So the Navy has built a working rail gun….

Science got one step closer to science fiction Thursday morning, when the Navy used an electromagnetic railgun to fire a 7-pound slug at seven times the speed of sound.

The record-breaking shot, witnessed by a roomful of VIPs via remote camera at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, also moved the armed forces further down the road to a faster, safer, lighter, cheaper form of firepower.

So what are they going to use if for?

The Navy’s ultimate goal is a ship-mounted weapon capable of firing missiles 200 nautical miles in a six-minute arc into outer space and back to land, guided by GPS.

This dwarfs the range of the Navy’s current workhorse gun, the 5- inch MK 45, which shoots about 13 nautical miles.

The railgun uses electricity to propel its missiles, so they carry no fuel. The damage is caused purely by the kinetic energy of the missiles’ descent, which is projected to reach Mach 5, so they carry no warheads.

This means the missiles are cheaper. They are also smaller and safer, making them easier to store aboard ships and allowing for more variety in a vessel’s design.

For the Marines the gun would support, there are further benefits.

A ship carrying a rail gun would be able to begin bombarding the shore much sooner, far beyond radar range. It also would be able to fire more quickly.

The gun has a projected accuracy of 5 meters, which would minimize risk to Marines on the ground as well as any collateral damage.

I am sure that this gun has some uses as a ground support weapon. But I think that navy is being willfully blind here. A rail gun will only be an incremental improvements on the navy’s ability to blast ground targets. But it could change naval warfare completely. Just how would you defend a carrier from a rail gun?

Cruise missiles you can shoot down. In theory you can also shoot down ballistic missiles. But how are you going to stop an accurate rail gun that can fire from outside of radar range from sinking your carrier?

Five NATO generals (A German, a American, A Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Dutchman) got together and wrote out “Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World.” It made headlines mostly because of its advocacy of the necessity of being willing to launch a nuclear first strike.

But to my mind, the most striking thing about the document it the mismatch between what they fear and their proposed solutions. For example, how is an improved NATO going to deal with the problems posed by European demographic problems?

It seems to me the basic problems they are laying out are twofold. Those trends that will lead to reduced western military power (such as Europe’s demographic issues) and there are those trends that will lead to a more unstable world (such as increased competition for natural resources do to the rise of China and India). Given the scale of both of those trends, their solutions seem inadequate.

Their logic demands an entirely new world order.

From Jane’s…..

Kim Jong-Il’s regime could collapse within six months, bringing chaos to North Korea, observers and intelligence sources in Asia have told Jane’s.

A joint United States report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the US Institute for Peace has also revealed that China has “contingency plans” in the event of North Korea’s implosion. The report, entitled ‘Keeping an Eye on an Unruly Neighbor’, said that China was prepared to “take the initiative” and had a military strategy for securing North Korea’s “loose nukes” should Kim Jong-Il’s rule fail.

Any apocalyptic scenario has to be taken with a grain of salt; in 1997 the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the collapse of North Korea within five years. However, there are reasons for the heightened levels of concern; in particular, the recent actions of Kim Jong-Il and other North Korean officials are being interpreted as signs that the regime is nearing its end.

Tellingly, the ‘Dear Leader’ is in the process of moving financial resources to ensure that his assets are portable should he have to go into exile, according to some sources.

H/T The Belmount Club. I hope it happens. Somtimes chaos is perferble to order.

I doubt that it will happen in the next 6 months. You have to make allowaces for China and South Korea intervening to prop North Korea up. But I think the odds are pretty close to 100% that it will happen in the next 6 years. The condtions in North Kora are so bad that if the regime does not collapse with in that time period, just about every one in the country will be dead by then anyway.

Islamic terrorism directed against US interests went on for decades before they managed to make the US sit up and take notice with the 9/11 attacks. I think a similar thing is going on with the cyber attacks from various national and criminal organizations. Right now they don’t amount to much. But eventually someone is going to pull off something that is going to make everyone sit up and pay attention.

From the Belmont Club….

America has been under foreign cyber attack before. But the Washington Post reports that recent attacks have become serious enough to issue a “rare public warning to the power and utility industry … a CIA analyst this week said cyber attackers have hacked into the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and made demands, in at least one case causing a power outage that affected multiple cities.” Although at least some of the reported intrusions were by “computers belonging to foreign governments or militaries”, the targets this time were, significantly, commercial. “Cyber extortion is a growing threat in the United States, and attackers have radically increased their take from online gambling sites, e-commerce sites and banks, which pay the money to prevent sites from being shut down and to keep the public from knowing their sites have been penetrated, said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute.”

From The Village Voice…..

After 9/11, untold thousands of New Yorkers bought machines that detect traces of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. But a lot of these machines didn’t work right, and when they registered false alarms, the police had to spend millions of dollars chasing bad leads and throwing the public into a state of raw panic.

OK, none of that has actually happened. But Richard Falkenrath, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, knows that it’s just a matter of time. That’s why he and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have asked the City Council to pass a law requiring anyone who wants to own such detectors to get a permit from the police first. And it’s not just devices to detect weaponized anthrax that they want the power to control, but those that detect everything from industrial pollutants to asbestos in shoddy apartments. Want to test for pollution in low-income neighborhoods with high rates of childhood asthma? Gotta ask the cops for permission. Why? So you “will not lead to excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety,” the first draft of the law states.

This rant went nicely with this week’s essay of the week.

Political endorsements are not usually worth much. By design they are vacuous attempts to pretend that this or that candidate truly is the ideal when anyone with half a brain knows that this is not the case. But Spengler’s political endorsement for president of the United States is sufficiently full of dry irony and considered real politic to be worth reading.

Game wardens have reputation for overstepping their authority. Here is one such story that is all too typical of what you will here in any rural area. Here is how the story ended. Sad to say, the ending is not all that typical.

Governments have a poor record when it comes to providing security. But if there is any area where the free market does a worse job then governments it is in the area of providing security. Any company with a profit motive is going to cut security to the lowest level possible. From The Washington Post….

Kerry Beal was taken aback when he discovered last March that many of his fellow security guards at the Peach Bottom nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania were taking regular naps in what they called “the ready room.”

When he spoke to supervisors at his company, Wackenhut Corp., they told Beal to be a team player. When he alerted the regional office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regulators let the matter drop after the plant’s owner, Exelon, said it found no evidence of guards asleep on the job.

So Beal videotaped the sleeping guards. The tape, eventually given to WCBS, a CBS television affiliate in New York City, showed the armed workers snoozing against walls, slumped on tabletops or with eyes closed and heads bobbing.

The fallout of the broadcast is still being felt. Last month, Exelon, the country’s largest provider of nuclear power, fired Wackenhut, which had guarded each of its 10 nuclear plants. The NRC is reviewing its own oversight procedures, having failed to heed Beal’s warning. And Wackenhut says that the entire nuclear industry needs to rethink security if it hopes to meet the tougher standards the NRC has tried to impose since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.