Are Submarines About to Become Obsolete?
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/are-submarines-about-become-obsolete-12253
I got to admit I was skeptical when I first read the title. People have been trying for decades to find a way to easily locate submarines with little to show for it, but the idea as described sounds more plausible. I found this article via a post at Schneier’s blog and the comments (as is quite typical) are very interesting. Several pointed out that simply knowing where something is doesn’t necessarily provide much utility, essentially all of our bombers and missile silos are known to the inch, yet they largely remain ‘safe’ because to take them on is to start a full-scale war. However, as I have attempted to show before, if we are to be involved in a war with a sophisticated adversary, we are not likely to be attacked in any conventional sense, so conventional weapons/systems are likely to be totally useless and represent an incredibly expensive drag on our economy.
Anyway, I thought my reader(s) might find this interesting. Computer hardware is getting so cheap today (they are just about ready to come out with computers with close to 100 cores (assuming quad CPU) likely for under $50K) that doing this sort of analysis just requires the willingness to commit to hiring a few people like me for a year or two…
