Monday, February 03, 2003

Personally, I think we are making a mistake and not focusing on urban warfare scenarios in Iraq.  If I was Saddam, I would be paying top $$ not for weapons of mass destruction but for urban warfare experts from Chechnya (total different spin from what you get from the big pubs).  Chechen tiger teams (sniper, SMG, and RPG) were able to shut down Russian armoured columns and prevent a coup de main (within this context, it is a rapid siezure of a city by advancing mechanized forces) of Grozny. One thing most people don't realize about the last Gulf War.  At the end of the war, Baghdad was basically intact.  We avoided casualties it by not confronting it (lots of people made assumptions to the contrary).    If Saddam concentrates his forces at the periphery, we win quickly.  If he learned anything from the last Gulf War and Grozny, we will need to fight for urban real-estate.  Our bet:  is Saddam stupid or smart? He may be smart politically, but can that intelligence translate to military smarts? Will he build Chechen-style tiger teams? Of course, I won the bet with my friends that Saddam would survive the last war intact.  They all thought we would take the country (as well we should have). 6:03:51 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

The Economist.  A new type of war in Iraq.  The upshot: This war may not (or should not if the Iraq learned anything from the last war) be fought in the open.  It will likely be fought in urban environments. Second, strong controls on civilian casualties will make it difficult for US soldiers to prosecute the war.  Third, most of our high tech weaponry is useless in urban battlefields. Here is a very interesting article on the lessons learned by the Russians in Grozny.   Some interesting snippets: The psychological impact of high intensity urban combat is so intense that you should maintain a large reserve that will allow you to rotate units in and out of combat. If you do this, you can preserve a unit for a fairly long time. If you don't, once it gets used up, it can't be rebuilt.  According to a survey of over 1300 (Russian) troops, about 72% had some sort of psychological disorder (as a result of the fighting around Grozny). Almost 75% had an exaggerated startle response. About 28% had what was described as neurotic reactions, and almost 10% had acute emotional reactions. Russian wounded and dead were hung upside down in windows of defended Chechen positions. Russians had to shoot at the bodies to engage the Chechens. The Russians were surprised and embarrassed at the degree to which the Chechens exploited the use of cell phones, Motorola radios, improvised TV stations, light video cameras, and the Internet to win the information war.   Chechens weren't afraid of tanks and BMPs. They assigned groups of RPG gunners to fire volleys at the lead and trail vehicles. Once they were destroyed, the others were picked off one-by-one. Russians were not surprised by the ferocity and brutality of the Chechens, but they were surprised by the sophistication of the Chechen use of booby traps and mines. Chechens mined and boobytrapped everything, showing excellent insight into the actions and reactions of the average Russian soldier. Mine and boobytrap awareness was hard to maintain. Let us hope that Saddam and his commanders have not given up pretensions of fighting this war as a conventional army. 4:02:34 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

NYT.  Classic quote from a Sony executive that nearly sums up why I won't ever buy a SONY product again:  "The packaging is as important as the item inside," says Mitsuru Inaba, the vice president in charge of Sony's Creative Center in Tokyo. Wrong! 2:24:01 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

I was thinking the same thing as Dave was when he wrote "Moon Missions."  It was: weren't those guys lucky to have participated in the space program.  Sure, they took a risk (a known risk), and they ended up paying for it with their lives.  However, they accomplished something that so few of us will ever get to do.  Would I take a 2% risk (there is probably a higher risk if the right statistical approach is used) of catastrophic failure to go to space?  In a NY minute.  After listening to the relatives of the astronauts that died on STS-107, one thing stands out: its clear both they and the astronauts knew the risk involved and accepted it as part of doing something that was truly exceptional. A true hero mindset. There is something we can do to help make going to space both safer and more economical:  build a new space transportation system with modern technology.  The shuttle was designed with early 1970's technology.  There is reason to speculate that we have made as much technological and scientific progress in the last 25 years than we had made in all the years before that.  Our inability to find it in our national will to apply that new technology to one of the few great human endeavors continues to astound me. 1:49:00 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Chandler in Organizations. Since the outset, we've intended that Chandler be useable by groups without requiring a server. Sharing calendars among a small... [Mitch Kapor's Weblog]   Excellent approach. 8:48:39 AM    Comment_ Trackback []