The Frigate Navy Redux

For the most part, I would like to be clear, I am downright delighted with what Secretary of Defense Robert (not Bill) Gates is doing. He's got a tough job at a tough time and is really taking a big bull by the horns in some of his efforts to reform the defense acquisitions process and push right-now tools out to the warfighters rather than sexy, slow to mature, high ticket programs that make for nice Popular Science covers. As a further footnote, something that he's doing that I think is absolutely brilliant is taking this agenda to the junior offices of the military. There are a lot more Lieutenants or Captains out there getting ready to lead their platoons or companies patrol somewhere in The Suck than there are queuing up for spots to fly an F-22. And while those smaller voices have a lot less individual pull than the Generals at the top, there are a lot of those smaller voices, and as they rotate through staff or Pentagon assignments, those voices start to wield some weight.

But I digress from a point I have not yet started to make.

This is to be about the Navy, and about naval strategy. One of Gates' favored programs is something called the Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS. Undeniably, it is sexy and dramatic vessel. A fast, agile sort of mini-warship, half Cigarette Boat, half special operations watercraft, half guided missile destroyer. It looks (and here is where I get a little mean) great on the cover of Popular Science. The LCS is a ship for the current war -- a fast and agile vessel designed to fight in close in to enemy shores, coping with "popup" threats, supporting SOF types and Marines, and clearing the way for the regular deep water navy. Peel the skin back on one and it reveals as a remarkable amount of empty space -- designed to be filled with mission kits for anti-sumbarine warfare, minehunting, inland strike, or covert operations.

Conceptually, the LCS is clever. It is designed to offer a game changing degree of modularity, and this modularity allows for a striking range of capabilities to fit in a single hull -- without that hull getting so large that it grows unwieldy and incapable of the in-shore mission. And (perhaps more importantly these days) without having to buy enough gear to equip every hull equally. The math, at this point, seems entirely sound -- the chances of needing to simultaneously land a SEAL team, sweep for mines, and hunt submarines are pretty slim. So build a bunch of ships that can't do all of these things at once and just enough gear to go around, one kit per vessel. You cross-deck the sonar arrays depending on which ship is tasked with sub hunting. Cross-deck the minehunting robots to the needed ships, the special ops kit, etc. all as needed.

The modularity carries with it a drawback -- the fact that these modules need to be changed. I mean, what if you do suddenly need to hunt submarines? Fine, go in to port, swap out the launching ramp and the rubber boats, and the gym and barracks for the SEALS. Load aboard the towed array sonar kit. Fly off the MH-60's that were doing the special ops work and land a couple of SH-60's to drop torpedos and do sonar dips. Let the SEALS go drink some beer and bring on board some mine warfare experts. Lather, rinse, and repeat of the mission changes again.

Great plan, provided you have a friendly port nearby. And, with a bit of a flourish, the drawback to the whole LCS falls in to place. It truly is designed for the current war. By which I mean the Persian Gulf -- a place where it is never too far from a friendly port where it can meet up with a tender for supply and conversion between roles. Which also means, of course, that though capable on paper of some fantastic speeds, the LCS' true speed of deployment is limited by the rate at which logistic support can be brought over to resupply and re-role the vessel when needed.

Now modern navy's have always depended on supply lines -- and since the US Navy perfected underway replenishment during and after World War Two, the need for friendly foreign bases has been much reduced. I fear that the LCS will only take us back a stage, back to the era of the coal fired navy when allied ports were needed every few thousand miles, ready to refill the hungry bunkers of those early, inefficient vessels. Commodore Perry, anyone?

I am as optimistic as the next person that the Obama administration's policies will see a return towards the coalition building that dominated the war fighting of the past few decades -- when the US was working as a member (all be it a dominant one) of a team and could, therefore, pretty reliably count on friendly ports for its efforts. But even so, this reliance has its costs and risks. Does the USS Cole bring back any memories?

Or, to bring up a more timely situation, what about Somalia and the shindiggery going on in the waters of East Africa? More on that later.

Much of naval warfare is about maintaining presence. That is the thing, in this globalized world, that navies can do better than any other branch of the services. A ship can, in a way that no other weapon system can, simply be. It can hang out, outside the twelve mile limit and in international waters, just saying a friendly "hi." The sort of "hi" that can carry Tomahawk missiles (and therefore reach just shy of 1,000 nautical miles inland in the latest version), soak up radio and radar signals and send them back home to the NSA boffins, keep track of hostile or suspect shipping. It is the very epitome of "speak softly and carry a big stick," it is the reason the phrase "gunboat diplomacy" has not been replaced with the phrase "uncrewed air vehicle diplomacy." A warship, or a collection of them, can maintain free passage of the sea lanes that carry the overwhelming majority of the world's commerce...or close them off when blockade and embargo is the order of the day.

The United States Navy currently possess the most capable and versatile floating big sticks in the military world -- the largest fleet of (and the largest) air craft carriers in the world. There are also dozens of CG-47 and DDG-51 class cruisers and destroyers, all with exactly the sort of staying power and strike capability that I'm talking about. Boo-ya. Fly Navy.

But these are big assets -- and many are tied up in the odd sort of self-escorting that is the devil of all deployed military operations. The cruisers are busy escorting the carriers, protecting them, tending to them. All of these vessels are also forward deployed, with their unique and amazing capabilities, around countries like North Korea that have a disturbing to just go ballistic one day (pardon the pun) or fighting the couple of active wars in which we are currently embroiled. Not a lot of these high-ticket ships are left to fill in the little cracks in US foreign policy.

Like Somalia.

There was once a great and noble fleet of Perry class frigates (a different Perry, not the Commodore who opened up Japan), but these little and versatile ships are rapidly disappearing and now less than half of those built remain in US Navy service. Just to give you an idea of the sort of missions that these ships are tasked with, let me relate the history of one particular Perry class frigate, the USS Nicholas, during Gulf War Senior. Now I don't want you to think that I'm disrespecting the contributions of the decks launching strike missions or the cruisers launching Tomahawks. But while these "big guns" stood back and did their deeds from a distance, the Nicholas found herself:

1) recapturing the first piece of Kuwait, an oil platform, and in the process capturing the first Iraqi prisoners of the war.
2) detecting and (in cooperation with a Royal Navy frigate of similar size and their embarked helicopters) sinking about a dozen Iraqi patrol boats.
3) rescuing a downed USAF pilot
4) accidentally being shot at by another USAF pilot (no harm done)
5) destroying several Iraqi laid mines
6) escorting the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin on gunfire missions.

During much of this conflict she was operating 70 miles closer to enemy shores than any other "regular" US Navy vessel. Since then she's kept on with the busy agenda. Read the Wiki page. Oh, and just to brag, ships that share my name have a bit of a history. If you really want a busy naval career, look at the 2nd USS Nicholas (the one I was just writing about was the third).

Now here's where I get to my point -- that list of accomplishments, from Iraq to Bosnia, is a litany you will find on few vessels twice her size. It is an irony of naval history that very often the big ships do not get the big missions.

As the Perrys fade away, proving too expensive to update and too expensive to crew, the LCS' are supposed to be coming online to fill the gap. Well, the Zumwalt is supposed to be as well -- but did anyone catch the price tag there? $3.3 billion. Yes, and perhaps more. That's the reason the big ships don't do exciting things. They cost too much. The Zumwalt is also easily the ugliest warship that anyone has ever contemplated building. Just say "no" to tumblehome, people.

But the little ships -- the new ones, the LCS -- run the risk of simply creating more trouble by requiring more basing, more supply lines, and more reasons to maintain a presence in the first place. It is just a return to the problem of spending so many of your resources protecting and supporting your resources that we you have no resources left to actually do anything.

Do I have a solution, or am I just a crank?

Actually, I have a solution. At one level, this solution is simply "more Perrys." More medium sized vessels, handy enough to operate in the littorals, large enough to play a role in a deep ocean fight and to help with the escort needs of the 1st class navy (carriers, cruisers, amphibious vessels), affordable enough to be built in quantities sufficient to send them where needed, large enough to be self supporting for a reasonable length of mission. Part of what made the Perrys such versatile vessels was that they were just big enough to take on all sorts of odd adjuncts for their interesting missions. During her Gulf War stint, the Nicholas was carrying a Navy SH-60B helicopter, two Army OH-58D helicopters, an add-on infrared sight system (such things are now common), a kluged together minehunting sonar, and a handful of Navy SEALs to do the dirty work that occasionally came along. It had to have been a crowded ship...but it held up.

Currently US shipbuilding is leaving this size range empty. The overly-small LCS hulls are being built, production slowly ramping up to speed. And the fugly Zumwalts are out there, somewhere, presumably striking fear and nightmares into shipyard workers forced to build them.

So for my solution I am going to turn to the French. Yes, the French. Mocked in American military circles for so many reasons (many of which are undeserved, or at least more reasonable when explored in some depth...e.g. why did the French accumulate such a reputation for capitulation and inaction...it might have something to do with a reaction to loosing 1.4 million dead and 4.3 million wounded in World War One while pursuing a strategy of "offensive above all else"...but that is a topic for another blog). But they are a nation of increasingly competent engineering -- even if it is occasionally different in art and concept than that produced by this nation.

The French are facing a similar problem, actually, their own need to maintain a sustained global presence. Ever since the days of de Gaulle, France has styled herself as a "mini superpower," wanting all of the trappings and abilities of the United States and the Soviet Union, all be it in miniature. And so France is one of the few countries of Europe that has always sought to maintain a global capability of power projection. This goal has not always been successful and many struggling deployments exposed weaknesses (much as the Falklands campaign exposed in the English).

As touches mid-size naval combatants (which is the point of this now much diverted blog), France had some interesting and moderately successful experiments with not-quite-warships in the form of the Floreal class, an odd sort of mini-frigate with a disproportionally large helicopter hangar (actually a normal size helicopter hangar on a ship that was by conventional measure "too small" to support it). The resulting package was perfect for low-level flag showing, cooperative work, blockading, etc. But it didn't quite have the chutzpa do really rumble with the real warships and only six were built. The Floreal was half of what I'm looking for -- sustained presence and enforcement, but not enough warfighting.

But facing the obsolescence of several other frigate-sized vessels, and an almost dramatically unsuccessful Franco-Enlish alliance to build an anti-aircraft destroyer, the French got together with the Italians (similar needs, if not quite of the same scale) and produced the FREMM. That stands for something, FREMM, presumably in French but possibly in Italian, that roughly means "European Multi-Mission Frigate." I have found, by the way, that French acronyms are often very nearly (and occasionally exactly) opposite the same acronym in English. So perhaps it is actually "Multi Mission European Frigate" and they kept the R from FRigate in there so it wouldn't be named "femm" which would be too close to "femme" for everyone's comfort. I'm not sure.

The first hull of these new ships to be built for the French is to be the Aquitaine which is a truly beautiful word and much easier to say that "FREMM" and so, even if it is harder to type, I will hereafter call these ships the Aquitaine class.

Now for starters, the Aquitaine is beautiful in a way that very few modern warships are. Boxy, yes, but somewhat less so than many of her peers. The long low foredeck gives a nice pointy look, not quite as Cigarette Boat as the LCS, but perhaps more evocative of the WWII era battleships and cruisers with their long gun covered bows. In a Walter Mitty sort of way, I can picture North (or South) Atlantic (or Pacific) seas dashing back as the bow buries itself in a wave, spray flying aft against the pilothouse windows (and of course, there is Commander Nick, cup of coffee in hand, standing on the heaving deck, scanning the horizon...).

Ahem, back to my morning train ride.

And besides, this is about naval strategy and procurement and not about romanticized places-I'd-rather-be...

At this point I am going to consciously avoid the trap of rattling off a catalog of meaningless statistics about what sorts of missiles are tucked where and how many shells the gun can fire in a minute's time. Generally, these are academic details. In nutshell-land, it would break down like this, going from fore to aft:

Gun for protection against aircraft or, even more critically, small/medium sized boats as are so often used by developing nations and terrorists.

Bank of missiles, some anti-aircraft for self protection and some strike for targeting deep inland.

Bundle of anti ship missiles.

A few odd smaller guns for defense against more of the small-random-boat sort of threat.

LOTS of decoys against missiles, torpedos, etc.

A couple of torpedos to deal with sneaky submarines.

A big hanger and helicopter pad for all the wonderful versatility that helicopters bring to medium-sized warships.

Tucked away is a surprisingly competent sonar system, on par with the best in the world. I say "surprising" because anti-submarine warfare is generally out of fashion among the navies of the West -- and has been so ever since the evaporation of the Soviet threat. That sonar is an important part of why I so like the Aquitaine -- a respectful inclusion of anti-submarine capability. Right now, the US Navy is letting much of its ASW capability go. Granted, the big-bad Soviet submarine force is in decay (with a tendency to catch fire, sink, or sit on the stocks for a decade or two half completed) and their new-building programs have tended to produce more ominous news reports than completed submarines.

But there are other threats out there, and in coastal waters a small submarine, such as those that are proliferating in the developing world, can be a potent force of ambush if well handled. And the proliferation of AIP's means that the sustained submerged endurance that was long the sole province of the nuclear navies (US, UK, France, China, Russia, and occasionally India) has spread. So another highly capable ASW hull is a (sorry Martha) Good Thing.

There is the usual complement of radars and a very capable electronic warfare suite (that IS a lot of antennas you see). I'm not barreling into details because the exact make and model of each piece of hardware is frankly boring. The overall picture, the synergy, is what counts. And here is what that synergy is:

A medium sized, versatile warship. One capable of providing world-class anti-sumbarine efforts from deep ocean escort to hunting diesel boats in the shallows. One capable of protecting itself from air threats and of minimally extending that protection to other vessels. One capable of projecting its sphere of influence and observation beyond the horizon (fancy way of saying "carrying a helicopter"). And, uniquely for its size, one capable of projecting the big-stick-factor several hundred miles inland, for the Scalp Naval will have capabilities not too far removed from the well known Tomahawk cruise missile. So take that persistence I've talked about and notch it up one.

An Americanized Aquitaine would obviously show changes. Swap missiles around (out go ASTERS and Scalp Naval, in go ESSMS and TacTom). Fiddle the radars so you have guidance for the ESSMS'. Whatever. Gain a bit here, loose a bit there. I'm not even going to get involved in the holy war that is medium calibre gun selection. Pick your favorite. The US is gravitating towards Swedish 57mm's, the Aquitaine has an Italian 76mm. Personally, there ain't no replacement for displacement (which is NASCAR for "bigger guns are better").

I'd (and this is a controversial one) actually not replacing the Exocet anti ship missiles with their American counterparts (a weapon called Harpoon). I'm actually only aware of a Harpoon being fired in anger twice, once in the 1980's and once in 1991's original Gulf War. Tac-Tom has a nominal moving target capability and I'd rely on that, saving a few bucks of purchase cost, hours of maintenance, and tons of displacement.

The big helicopter deck is a crucial asset -- the no-hanger DDG-51's taught the US Navy to never again build a large combatant without helicopter capabilities. Particularly in today's small-to-medium size wars, the ability to extend the ship's horizon by anything from a few dozen to a hundred miles provides much of the reach necessary for patrolling and enforcement.

This is, in a very real sense, a return to the role of the Frigate as it was two hundred years ago. A ship capable of holding its own in battle, of fighting amongst and supporting the larger vessels when the conflict reaches "large" size. But a ship optimized for cruising, for endurance at sea and for flexibility in employment. A ship that could support a low level conflict off the coast of a nascent African nation (my Somalia riff again) or anywhere else without requiring controversial or vulnerable ports. A ship capable of maintaining a presence, for purposes of force or policy, of acting when necessary in offense or defense, of protecting interests at sea or on land.

Now I'm not insisting that, right now, the DoD slap down 500-600 million US$ for each of thirty or forty of these ships. I'm a blogger, and therefore have little power to actually insist anything. But here's how things stand -- the LCS was supposed to run about $240 million each and is currently about 100% over budget (and swelling). The Aquitaines are supposed to cost $510 million each. Given the lower technical risk of the less "game changing" design, I'd estimate the chances of cost growth on the FREMM project to be a lot less, say 20%. And the LCS bugs will get ironed out until they cost, say, $350 million each. That would allow for building roughly 32 Aquitaine class vessels for the cost of the planned 55 LCS vessels. 32 vessels with much greater staying power, versatility, adaptability, and utility. And 32 vessels that will not hamstring the navy with increased basing requirements, shorter endurances, and yet more vulnerable and expensive supply lines. Furthermore, with sufficient size, crew, endurance, and capability, the Aquitaine would free up some big DDG-51 and CG-47 vessels, allowing them to operate at somewhat reduced tempos or to focus on global crisis states such as North Korea and its nascent ballistic missile capability.

I don't care how this is implemented. The Aquitaine is pretty and presents exactly the sort of blend that I think a vessel of this class needs (the strategic strike role is genius). But I do know what one of the major hurdles will be -- the submarine force. Facing the same threat of "why do we have them" as other cold war naval assets (reference above on decline of Big Red's submarine forces), the sub guys have pointed out three roles for which they are excellently suited: anti-submarine warfare, strategic strike, and special operations. These are all true -- these are excellent roles for a submarine. But the wonderful nuke boats are expensive to operate, a limited asset numerically, but worst of all their ace card, their stealth, denies them the ability to provide presence. But an Americanized Aquitaine would threaten two (actually all three) of these roles and therefore face opposition from the silent service. Well, no good idea ever went unopposed, and if Gates is willing to face down The Admirals and The Generals over some of the other elements of his agenda, perhaps he can fight this one for me. Besides, there are a lot more naval officers who are going to see surface commands (and therefore have a vested interest in a surface navy) than will ever see an undersea command.

The result of all of this?

Not, perhaps a potential game changer, but a solid and adaptable performer. Something perfectly suited to the crucial need for naval presence in times and places of peace, crisis, and war.

A ship that would enable more projection, and less dependance.

A classic frigate for the 21st century.

Whither the Rifleman?

Ever notice how often I start things with whither? Great word. Technically it is an interrogative meaning "to where" or "to what state" but the fact that it sounds so much like wither gives this wonderful sense of mood and foreboding.

A couple of recent events, globally and personally, got me applying wither to war and to the role of the rifleman, the guy with the gun, the man on the front lines. They got me thinking on this topic not in a "build a world beyond war" sort of sense -- I'm much too practical and cynical to believe that conflict, armed or otherwise, will ever cease between people, peoples, and nations. And I appreciate the value of a strong and solid defense, that much is for sure. Instead my musings were (and still are) in an operational sense -- given the current and projected future political and economic climate in the world, what sort of conflicts are likely and what sort of roles should we expect our military to play in them? And, taking it to the next and (personally) more interesting derivative, how do we organize and equip our military to respond to those challenges?

The first thing that got these musings started was an article in Aviation Week that a USAF Reaper UAV (drone, if you're not down with the aerospace lingo) dropped a bomb on an explosive carrying remote controlled car in Iraq. The first thought, based on the remote controlled car thing, was of the two brothers from the cast of Ocean's Eleven. But then the story percolated and the true point of it hit: one robot attacked another.

Now let's be far and stop preparing for the Rise of the Machines. Both vehicles were remote controlled -- that's a far cry from SkyNet and the Terminators. A crew, probably in Langley Virginia, was controlling the Reaper via a satellite link and another crew, probably standing by the side of the road, was controlling the bombed-up Iraqi SUV. Come to think of it, this has got nothing at all on Battlebots. Well, except for the fact that the one remote control robot thingy was trying to kill people and the other remote control robot thingy was linked via satellite to a station half way around the world and dropped a 500lb laser guided bomb on the first remote control robot thingy.

Never the less, this illustrates one of the projected directions of modern air war. Un-crewed (we don't say "unmanned" any more) air vehicles have the wonderful ability to stay on scene for hours and hours and hours -- days even. A Reaper can loiter for NN hours, a Global Hawk for 40 to 48, and that latter figure after flying a 3,000nm round trip from home field to target area. This kind of sustained presence is invaluable in brining the areal perspective to the kind of fight going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. The traditional fast mover can offer little but responsive firepower -- heading in from a loitering point when called for by guys on the ground and depending on them for direction and guidance. Even maintaining that kind of ability -- a "cab rank" of close air support -- requires a couple of dozen aircraft in the field, tankers, and a rotating (and expensive) presence.

Given the proliferation of MANPADS (MAN Portable Air Defense Systems -- here it is OK to be sexist and assume the shooter is a guy) there is also a vast risk in having a two of four ship of F-16's hanging around in the skies near target-land, even if the airspace is nominally under friendly control. This is particularly true when the airspace is more heavily defended, less nominally under friendly control, or is airspace that isn't supposed to have any of our guys operating over it in the first place.

Right now, the use of UAV's as a surveillance and targeting tool (robot vs. robot or robot vs. human) is confined to the tactical -- to supporting troops on the ground, watching convoy routes, and patrolling cities looking for characteristic acts of bad-guy behavior. The weapons employed have typically been in the "lightweight" category: Hellfires and 500lb bombs and a lot of attention is going to even lighter weight weapons like the very clever Viper Strike to enable close-in drops.

But many analysts (including myself) see a future where persistent uncrewed surveillance and targeting assets mix with stand-of missiles to combine near-real-time covert operation with the sort of hard-hitting punch traditionally associated with manned aircraft and, in particular, strategic assets. Which is talk-around speak for B-52's, B-1B's, and B-2's. Granted, a single B-2 can drop something like 16 2,000lb bombs -- and it'll take a lot of missiles to equal that kind of warload. And I'm not going to get into the economic argument of 1 B-2 bomber vs. 200 Tomahawks or such -- because that sort of argument will go back and forth until the cows come home since the numbers inevitably involve a considerable amount of speculation and how-much-a-human-life and where-do-you-draw-the-line logic (which allows them to be tweaked to say whatever you want them to...).

And that's not the point of this blog entry, either. The point -- or at least a stepping stone -- is that I see air combat increasingly the domain of the uncrewed vehicle. Some roles will remain crewed: big assets (bombers), for example, will long continue to have people in them -- putting someone inside an asset of that power (and expense) creates a warm fuzzy feeling of control and responsibility. But you get the point.

The second thing that got me musing on this particular path was the long-delayed fruition of some Internet research. Sometimes things on that fabulously interconnected collection of information go that way: you start looking for something, fail to find it, give up, and three months later find it purely by accident. Perhaps it got posted while you weren't looking. Perhaps someone else found it and put a link someplace you just happened to be looking. Perhaps you subtly shifted your Google search terms just enough to get the right result this time. Anyway, because of this phenomena, I sometimes go back and start tossing out a few searches for questions I'd been trying to answer but had to give up on.

A couple of weeks ago one of these bore fruit. I've long had a fascination with military organizations -- the structuring of military forces to cope with the expected (and unexpected) trials and tribulations of deployment and combat. It is an optimization puzzle -- given a constrained number of people (and money and other assets), how do you best arrange things to bring effective, robust, and sustainable combat power to bear? Philosophies on these organizations shift about every decade or so as the conflicts underway in the world shift from one sort to another. As the NATO armies began to see their roles changing from that of a Cold War roadblock against the Soviet Union to that of flexible, transportable intervention forces, they had to do some hard re-examination of force structures. As the U.S. Army increasingly found itself fighting a long-lasting counterinsurgency as opposed to a fast-moving war of maneuver, it had to do some equally dramatic re-examination of force structures.

As you can imagine, this is a big time of self-examination for the world's armies. Those not directly involved in a fight somewhere are watching and learning lessons and trying to forecast the next fight and therefore, the next round of organization and equipment. So a lot of armed forces are going through periods of structural change -- and change is always disturbing for the changee but interesting and illuminating for the observer. Different organizational approaches and different concepts of restructuring can reveal a lot about the underlying philosophies of the force in question and the operational history through which it has evolved.

This isn't an examination of different TOE organizations or what they mean about the culture of a nation or a military. Suffice it to say that I was having fun looking some over. The unavoidable realization is the continued presence of infantry. Tanks have grown from odd curiosities through charging Blitzkrieg cavalry to indispensable support weapons. Missiles, machine guns, and mortars have expanded to populate units ever more thoroughly and diversely at the squad, platoon, company, battalion, and brigade levels. But there at the heart of it remains a collection of guys with rifles.

Only the guy-with-rifle can clear a stairwell without blowing up the building. Only the guy-with-rifle can rifle through the papers in a bomb-maker's hide looking for contacts. Only the guy-with-rifle can snap interconnected zip-ties across someone's wrists and send him back across the lines. Only the guy-with-rifle can man a roadblock or walk the streets on a dismounted patrol. Only the guy-with-rifle can use his wits and his skill in their purest form to go, see, and report with an intimacy with which no sensor package can compete. And, in the nicer side of the military, only the man-with-rifle can put down that gun and unload supplies or build schools or clear rubble or help the wounded or any of those humanitarian moments.

Only he possesses that unique flexibility and adaptability of the human.

Any given guy-with-rifle might now carry a personal radio and GPS receiver, a laser rangefinder, night vision gear, and a short range guided missile -- all gear inconceivable as personal equipment even twenty years ago. His rifle might have a laser spot projector for nighttime target marking, a flashlight, a grenade launcher, and a 4-power scope clamped and strapped to it. He may wear protective gear offering protection unheard of to previous generations of soldiers. But all of this goes to underscore not his budding obsolescence at the hands of impending robotic marvels but rather continued -- or even increased -- importance.

All these marvels have served to distribute the fight in ways never before imagined, each rifle team's scope of responsibility filling an ever larger circle of geography and threat. And as the infantryman finds himself lugging ever more equipment to confront ever more diverse threats, he is again forming the heart of the world's armed forces.

Reviewing the new organizational structures -- either in place or in the works -- all show a shift in the expected focus of the fight from the rolling armored warfare of a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact fight or Operation Desert Storm style towards a tighter grinding battle more akin to what was seen in Bosnia or Iraq. The expected degree (and nature) of cooperation between those long time rivals of the ground fight, the tanks and the infantry, is an interesting thread to follow in trying to understand these shifts.

These military organizations that are heading into the second decade of the 21st century each show some degree of revision in the thinking about how these arms should cooperate. You don't have to be a military analyst to see how awkward a tank can be moving down a city street and yet how devastating a single shot from a 120mm main gun is when confronted with a sandbagged machine gun post that could hold a company of infantry off for hours. And so the armies of the world progressively push the armor-infantry cooperation ever further down the chain of command.

The rifle platoon has long been the sacrosanct heart of the United States Marines, and that particular force cross-attaches so vigorously that a platoon commander could well find himself with tanks, armored transport, heavy machine guns, ATGMs, snipers, or mortars seconded to his direct control. Nothing here is changing -- conditioned by the intimate island fighting of the Pacific, the Marines have never lost sight of their vision as a rifleman-centered force. Tank and Amtrak battalions have always expected (and trained) to be carved up and subordinated to other units for employment in battle. This particular willingness to play mix-and-match with forces from widely separated branches of the force has long been a uniquely Marine style of operation. Coming from the mindset of an intervention force, rather than an anti-Warsaw-Pact roadblock, they have long fostered creativity and versatility. And, it almost goes without saying, a foundation based on the small unit of riflemen.

The new "square" organization and increasingly "combined arms" structure of the US Army's Armored Brigades shows a clear migration towards a infantry-armor balance. In the brigade, two identical combined arms battalions each contain two tank companies and two mechanized infantry companies. The US Army has never regularly brought the combined arms of armor and infantry together in a unit as small as a battalion before (excepting cavalry organizations, by the way). The two-by-two structure also displays an expectation of the tank and infantry forces as a fighting team, mutually supporting each other to deal with urban obstacles, enemy fighting vehicles, close-in threats, and the maneuver fight.

The French army's new structure looks positively gothic and incomprehensible -- and trust me, I've spent plenty of time trying to wrap my thoughts around it. In addition to a smorgasbord of tactical options at every level, it showcases a unique in-between regimental structure for the Leclerc tank force. Thin on support and supporting arms at the upper level, this structure seems to push reconnaisance, fire support, and combined arms down to the company level in a way that defies understanding. Until, that is, the armored regiment is viewed alongside the two infantry battalions that join it to make up a French battalion (I told you it was almost incomprehensible!). Then the thin-at-the-top, heavy-at-the-bottom structure makes sense. The tank regiment itself is a skeleton force that exists only for training and administrative purposes (plus the rare open-field engagement, one could suppose). When deployed, it would be expected to disperse under the operational control of the two rifle battalions, taking its decentralized supply and maintenance resources with it.

Even the Germans, long a panzer-centric force of armored mobility, are starting to change. The Heeresstrukturs of old emphasized infantry as a supporting arm, screening for the armored spearheads, holding territory after an advance, playing at ambush in withdrawal. But now, increasingly aware of NATO's role as a stabilizing and intervention force, the Bundeswehr is fattening its rifle platoons from a scarecly usable eighteen dismounted troops to an at least marginally effective twenty four. Tank and rifle companies now follow exactly identical structures, intended at least partially to enable routine cross attachment down to the platoon level. The equipping of a significant percentage of their fabulous Leopard 2 tanks with dozer attachment further leads to an expectation that the armored arm would accompany the infantry as an integrated anti-obstacle force. Furthermore, the latest couple of iterations of German army structure (going back to the 1990's) have shifted from the three-tank platoon in their armored units to the four tank platoon. The former has been found optimum for use in tank-on-tank engagements (particularly in open terrain). The latter, incidentally long used by both the US Army and Marines) is much better in a supporting role or urban fight -- the four tanks split into two pairs and can continue to provide mutual support where a three tank unit would either be overkill and hingly cumbersome or leave one orphan tank off (and highly vulnerable) on its own.

All of this makes one thing clear -- the rifleman is here to stay. The reasons for this emphasis shift are obvious -- increasing expectation of urban fighting, prevalance of counter-insurgency fighting, peacekeeping operations where forces work close to the civilian populations rather than in an open field battle -- are obvious and clear to anyone who watches the news. Tanks are retreating from their role as the unstoppable bohemouth's of the battlefield back to the role of supplying escort, protection, and covering fire for the infantry for which they were originally concieved. Air power is threatening to obsolete itself, metamorphosing (at least partially) from resplendant knights of the air into remote control spotters sitting in air-conditioned control vans thousands of miles from conflict.

And through all of it, the most intimate core of combat remains.

Two quotes. One is a half-remembered paraphrase from (I believe) a former commandant of the US Marines. The other is from Mick Jagger. Go figure.

The most powerful force on the battlefield is a single man with a rifle.

Say a prayer for the common foot soldier.

Falling out of the sky

So what's the deal, guys?

2008's been a bad year for the Air Force. We lost a B-52 and her crew today -- an airplane that was flying for probably 45 years, flew during (though not necessarily in) five or so wars, and had probably outlasted the first men to sit in her cockpit. Now granted, military flying is always dangerous and 45 year old airplanes carry their own dangers. But we are talking about a type with one of the best records in the Air Force -- probably not least because all the bugs had been worked out by now!

But that crash, off the island of Guam, comes just five months after the loss of a B-2 off the same island. The B-2 is almost the opposite of the B-52 -- new (though hardly so new as to have that new bomber smell anymore), high-tech, and built in such small numbers that the individual aircraft are almost flown as combat capable prototypes. The B-2 loss -- much better understood than the more recent accident, of course, since there's been time for investigation -- was due to the flight crew missing a pre-flight step that was necessary to ensure accurate air data was received. Moisture contaminated one of the plane's sensor and caused the fly-by-wire computers to have all sorts of crazy ideas as to what was going on and directly lead to the crash. As perposterous as this might sound, the technical reasons are reasonable and this sort of little foible is hardly unknown on cutting edge airplanes -- particularly ones that are built in such few numbers that it is easier to live with bugs than to fix them. But the problem was the lack of procedure documentation. Crew chiefs passed this lore -- that you switch the deice on before takeoff when the air data system might be contaminated -- on orally, like shamanistic traditions of how to summon spirits or something (That the B-2 is officially named Spirit was not lost on me when I wrote that analogy).

Again -- fine for the rarin' old days of Edwards Air Force Bace and Chuck Yeager and George Welch duking it out for first through the soundbarrier honors. But let's remember that Welch died not too many years later when his F-100 lost control -- and Yeager nearly lost it a few times himeself. This is 2008, not 1949, and there are certain things we don't say anymore (you catch that, Jessie Jackson?) and certain things we don't do anymore. And one of those things is pass on the knowledge necessary to fly a billion dollar airplane -- one of the two dozen most powerful military tools anywhere in the world -- by word of mouth.

Now I don't know what caused the loss of this B-52 and her crew. Were they in distress before the accident? Pushing their luck while preparing for a bit of showboating? Or a victim of sloppy, haphazard support like happened back five months ago? I'll grant you that Guam may be no-one's idea of a sexy duty station. You're not fighting the GWOT but you're not at home with the family in Louisiana either. So you're cranky, sullen, uncommunicative. And cranky, sullen, uncommunicative people don't do their jobs well... But the thought of any sort of endemic cultural problems in the military -- and right now particularly in this part of the military that handles such phenomenally powerful, valuable, and rare assets more -- is deeply unnerving. Just remember the B-52 that few cross country with some live nuclear warheads onboard last year. Alright, no-harm-no-foul works in a lot of situations, but live nukes haven't been wanderingn around the skies since the 1960's without very good and specific reason. All three of these incidents involved the former Strategic Air Command (SAC) -- long the Air Force's flying elite. And if this once so professional portion of the force is struggling so dramatically, my fear is that things in the less "bling" portions will be perportionately worse. Now I might be just plain out of date -- the old SAC days are long gone, and for very good reasons. But that's a lot of espret de corps to loose and loose fast.

So that's my question -- who is minding the store over there? Whoever you are, let me tell you that General Le May wouldn NOT be proud. You'd all have found yourself off flight duty and given a dressing down that even Admiral Rickover would have admired. I know I'm jumping to conclusions, but this isn't about a single crash -- its about something that seems too significantly clustered to be mere coincidence. And non-coincidences demand a search for universal causes.

Oh, and while I'm at it, and just to make sure the civilians don't get off too lightly, what's with the reporting here? Variously, I've had it described that today's B-52 crash occurred while the airplane was performing flyovers of a parade -- unlikely unless parades in Guan are held 25 miles out to sea. Granted, it might have been going to a flyover for one of Guam's national holidays, but the former makes it sound like a bomber augered in to a crowd of flag waving kids or such. And we like to save that particular trick for Russian airshows. The B-52 was also described in another report as a "fighter plane." Now I don't expect every hack reporter to know the subtle details and politics of military aircraft typing, but the difference betwen "fighter" and "bomber" has been intuitive since, oh, say, the Blitz! Flighter: small, puny bombload, mushes crewmembers around in aerobatic maneuvers. Bomber: big, devistates city blocks at a time, flies 34 hour long missions. Got it? "B" -- for bomber, guys.

Werftschlüssel and Rasterschlüssel '44

It is now time for the second and third of my promised favorite ciphers. And, just to let you know, I am now planning on creating an entry for Vic cipher and some of the other very elaborate spy ciphers of the cold war. Operationally Vic and its cousins were not effective for the field -- requiring too much precision, time, and care and training for a field radio operator or cipher clerk who may well be working under fire. The importance of ensuring that ciphers can realistically be used in field conditions sometimes escapes the notice of the experts charged with developing cipher systems. As we will see, this weakness played an important role in undermining one of the ciphers planned for study today. ADFGVX, on the other hand, certainly can be implemented under field conditions.

I feel I proved this when I wrote my last crypo blog entry -- the examples were all typed while riding the bus!

The Werftschlüssel is more generally known by its anglicized name "Dockyard Cipher" or just "Dockyard." It was the standard mid-grade code used by the German navy during WW2, a companion to the famous Enigma machine that was better suited to auxiliary vessels, small units, and others situations where the expensive and valuable Enigmas could not reasonably be issued. Dockyard is best known for the role it played in routine breaking of Enigma ciphers. Always ready to help out their foes with some bad practice, the German navy would often send identical (or at the very largely similar) messages in the two systems. The easier-to-break Dockyard would yield the known-plaintext crib that was necessary for the folks at Bletchley Park to break that day's Enigma settings.

Dockyard was simple to implement -- the plaintext was written out in five columns (apparently there were specially printed tables to help with this process).

Using the plaintext "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" would set up columns like this:

I T W A S
T H E B E
S T O F T
I M E S I
T W A S T
H E W O R
S T O F T
I M E S X

Each vertical pair of letters (or digraph) would be encrypted together according to one of a set of tables published on a monthly or bimonthly basis. IT would be looked up and replaced with its cipher pair, TH with its pair, WE with its, and so on. Each column would be enciphered with using the keypairs from a separate table. These columns were selected from the book of 20 or 30 columns mentioned earlier -- I don't know if the procedure was to use a daily set of columns or for the operator to select five for each message and somehow communicate that in an indicator group.

The idea of using 20 or 30 different digraph substitutions was an interesting one -- presumably intending to reduce the amount of traffic that was generated for each. The seriation step also helped break up common digraphs (e.g. the "ch" that is as common in German as the "th" is in English). Digraphic substitution is a nice way of diffusing the statistical predictability of language -- no single digraph has the same obvious statistical dominance as "e" for example. There still are trends, and with a large enough sample, they are noticeable.

The seriation of Dockyard works to further diffuse the common elements of language, but the resulting digraphs still do not have a random distribution, much as we might think that they would. The statistical frequency of individual letters and certain patterns of letter use still result in digraphs appearing more often than others. The EE pairing is more common than any other, for example, because there are simply more e's going around to possibly end up stacked on top of each other.

As a result, the Naval Section at Bletchley could slowly compile up a key for each of the tables in a set. Using the statistical procedures discussed together with some guesses about message content (all the tools of classical cryptanalysis), the tables would be recovered. Once the tables were recovered, identifying which five were in use on a given message was a relatively simple matter of frequency counts. From all of this, the Dockyard cipher was probably the greatest source of intercept information to the Allies about German naval movements -- particularly considering its role as a source of Enigma plaintext cribs. From 1941 to 1945, about 33,000 dockyard messages were intercepted. 90% of them were read the same day they were intercepted...

The second cipher of the day, Rasterschlüssel '44, was not quite as thoroughly broken by the Allies, but more because of its late arrival than because of its security. An unfortunate example of the distance between field operators and back-room-thinkers, RS44 was issued with ambiguous instructions and a complicated operational procedure that resulted in frequent resending of messages, slow operation, and frustrated cipher clerks. And since frustrated cipher clerks have been known to violate procedure and just send the damn thing in the clear once in a while, RS44 ended up as its own worst enemy.

Though I titled this thread of blogging "My Favorite Cipher," and I am a big fan of ADFGVX and find something nifty about the simple tables of Dockyard, I don't particularly like the Rasterschlüssel. It is a transposition cipher alone -- something which a certain truthiest superstition tells me can't possibly be as secure as a mix of transposition and substitution (remember -- diffusion and confusion) as used by ADFGVX. How can it be, I just feel, that a cipher that preserves all the right letters can have the security of one that changes them? Just move then around -- like a big word scramble!

I know, it is wrong, but I can't help but feel that way...

RS 44 was a fairly complex table based transposition. The grid above was specially issued -- one per day -- to all units using the cipher. The clerk would randomly select a square to start in and begin filling in the message in the open spaces, working from left to right, wrapping down columns and back up to the beginning if the message ran off the bottom of the printed grid. The grid was printed on cardboard and was placed behind a thin "flimsy" printed with a grid that let the light and dark squares show through. That way the clerk knew what spaces could be filled in and what couldn't. Once the message was filled in, taking off began.

Using a complex and troublesome formula, the cipher clerk would then determine the column to begin taking the message text off. This process would proceed from top to bottom, moving from left to right as each column was completed. Once the leftmost column was transcribed off, the process would start at the rightmost and work through until the message was done. Indicator groups would indicate both the starting position of the message and the column from which the taking off to the final cipher text began.

That's it. This has been described as the ultimate hand field cipher -- but I can't help but feel a certain "that's it?" at the end of the procedure. But yeah, that's it. I suspect that we see another case of the "possibly combinations" fallacy. Based on the formula that created the daily grid tables, there was an absurdly large number of possible combinations. More, in fact, than rotor settings on the Enigma machine.

And again, German cipher designers let themselves be overwhelmed by the mathematical possibilities of a system and ignore implementation details.

I look back on these two, on Dockyard and RS'44, and can't help that they lack the certain elegance of ADFGVX. RS'44 in particular relies on the tired old misconception that a larger number of possibilities equates with increased security. Dockyard has the cleverness to use multiple keys within each message -- effectively decreasing the traffic in each substitution key. Unfortunately, it still generates a significant amount of traffic in each table. The designers of Dockyard probably thought that each combination of tables would effectively constitute an entirely new key (and picking 5 of 20 tables yields 1,860,480 possibly combinations, 5 of 30 yields 17,100,720).

Each table in dockyard was composed along the lines of some fairly strict rules. Any given letter pair and its cipher were reciprocal -- if EH enciphered as DG then DG enciphered as EH. No letter from the plaintext pair could appear in the ciphertexext pair. For the plaintext digraph ML the cipher digraph could contain neither the letter M nor the letter L in either position. This dramatically limited the possibilities that needed to be tried and gave the cryptanalyst a few extra clues. It simplified the job of creating the tables and sped things up for the cipher clerk and helped to introduce some self-checking features into the cipher. Nice idea -- but at a cost in security. A cost that was probably accepted in light of the massive number of tables available (or rather, of the massive number of combinations of tables that might be used in any given day's key).

Since the cryptanalysts at Bletchley learned to look at each column as essentially a separate entity, they were able to aggregate samples large enough to bring statistical tools to bear. With the result, as mentioned, that Dockyard was despite good intentions one of the most well read of German wartime ciphers.

What do I collect?

My former boss, a man about whom tact and professionalism demand that I say no more, used to ask me "what do you collect?" The fact that has asked me this question at least three times during our interview process and my short ten month's tenure as his employee should have told me something about how much interest he actually had in his staff's well being, but that's water under the bridge (or whisky down the throat, if you want a more accurate image of that time).
But his question was an interesting one because, in many ways and for all his flaws, he was an astute observer of human nature and had a disturbingly accurate arsenal of stereotypes at his disposal. His question was the product of an assessment that people with my personality inevitable collect something. Typically something obscure or marginalized. So what is it?

Action figures? No, but it fits the type, doesn't it?

Slide rules?  Obscurely enough, I do own to, one a glorious Faber 2/83N arguably the finest slide rule ever produced, but I can't see myself investing in dozens, seeking out obscure models for Deitgzen, Hemi, Pickett, Aristo, or K&E.

Calculators? I thought about that one -- and I do want to get an HP-25 or an HP-67 and I'd gladly give a nut to have an HP-65 in my collection. Space (and budget) permitting, I'd love to have one of the RPN members of the HP-98XX family and an HP-9100 would be amazing... But I don't actually do these things.

Nor have I built my cryptology collection beyond the one NEMA machine. No Enigma, no little Hagelin wheel machines, just the one. There simply isn't enough on the market that is affordable to make it possible.

Books? Sure, I have hundreds, but its not really collecting. There is no purposeful seeking out of missing volumes, pride in obtaining a rare edition, etc. I love and treasure them, but as tools.
Vintage airplanes in a hangar somewhere, smelling vaguely of fuel and paint? No. I wish...but lacking Paul Allen's budget I need to keep my collecting under control. But what'd I'd give to have a half dozen classic aircraft sitting somewhere. I'd spend all my weekends lost in complex fantasies, sitting in the cockpits with a sandwich and a beer, playing with all the knobs and levers.
But wait a second (and my inductive writing style is finally reaching its almost inevitable conclusion), I can do that, only without the cockpit to sit in! I have it, the thing I collect: vintage aircraft manuals. I do carefully seek out missing spots, I genuinely feel a thrill when I get an obscure or rare item to add. I've done it for years, but with the internet, over the past three years the collection has grown from a half dozen to hundreds. Don't ask me how many.
I've got pilot's manuals or other documentation on everything from the obscure (BTD-1 Destroyer) to the pervasive (Boeing 737). From the doomsday (B-52) to the innocent (Cessna Mustang). From the complex (C-17) to the simple (Staggerwing). From the secret (F-117) to the well known (P-51). From the high performance (SR-71) to the mundane (Twin Otter).
They are fascinating for student of technology, tracing the evolution of one particular segment from almost its dawn (I don't think that Orville and Wilbur wrote a lot of documentation...) to its very cutting edge. There is plenty of potential for Walter-Mitty moments of mental digression. There is a chance to really get under the skin of some historic airplanes and, by extension, of those who designed and flew them.

Some of my favorites are from the late 1940's on through the middle 1960's. This era gave us amazing advancement in aviation -- the stimulus of the war pushed the envelope and then then period of consolidation when that amazing surge gathered itself up and pushed the electromechanical, slide rule, vacuum tube, and aluminum stage of engineering artistry to its conclusion.

It was an era when the ballpark sums of the slide rule demanded filtering through the mind of an inspired engineer. It was a time when a single gifted brain (Kelly Johnson, Edgar Schmued, Ed Heineman, Frank Whittle, Werner Von Braun, and a half dozen other titans) could shape a design from intuition and lead a project by sheer force of will. The resulting products were often bedeviled by vices and idiosyncrasies but pushed the state of the art at a pace unequaled since. And they rewarded the deft hands of a skillful pilot (and punished the ham fists of a clumsy one). It was an era when pilots were real pilots, engineers were real engineers (and let's not forget the small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri -- they were real too!).
For a variety of reasons, some of my favorites are not the actual flight manuals, the detailed collections of technical specifics and procedures, but the training manuals provided to introduce pilots to their new mounts during the 2nd World War. Thin on technical details, they never the less provide a wonderful zeitgeist. A smilingly benevolent picture of General Arnold on the inside cover, cheerful anecdotes of field successes, little humorous drawings of wayward Ensigns of Lieutenants who used too much throttle on the runup and the comic fate they suffered, and the pervasive use of all those wartime epithets of "Jap" or "Jerry" or "Hun" or whatever. The writing style is half legitimate indoctrination and half propaganda. Always positive on the friendly side, always optimistic. As I once put it in an email to a fellow collector:I love those training manuals from the 1940's and early 1950's, with their snappy and cheerful style. Phrases like "Your Corsair is a snappy flying bird!" instead of "Your Corsair will have nearly uncontrollable roll characteristics in the landing pattern!" And, if it is an AAF manual, the smiling face of Hap Arnold on the inside cover...kind of fatherly, experienced and stern yet supportive of young 2nd Lieutenants...

The drawings, moving in to the 1950's just got better for a time. The other picture above is from the pilot's manual to an F-89, an obscure 1950's all-weather interceptor. What more could I say? So overtly sexist as to be comical, aimed at the entirely male audience of military aviation. But again, there is a potentially telling look at the era and the community here.

Its not just the irony of that important information stacked buxom brunette. The technology of the late 1950's is also something I enjoy reading about. It was "chunky" in a way that made it easy to understand. You could truly look at a diagram of an airplane's

 flight control system (and the comparatively rare service manuals are the place to go for this) and understand what things did and how they worked.

Eventually things get less interesting. The Navy, in particular, starts to carve the information up into classified and non-classified sections. The aircraft, military and commercial, get sufficiently complex that the reading gets denser and denser. Still fascinating, from the airplane lover standpoint, but no longer the full retro experience on top. Thing hit their nadir, probably, in the Navy's current manual for the F/A-18, a volume so dryly procedural and simultaneously obtuse and neurotically obsessed with minutiae as to read like Tolkien's Silmarillion, only without the elves. Boeing's current commercial offerings are no better -- the 767's and 777's reading more like giant VCR manuals than the sort of in-depth technical examination that I enjoy -- and I tend to believe a qualified pilot needs. It is as if the F/A-18 manual substitutes prepared drills for every contingency for actual understanding and the 767 and 777 manuals are afraid of spilling any corporate secrets.

Part of this is increased complexity. The current generation of aircraft are incredibly complex but largely self monitoring. But, that said, Airbus actually produces significantly more interesting training documentation than Boeing does.

Why does this keep happening?

Another medical helicopter down. Two of them. And six (or seven, according to some reports) dead.

I actually feel fairly close to this issue -- a day doesn't go by that I don't hear one of the Augusta 109's of Seattle's Life Flight go buzzing by. I can even identify them by sound from the other helicopter traffic we get here in Edmonds: Snohomish County's UH-1 SAR bird, the huge Army MH-47's, the smaller Coast Guard HH-60's, and even a very occasional Blackhawk or variant. The Life Flite guys hug the shore, I think, staying just off over the water to keep their noise footprint low. Very courteous!

But not quite three years ago this rash of EMS crashes hit home as one of those daily visitors went down just a few miles from my home.

So every time I hear about another well intentioned EMS crew paying the price (I don't mean to sound too rhapsodic and lauditory here), I feel it more strongly than with most other crashes. I don't usually launch into the "Something Must Be Done!" sort of rant, demanding congressional investigations, senate hearings, increased regulation and stringent limitation. But it is only a matter of time before one of these things goes down really ugly. Into a busload of nuns and orphans, into the roof of a hospital's NICU, or something similarly ghastly. So now I've got to say it: Something Must Be Done!

And what is that?

Well, before you act, you think. And before you think, you learn.

Why are these crashes happening?

First, EMS aviation is up. Way up. I don't have the numbers handy, but Google does, I promise. And I'll lead you to check it out if you don't believe me. But the rate of accidents-per-flying-hour is also way up. So this isn't simply a product of statistics.

It could be a product of training -- just look at those wacky airport screeners. If you suddenly up the demand for qualified members of a highly skilled (and more than mildly heroic) profession, you run the risk of scraping the bottom of the barrel. Hell, we saw that at Amazon back-in-the-day when pretty much anyone with a heartbeat was qualified to interview as a customer service rep. And answering phones for Earth's Biggest Bookstore doesn't hold a candle to flying the sick and injured to lifesaving surgeries and treatments. So I could buy this idea -- all the good pilots got used up. But we're still not talking about a huge pool. We're talking about a few hundred more pilots. And I can only assume that the military is generating a pretty good pool of qualified pilots. Retention is a struggle right now for all of the land services -- so that means that qualified aviators are probably pushing through faster than ever. And sure, a particular subgroup like helicopter pilots may not be suffering from the same problem as the services at large, but I still can't imagine that the pool's been scraped that far down.

Could it be overuse? Fleet maintenance? Helicopters without adequate spare parts or maintenance? Maintenance personnel without adequate training?

Ultimately, I fear the problem is cultural. EMS crews are the lightweight (hold on, don't flame yet) versions of the military CSAR units and the Coast Guard SAR pilots and rescue swimmers. They do, after all, fly helicopters to pick up those in trouble and carry them to safety. They may not do so either under fire and deep in enemy territory or hundreds of miles out to sea in the middle of a hundred year storm. Hence the "lightweight" comment -- let's be honest and admit that picking up a few tourists strapped to a backboard from an LZ prepped by firefighters on the ground is different from winching a fisherman from the deck of a sinking crabber in the middle of the night.

It just IS. Do disrespect. No criticism. Yet.

But do we have the recipe for a Napoleon Complex here? Anyone with a heartbeat must get a little thrill at the thoughts of oceanic or combat SAR missions. There is the stuff of true, deep heroism. Flying helicopters to and from hospitals is still cool -- I'd do it. But is there a danger of setting up the crews of the EMS birds to try to mimic their slightly higher profile cousins? To take risks, in other words, that they are neither trained or equipped for? To venture forth in weather that should keep them grounded. To rush to fly missions without proper briefing and planning?

To try, in short, to rise to a perceived ideal of that which makes their brethren in the uniformed services such an elite.

And who could blame them? Lives are on the line! And if you didn't see value in saving lives, would you not be doing something else? Covering traffic, leading tours, shuttling oil rig workers, filming movies? I'd push the envelope, you'd push the envelope, anyone would. Imagine making the call, as the pilots of an EMS helicopter are tasked to.

You've got two people injured in a car accident 75 miles away. They'll probably die if transported by ambulance. But you can get out and back, with your highly qualified flight nurses, fast enough to save their lives. Now comes the agonizing part: weather is sitting just at (or just below) minimums. Do you go or do you stay? What if it clears on the way? What if you don't go and then get blamed and labeled a coward? So you tell the ground crew to prep the helicopter, the nurses to get loaded, and you start reviewing the mission and planning your flight. Five or ten minutes later, everyone is ready to go, but the weather hasn't gotten better. Do you go, or do you scrub? Of course you go!

And who could blame you.

But how do we, if this is the source of the problem, or part of it even, stop those well intentioned crews from taking undue risks, whether it be in the name of honest heroism or a desire to fly with the big boys?

My favorite cipher

There is something gloriously manual about a hand cipher, a cipher using pencil, paper, and possibly a small collection of keytables or such. There is intimate connection with the message, and a comprehensible dynamic that is impossible for the oily "kerchunk" of a rotor machine or the silent algorithmic intensity of yet more modern techniques.

So, in my not-remotely-technical way, I propose a quick review of three interesting wartime hand ciphers. One from the First World War, two from the Second, all three German. I'll take a look at these three from the standpoint of a cipher clerk enciphering a message in the field and then, with a perspective as artistic as it is mathematical, at the inner workings that render reversible incomprehensibility. It'll take time, so bear with me. First one, then the rest later on. If I get into it, there might even be more than these three..

ADFGVX -- and the heroic efforts that lead to its breaking -- is at least conceptually familiar to students of 1918. In the final year of that static conflict, the French cryptographic victory helped the allies withstand the final German push to Paris (it should be noted that there are those who question this widely held view of the history).

The German designers of ADFGVX knew well that a successful cipher needed to be simple to use. This lesson, and the corollary that a complex cipher may, through laziness or simple haste, may prove self-compromising in the field, was one that would be lost between the wars, much to the relief of allied cryptanalysts who knew they could always count on sloppy German practice.

But ADFGVX itself embodied some very interesting ideas. For starters, it enciphered messages into six easily transmitted letters: A, D, F, G, V, and X. In Morse, these letters are simple to send and difficult to confuse on reception. Clear transmission (and therefore minimum repetition) improves security.

Let us suppose you have the message "It was the best of times" to encrypt. The first ingredient is a 6x6 substitution square (note that original versions of this used the letters ADFGX in a 5x5 grid and therefore could not directly encipher numbers). In the field, this would have been provided by headquarters and, probably, changed on a daily basis.

  A D F G V X
A Q 1 W E R 2
D 3 T Y U 4 I
F O P A 5 S 6
G D F 7 G 8 H
V J 9 K 0 L Z
X X C V B N M

(Note that I generated this square by typing on that irritating anachronism, the QWERTY keyboard. I don't pretend to cryptographic validity here.)

We look up each letter in the plain text in the grid and then write down the two ciphertext letters that define its coordinates (row first, column second, so "R" would be represented as AV).

Our message encrypts as:

I T W A S T H E B E S T O F T I M E S
DXDDAFFFFVDDGXAGXGAGFVDDFADDDXXXAGFV

Note that the length is now doubled -- but these are the six easiest letters to transmit (radio was effectively all Morse back then!).

We're not done, because this is just a simple monophonic substitution. That is, every letter in the plaintext corresponds to a single symbol in the ciphertext (even if that symbol consists of two letters). And a monophonic substitution is about as easy to solve as it gets.

Now we write our columns out according to a code word that we have been given. This might also change from day to day, or depending on recipient, in an effort to reduce the amount of traffic a given key setup would produce. Our code word is EDMONDS -- but we omit the second instance of any repeated letter for EDMONS. Write the intermediate encipherment out underneath this word, lining each letter up underneath the ones above it.

EDMONS
DXDDAF
FFFVDD
GXAGXG
AGFVDD
FADDDX
XXAGFV

I got lucky and my message lined up directly underneath the key word, making things look tidy and in fact more cryptographically secure.  The Germans left any blank columns unfilled but, as the tale will show, would have been better off adding random nulls at the end to fill all columns fully and equally.

Now take the letters off vertically by columns, in order of the alphabetical position of the letters in the key word. In this case, take of the D column first, then the E column, the M column, the N, the O, and finally the S. Per traditionally proper technique, we will do so in five letter groups.

XFXGA XDFGA FXDFA FDAAD XDDFD VGVDG FDGDX V

This message would then be transmitted.

Analytically, ADFGVX embodies degrees of both transposition (portions of the message are moved around -- think word scramble) and substitution (think, well, substitution). Interestingly, however, it relies on a third component for its security kicker: fractionation. This results from the step where each plaintext letter's two-part symbol is written down horizontally and then taken off vertically. Each plain text symbol is, therefor, divided (or fractionated) into two parts which are located in different portions of the ciphertext. Modern cryptography places quite a bit of emphasis on this idea -- confusion and diffusion being two sought after goals.

At first blush ADFGVX might seem extremely secure. But the reality is that there are cracks a cryptanalyst can pursue. Realize that after our first step -- the plaintext's initial transformation by substitution into the double-lenth intermediate message of digraphic symbols -- all we had was a simple monophonic substitution. Funny looking, yes, but ultimately almost entirely devoid of security. Given any message with a normal distribution of characters and statistics will quickly yield the digraph pairs that correspond to each plaintext letter. Our sample message is statistically skewed, but AG's representation of E would quickly stand out in any normal frequency count. From there, the rest follows and the message is wide open.

A cagy cryptanalyst can, then try to break back from the fractionation component of the second step. Trialing different lengths and sequences of the columnar transposition guided by the keyword in the cipher's second step is a brute force possibility. This would involve taking an intercepted message "backward" to the intermediate stage by various different keywords, then analyzing the resultant intermediate text for normal statistical distributions of digraph pairs.

Hold on, in case I lost you, think of it this way...and remember that once we reach the intermediate stage of the in-order double-lenght message, the break is effectively trivial.

Our wily cryptanalyst starts by assuming the message's keyword was four letters long. It really doesn't matter what those letters were because a four letter word can only yield 24 possible ways of taking off the columns to produce the final cipher:

1234, 1243, 1324, 1243, 1423, 1432, 2134, 2143, 2314, 2341, 2413, 2431, 3124, 3142, 3214, 3241, 3412, 3421, 4123, 4132, 4213, 4231, 4312, 4321.

The cryptanalyst now tests the intercept by transcribing the message backwards into each of these columnar orders. This, incidentally is exactly what the friendly cipherclerk on the receiving end would do, but he would know they keyword and therefore the order in which to fill in the received code. Each of these 24 possibilities is then take off (going sideways this time) to produce a candidate intermediate text. Do a statistical count on this intermediate text and see if it looks valid. If close, try to decrypt. If gibberish, try again.

Sounds easy but time consuming -- but when nations are on the line resources are usually available, and nothing so far can't be taught to any moderately apt college student. But now let's say your foe used a five letter keyword for the 2nd step. That would have 120 combinations you' have to examine. Six letters? 720. Eight letters? 5,760. Nine? 51,840. You get the idea, right? And we forgot to account for the paltry six possibilities offered by a three character keyword. The Germans, at least in the first intercepts to be broken, used 20 columns...

In the end, the French depended upon some even more clever analysis. Cryptographic genius George Painvin spent months (and lost 20 pounds) breaking this cipher just ahead of the threat of a German offensive aimed at Paris. He guessed the structure of the cipher and saw that the essential security lay in the columnar transposition. To avoid brute force, he used two messages with the identical beginnings so helpfully common to military communication to determine the number of transposition columns used (20). The identical openings resulted in the first twenty characters of the intercept being identical. After that first column, the diffusion element of the cipher intermingled the traces of the identical openings with the divergent bodies.

Knowing that there were 20 columns, he could reconstruct them. Some were longer and some shorter by one letter. Logically, the longer columns would be to the left because of the order in which they were filled in. This sorted the columns into two groups -- the long left and the short right, thinning the field a little but still leaving far too many options to try. Assuming that messages with identical beginnings might have identical endings, Painvin was able to apply his opening logic in reverse and create a few groups of pairs that he knew must be next to each other, but not which was to the left and which was to the right. But with two columns, he could afford to roll the dice and try to find statistical distributions that matched written German.

That worked, and allowed him to find the digraph pairs for a few common letters. Using this break, the rest of the columnar arrangement and the substitution square filled themselves in by turns. Statistical guesses at the substitution arrangement could guide the arrangement of the columns (arrangements that produced greater frequencies of digraphs corresponding to common letters were more likely to be correct). As more columns were arranged, more digraphs emerged, and so on, until the columnar arrangement and the substitution table were both fully filled out and all that day's traffic could be read.

It was laborious and depended on a sufficient volume of traffic. The French never read ADVGVX reliably -- only on days with sufficient traffic to generate the sort of kick start needed. The initial breaks took weeks to analyze -- rendering the effort useless from a tactical standpoint. But as experience (and traffic and poor communications practice) grew, solutions were achieved sometimes the same day the messages were sent.

All this said, I like the beauty of this cipher. It embodies both substitution and transposition, and yet is relatively wieldy. If you thought that trial example was tough, just wait until parts two and three...

There are also a few steps that could be taken to improve security. A classic step is to substitute codewords for frequently named people and places. Certain suspected patterns can help speed up the breaking of the final stage, and if an army is fighting in Verdun, for example, a cryptanalyst looking at a signal to or from that army might look for that word. Substitute FIBLA for that word (and then encrypt it) and you have an improvement. Even better, have FIBLA, GIZWA, NILMO, and QAGTL all as options for the cipher clerk to pick at random.

The second stage keyword should be long, to maximize the number of choices facing the cryptanalyst. Chose a phrase like "YOURE MY WONDER WALL" (I've had that song stuck in my head today) instead of just a few words. Take columns headed by duplicate letters off in order instead of ignoring repeats and you have a 17 letter keyword: 355,687,428,096,000 possible combinations, more than enough to prevent trial-and-error cryptanalysis as I suggested. Better yet, don't use a keyword at all (and I believe this might be how the Germans actually implemented the cipher) but a numeric sequence (11 4 7 8 3 8 6 10 1 5 2 9 12) that couldn't correspond to some word or phrase a codebreaker might recognize.

An implementation that somehow changed a portion of the key (say the keyphrase) at every message would increase security. A little recognized fact is that message length can have a lot to do with the ability of a foe to compromise a cipher system. ADFGVX is vulnerable, but only with a sufficient amount of identically keyed traffic. So embedding an encrypted version of an ever changing key phrase or selecting one from a daily sequence rather than using the same one all day long would help. One could easily see a book that contained the substitution square on the left side and a table of 50 different transposition keys on the right, each identified by an in indicator to be sent along with the message or else some sort of scheme for sequencing to govern their selection. This was a common feature of some of the better ciphers of the 2nd world war and shortly thereafter -- the amazing American SIGABA machine for one, the postwar Swiss NEMA for another -- an indicator group that specified an easily changed portion of the machine's settings was transmitted (enciphered in some manner) as part of the message header and footer. The great Soviet spy ciphers (Vic and its kin) used similarly variable portions for every message.

I think that the idea of saying "I transmit part of my cipher key IN my message?" is shocking to most. Understandably! But the countermeasure is that done properly, the indicator group is not easy to read, and the effect of reducing message traffic for any given setup more than outweighs the risks.

Naturally, all the standard weaknesses of classical error cryptography (and their potential countermeasures) are present as well. Sloppy work resulting in identical messages being sent with different keys. Sending the same message on a secure and a non-secure channel resulting in the compromise of all the message on the secure channel for that keying period. Stereotyped beginnings or entire messages -- this was the bane of actual German cryptography, with a national penchant for patriotic phrasing or "nothing to report" reports...

Interestingly, while it would considerably weaken the security of the thing, it is possible to do a ADFGVX variation with no prepared materials, using a keyphrase of sufficient length to form up the initial substitution table. Take the letters of "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" and use them to form the initial grid, alphabetically filling in the rest of the spaces.

  A D F G V X
A T H E S K Y
D A B O V P R
F W C L F I N
G D B G J M Q
V X Z 0 1 2 3
X 4 5 6 7 8 9

Of course, we'd need to come up with some scheme for the numbers -- or else use the 5x5 version. Its weaker, since an analyst could guess the arrangement once they started to get a break. But for a spy or someone forced to work with no materials and sending a very small amount of traffic, it has possibilities.

I find this cipher charming for some reason. Its balance of complexity and comprehensibility works for me. It has its vulnerabilities, but then again so does anything of this period or level of sophistication.

The accessibility of it means I can play with it in my mind, try to understand it the way I picture George Painvin did.