TINKERING NETWORKS AND DIY ROCKETS

The history of the dominant technologies of 21st Century warfare won't spend much time on the complex and expensive systems developed by US defense contractors. Instead, the focus will be on the innovations that are derived from open tinkering networks of amateur inventors. The reasons for this include:

• Higher levels novelty production. Diverse and open networks of amateur hackers, tinkerers, and inventors can pursue more paths of discovery and development simultaneously than large, expensive, and linear development efforts. The importance of this will increase as Moore's Law, which measures the level of computing power available to the average user, increasingly shifts to the vertical (remember, this is an exponential curve). See open decision making for more.

• More platform leverage. Open development has access to all the global platform has to offer from services to systems to knowledge. In short, the more open and globally networked you are, the better you can take advantage of this leverage.

• Faster adoption. The delta between development and widespread adoption of innovations that work will increasingly shrink due to widespread sharing. This is in contrast to the closed and tightly controlled process of deployment seen in traditional defense systems acquisition.

DIY ROCKETS

We can see an early example of this trend in weapons development with the IED (improvised explosive device) which has migrated from a tactical device to an operational (operational art is between tactics and strategy) weapon. Another weapon that may follow a similar path of development is the DIY (do it yourself) rocket. Although it is early days, the writing is on the wall. DIY rockets are inexpensive ($500 to $2000 currently). Easy to store and quick to launch (they require less set-up time than IEDs). In terms of effects, they convey the message (despite the current inaccuracy) that no place is safe for civilian supporters of a war effort. It can also be used to destroy economic activity in affected areas. For example, the Israeli town of Sderot, which has suffered an increasing number of DIY Rocket attacks over the last seven years:

About 4000 of the town's 23,500 people have moved out in the past two years, according to municipal figures. Many more say they would leave if they could... Home prices have fallen by 50 per cent... 20-30 per cent of businesses in Sderot and surrounding areas have shut down... Overall sales at the stores that remain open have dropped by nearly 50 per cent...

Given this example, it's clear that DIY Rockets can make wars with global guerrillas disastrous under the requirement (set by the highly competitive global marketplace) that these wars should be fought during peacetime. Further, if they combined with a defensive hedgehog, it forces conventional forces to make relatively ineffectual and harried strikes on fleeting targets, which creates the collateral damage so useful to an insurgency.

We can expect these DIY efforts to get steadily better as new amateur tech (tinkering networks) adds increasing levels of sophistication (from range to accuracy). Here's a great example of low cost design software from RocketSim. Basic avionics. Here's a nice system that adds telemetry and inertial/GPS measurement. As a capper, here's potentially a platform play in open source avionics for rockets. The last step, a control system connected to servo based vanes is all that is needed to enable it to hit specific buildings. That's hard, but well within the capabilities we see emerging in the tinkering space.

NOTE: Of course, I should point out (and was encouraged to do so by quite a few people), that a much simpler solution in the short term is to use small drones to do the same thing (essentially, a V1 solution). Further, this area is much farther along the development path, as you can see on Chris Anderson's DIYDrones site.

Comments

[Charles Cameron (hipbone)]

Heh: ETA arrival or ETA Basque?

[Duncan Kinder]

An historical illustration of open source development would be how a 16th century group of Florentine intellectuals and musicians, the Florentine Camerata set out to reform Renaissance music, thereby leading to the development of opera.

"Unifying them was the belief that music had become corrupt, and by returning to the forms and style of the ancient Greeks, the art of music could be improved, and thereby society could be improved as well"

"Largely concerned with a revival of the Greek dramatic style, it is from their experimentations that the stile recitativo was invented. The style later became primarily linked with the development of opera."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_Camerata

"The Florentine Camerata was a type of half salon/half academy in Florence during the last years of the 16th and first years of the 17th centuries. The group was made up of a mix of musicians and intellectuals, including Vincenzo [Galilei, father of the great astronomer, and renowned singer/composer Giulo Caccini."

"Caccini, an early pioneer of the camerata's new flagship style said of his first visit to one of their meetings:

'I learned more from their learned discussions than I did in more than thirty years of studying counterpoint.' "

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1931907

[Freyr]

So how does a resilient community (RC) defend against a DIY rocket? Will each community have its own low tech Patriot Missile type battery? When a group of people decide that they're going to make their community "resilient," this will require the community to analyze the threats it faces. It won't make sense for a RC in Wyoming to have an anti-DIY rocket battery, but for a Israeli settlement community, then I guess it would.

I'm very much looking forward to reading more about RC's.

[Areth Foster-Webster]

I have started a weapons systems/tinkering blog and project space at http://www.openwarfare.org I would encourage anyone who is interested in such things to come on over and check it out