Future Technology
Cesar Harada @ Mission Future Global Summit, The Future of Technology 2009 Ars Electronica
2009/09/06 Linz : Cesar Harada (http://cesarharada.com) representing Open_Sailing (http://opensailing.net) at Mission Future Global Summit, 11:00-12:00 The Future of Technology
missionfuture.trendpool.com/?p=5943
Photo by Stephanie Werner.
With Hide Ogawa // Creator & Artist, Ars Electronica Futurelab; DENTSU Inc
Constantin Gonzalez-Schmitz // Ambassador Technical Systems, Sun Microsystems
Horst Hörtner (tbc) // Director, Ars Electronica Futurelab
Amanda Parkes // MIT Media Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tangible Media Group
Hiroshi Ishii // MIT Media Lab (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Tangible Media Group
Future Car Technologies
Article by Brenda Williams
The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century
Future Technology – click on the image below for more information.
Future Technology
The Future of War makes a brilliant case that the twenty-first century, even more than the twentieth, will be the American century, and that America’s global dominance will be associated with a revolution in weaponry and warfare as basic as the one that arose with the development of gunpowder five hundred years ago. From the era of flintlocks and cannons to the day of automatic weapons and heavy artillery, the waging of war-while undeniably changing in many aspects-has continued to rely on the t
The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century
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ISLI to speak at the IMechE's Improving Aircraft Engine Health Management Event
Future Technology
Set to take place in Derby on November 23, the event 'Improving Aircraft Engine Health Management: Future Technologies, Today' is scheduled to focus on driving continued improvements in aircraft energy efficiency and reducing flying costs through …
Future Technology question by Isabel Ramirez: Where do you see communication technology in the future?
Just as the question above states…Where do you see communication technology in the future? I think it would be interesting to see a phone that lets you do video while speaking.
Future Technology best answer:
Answer by Amandaa
idekay
Entertaing, thought-provoking, but kind of silly,
“The Future of War” predicts US dominance of warfare throughout the 21st Century, as a result of US advanced technology in general and precision weaponry in particular. Their train of thought has considerable merit, and deserves reading and thoughtful attention. However, the book suffers from the same two major flaws as most books by visionaries without enough practical experience: misunderstanding of specific happenings in the past, and unlikely projections into the far future. Having been involved with US defense for 50 years, as a member of the military, as a designer and developer and advisor on US weaponry, and as an advisor on strategic, operational and tactical issues, I read this book with considerable amusement, although I do take seriously much of what it says. I shall give specifics on two failures to understand the details of the past, and then offer criticism of two of the book’s projections, as examples.
Past episode #1: The 1991 precision strikes against Iraq. There is no doubt that our air strikes and land attacks in the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait were exceedingly effective, and there is no doubt that this effectiveness was largely due to our precision weaponry. However, to do precision strikes, whether with airborne munitions or ground forces, it’s necessary to know what targets to attack, where they are, and what weapons are likely to be effective against a particular target. In the 1991 campaign, this effort was undertaken by the “Jeddi Knights”, largely under the guidance of Col. John Warden. The key role of the “Jeddi Knights” was to establish priorities and mission profiles for which targets to strike when with what munitions, and they did this extraordinarily well. What the Friedmans obviously don’t know is the amount of detailed information that was available to the “Jeddi Knights”, carefully acquired over the 70 years preceding the campaign, first by the British until about 1950, and thereafter by the US military. The armed forces of major powers assume they may have to fight wars on short notice aganst opponents who have been designated shortly before by national authorities, so they invest a great deal in gathering information pertinent to how various campaigns might be conducted. In the case of Iraq, the British did very careful mapping from 1920 until about 1950, producing “ordnance” maps of higher detail and accuracy than exist even for some parts of the United States, and these were invaluable to planners. Then, starting in about 1950, when it began to seem possible that the US might someday have to fight somewhere in the Middle East, the US military carefully gathered information relevant to how a campaign might be fought, and which potential enemy targets should be candidates for destruction. These studies resided in US intelligence and military archives until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and were then used as the basis for planning the campaign.
Two examples of this. First, the destruction of certain bridges was given high priority not to impede vehicular movement, but to sever the communications cables running under the bridges; our planners knew which cables important to Iraqi Command and Control were buried too deeply to destroy easily except where they were routed under bridges, and therefore which bridges to take out to disrupt Iraqi military communications. Second, the swing by US, British and French forces far to the West, the “Hail Mary” gambit, would not have been possible in that harsh terrain unless viable routes for armor and supply vehicles were known, and the Iraqi Army either didn’t know of such routes or didn’t believe we could know of them. There are exactly two feasible routes, and both were used; they can both be determined in complete detail from careful study of the British Ordnance maps prepared in the 1930s, and (although I wasn’t involved in the campaign planning) I had no difficulty in finding and plotting the only two feasible routes before the ground campaign began, from the good maps in my possession. I also understand why it was necessary to bring the two prototype JSTARS systems to the theatre, to detect and allow blocking of any Iraqi strike intended to sever the Tapline Road; this was also evident from the maps.
By contrast, we had no success at all in locating and destroying mobile Scud missile launchers, because they moved around with great frequency. If you don’t know where something is, no precision of your weaponry, and no amount of technical sophistication or military skill, will allow you to destroy it.
Past example #2: The SAFEGUARD BMD system. The Friedmans say, on the basis of assertions by people who may or may not be experts, that SAFEGUARD was deactivated because it wouldn’t work. In fact the situation was exactly the reverse, but one must know the purpose of SAFEGUARD and its mode of operation to understand what actually happened. The mission of SAFEGUARD was to prevent…
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|Smart Thoughts Important to Future of National Security,
The authors begin by noting that there is “a deep chasm between the advent of technology and its full implementation in doctrine and strategy.” In their history of failure they note how conventional wisdom always seems to appreciate the systems that won the past wars, and observes that in the U.S. military there is a long history of transferring power from the political and military leadership to the technical and acquisition managers, all of whom have no real understanding of the current and future needs of the men who will actually fight. They address America’s vulnerability in both U.S. based logistics and in overseas transport means-”Destroying even a portion of American supply vessels could so disrupt the tempo of a logistical build-up as to delay offensive operations indefinitely.” They have a marvelous section on the weaknesses of U.S. data gathering tools, noting for example that satellites provide only a static picture of one very small portion of the battlefield, rather that the wide-area and dynamic “situational awareness” that everyone agrees is necessary. They go on to gore other sacred oxes, including the Navy’s giant ships such as the carrier (and implicitly the new LPH for Marines as well as the ill-conceived arsenal ship) and the largest of the aircraft proposed by the Air Force. They ultimately conclude that the future of war demands manned space stations that are able to integrate total views of the world with control of intercontinental precision systems, combined with a complete restructuring of the ground forces (most of which will be employed at the squad level) and a substantial restructuring of our navel force to provide for many small fast platforms able to swarm into coastal areas.
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|Worth the money,
The Friedmans stir up controversy because they don’t adhere to any one standard weltanschauung (not even that of MIT). That’s OK. Their primary contribution in this book is framing the issue of maritime security with both focus and relevance. They are 100 percent right: in the next half century it will become much harder to defend ships at sea – merchantmen or warships – because of long-range shoot-and-scoot missiles posing a threat from shore, and because of inescapable surveillance from space. This will profoundly alter international security relationships and world trade patterns. This will in turn affect your life directly.
America is the only great naval power in history who has never really recognized that she is one. The Friedmans pull out some nuggets, even if much of their information is well known to those in the military and the defense industry.
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