From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Sep 15 2001 - 12:38:07 MDT
Hal commented:
> It's an interesting idea, but bullets are a LOT cheaper than airplanes,
> no matter how great our manufacturing capabilities are. I don't see
> how you're going to keep them from being shot down.
Well, these are "moving" targets, so presumably there isn't
a 1-to-1 bullet-to-kill ratio. It would be interesting to know
what the air speed is that planes would have to be to make shooting by
human snipers highly inneffective. Which of course would lead to robotic
anti-aircraft weapons, leading to all kinds of counter measures.
But it takes time for less technologically sophisticated countries
to develop and deploy these.
In my mind it becomes a question of mass-production and efficiency
scales. We are talking "model" airplanes with video cameras and
some communications chips as being the foot soldiers here. If it
goes to the MEMS scale, we are talking "flys" on the wall. At
some point the bullets *do* become more expensive than what is being
shot at.
If you blanket a society in inexpensive surveillance equipment it simply
becomes pointless at some point to shoot them down. One ought to be able
to calculate what the production capacity that would be needed to be such
that the Afgani population/bin Laden cells would become so preoccupied
with dealing with the mosquitos that their ability to launch terrorist
initiatives would be severely compromised. The interesting thing is
that we know from internet protocols how to "route around" node
failures and certainly have the ability to arrange unit failures
such that they automatically call up replacements. If our mass
delivery capability exceeds their mass removal capability, you can
simply bury the terrorists in the broken wreckage of the surveillance
units they have killed.
If we assume that cruise missles cost $1M, and surveillance planes
could be manufactured for $500, then one gets ~2000 spies per cruise
missle. Assuming we would be willing to spend $1B on locating
bin Laden, then you have ~2 million planes flying over Afganistan.
That is a *lot* of shooting one would have to do to negate the
observational capabilities.
Robert
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