMFRP%2012-1...
- all2 8y agoIn WWII they leaned on understanding from British occupations across the world. Insurgents were a big issue for the British, and they had started to sort out how to fight a guerrilla war as the empire was collapsing. I wish I could remember the book I read. It details things like how the one person you had to worry about at a security checkpoint was the person with all their papers in order... I want to say it was Western Africa, or a similar holding that the book centered around. [edit] All that to say I agree with you. A self-sufficient force seems to be, by nature, multi-talented. [/edit] [edit2] And the book, which is quite good, is "Small Wars" by a Colonel Callwell. https://www.amazon.com/Small-Wars-Their-Principles-Practice/dp/1438513887 https://www.amazon.com/Small-Wars-Their-Principles-Practice/... [/edit2]
- fenwick67 8y agoI always thought of it more like conjoined triangles
- tlear 8y agoIt is all great till you face an opponent with high end tech capability. The more communications you use the more connected you are the more things to jam, intercept and misdirect. This seems to be the Russian approach. We will see the preview of the future whenever Israel decides to face their new systems in Syria. No GPS, jamming up the vazoo etc. US is already playing with Russians there to a degree. I think the quote was: "The most hostile EW environment in the world"
- kijin 8y agoThey're already taking that into account. > Retired Navy Adm. Scott Swift, former U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, said at the conference that in future conflict, communications will be degraded. “Windows of communication will open and close rapidly in times that are not under the control of the commander,” he said. That is why the autonomy and the unmanned piece of mosaic warfare is important. Systems must be able to act independently when they are cut off from higher headquarters, he said. Coming soon to a battlefield near you: drones equipped with AI that can distinguish friends from enemies 85% of the time, combatants from civilians 61% of the time, and capable of firing at will when the satellite link is down.
- azernik 8y agoDARPA being DARPA, they came up with a buzzword to sell it to the brass and to Congress. Read into the actual content, and it's the related ideas that a) military communications equipment should interoperate better than it does now, and b) that command and control mechanisms should be better optimized for combined-arms (and cross-branch) warfare.
- starbeast 8y agoHave they provided an API for the meat eating robots?
- ryandvm 8y agoLord, "meat eating robots" has to be the most dystopian phrase I've ever heard.
- starbeast 8y agoEATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot - https://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presentation%20EATR%20Brief%20Overview%206%20April%2009.pdf https://robotictechnologyinc.com/images/upload/file/Presenta... Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase II Project DARPA Contract W31P4Q-08-C-0292
- azernik 8y agoTo be fair, those robots are omnivores. In practice they'd likely be mostly-vegetarian.
- starbeast 8y ago'Likely be mostly' is not that reassuring. Given that fear is a weapon, I don't trust people on a battlefield to not use meat eating robots for psychological effect, if they happen to have them around. If it is possible for people to be fed into the meat eating robot, then they will be.
- ape4 8y agoNot to be confused with the Mosaic browser.
- Terr_ 8y agoAt first I expected the subtext to be "monocultures are risky", but now it seems more like "good munitions but weak management".
- booleandilemma 8y agoA tile in a mosaic is one small part of a bigger picture. “If you lose one tile, not a big deal,” he said. In this metaphor, a tile equals an individual weapon. So like microservices, but for killing people.
- int0x80 8y agoExactly my thoughts :) Also: the F22 datalinks are incompatible and can not easily interoperate with the F35 ones. That problem sound familiar too.
- mxxx 8y ago"More deadlier"...?
- dqpb 8y agoImagine if we spent as much money researching how to combat entropy as we do researching how to induce it.
- insideYourMind 8y agoSo, taco bell programming with coca cola recipes.
- jnurmine 8y agoFiguring out "innovative ways to overwhelm adversaries", "create multiple dilemmas" and "get inside and disrupt its leaders’ decision-making processes" sounds like a re-discovery of maskirovka and reflexive control.