[HN Gopher] No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do - ...
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No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do - Story of Naval
Data System
Author : bulla
Score : 127 points
Date : 2022-05-10 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ethw.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ethw.org)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The Sum of All Fears. The scene where Russian BACKFIREs attack a
| US Carrier with AS-4 missiles. _That_ is why you have to let the
| computers make many decisions. Humans are just too slow.
| [deleted]
| birdman3131 wrote:
| This feels like a real interesting article that was chopped up
| and mixed. They will mention something interesting for a
| paragraph or two and then go on to something completely
| different. Its difficult to read for me.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of great content in it, but it's very
| disorganized.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There was a lot going on at the same time. Some jumping
| around could not be avoided.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I guess it's a cultural thing - as a nation of immigrants with
| low population, once scientific knowledge grew, slavery started
| to become unpopular and communist / socialist ideas started
| becoming popular with the labour class, Americans increasingly
| turned to technology to try and replace them or make their work
| redundant. Thus, the powers to be in the US have an affinity to
| trusting technology.
|
| Most of Europe and Asia especially does not share this enthusiasm
| and have policies that dictate that humans should be able to
| override the "machine" at any point.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Can you provide any credible sources for this theory?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| If they didn't use the system "they would probably be instantly
| removed from their commands and maybe court martialed" Dumbest
| shit I've read all day. That's not how the Navy works.
|
| A captain is given wide latitude in how to run His ship.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| > A captain is given wide latitude in how to run His ship.
|
| Sure. On the other hand, an admiral is technically allowed to
| micromanage the ships under his command. They seldom do because
| it can lean to needless conflicts, hurt egos, etc. Which tend
| to make the fleet less effective.
|
| On the other hand, this would be a situation where SECNAV would
| be putting pressure on the admiralty to get this system into
| operation.
|
| I don't think back in the day a captain going "I'm not going to
| have my men use these new-fangled anti-aircraft weapons" would
| have gone over very well. Well this is not technically all that
| different.
|
| I do agree that sentence is probably overstating things a fair
| bit. In practice the captains would likely get pressured into
| using it by the admiralty, rather than actually removed. And to
| get court martialed for not using it would realistically
| require ignoring an order to use the system.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Exactly
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| "A captain is given a wide latitude in how to run Their ship."
|
| Though, after a quick google, it seems that the US took until
| April 2022 (a fortnight ago) to get their first female Captain.
| I'm slightly agog it's taken so long.
|
| https://www.forces.net/services/navy/royal-navy-history-firs...
| hereforphone wrote:
| Bad bot
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| I wish... my bots are actually capable of parsing
| information. I, it seems, am not :(
| rsofaer wrote:
| That article is about the UK!
| ranger207 wrote:
| That's the UK Royal Navy. According to Wikipedia[0] (which
| cites a broken link unfortunately) the first female ship
| captain in the US Navy was LT CDR Darlene Iskra in 1990
| commanding the USS _Oppertune_, and CDR Maureen A. Farren was
| the first to command a combatant ship, the USS _Mount Vernon_
| in 1998.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_
| Nav...
| BuildTheRobots wrote:
| Apologies, I'm so used to HN being US centric. Even more
| reason for Their ship, if the UK has been doing it for 30
| years...
| imwillofficial wrote:
| HN is US centric because ycombinator and Silicon Valley
| are in the US.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Nobody asked you to try to correct my statement.
| caycep wrote:
| I'm kind of wondering - at the beginning of the war, the IJN
| seemed to be on the upper hand with technical innovations, at
| least at the tactical level, and training. Why did it not keep
| pace with the tech development vs. the allies? Surely there were
| no shortage of talented individual intellectuals (Jiro Horikoshi,
| etc). Is this primarily a case study in management styles? i.e.
| the IJN had too many of those "No Damned Computer is going to
| tell me what to do" officers that shot down ideas like fighter
| director officers or NTDS systems?
| iooi wrote:
| Tech only gets you so far. Japan had a gigantic oil problem,
| even if they had developed supersonic jets at the end of the
| war they wouldn't have had the fuel to use them. Nice thing
| about kamikazes is that they use half the the fuel, since they
| don't need to return.
| ranger207 wrote:
| I'm not so sure the Japanese had better equipment at the start
| of WWII. The Zero was about the only thing that was
| qualitatively better than American planes, but that was more
| due to them having optimized it perfectly for their doctrine.
| Once Americans developed tactics to counter the Zero, like the
| Thatch Weave, the Zero's relative performance went down
| significantly.
|
| However, Imperial Japan certainly had much more experience than
| the US at the start of the war: they'd been fighting in China
| for years, had carrier operations down to a science, and had
| dominated southeast Asia for even longer. But they ultimately
| failed to adapt as the war went on. In a way, America starting
| as the underdog actually helped long term: while the US kept
| improving equipment, incorporating what doctrine and training
| worked, and refining production processes, the Japanese
| military essentially continued to use what had worked for the
| relatively low intensity war they had been fighting before.
|
| The most famous example is probably that Axis (Japanese and
| German) pilots often had dozens of air to air victories, while
| the US sent their pilots home to train new pilots regularly.
| While the Japanese aces were formidable, the rest of their
| pilots weren't so great, and after so many pilots were lost
| there was nobody to create new good pilots. Over China, where
| the Zero was technically better than anything it went up
| against, it was fine to throw new pilots on missions with
| little experience, since the plane would compensate for
| inexperience. Against the US Navy though, even the most green
| pilot had trained from an experienced pilot and knew all the
| tricks and tactics that would otherwise take several combat
| sorties to discover. In short, the US pilots had lower peaks
| than the Japanese, but the baseline level was much higher.
|
| Another example is the Bofors 40mm antiaircraft gun. Reportedly
| the original Swedish blueprints had so many sections marked
| "machine to fit" that an engineer said that "the Bofors gun had
| been designed so as to eliminate the unemployment problems of
| the Great Depression"[0]. By the end of the war, production
| time of the gun had been cut in half, enabling every ship in
| the fleet to be loaded with ever increasing numbers of guns.
| Meanwhile, the Zero's factory didn't even have an airstrip, and
| it had to be carried disassembled on animal-drawn carriage to
| the nearest airport, up to the end of the war.
|
| TL;DR the Japanese didn't have better equipment at the start of
| the war, but they did have more experience. However, they
| relied on their tried-and-true methods of production and
| training, which were geared towards a lower intensity war
| against an inferior opponent in China. The US knew they started
| from the underdog position and worked from the start to improve
| everything everywhere, and continued to do so up until the end
| of the war.
|
| [0]
| http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_4cm-56_mk12.php#Use_by_...
| jcranmer wrote:
| The Long Lance torpedo was far better than anything the
| Allies had, I believe even by the end of the war. (Certainly
| leagues ahead of the US's Mark 14 torpedo which had the minor
| defect of _not working_ for several independent reasons).
| Japanese rangefinders were also I believe ahead of the
| American ones, and in general. In terms of tactics, Japanese
| night fighting doctrine was again far superior to anything
| the Allies had put together--witness the repeated mauling of
| the American fleets at Guadalcanal for how poorly the US
| fared in this regard in the early part of the war.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| You allude to this, but one of the reasons the Mark 14
| didn't work was that they were clockwork masterpieces that
| were _so_ expensive that the Navy didn 't want to expend
| any of them in testing, and didn't do a single live-fire
| test! (It was the Great Depression, after all. Penny wise,
| pound foolish.)
|
| They proceeded to full-rate wartime production completely
| blind:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Development
| paulmd wrote:
| I'm not any kind of an academic on the subject, but I'd guess a
| combination of lack of resources, and general lack of scale.
|
| Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you assume
| they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or amount
| of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny fraction of
| the size of the US, the US simply could be working on a lot
| more projects at once, and even long-shot ones that might not
| bear fruit, and they were working on the shorter-term ones at
| the same time. And that size factor also translates into much
| poorer availability of the strategic materials that are
| necessary for a lot of advanced research.
|
| After Midway the Japanese military really shifted into field-
| expedient mode, you can see it even in things like the quality
| of their small arms production, they started cutting every
| corner that it was possible to safely cut and then some. At
| that point I imagine that a lot of the advanced research was
| cut hard unless it was really really important (iirc they still
| had, for example, a nuclear program) or seemed likely to bear
| immediate fruit.
|
| The pacific front was really over when Japan didn't get the US
| carrier fleet at Pearl Harbor and it was definitely over after
| Midway, everything after that was just stubbornness. Same as
| the European front - there was really no chance of victory once
| the US shifted off a market-economy to a command-economy
| focused around war production and you had an industrial nation
| 2-3x the size of everyone else sitting 2000 miles away (which,
| realistically, might as well have been on the moon as far as
| Axis force projection) pumping war materiel into the battle.
| The US could build tanks faster than the Germans could blow
| them up, they could re-tool the Russian industry to modern
| standards, and they could build ships faster than the Japanese
| (or German u-boats) could sink them, all at the same time.
|
| In that sense even if they had gotten the pacific fleet, the US
| probably still could have won in the long term, it would just
| have taken years longer. It's a "what if the germans had
| actually taken moscow" counterfactual... it probably still
| wouldn't have changed anything given the biggest factor, which
| is an untouchable foe sitting on the other side of the planet
| pumping out war materiel while you run out of your own
| resources.
|
| But yeah in general the role of the military in Imperial Japan
| is very interesting... the army and the navy both had their own
| armies and navies and air forces, and they basically were in
| competition for the favor of the emperor. It wasn't quite what
| we think of as a modern professional military where everyone is
| at least theoretically "on the same side", the armed forces
| VERY MUCH did not like each other and would go out of their way
| to screw the other over. I could definitely see some disdain
| for eggheads, or refusing to adopt a technology because it came
| from the wrong branch too.
| caycep wrote:
| I'm familiar with the industrial advantages...I'd had assumed
| that intellectual/engineering man hours would be easier to
| come by, but perhaps that was also limited in scale as
| well...or maybe it's a cultural thing that needs to get
| developed in a hypothetical Japanese equivalent of
| MIT/Harvard business school that did not yet exist...
| newsclues wrote:
| Cultural issues would be the aspect other than industrial,
| that gave the Americans a huge advantage. Decentralized
| command and initiative of low level officers and soldiers
| was a big factor.
|
| Can't remember the episode but this has been discussed on
| the Jocko Podcast I think.
| paulmd wrote:
| that is actually still an advantage of the US (or at
| least western armies) today... one of the reasons that
| Russian tank column in Ukraine just sat there for weeks
| is that the russians have a very top-down command
| structure where you don't do ANYTHING unless you're
| ordered. They lost communications, so there they sat. And
| when they actually sent generals up to get things cleaned
| up, the Ukranians picked them off with drones and
| snipers.
|
| The number of generals in the Russian command structure
| is also completely wack by western standards. The US has
| a very very large military and we have about 200 generals
| per service. The Russian army has about 1,500 generals in
| their army. So the "you don't do anything unless the
| general tells you" makes sense in that context - they
| have a lot of generals to match, their command structure
| is just much more top-down.
|
| (tangent, but hopefully interesting!)
| newsclues wrote:
| I respect the Russian style of pushing leaders towards
| the front lines.
|
| Russia doesn't have an NCO rank system so they lack low
| level leadership at the tactical level. So they have more
| high level of leadership and need them closer to combat.
|
| Centralized command with poor communications
| infrastructure in a war zone with advanced electronic
| warfare, gives you good reasons for why the Russian
| military is struggling.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >I respect the Russian style of pushing leaders towards
| the front lines.
|
| Observationally, it hasn't been great for officer
| lifespans.
| newsclues wrote:
| But can we observe the effect of the leadership on a
| tactical or operational level?
|
| Soldiers die, why shouldn't generals?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| On a grand strategy level, it's been a disaster, since
| Russia started a war of conquest (bad) far short of the
| absolute minimum 2:1 manpower advantage required. (very
| bad)
|
| On a theater strategy level, it's been a disaster, as
| generals operated independently in opening many separate
| thrusts, without force concentration, and were defeated
| in detail.
|
| On a doctrine level it's been a disaster, as the Russians
| apparently forgot what combined arms were, with the
| observed loss of hundreds of armored vehicles to
| airstrikes, (because RU air force didn't establish air
| supremacy) accurate artillery, (because RU ranged fires
| hasn't been able to suppress dispersed enemy artillery)
| and ATGMs. (because RU infantry failed to screen armor
| against enemy infantry)
|
| On a tactical level, morale has been zero, as RU
| conscripts abandon equipment, shoot up their vehicles to
| avoid being sent to the front, and run over general
| officers after failed attacks.
|
| So. General staff at the front sounds nice, but is not a
| substitute for winning.
| newsclues wrote:
| You don't have an example where the generals fought from
| the rear and won? So if they weren't there it would be a
| greater disaster.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I'm going to use the phrase "Not a substitute for
| success." from now on when debating the merits of
| pointless paperwork and bureaucracy while disregarding
| the essential technical work required to achieve the
| business goals.
| rurp wrote:
| > (tangent, but hopefully interesting!)
|
| Very interesting! I don't have much to add but wanted to
| drop a note and let you know that your posts in this
| thread have been fascinating to read.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Another reason for the centralized command structure is
| politics: If you have an autocracy (of some kind) and a
| class system, then people are compelled to serve the
| elite. Those people can't be trusted to make decisions;
| in Ukraine, some are deciding to surrender their
| equipment and retreat. If you have a political system
| founded on political equality and self-determination,
| then it turns out people work together much better,
| loyalty is not an issue, and you can trust those people
| to be motivated and independent thinkers.
|
| Amazingly, with all the visible success of the latter
| system, some in the US now push for the former.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Japan simply was not that big a country and even if you
| assume they had a disproportionate amount of intellectuals or
| amount of advancement per individual, they're a tiny tiny
| fraction of the size of the US
|
| I don't have numbers from 1941, but today Japan is the ~11th
| largest population with ~125 million; the US, 3rd, has ~330
| million. That's an important difference, but not at all a
| "tiny fraction".
|
| Also, population is only one input. Many small countries,
| such as England, have had great success with technology.
| dontcare007 wrote:
| Think bell curve distribution and population size. That's a big
| difference, all other things being equal. The US just has
| quantitatively more individuals to the far right of the curve,
| just based on population size. Then cultural differences- US
| highly prizes individualism (or used to, at least). Japan
| prized homogeneity, conformance, and Zen style perfection.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Population is essential, but so are other inputs, including
| education. Many countries with large populations are far
| behind on technology. Also, you need people who are capable
| using technology, especially in novel ways in novel
| situations.
| openasocket wrote:
| I'd love to see a deep dive like this into how the modern Aegis
| system works from a programming and architectural standpoint
| Marthinwurer wrote:
| Anything technical about the actual system is probably
| classified because it's active military hardware, but some
| possible avenues of reading would be the F-35 sensor fusion
| paper, as well as some radar textbooks like Stimson or Skolnik.
| dang wrote:
| Related - one past thread with one comment:
|
| _No Damned Computer Is Going to Tell Me What to Do_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580701 - June 2020 (1
| comment)
| joelberman wrote:
| I was one of the first sailors to go through DS A school at Mare
| Island. Previously the DS went through ET school first. We
| learned the purpose of every gate in the UDT a 15-bit computer
| with 512 words of memory before stepping up to the 642A and 642B
| computers. This was in 1967 when it was still possible to know
| how every bit of hardware and software worked.
| albatross13 wrote:
| Now that is cool- I have to ask, is there a moment in your
| memory where looking back you kind of realized "Wow, I can no
| longer keep track of everything going on with these computers?"
| (in regards to it being possible to know how every bit of
| hardware/software worked).
| segmondy wrote:
| It's still possible to do so. Just get an EE degree, you will
| understand hardware down to the gate level. Take a solid CS
| course and you will understand software down the basic
| levels. Understanding hardware to OS is something that a lot
| of people still know, what is difficult to know these days is
| the layers of software by 3rd parties running on the OS.
| izzydata wrote:
| You can analyze any single part of a modern large piece of
| software, but I think the point is that you can no longer
| remember the entirety of the software or hardware. Even a
| single function is going to get compiled through multiple
| layers of obfuscation until it hits the hardware and at
| that point modern CPUs are also extremely convoluted.
| Nobody is going to know how a function on your OS will
| compute with absolute certainty.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| From what I've read from others a PDP-8 or maybe a PDP-11 is
| about the limit. They got a 12-bit computer with 32 KiW to be
| a time sharing system for 17 users with TSS-8. So they were
| still quite capable.
| bell-cot wrote:
| '67...wow. I'd bet I understand the reason for that kind of
| training. Folks who remembered (for instance) the Second Naval
| Battle of Guadalcanal (14-15 November, 1942) would still be
| serving. And the vast differences in the performances of the
| battleships USS Washington and USS South Dakota in that battle.
| Admiral Lee, aboard the Washington, had an _incredibly_
| detailed understanding of the ship and its systems. He made
| "Sink enemy battleship while taking no damage" look easy. Vs.
| the South Dakota's massive screw-ups in her electrical
| switchboard room - just before the battle got interesting -
| converted her into a helpless, easy target for enemy fire.
| mwint wrote:
| Sounds interesting, do you know of any good places to read
| about this?
| caycep wrote:
| shoot, I forget...but wasn't there a ton of material
| written re the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal? I vaguely
| remember the name Samuel Eliot Morrison. Also, as a kid, I
| remember a Natl Geo style writeup by Robert Ballard since
| he led an expedition to use ROVs to look at wrecks on Iron
| Bottom Sound.
|
| I think Lee got a bit of luck too...since all of the rest
| of his fleet got blown up around him and the Washington was
| able to take advantage of the fact that all the attention
| were on the burning destroyers and the South Dakota, while
| he could take shots at will.
| wcarey wrote:
| Samuel Eliot Morison wrote a definitive history of the
| naval war in the Pacific, so your memory is good! Ian
| Toll's new series is shorter, but also top notch and
| benefits from more access to Japanese sources.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Start at the mouth of the Wikipedia rabbit-hole -
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Battle_of_Guadalcanal#S
| e...
|
| - and beware! - Wikipedia has some _seriously_ deep
| citations on this, if you don 't have plenty of hours to
| kill.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I'd also be interested. Any books by professionals -
| historians, for example?
| rjsw wrote:
| A biography of Admiral Lee [1] was recently published.
|
| [1] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Battleship_Com
| mander....
| jandrese wrote:
| Beyond what was already posted there is a good starting
| overview video.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI24zwFLcuU
| [deleted]
| mandevil wrote:
| _Battleship at War_ by Ivan Musicant is the full story of
| the USS Washington, does a good job at detailing that
| battle from the USS Washington perspective, and also
| discusses the early portions of the development of the
| Combat Information Center (one of the first implementations
| of the manual processes described at the beginning of
| article- greasepaint on plastic, reverse writing, etc.-
| came aboard USS Washington so that Admiral Lee could have
| improved situational awareness inside the tiny armored room
| with basically no windows that was the citadel).
|
| Read it 30 years ago and still remember it vividly today.
| kloch wrote:
| Reminds me of this scene from War Games
| https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=66
| ncmncm wrote:
| This series is outstanding!
|
| Be warned, it is five long chapters, and will take hours to read.
| But it is well worth the time. I learned more computer history
| from this one book than everything I had picked up in decades
| before.
| wazoox wrote:
| I've read the whole book (probably from HN recommendation) and
| it's awesome what they achieved back in the 50s. Networking huge
| computers at sea for C&C and targeting back in the 50s and 60s.
| The writing may not be great, but the whole thing is incredibly
| interesting!
| zikduruqe wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwf5mAlI7Ug
| rocqua wrote:
| This is an amazing read, but damn is it long.
|
| I was happy to reach the end of the page, only to see "for
| chapter 2 click here". Guess I am going home late today.
| axus wrote:
| I'd definitely be interested in buying this as a book for
| reading after work
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You know, if Luke Skywalker hadn't listened to Obi Wan and
| switched off his targeting computer that Death-star would still
| be out there menacing peaceful planets.
|
| Good job the Rebels didn't disable manual over-ride.
| krisoft wrote:
| Yeah, because space based fairy tales provide a proper basis to
| engineer a fighting force.
|
| There are many good reasons why one would want a manual over-
| ride. The imagination of popular script writers is not one of
| them.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I'm glad we're in agreement. If only Ronald Regan has
| listened to his 'Star Wars' advisors. And a shame Boeing's
| 737 MAX software team had parents who took them to see Smokey
| and the Bandit in 1977.
| ncmncm wrote:
| RR (rather, the people writing his script) knew that Star
| Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It only need to
| panic the Soviet military brass enough to to get them to
| crash the Soviet economy.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Star Wars didn't need to actually work, as such. It
| only need to panic the Soviet military brass enough to to
| get them to crash the Soviet economy.
|
| It's a good, and perhaps trivially true theory, insomuch
| as warfare is always bluff. I think by mid-80's the
| writing was already on the wall with respect to Soviet
| over-reach and CIA knew that.
|
| But don't you think the ruskie scientists knew "space
| lasers" were never going to happen? As I understand it,
| the best we ever got were some kinds of chemical MASERs
| (Ammonium liquid phase) that could take out a slow
| missile at a couple of kilometres on a perfect day. Any
| confirmed advances on that?
|
| Ironically enough, in the context of this thread, such
| weapons absolutely could _not_ function without total
| computer control of the ranging and targeting angle.
| DuskStar wrote:
| The Navy is currently deploying 100kW-class solid state
| lasers. It's taken a while, but the dream of laser AA is
| coming!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Oh dear! Why all the Star Wars hate?
|
| Did I wander into a convention of TREKKIES? :)
| gumby wrote:
| I am surprised there was opposition given the by then decades of
| deployment of targeting computers for the canon.
|
| OTOH there was a lot of resistance to radio connection, as many
| captains felt it diminished their autonomy.
|
| What's fascinating about the latter that appears right now is
| that the US military did retain autonomy in the ranks while
| deploying radio communication. By contrast the USSR used it to
| reinforce top-down decision making. We can see the contrast in
| Ukraine today.
| aeortakertj wrote:
| Oh yeah. My dad was an Air Force officer for twenty years. He
| spent most of that time loudly, proudly refusing to learn how to
| use computers. Throughout the 70s he got shipped around to ever-
| smaller facilities with the oldest-available technology. He
| finally got fired in the 80s when there was nowhere left to send
| him to. He still tells the story frequently and doesn't
| understand why no one recognizes what a genius he is.
|
| If you really want to see some shit, look up the story of the
| Permissive Action Link and how the USAF intentionally bypassed
| the system and lied to Congress about it for decades.
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(page generated 2022-05-10 23:00 UTC)