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“JADC2, explained Abadie, progresses the discussion from kill chains to kill webs. Instead of having a single, linear pipeline from one sensor to one shooter, the kill web creates a network of pathways that can connect any sensor to the best shooter”
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At second Project Convergence, US Army experiments with joint operations in the Arizona desert c4isrnet.com/battlefield-te
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They claim to have gotten response time down from 20min to 20sec. Without knowing the details of the claim, I kinda believe it. Things were already headed towards this web direction when I was working on this stuff in 2004-06. It’s like a fat protocol instead of thin.
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Back then the kill chain (FFTTEA — find-fix-track-target-engage-assess) was assumed to pass through a centralized tasking step at theater level, like a JSTARS aircraft. This is a bit like Soviet central planning. Sounds like they’ve decentralized this a bit in this “web” concept.
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But if you’ve got enough loitering assets, and a surplus, then statistically the tasking would be faster if you had a kind of bidding system, “anyone want to kill this?” “I can do it” within a broad mission like persistent area denial aka hit anything that moves.
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In effect you’ll have a giant network doing a kind of Hebbian learning in a theater. Tasking patterns already done will likely trigger faster. Skynet/Matrix type stuff. Grim, but things have been headed this way for 30 years now.
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Modern antiwar movement rightly focuses on the troubling rise of this kind of instant precision-killing integrated machine at the disposal of every major military, but it’s important to acknowledge the progress — it’s less terrible than shit like the Dresden firebombing of WW2.
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The fact that we’ve gone from civilian casualties and collateral damage being counted in anonymous aggregate ways (“15,000 people killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed”) to named, micro ways (“Hamid’s wedding party mistakenly tagged as a terrorist cell”) is grim progress.
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Kinda weird if your design is for a system that has a continual surplus of observed supporting fire, though. In the presence of scarcity, the "loitering asset" becomes deadly vulnerable to the sunken cost fallacy. Control structures are I thought designed to mitigate that.
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Yeah it’s a delicate tradeoff. I was at a talk once on why Global Hawk ended up flying so high and having such costly cameras. Runaway cost curve because you fly higher to avoid ground fire but now your cameras are costlier, so now the value at risk is higher. So fly even higher.
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