How Dumb Cluster Bombs Are Becoming Heinously Smart is a fascinating post on smart cluster bombs. For example:
Once these 64 pound, 31 inch long submunitions are released, each will deploy a parachute, slowing their forward movement and orientating them vertically in relation to the ground. Then, a rocket motor fires and forces these cylinders into a slight climb, although at a distance it would look like the BLU-108s are hanging in mid-air. This rocket also causes the BLU-108s to spin rapidly.
As the submunition spins while almost hovering in mid-air above the target area, each BLU-108 cylinder will throw four individual sub-submuntions, known as ‘Skeets,’ from its body. Each Skeet is slung in a different direction at a 90 degree vector from the now empty BLU-108 cylinder. As these hockey puck-like Skeets fly through the air while rapidly spinning, a small infrared imager and laser ranging system activates on each one. The infrared seeker rapidly scans the ground below for an enemy vehicle or weapons fixture that it can recognize, while the laser ranger provides a ground contour map.
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the Skeet fires off its 2lb explosively formed penetrator along with a fragmentation ring, sending a molten spear into the target along with a handful of dense shrapnel covering the area around it. The idea is that the penetrator kills the vehicle from top, where even main battle tanks are vulnerable, while the shrapnel kills who is inside (if it is a lightly armored target) and anyone in the targeted vehicle’s immediate vicinity.
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the Sensor Fuzed Weapon’s unique discriminating abilities, and its WCMD delivery system, will most likely morph into even more dynamic submunition capabilities. Ones where taking out individual soldiers via large-insect sized flying explosives, capable of loitering above the target area for long periods of time, could become a reality. Or even a future where small nano-robotic mites are dropped using a WCMD-like dispensers over a convoy of enemy armor, their mission to destroy vehicles’ electronics from the inside out without causing so much as a single explosion, may also become a real capability one day.
In many ways conventional warfare is obsolete because equipment on the ground is so vulnerable. Unless a force can successfully challenge the air superiority of their opponent wars will (and are) be fought using Fourth and Fifth-Generation Warfare.
The most naïve and stupid comment I found on the post is the following:
Why can’t we use this technology to deliver food to hungry people? Smart fruit, laser guided bananas. Something positive, and far cheaper.
Nevermind, answered my own question. There’s no profit in peace or help, only in violence and destruction.
I would try to explain it to them but I don’t think we have enough in common to form a means of communication such that they could understand what I was saying.
That person honestly thinks that making X cheaper to produce *reduces* the profit? Wow.
Also does person think that if “smart fruit” *were* expensive to produce then Texatron would be selling them? Or do the smart fruit have to be “evil” too?
That really is an amazing disconnect and lack of basic understanding. Though it also broadcasts many tennets of the commenters’s beleif system.
This is where asymmetric warfare will continue to become more important. The US cannot be beaten on a battlefield, if you let them fight the large, set piece conventional war that was fought in Europe. Every defeat of the US has come from primitive insurgents who used guerrilla tactics and improvised weapons.
Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan- they all have one big thing in common: The US, being the superpower with all of the high tech toys, won all of the battles, but lost the war.
The reason for this is that our powers that be have forgotten that winning a war is not about winning battles. It is about forcing the enemy to bend to your will by destroying his capability to continue fighting. For political reasons, the US never really has a long term will to continue the fight. If you can absorb the punishment long enough, the US eventually displays its ADHD nature, gets distracted, and finds some other problem to occupy its time.
I personally would like to see a bomb that throws bananas at terrorists at explosive, supersonic speeds. It will be Monty Python come to life.
There are people coming close with pumpkins. Does that count?
“There’s no profit in peace or help, only in violence and destruction.”
Last time I went to a Wal Mart they utterly failed to provide any violence or destruction. They must be doing it wrong. Same goes for the Salvation Army– Last time I gave them a bunch of my stull they failed to punch me in the face, or break anything. All they did was thank me, the idiots. SOMEONE, it seems, has a poor business model.
We have applied technologies to food. What do you think commenters opinion of GMO food is?
And food production. Drought- and wind-resistant hybrid seeds; advanced water purification, transport, storage, and irrigation methods; greater nutritional value per unit; more effective preservation to mitigate surplus/famine cycles. It’s all there.
But that clown is saying that it’s not “profitable enough” for Ethiopia and Somalia to produce more food using their own resources; it must be much better for their citizens to be subservient to warlords and accept international welfare and aid. WTF!?
Somehow I think this writer would have been opposed to planting non-native trees in rows to help conserve farm soil in the 1930’s as “unnatural.”
“Why can’t we use this technology to deliver food to hungry people? ”
Because once the enemy is de-militarized, you can just use trucks.