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.
'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.
_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.
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.
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.
Along those lines, a biography video for Admiral Lee by a naval history enthusiast really manages to capture what an impressive and capable person he was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58lfaMFUQc0
Thanks. I have no complaint, but I want to point out that there is a difference between an enthusiast and a professional. Enthusiasts don't know what they don't know.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Contrary to some sibling posts, datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO; everything is "wider" but not more difficult to understand. For example, undergraduate computer engineering students could and did design pipelined in-order 32 bit processors as part of their studies.
At least IMO superscalar + out of order execution was when things really became too complex to hold comprehension of the entire processor in one's head.
> datapath width isn't really the limiting factor for comprehension IMO
People reckon that changing the head gaskets on an old Rover V8 engine is a complicated and scary job but it's exactly the same as doing it on an old Mini A-series engine, you've just got to do two of them and they're twice as big.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The Imperial Japanese Navy was best in the world in three things on Jan 1st 1942- attacking ships from airplanes, launching night torpedo attacks from cruisers and destroyers, and having the biggest, meanest battleship with by far the biggest guns and the most armor. Now, the Japanese navy picked very wisely- these were clearly the most important things in 1941, which was why they were so effective at fighting.
But, at best, they had parity with the USN in every other category. So, for instance, the USN was much better at receiving air attacks- they were about two years ahead on radar technology (which, given the pace of technological development in 1940 is the difference between your first experimental set and wide-scale operational deployment). They were much better at radios and communication (literally the Zero's radio was so useless that the standard way that surface ships communicated with friendly Zero's on CAP was to fire their main guns into the water, kicking up big spouts of water, summoning the Zeros to attack enemy planes near the ship). They were much much better at medium range AA fire (the USN developed the Mk. 37 Fire Control System, an analog gyrostabilized computer hooked up to the range finder which automatically slewed the gun turrets to the correct spot, adjusting for the wave motion of the ship. By 1944 it was so sophisticated that when an operator tracked the target in the range-finder it could even automatically set the timer on the shell for the correct time of flight for that distance). A lot of these advantages compound: for example, the RN never developed as sophisticated a fire control system as the Mk 37 because the USN had also developed more expensive and better (small-tube high pressure) boilers at about the same time. These more sophisticated boilers allowed USN destroyers to adopt unitized machinery- going boiler-turbine-boiler-turbine, so that one hit that took out two rooms wouldn't knock out power to the whole ship. The RN, with less sophisticated engineering plants (boiler-boiler-turbine-turbine), were much more focused on continuing to fight a ship after power was lost and so didn't try to develop that sort of analog computer system, and instead insisted that their turrets be workable against airplanes using purely manual controls. And this sort of superiority shows up again and again when you look at other areas: submarine warfare and anti-submarine warfare, UNREP, amphibious assault, etc. all of these other categories the USN was somewhere between slightly and extremely superior.
The Japanese, by carefully wielding those three areas of advantage, fought the larger USN to mutual exhaustion over the course of 1942, where both sides lost most of their carriers and other ships. But then by Operation Hailstone, the February 1944 raid on Truk, a totally different USN existed, which had been built during the course of 1942 and 1943, and that navy stomped through the remains of the IJN and has been the dominant naval force afloat for the past 80 years. ("There are three different navies that need to be understood to understand the Pacific War: the USN of Jan 1 1942, the IJN of Jan 1, 1942, and the USN of Jan 1 1944" as a historian once told me.)
And that other navy was built because, as smart and clever as the Japanese were, the US had twice the population and three times the per-capita income. In a war of national wealth like a naval-air war, that difference just couldn't be answered.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 haven'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 does not appear to be a substitute for winning.
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.
> But can we observe the effect of the leadership on a tactical or operational level?
It's apparently (there are other factors) a major contributor to their tactical and operational problems, because centralized command and control vs. distributed initiative around a central plan makes high level commanders single points of failure, and they are experiencing lots of failures, losing more than twice as many generals so far in Ukraine than the USSR lost in a decade in Afghanistan, as well as large numbers of other senior officers.
> Soldiers die, why shouldn't generals?
The operational problem isn't “generals sometimes die”, it's that the military organization is paralyzed without centralized response, which would be a problem even if generals weren't getting killed. But pushing senior commanders forward and in more exposed positions to mitigate that problem is exacerbating, rather than mitigating, it when instead of shortening the command response cycles it lengthens it because the commanders are getting killed.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No. It's an extrapolation of something one of my history teacher taught in school when teaching us about our colonial history. While early imperialism was about enslaving people for labour and obtaining raw resources from the colony, as the industrial revolution happened the goals changed. With the advent of industrialisation the capitalist-imperialists found a way to reduce dependence on human labour and this was considered a necessity to counter the potential economic might of the colonies in Africa and Asia with huge populations. (And this did give some colonies an edge - for example, at one point in history both India and China were economically richer because of the easy availability of cheap labour). To ensure their economic edge, apart from using industrialisation to reduce the need for human labour by finding machines to replace them, they also used the colonies as a market for their industrialised goods. For this, they also had to destroy the local industries of the colonies (deindustrialisation) that had the advantage of surplus and cheap labour, and thus make colonies importers of their manufactured goods. ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britai... ).
After the French revolution, and later the Russian revolution, once freed colonies got influenced by socialism and / or communism, it was common to see some socialist or communist parties organising protests against machines or computers that were "stealing" human jobs to "enrich" the capitalists at the expense of human workers. Thus, there is a political history in past colonies to view mechanisation / industrialisation with suspicion and distrust, and the debate on humans vs machines in these countries leans towards humans being "superior".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
