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War & Peace: Inventions

#1
Zinjanthropos Offline
Dining at a local establishment with friends when subject of barb wire came up. Someone mentioned that barb wire was originally invented for warfare. I said that wasn't the case as it was one of those peacetime inventions the military saw value in. Nice thing about modern technology is that we could solve the argument by using the handy cellphone. The answer is contained in this internet article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/t...-62212258/.

Peacetime inventions have aided warfare but I also realize it works in the other direction too. Not sure if peace is influenced more by inventions than the actual implementation of them during wartime. Then I started thinking about handheld technology and its implications. Our inventiveness.... How essential is it to warfare & our peace?
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#2
C C Offline
(Jun 3, 2018 02:09 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Dining at a local establishment with friends when subject of barb wire came up. Someone mentioned that barb wire was originally invented for warfare. I said that wasn't the case as it was one of those peacetime inventions the military saw value in. Nice thing about modern technology is that we could solve the argument by using the handy cellphone. The answer is contained in this internet article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/t...-62212258/

"Barbed Wire: Invented in the late 19th century..."

"Late" 19th-century sounds a tad tardy. Some years ago I came across a slim book about fencing originally published in either very late 1860s or early 1870s Chicago. It had one chapter which formally introduced the newfangled "barb-wire" to ranchers and farmers and the supposed proper approach to utilizing it. Of course, classic Hollywood also had those many shoot'em-up western movies which probably exaggerated the legendary "range wars" resulting between cattlemen and sod-busters over the effects of barbed wire restricting the once open range to actual property boundaries.

The military field telephone surprisingly came into practice circa the same time.

Quote:Peacetime inventions have aided warfare but I also realize it works in the other direction too. Not sure if peace is influenced more by inventions than the actual implementation of them during wartime. Then I started thinking about handheld technology and its implications. Our inventiveness.... How essential is it to warfare & our peace?


Arguably, such might be slightly instigating war itself in cases like the Congo. Where the mining of rare minerals needed for today's computerized devices was fueling the conflicts and suffering arising there, via the mineral trade partly financing rebel groups.

Social media and dark-net outlets vastly improved the recruiting capacities of rebel and terrorist organizations. As well as enabling and coordinating spontaneous, violent riots and protests on domestic fronts.

The current density of mobile device communication and the satellite-observable battlefield is claimed to alleviate the traditional "fog of war". If that leads to the strategic threat of one armed force having far less uncertainty and better coordination than the another, then it might be proposed that it reduces the desire to initiate hostile engagements or ends them faster when they start. But militarized states eventually acquire access to the technology (armed balance) and the Middle Eastern and impoverished third-world parties just keep on bloodying each other without concern over who has a slight edge in informational awareness, anyway.

A lot of the treatises on C4I are rather dated [C4 = Command, Control, Communications, Computers; I = Intelligence]. A more recent account of network-centric operations (2015) emphasizes the shift of military from relying on contracted custom-built equipment to the much improved COTS offerings. But the coordinating and connecting situational awareness systems themselves are probably still unavoidably tailor-fitted services.

The U.S. Army’s Nett Warrior system uses consumer-grade Android smartphones to arm individual soldiers with enhanced situational awareness and communication capabilities on the battlefield. This use-case falls directly in line with the network-centric warfare doctrine since it facilitates informed decision-making in an arena in which judgments must be made quickly and frequently involve life and death decisions. Operating on radio networks, these devices provide details on friendly as well as enemy troop locations, and allow soldiers to send text communications to one another. Perhaps most importantly, this system serves as a platform on which more applications can be built; increasing the capabilities of soldiers and improving their effectiveness in the field while reducing risks associated with uninformed decision-making. As tactical radio networks evolve and mobile device technology becomes more powerful, soldiers will essentially have access mini computers in the field. Therefore, this device will not only improve communications with command and control and among soldiers, but will also serve as an interface for data garnered from numerous sensors on the battlefield and satellites in the sky.

Militaries face a number of obstacles—budgets, fragmentation, and legacy technologies—that inhibit their use of modern technologies. Nonetheless, these organizations have made great strides in incorporating mobility within the past few years alone. The idea of equipping individual soldiers with consumer-grade mobile devices in the field for communications and situational awareness would have seemed ludicrous to many only a few years ago; yet Nett Warrior now embodies these ideas.

Needless to say, the new genre of cyber-warfare itself made possible by the overall nature of the era, and whatever hacking potential it has for crippling power sources, spying, and disrupting deployments, and hijacking drones, robots, and autonomous vehicles.

~
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