
Driverless Navy Boats Programmed to Swarm Like Bees (2014) - jjp
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/who-needs-driver-these-navy-boats-are-programmed-swarm-bees-180953005/
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clock_tower
Interesting. So the Navy did pay attention to Millenium Challenge, or at least
to the Iranians paying attention to it...

For those not current on it: Millenium Challenge was a Pentagon wargame played
in 2000, brought to the world's attention by the War Nerd and Malcolm
Gladwell, in which the OPFOR general, playing (approximately) Iran, sank a US
carrier fleet by swarming it with small speedboats armed with anti-shipping
missiles (among other acts that were, similarly, equal parts "brilliant
military innovation" and "indefensible munchkin-ing"). The Iranian Navy took
note of this, and started fielding speedboats armed with anti-shipping
missiles for real; these boats are evidently the US's response to that.

~~~
tsotha
Iranian patrol boats always had anti-shipping missiles. They don't have many
patrol boats, though, and they don't have many missiles. Beyond that, if
you're going to use a missile there's no point in putting it on a boat if your
target is in the Straight of Hormuz. You just launch it from land.

The concern is the Iranians (or whoever) would use speedboats packed with
explosives and ram them into US ships. Speedboats and explosives are cheap, so
this is a pretty easy attack to put together, and if it's a sneak attack you
could get closer by having them pretend to be ordinary civilian traffic.

But the attack is pretty easy to counter, too - the Navy issued .50 cal
machine guns with a mount that clips on the rails. The M-2 has a range of
almost two kilometers and will turn a speedboat into kindling in just a few
seconds.

Beyond that, people (particularly Dolan, who thinks everybody not him is an
idiot) who point to that particular exercise have a fundamental
misunderstanding of the way these things work. You can't get that many people
and ships together doing whatever they want and not have casualties. The Navy
_did_ stop the exercise, and while they're not talking the most likely reason
is the red team wasn't following the rules. The point of these kind of
exercises isn't to develop new and innovative tactics - the point is to make
sure everybody does what they're supposed to do.

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jessaustin
_The software, called Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and
Sensing, or CARACAS..._

They have a sickness, in the military. b^)

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amiramir
Reminds me a little of Doug Lenat's Eurisko [1] fleets for Traveler TCS in
1981: lots of cheap, defenseless, and heavily armed boats.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko)

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archmikhail
This is all fine and dandy, until the software is hacked and the swarming
boats turn on the ship they were protecting. I don't trust the US military
with making such a technology.

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lemoncucumber
Beads?

