All posts in this blog from June 2006 or later and all posts in July 2005 and earlier have been assigned labels (aka tags) that help identify their subject matter, and a significant portion, although probably a minority, of earlier posts at this blog have been tagged. Also, all posts at sister blog Dispatches at Turtle Island have been tagged.
Posts in the remaining ten months (which were a period of very high numbers of posts per month) of the 126 months that this blog has been in operation have only been tagged sporadically. I hope to have all posts at both blogs tagged sometime this year.
The effort continues to be one that continues in fits and spurts.
How prolific was I during those months? Very.
August 2005 - 67
September 2005 - 100
October 2005- 278
November 2005 - 195
December 2005- 144
January 2006 - 211
February 2006 - 157
March 2006 - 144
April 2006 - 67
May 2006 -136
I'm also trying to clear the backlog of draft posts, either refining and publishing them, or deleting them. I have about two dozen left after the latest spat of published draft posts today. About half of the remaining draft posts won't ever be published in anything close to their current form because I have tagged them TMI and belong in a diary rather than being posted to the world.
05 January 2016
Concepts For Military Technologies
There are lots of perfectly plausible and workable weapons systems, military vehicles and the like that are not currently in U.S. military service because these approaches were never proposed and championed by the right people in the military procurement process.
I outline some of these roads not traveled below. Some of the ideas below have been implemented in other countries or at other times. Some have had advocated in the military procurement process, but either weren't adopted, or were only adopted on a limited basis. Other ideas have never been tried to my knowledge. Few of these ideas are original, although I cannot always easily source where I came across the ideas.
This list is not complete by any means. Options involving drones have been omitted and some ideas have been noted and not filled in unless this post is later edited to keep the idea afloat.
Manned Aircraft
Homeland Defense Interceptor
The ATG homeland defense interceptor proposal.
The basic concept in this and a number of other of the ideas below, is that a solution to a particular mission can often carry out that mission just as well or better than a multi-purpose solution, at a lower cost, because it is detrimental to devote resources to capabilities that aren't plausibly a part of the mission that needs to be carried out.
The homeland defense interceptor would be a fighter aircraft designed to be operated by the Air National Guard to replace F-16 fighter aircraft (and ultimately F-35A fighter aircraft) in U.S. territory from 9-11 style attacks and misconduct by civilian aircraft, possibly with improvised armaments. Essentially, they serve a Coast Guard type role patrolling U.S. airspace.
These aircraft would have no air to ground bombing capability, no stealth features, no short takeoff and landing or vertical takeoff and landing features, and no aerial refueling capabilities. It would have sophisticated sensors, but light air to air combat capabilities and defensive systems (perhaps machine guns and a couple of air to air missiles), that are adequate against an unsophisticated opponent. It would be faster than almost all commercial civilian aircraft (perhaps Mach 1.6), but not "hypersonic".
It would be designed to be cheaper to acquire, cheaper to operate, easier to maintain, lighter, and easier to operate for a part-time National Guard pilot, than an F-16 or F-35A. A proposal in 2004 by firm ATG would have cost $6 million each (v. $26.9 million for each F-16 and more than $100 million for each F-35A), and $950 per flight hour to operate v. $3,600 per flight hour for the F-16.
Small Intra-Theater Fixed Wing Transport Plane
This would be a fixed wing, short takeoff and landing plane suitable for operating on primitive field airstrips over short to moderate distances for cargo loads smaller than those of a C-130.
They would offer higher speeds, longer ranges, greater fuel efficiency, and lower acquisition costs and maintenance costs than comparable transport helicopters, which the U.S. Army has developed so that it can control its own intratheater logistics.
The C-27J Spartan aircraft was proposed to fill this role and reached an advanced state of development with a few actually purchased, but was ultimately quashed by the Air Force fighter mafia and opponents of foreign military purchases. These planes cost $53.3 million each, are sold to many countries, and about half of the 22 ton payload of a C-130J which costs $67 million-$120 million each.
A C-27 Spartan is depicted above.
A-10 and AC-130 Replacements
In the existing military, there are two kinds of aircraft used primarily for close air support, both of which are no longer being produced and have Vietnam era designs.
One is the A-10, a fighter aircraft designed for close air support. The other is the AC-130, a modified intra-theater transport C-130 aircraft with a howitzer artillery piece and heavy machine guns that can be used to support ground troops.
Both designs are conceptually sound and have proven useful in warfare. But, both are unpopular with the fighter mafia, which wishes it didn't have the mission of close air support at all, and have aging aircraft currently in service because replacements were not authorized for several decades based upon the false promise that the F-35A and F-35B would be suitable replacements for the A-10.
One design that could replace the AC-130 (each of which is now more than 40 years old) is the AC-27 gunship with a 30mm cannon, rather than the 105mm howitzer of the AC-130.
An Artists conception of the AC-27
The time has also come to design a new manned close air support aircraft in the tradition of the A-10, but taking advantage of the technological advances that have taken place over the last forty years. Such a design might take the basic concept of the A-10 (low speeds, armor for the pilot, high levels of redundancy, a canon designed for air to ground fire on small targets, etc.), and simply update them with modern materials, electronics, and weapons. One candidate considered about six years ago is the significantly smaller but similarly CAS optimized SM-27J (see also here).
Airliner Sized Transport Bombers
The B-52 Stratofortress was a good design. It has a top speed of 650 miles per hour and no stealth whatsoever. Yet, we are using 53 year old B-52s in active duty military service. Most recently, the plane shown above built in 1962 from a design that entered service in 1952 was returned to service after being sent to the Boneyard in 2008, because a B-52 in active service broke down. Even with upgraded electronics, the B-52 is due for a replacement. The planes are just plain old and need to be replaced. No trucking company would maintain a fleet consisting primarily of 1962 delivery trucks.
A transport bomber would replace the B-52 in mission of delivering large payloads of bombs, cruise missiles and supply drops over long distances without stealth or exceptional speed in circumstances where air superiority has been accomplished. Mostly likely, they would use commercial off the shelf technology found in air freight jets adapted from commercial airliners. Conceptually, this is a B-747 or a B-777.
In U.S. Navy service, this role is partially fulfilled by the P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft (based on the Boeing 737-800 airliner), shown below, which entered service in 2012, replacing the P-3 that entered service in 1962.
Fighter Sized Transport Bombers
A similar concept, in place in many military forces of the world with small budgets, for use in situations where air superiority has been accomplished and precision guided bombs are available, is to use small commercial aircraft or training fighter aircraft, with little or no air to air combat capability, no stealth, and no supersonic flight capabilities, to deliver precision guided bombs from altitudes higher than enemy anti-aircraft weapons can reach. These aircraft can cost a fraction of what a multi-purpose fighter aircraft like an F-16 or F-35A would cost, and yet carry out its much narrower mission in much more limited (but common) conditions, just as well.
This might be particularly useful in supporting small Army or Marine units in a theater if they need to call down air strikes occasionally on enemy positions, in a counter-insurgency action where skirmishes and ambushes, rather than major battles, are anticipated.
For example, the post-Iraq War military of Iraqi currently has a number of Cessna general aviation aircraft which have been outfitted with modern avionics and air to ground weapons that it uses in this role. The U.S. military could use something more sophisticated than a Cessna as a platform for a small transport bomber, but certainly wouldn't need to use something as expensive and sophisticated as the F-16s used in that role today by the U.S. military.
The A-67 Dragon, pictured below, is another aircraft in this class.
Seaplanes
Seaplanes can land lots of places without needing true and hugely expensive aircraft carriers (and perhaps could be winched from sea into hangers without the need for sophisticated takeoff and landing facilities). Similar uses have been made of them in the past, but none are currently in U.S. military service.
There are far more small bodies of water where a plane could land in much of the world than they are field air strips. Helicopters can land almost anywhere but are slower, have shorter ranges, and are less fuel efficient and are less reliable than fixed wing aircraft.
Seaplanes are well suited to search and rescue missions in the open sea (where helicopters have shorter range), and to resupply naval ships other than aircraft carriers while they are at sea. One can also imagine seaplanes supported by a chain of resupply ships or submarines, which are much cheaper and easier to keep in continuous service than air tankers.
A seaplane the size of a C-27 carrying a Marine amphibious armored personnel carrier could land in a lake or a large river or near a coast, deploy the amphibious vehicle, and depart (reversing the operation to retrieve an amphibious vehicle). This would allow us to deploy medium weight U.S. forces in all sorts of places in the world where it would be more difficult to deploy ground forces that heavy by other means.
Transport Airships
A key weakness of the U.S. armed services is an insufficient investment in the high speed transport resources needed to deploy a credible military force quickly. Air transport is the state of the art when it comes to speed, but the U.S. Air Force's logistics capacity is quite modest. Moreover, many key Army vehicles and military systems can't be carried by anything other than large C-5 and C-17 transport aircraft, and C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft can't land at unimproved field airstrips.
A transport airship concept
An airship that achieves some or all of its lift from lighter than air vacuums or gases that it encloses, can carry loads ten times larger than the largest transport aircraft (in the U.S. military, the C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft), and as large as a smaller transport ship.
An airship can takeoff from a loading point on land and deliver its cargo to another loading point on land, without having the shift cargo from rail or a truck to a ship at a port and back at coastal areas, without having to have intact bridges over rivers and canyons, and without having to have a functional or IED free road infrastructure. It can reach roadless areas or areas where control of the ground is contested, with only minimal infrastructure at the destination.
A transport airship uses about the same amount of fuel per pound of cargo per mile as a truck or efficient transport aircraft, although more than shipping by boat or rail. An airship is comparable in speed to rail or a truck, but can travel on "as the crow flies" paths, and is three or four times as fast as a typical military transport ship.
Transport airships travel at lower altitudes than aircraft and aren't stealthy at all, so they are not well suited to supplying cargo over contested territory. But, they are relatively fast and efficient ways to get large volumes of cargo from U.S. territory or a U.S. base to the allied controlled fringes of a regional conflict zone, without straining the resources of scarce, heavy transports like the C-5 Galaxy.
Transport airships would also be useful for moving men and material within U.S. controlled territory and to U.S. bases in peacetime. For example, to promptly ship tanks or tank parts to Japan from the U.S. when there is not currently military action in the Pacific theater, or deliver supplies from New England or Hawaii to Fairbanks, Alaska.
Another possible way to deploy airships in conflicts where the opposition lacks any naval resources, would be to deliver cargo to landing ship docks off shore and over the horizon from opposition forces, and then having the cargo that is delivered deployed to shore from the ship as if the ship had carried its cargo there itself.
Ships and Submarines
Reallocating Responsibility From Surface Combatants
The almost 10,000 ton Arleigh Burke class destroyer is the most common major surface combatant in the U.S. Navy's fleet and new ones are still being built. It entered service in 1991 and has a unit cost of $1.84 billion. It is a multi-purpose surface combatant mostly used to escort aircraft carriers.
U.S. Navy destroyers, and until recently cruisers and frigates (which are no longer in active U.S. naval service), serve primarily as floating bases from which sea to land missiles, anti-surface combatant missiles, anti-submarine missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles are launched.
Destroyers are large (typically just under 10,000 tons and hundreds of feet long), slow moving (under 50 miles per hour at top speed and much slower at cruising speed), and are home to several hundred crew. These ships must carry not only weapons systems, but long term room and board facilities for their entire crews.
Naval exercises and a handful of actually naval encounters in the post-World War II era, have revealed that surface combatants are a high risk of suffering massive casualties from attack submarines, hypersonic missiles, aircraft launched cruise missiles or suicide aircraft attacks, or attacks by swarms of small, fast missile boats. Their deployment can also be substantially slowed with sea mines. No amount of armor can protect them from powerful missiles, and active defense systems are not 100% effective.
These ships also pose a logistics problem in a larger conflict. It can take months for a surface combatant to redeploy from one theater, for example, the East China Sea, to another, for example, the North Atlantic Ocean. Typically, about a third to two-thirds of the surface combatant fleet is in port between deployments, at any given time.
But, the same missiles that are launched from surface combatants can also be launched from heavy bombers (the P-8, the B-52, the B-1, the B-2 and possible future aircraft), as autonomous cruise missiles from based on the ground, and from submarines outfitted to the task (as some Ohio class submarines have been).
Only about 5% of the total crew for an aircraft is on the plane when it is deployed on a sortie, while the room and board for the flight crew and the support crew remain out of harms way at a remote base. Typically a heavy bomber crew will have a few of two to a dozen people on a flight, compared to about 300 on a destroyer. Surface combatants are also very expensive (while the $1 billion cost of bombers like the B-2 were exaggerated because R&D costs were spread over a much smaller number of aircraft than anticipated, and is still less than the cost of a destroyer) and surface combatants can be difficult to resupply promptly as sea.
Aircraft move at least ten times as fast as surface combatants, are much smaller targets and can employ stealth technology in many cases, stay in the active combat theater for just a few hours rather than continuously for weeks, and take days rather than months to redeploy from one theater of combat to another. Airborne refueling can address the range limitations of aircraft.
Submarines are large, crew heavy, and slow like surface combatants, but are much harder for even a sophisticated enemy to locate and destroy. Yet, they can be just as effective as surface combatants in many roles. For example, submarine launched missiles were just as useful as surface combatant launched missiles in the bombing campaign against Libya during its Arab Spring uprising.
While there are niches (e.g. the diplomatic usefulness of threatening force by deploying surface combatants in the vicinity of a potential conflict area, or providing a base for Marines where no land base is available), it makes a great deal of sense to shift a large share of responsibility for anti-surface combatant warfare, anti-submarine warfare, and launching missiles at coastal land targets, from war ships to submarines and long range heavy bombers and patrol aircraft and cruise missiles. Neither submarines nor aircraft are nearly as vulnerable to enemy attack as large surface combatants. This is one reason that many nations have refrained from purchasing large warships.
Automation
The Zumwalt class DDG-1000 destroyer
Modern ships, like the Littoral Combat Ships and the Zumwalt class destroyers (DDG-1000), operate with crews of about a third of the crews of comparable Oliver Perry Frigates, Arleigh Burke destroyers, and recently retired classes of cruisers. Simply automating replacements of these ships from the bottom up would allow crews to be reduced from 200-300 sailors to 70-100 sailors.
Carrier Escorts
One of the main responsibilities of frigates, cruisers and destroyers in the U.S. Navy is to escort aircraft carriers which have few missile batteries, anti-missile/anti-aircraft weapons, and anti-submarine sensors of their own.
Most replacements for today's destroyers, in addition to being automated, should be designed narrowly for the purpose of escorting air craft carriers by providing defensive capabilities it cannot provide itself (like the Aegis sensor network and anti-submarine warfare sensor network of the carrier group as a whole, extended over many miles at sea, defense from swarm attacks of small missile boats, and anti-missile firepower), while ceasing to be bases for sea to land missiles, or playing a central role in destroying large enemy warships or submarines.
Carrier escorts might be 3,000-5,000 tons rather than the 10,000 tons or so of a modern destroyer or cruiser, and have a crew of 80 sailors or so.
Missile Defense Cruisers
The San Antonio Class Marine Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD-17) Hull is one design that has been considered for a ballistic missile defense cruiser. The Zumwalt has also been suggested as a template for a ballistic missile defense cruiser.
One niche where a surface combatant might be useful is in a ballistic and cruise missile defense role against missiles launched by rouge states like North Korea or Iran.
In this role, having a ship present on task at all times close to the expected launch location of the missile where it is not possible to secure a local military base would provide an opportunity for a prompt launch of an intercepting missile. The Navy has shown success with this kind of missile defense technology, while similar programs in the rest of the armed forces have not been nearly as successful.
This ship might be nuclear powered, since it would need to spend long, uninterrupted tours on task in distant locations where resupply is not easily available or commercial shipping has been disrupted.
Transport Submarines
The military would often like to be able to covertly deploy significant numbers of ground troops and heavy equipment (like tanks and trucks) by surprise or in blockaded coastal areas. It would also like to be able to resupply allies whose access to commercial shipping has been disrupted (something that doesn't necessarily take a very sophisticated naval force, or even any naval force, to accomplish as aircraft and artillery can also disrupt shipping), or to evacuate troops or civilians from an area where surface cargo ships are at high risk of being sunk. A concept drawing of one can be found here.
The military would also like to have the capability to deliver cargo under ice sheets, such as those found in the Arctic, to reduce shipping times.
One sensible way to achieve these objectives would be with large (Ohio class sized, for example) transport submarines. These submarines would not have to have the sophisticated and expensive weapons of attack submarines, without the ability to function at the depths of existing U.S. Navy submarines, and could probably manage with air independent propulsion systems which allow submarines to stay submerged for weeks instead of months or years. They could be more automated than existing attack and nuclear missile submarines, both because of their more modern designs, and because they would have fewer crew intensive military capabilities.
A variant on the transport submarine is the Littoral Warfare Submarine concept designed for inserting troops with stealth in coastal environments.
Submarines As Command Ships
Submarines are also attractive alternatives to surface combatants as command ships, i.e. a base for executive and intelligence staff and support personnel for a military unit (e.g. a field hospital) that does not engaged directly in combat as part of a naval group. Since command ships almost by definition have reduced offensive and defensive capabilities relative to primary combatants, it makes sense to put these functions in a less visible and difficult to determine location to the extent feasible.
One obvious way to create a submarine command ship would be to adapt a submarine transport ship for the purpose.
Combat Boats and Missile Boats
China's Houbei class missile boats are just 225 tons v. 10,000 tons for a U.S. destroyer and carry 83 small missiles. They do not include living accommodations for the crew and can reach high speeds. They are designed to mount "swarm" attacks on larger conventional warships. In blue sea operations, a missile boat would have to be supported by a mothership that would house the crew and provide supplies for the missile boats.
Seven countries including the United States which has six of them for military engagements on rivers use the Swedish CB90-class fast assault craft which cost about $3 million each. It is the fastest and most maneuverable military boat currently in service anywhere of which am I aware, and can operate in water less than three feet deep.
It has a crew of three, three machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a small number of small mines, and can be mounted with a Hellfire missile or armor. It can also carry up to 21 troops and has been converted for use as a rapidly responding water based command post, ambulance, search and rescue craft.
It is well suited for addressing piracy, smuggling, and delivering troops to island destinations. The U.S. military all to often uses far more expensive and slower and less agile destroyers for this missions, which may win every battle, but will ultimately lose a war of attrition. It also represents the kind of basic frame that make might sense for a close fire support boat.
Close Fire Support Boats
The X-18 Fire Support Vessel concept known as the "tank boat". See also here.
Perhaps one in six or seven Marine landing craft could be converted to a close fire support role. It would be armed with a main gun the size of a tank's main gun, and/or a battery of short range missiles powerful enough to destroy fortified gun nests and armored vehicles on the shore that are engaging the landing group, in lieu of soldiers and supplies of its own. It would have armor comparable to that of a main battle tank. This should be technologically feasible because if a landing craft can carry a tank to shore, it ought to be able to integrate what is essentially a tank stripped of its treads and engine.
Essentially, close fire support boats would provide artillery support to landing parties. They would be deployed from a landing ship dock or amphibious assault ship, just like other landing craft, and would not have long term accommodations for the crew on board.
It might also have heavy machine guns for anti-personnel purposes, anti-small craft lasers, light anti-aircraft missiles primarily to address fighter sized transport bombers and helicopters and armed drones, and active point defense resources similar to the Navy's Phalanx close in weapons system to address incoming missiles and artillery rounds.
These boats could also be used in patrol roles to interdict and regulate shipping, to support operating bases near the coast, to intercept and destroy armed small craft, and to deploy fire power up major rivers.
High Speed Transport Ships
The HSV-2 Swift
The USNS Spearhead JHSV-1
Ships can carry much larger loads than aircraft, but are incredibly slow. One way to bridge that gap is with high speed transports such as the HSV-2 Swift retired in 2013 and the JHSV-1 introduced in 2011. But, because sealift capability serves the Army, another military service, it has rarely been a popular program with naval procurement officials.
The Swift, for example, can travel up to 3500 nautical miles at 45 knots while carrying 605 tons of cargo. The loaded ship is about 1668 tons, about one-sixth the size of a destroyer. It has a crew of 35.
The Spearhead with a crew of 22 can berth 150 passengers, transport another 312 troops, and can serve as a base for a medium sized helicopter while traveling at 43 knots.
A variant on this concept is the concept of "distributed lethality" which includes the notion of placing more powerful weapons on ships such as the LCS and high speed transports that traditionally have had only minimal standard armaments, such as in the concept of a JHSV-1 outfitted with a railgun shown below.
Military Systems For Ground Troops
A Medium Grade, C-130 Transportable Missile Tank, Manned or Unmanned
A British Army Light Missile Tank
An Anti-Aircraft Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle
An Anti-Tank Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle
A C-130 transport aircraft can only carry 19 tons. One Army vehicle designed to conform to that limitation, which makes it much easier to deploy rapidly, is the Stryker armored personnel carrier.
The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle weighs about 35 tons (but half of the 70 tons of an M1-A Abrams main battle tank which has heavier armor and a crew of three or four) and holds a similar number of infantry to the Stryker, but with heavier armor and anti-tank missiles in lieu of a central tank gun. Despite having anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, the Bradley was just as effective at destroying Iraqi tanks in the Iraq War as U.S. M-1A tanks.
It would be useful to have a vehicle with a tank sized crew, rather than an infantry carrying role, anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, and armor closer in strength to the Bradley than to the Stryker, yet within the 19 ton and dimensional limitations of the C-130 transport aircraft. This would provide the most heavily armored and armed rapidly deployable armed military vehicle in the U.S. military and would rival comparable vehicles anywhere in the world.
Simply eliminating the infantry crew capability from the existing Bradley design, shrinking it in length, would go a long way towards trimming the necessary 16 tons from the weight of a regular Bradley to fit this role.
This lighter narrower missile tank could also be used in urban and mountain areas where passages are too narrow for a full sized main battle tank without considerable engineering work on the passage, and it could be used in places where civilian bridges are not U.S. military grade using existing infrastructure.
In a more radical version of this concept, weight could be reduced by removing all crew in a remote controlled drone version of this medium grade missile tank, rather than just reducing the size of the crew.
The 13.5 ton British Stormer would be an example of the system in this class, as is China's 13.75 ton HJ-9. A smaller 4.5 ton Ferret, Mk5 Scout Car has a similar role. A concept using Hellfire missiles is realized here and loosely based on a prototype M-113 Hellfire missile launcher.
A Next Generation Combat Patrol Vehicle
The Oshkosh L-ATV won the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contest to replace the Humvee
This vehicle would replace the armored Humvee and smaller interim MRAP vehicles to provide transportation for four soldiers and their gear on patrol in hostile territory where small arms fire and IED attacks could be expected. As a purpose built armored vehicle, it could avoid the problems of associated with aftermarket armor that the vehicle wasn't designed to bear which plagued the Humvee.
A program to design and produce this vehicle already exists and the winner is shown above.
Long Range Sniper Rifles With Assisted Aiming And Guided Exacto Bullets
Advanced sighting systems can allow a novice to shot a sniper rifle with the precision of an expert.
Smart bullets (0.50 caliber) that swerve in flight to hit targets in motion or around corners or behind walls further ups the ante. Combine the two and the lethality of a sniper using this advanced weapon system is profoundly increased.
Short Range Grenade Launchers With Range Control
The XM-25 was proposed to give U.S. soldiers a short range grenade launcher with "smart" grenades that can detonate at a specific distance (e.g. above an enemy position in a trench or foxhole). Prototypes were tested in Afghanistan starting in 2010, but the non-experimental version is not scheduled to enter service until 2017. It has a range four times as great (600 meters) as the M203 grenade launcher (which uses "dumb" grenades) that it replaces.
Each weapon costs about $35,000 and the rounds cost about $55 each.
Carbines That Can Shoot Around Corners With Video Sights
An accessory called Corner Shot allows soldiers to shoot around corners with video sights, thereby eliminating the need to expose themselves to enemy fire in order to shoot at them from behind cover.
Mobile Point Defense Vehicles
The Army's Centurian C-RAM system puts a Navy Phalanx point defense system on a semi-trailer that can be trucked to provide active point defense to a military base or other potential target.
This would be a glorified flatbed truck or semi-trailer with either a modified Phalanx close in weapons system or active defense laser weapon that could be moved to a location to provide point defense to a small military base or a civilian facility from air to ground missiles, artillery shells, and armed drones.
Active defense laser weapons are becoming standard on U.S. warships, even though land vehicle based and aircraft based laser systems have largely been duds so far.
Rapid Response Forward Observer Vehicle
The Dutch Fennek Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle is a forward observer vehicle in current military service that also has an anti-aircraft missile bearing version.
A fictional prototype vehicle called the Tumbler from the movie Batman Begins captures the concept well.
The concept here is that it is sometimes no longer necessary for the military system that is used to order a strike with a guided bomb or missile to a target to carry the ordinance itself. Instead, it merely needs a targeting system and some means of communicating the coordinates of the target to an artillery battery, aircraft with bombs, cruise missile battery, or ship or submarine with sea to land missiles like the Tomahawk, which would launch their missile or smart bomb at the target.
This would allow the vehicle itself to be small and fast, although protecting the occupants would remain a priority.
I outline some of these roads not traveled below. Some of the ideas below have been implemented in other countries or at other times. Some have had advocated in the military procurement process, but either weren't adopted, or were only adopted on a limited basis. Other ideas have never been tried to my knowledge. Few of these ideas are original, although I cannot always easily source where I came across the ideas.
This list is not complete by any means. Options involving drones have been omitted and some ideas have been noted and not filled in unless this post is later edited to keep the idea afloat.
Manned Aircraft
Homeland Defense Interceptor
The ATG homeland defense interceptor proposal.
The basic concept in this and a number of other of the ideas below, is that a solution to a particular mission can often carry out that mission just as well or better than a multi-purpose solution, at a lower cost, because it is detrimental to devote resources to capabilities that aren't plausibly a part of the mission that needs to be carried out.
The homeland defense interceptor would be a fighter aircraft designed to be operated by the Air National Guard to replace F-16 fighter aircraft (and ultimately F-35A fighter aircraft) in U.S. territory from 9-11 style attacks and misconduct by civilian aircraft, possibly with improvised armaments. Essentially, they serve a Coast Guard type role patrolling U.S. airspace.
These aircraft would have no air to ground bombing capability, no stealth features, no short takeoff and landing or vertical takeoff and landing features, and no aerial refueling capabilities. It would have sophisticated sensors, but light air to air combat capabilities and defensive systems (perhaps machine guns and a couple of air to air missiles), that are adequate against an unsophisticated opponent. It would be faster than almost all commercial civilian aircraft (perhaps Mach 1.6), but not "hypersonic".
It would be designed to be cheaper to acquire, cheaper to operate, easier to maintain, lighter, and easier to operate for a part-time National Guard pilot, than an F-16 or F-35A. A proposal in 2004 by firm ATG would have cost $6 million each (v. $26.9 million for each F-16 and more than $100 million for each F-35A), and $950 per flight hour to operate v. $3,600 per flight hour for the F-16.
Small Intra-Theater Fixed Wing Transport Plane
This would be a fixed wing, short takeoff and landing plane suitable for operating on primitive field airstrips over short to moderate distances for cargo loads smaller than those of a C-130.
They would offer higher speeds, longer ranges, greater fuel efficiency, and lower acquisition costs and maintenance costs than comparable transport helicopters, which the U.S. Army has developed so that it can control its own intratheater logistics.
The C-27J Spartan aircraft was proposed to fill this role and reached an advanced state of development with a few actually purchased, but was ultimately quashed by the Air Force fighter mafia and opponents of foreign military purchases. These planes cost $53.3 million each, are sold to many countries, and about half of the 22 ton payload of a C-130J which costs $67 million-$120 million each.
A C-27 Spartan is depicted above.
A-10 and AC-130 Replacements
In the existing military, there are two kinds of aircraft used primarily for close air support, both of which are no longer being produced and have Vietnam era designs.
One is the A-10, a fighter aircraft designed for close air support. The other is the AC-130, a modified intra-theater transport C-130 aircraft with a howitzer artillery piece and heavy machine guns that can be used to support ground troops.
Both designs are conceptually sound and have proven useful in warfare. But, both are unpopular with the fighter mafia, which wishes it didn't have the mission of close air support at all, and have aging aircraft currently in service because replacements were not authorized for several decades based upon the false promise that the F-35A and F-35B would be suitable replacements for the A-10.
One design that could replace the AC-130 (each of which is now more than 40 years old) is the AC-27 gunship with a 30mm cannon, rather than the 105mm howitzer of the AC-130.
An Artists conception of the AC-27
The time has also come to design a new manned close air support aircraft in the tradition of the A-10, but taking advantage of the technological advances that have taken place over the last forty years. Such a design might take the basic concept of the A-10 (low speeds, armor for the pilot, high levels of redundancy, a canon designed for air to ground fire on small targets, etc.), and simply update them with modern materials, electronics, and weapons. One candidate considered about six years ago is the significantly smaller but similarly CAS optimized SM-27J (see also here).
Airliner Sized Transport Bombers
The B-52 Stratofortress was a good design. It has a top speed of 650 miles per hour and no stealth whatsoever. Yet, we are using 53 year old B-52s in active duty military service. Most recently, the plane shown above built in 1962 from a design that entered service in 1952 was returned to service after being sent to the Boneyard in 2008, because a B-52 in active service broke down. Even with upgraded electronics, the B-52 is due for a replacement. The planes are just plain old and need to be replaced. No trucking company would maintain a fleet consisting primarily of 1962 delivery trucks.
A transport bomber would replace the B-52 in mission of delivering large payloads of bombs, cruise missiles and supply drops over long distances without stealth or exceptional speed in circumstances where air superiority has been accomplished. Mostly likely, they would use commercial off the shelf technology found in air freight jets adapted from commercial airliners. Conceptually, this is a B-747 or a B-777.
In U.S. Navy service, this role is partially fulfilled by the P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft (based on the Boeing 737-800 airliner), shown below, which entered service in 2012, replacing the P-3 that entered service in 1962.
Fighter Sized Transport Bombers
A similar concept, in place in many military forces of the world with small budgets, for use in situations where air superiority has been accomplished and precision guided bombs are available, is to use small commercial aircraft or training fighter aircraft, with little or no air to air combat capability, no stealth, and no supersonic flight capabilities, to deliver precision guided bombs from altitudes higher than enemy anti-aircraft weapons can reach. These aircraft can cost a fraction of what a multi-purpose fighter aircraft like an F-16 or F-35A would cost, and yet carry out its much narrower mission in much more limited (but common) conditions, just as well.
This might be particularly useful in supporting small Army or Marine units in a theater if they need to call down air strikes occasionally on enemy positions, in a counter-insurgency action where skirmishes and ambushes, rather than major battles, are anticipated.
For example, the post-Iraq War military of Iraqi currently has a number of Cessna general aviation aircraft which have been outfitted with modern avionics and air to ground weapons that it uses in this role. The U.S. military could use something more sophisticated than a Cessna as a platform for a small transport bomber, but certainly wouldn't need to use something as expensive and sophisticated as the F-16s used in that role today by the U.S. military.
Iraqi Air Force AC-208 Cessna Caravan launches a Hellfire missile
via Wikipedia article on AGM-114 Hellfire
The A-67 Dragon, pictured below, is another aircraft in this class.
Seaplanes
Seaplanes can land lots of places without needing true and hugely expensive aircraft carriers (and perhaps could be winched from sea into hangers without the need for sophisticated takeoff and landing facilities). Similar uses have been made of them in the past, but none are currently in U.S. military service.
There are far more small bodies of water where a plane could land in much of the world than they are field air strips. Helicopters can land almost anywhere but are slower, have shorter ranges, and are less fuel efficient and are less reliable than fixed wing aircraft.
Seaplanes are well suited to search and rescue missions in the open sea (where helicopters have shorter range), and to resupply naval ships other than aircraft carriers while they are at sea. One can also imagine seaplanes supported by a chain of resupply ships or submarines, which are much cheaper and easier to keep in continuous service than air tankers.
A seaplane the size of a C-27 carrying a Marine amphibious armored personnel carrier could land in a lake or a large river or near a coast, deploy the amphibious vehicle, and depart (reversing the operation to retrieve an amphibious vehicle). This would allow us to deploy medium weight U.S. forces in all sorts of places in the world where it would be more difficult to deploy ground forces that heavy by other means.
Transport Airships
A key weakness of the U.S. armed services is an insufficient investment in the high speed transport resources needed to deploy a credible military force quickly. Air transport is the state of the art when it comes to speed, but the U.S. Air Force's logistics capacity is quite modest. Moreover, many key Army vehicles and military systems can't be carried by anything other than large C-5 and C-17 transport aircraft, and C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft can't land at unimproved field airstrips.
A transport airship concept
An airship that achieves some or all of its lift from lighter than air vacuums or gases that it encloses, can carry loads ten times larger than the largest transport aircraft (in the U.S. military, the C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft), and as large as a smaller transport ship.
An airship can takeoff from a loading point on land and deliver its cargo to another loading point on land, without having the shift cargo from rail or a truck to a ship at a port and back at coastal areas, without having to have intact bridges over rivers and canyons, and without having to have a functional or IED free road infrastructure. It can reach roadless areas or areas where control of the ground is contested, with only minimal infrastructure at the destination.
A transport airship uses about the same amount of fuel per pound of cargo per mile as a truck or efficient transport aircraft, although more than shipping by boat or rail. An airship is comparable in speed to rail or a truck, but can travel on "as the crow flies" paths, and is three or four times as fast as a typical military transport ship.
Transport airships travel at lower altitudes than aircraft and aren't stealthy at all, so they are not well suited to supplying cargo over contested territory. But, they are relatively fast and efficient ways to get large volumes of cargo from U.S. territory or a U.S. base to the allied controlled fringes of a regional conflict zone, without straining the resources of scarce, heavy transports like the C-5 Galaxy.
Transport airships would also be useful for moving men and material within U.S. controlled territory and to U.S. bases in peacetime. For example, to promptly ship tanks or tank parts to Japan from the U.S. when there is not currently military action in the Pacific theater, or deliver supplies from New England or Hawaii to Fairbanks, Alaska.
Another possible way to deploy airships in conflicts where the opposition lacks any naval resources, would be to deliver cargo to landing ship docks off shore and over the horizon from opposition forces, and then having the cargo that is delivered deployed to shore from the ship as if the ship had carried its cargo there itself.
Ships and Submarines
Reallocating Responsibility From Surface Combatants
The almost 10,000 ton Arleigh Burke class destroyer is the most common major surface combatant in the U.S. Navy's fleet and new ones are still being built. It entered service in 1991 and has a unit cost of $1.84 billion. It is a multi-purpose surface combatant mostly used to escort aircraft carriers.
U.S. Navy destroyers, and until recently cruisers and frigates (which are no longer in active U.S. naval service), serve primarily as floating bases from which sea to land missiles, anti-surface combatant missiles, anti-submarine missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles are launched.
Destroyers are large (typically just under 10,000 tons and hundreds of feet long), slow moving (under 50 miles per hour at top speed and much slower at cruising speed), and are home to several hundred crew. These ships must carry not only weapons systems, but long term room and board facilities for their entire crews.
Naval exercises and a handful of actually naval encounters in the post-World War II era, have revealed that surface combatants are a high risk of suffering massive casualties from attack submarines, hypersonic missiles, aircraft launched cruise missiles or suicide aircraft attacks, or attacks by swarms of small, fast missile boats. Their deployment can also be substantially slowed with sea mines. No amount of armor can protect them from powerful missiles, and active defense systems are not 100% effective.
These ships also pose a logistics problem in a larger conflict. It can take months for a surface combatant to redeploy from one theater, for example, the East China Sea, to another, for example, the North Atlantic Ocean. Typically, about a third to two-thirds of the surface combatant fleet is in port between deployments, at any given time.
But, the same missiles that are launched from surface combatants can also be launched from heavy bombers (the P-8, the B-52, the B-1, the B-2 and possible future aircraft), as autonomous cruise missiles from based on the ground, and from submarines outfitted to the task (as some Ohio class submarines have been).
Only about 5% of the total crew for an aircraft is on the plane when it is deployed on a sortie, while the room and board for the flight crew and the support crew remain out of harms way at a remote base. Typically a heavy bomber crew will have a few of two to a dozen people on a flight, compared to about 300 on a destroyer. Surface combatants are also very expensive (while the $1 billion cost of bombers like the B-2 were exaggerated because R&D costs were spread over a much smaller number of aircraft than anticipated, and is still less than the cost of a destroyer) and surface combatants can be difficult to resupply promptly as sea.
Aircraft move at least ten times as fast as surface combatants, are much smaller targets and can employ stealth technology in many cases, stay in the active combat theater for just a few hours rather than continuously for weeks, and take days rather than months to redeploy from one theater of combat to another. Airborne refueling can address the range limitations of aircraft.
Submarines are large, crew heavy, and slow like surface combatants, but are much harder for even a sophisticated enemy to locate and destroy. Yet, they can be just as effective as surface combatants in many roles. For example, submarine launched missiles were just as useful as surface combatant launched missiles in the bombing campaign against Libya during its Arab Spring uprising.
While there are niches (e.g. the diplomatic usefulness of threatening force by deploying surface combatants in the vicinity of a potential conflict area, or providing a base for Marines where no land base is available), it makes a great deal of sense to shift a large share of responsibility for anti-surface combatant warfare, anti-submarine warfare, and launching missiles at coastal land targets, from war ships to submarines and long range heavy bombers and patrol aircraft and cruise missiles. Neither submarines nor aircraft are nearly as vulnerable to enemy attack as large surface combatants. This is one reason that many nations have refrained from purchasing large warships.
Automation
The Zumwalt class DDG-1000 destroyer
Modern ships, like the Littoral Combat Ships and the Zumwalt class destroyers (DDG-1000), operate with crews of about a third of the crews of comparable Oliver Perry Frigates, Arleigh Burke destroyers, and recently retired classes of cruisers. Simply automating replacements of these ships from the bottom up would allow crews to be reduced from 200-300 sailors to 70-100 sailors.
Carrier Escorts
One of the main responsibilities of frigates, cruisers and destroyers in the U.S. Navy is to escort aircraft carriers which have few missile batteries, anti-missile/anti-aircraft weapons, and anti-submarine sensors of their own.
Most replacements for today's destroyers, in addition to being automated, should be designed narrowly for the purpose of escorting air craft carriers by providing defensive capabilities it cannot provide itself (like the Aegis sensor network and anti-submarine warfare sensor network of the carrier group as a whole, extended over many miles at sea, defense from swarm attacks of small missile boats, and anti-missile firepower), while ceasing to be bases for sea to land missiles, or playing a central role in destroying large enemy warships or submarines.
Carrier escorts might be 3,000-5,000 tons rather than the 10,000 tons or so of a modern destroyer or cruiser, and have a crew of 80 sailors or so.
Missile Defense Cruisers
The San Antonio Class Marine Amphibious Transport Dock (LPD-17) Hull is one design that has been considered for a ballistic missile defense cruiser. The Zumwalt has also been suggested as a template for a ballistic missile defense cruiser.
One niche where a surface combatant might be useful is in a ballistic and cruise missile defense role against missiles launched by rouge states like North Korea or Iran.
In this role, having a ship present on task at all times close to the expected launch location of the missile where it is not possible to secure a local military base would provide an opportunity for a prompt launch of an intercepting missile. The Navy has shown success with this kind of missile defense technology, while similar programs in the rest of the armed forces have not been nearly as successful.
This ship might be nuclear powered, since it would need to spend long, uninterrupted tours on task in distant locations where resupply is not easily available or commercial shipping has been disrupted.
Transport Submarines
The military would often like to be able to covertly deploy significant numbers of ground troops and heavy equipment (like tanks and trucks) by surprise or in blockaded coastal areas. It would also like to be able to resupply allies whose access to commercial shipping has been disrupted (something that doesn't necessarily take a very sophisticated naval force, or even any naval force, to accomplish as aircraft and artillery can also disrupt shipping), or to evacuate troops or civilians from an area where surface cargo ships are at high risk of being sunk. A concept drawing of one can be found here.
The military would also like to have the capability to deliver cargo under ice sheets, such as those found in the Arctic, to reduce shipping times.
One sensible way to achieve these objectives would be with large (Ohio class sized, for example) transport submarines. These submarines would not have to have the sophisticated and expensive weapons of attack submarines, without the ability to function at the depths of existing U.S. Navy submarines, and could probably manage with air independent propulsion systems which allow submarines to stay submerged for weeks instead of months or years. They could be more automated than existing attack and nuclear missile submarines, both because of their more modern designs, and because they would have fewer crew intensive military capabilities.
A variant on the transport submarine is the Littoral Warfare Submarine concept designed for inserting troops with stealth in coastal environments.
Submarines As Command Ships
Submarines are also attractive alternatives to surface combatants as command ships, i.e. a base for executive and intelligence staff and support personnel for a military unit (e.g. a field hospital) that does not engaged directly in combat as part of a naval group. Since command ships almost by definition have reduced offensive and defensive capabilities relative to primary combatants, it makes sense to put these functions in a less visible and difficult to determine location to the extent feasible.
One obvious way to create a submarine command ship would be to adapt a submarine transport ship for the purpose.
Combat Boats and Missile Boats
China's Houbei class missile boats are just 225 tons v. 10,000 tons for a U.S. destroyer and carry 83 small missiles. They do not include living accommodations for the crew and can reach high speeds. They are designed to mount "swarm" attacks on larger conventional warships. In blue sea operations, a missile boat would have to be supported by a mothership that would house the crew and provide supplies for the missile boats.
Seven countries including the United States which has six of them for military engagements on rivers use the Swedish CB90-class fast assault craft which cost about $3 million each. It is the fastest and most maneuverable military boat currently in service anywhere of which am I aware, and can operate in water less than three feet deep.
It has a crew of three, three machine guns, a grenade launcher, and a small number of small mines, and can be mounted with a Hellfire missile or armor. It can also carry up to 21 troops and has been converted for use as a rapidly responding water based command post, ambulance, search and rescue craft.
It is well suited for addressing piracy, smuggling, and delivering troops to island destinations. The U.S. military all to often uses far more expensive and slower and less agile destroyers for this missions, which may win every battle, but will ultimately lose a war of attrition. It also represents the kind of basic frame that make might sense for a close fire support boat.
Close Fire Support Boats
The X-18 Fire Support Vessel concept known as the "tank boat". See also here.
Perhaps one in six or seven Marine landing craft could be converted to a close fire support role. It would be armed with a main gun the size of a tank's main gun, and/or a battery of short range missiles powerful enough to destroy fortified gun nests and armored vehicles on the shore that are engaging the landing group, in lieu of soldiers and supplies of its own. It would have armor comparable to that of a main battle tank. This should be technologically feasible because if a landing craft can carry a tank to shore, it ought to be able to integrate what is essentially a tank stripped of its treads and engine.
Essentially, close fire support boats would provide artillery support to landing parties. They would be deployed from a landing ship dock or amphibious assault ship, just like other landing craft, and would not have long term accommodations for the crew on board.
It might also have heavy machine guns for anti-personnel purposes, anti-small craft lasers, light anti-aircraft missiles primarily to address fighter sized transport bombers and helicopters and armed drones, and active point defense resources similar to the Navy's Phalanx close in weapons system to address incoming missiles and artillery rounds.
These boats could also be used in patrol roles to interdict and regulate shipping, to support operating bases near the coast, to intercept and destroy armed small craft, and to deploy fire power up major rivers.
High Speed Transport Ships
The HSV-2 Swift
The USNS Spearhead JHSV-1
Ships can carry much larger loads than aircraft, but are incredibly slow. One way to bridge that gap is with high speed transports such as the HSV-2 Swift retired in 2013 and the JHSV-1 introduced in 2011. But, because sealift capability serves the Army, another military service, it has rarely been a popular program with naval procurement officials.
The Swift, for example, can travel up to 3500 nautical miles at 45 knots while carrying 605 tons of cargo. The loaded ship is about 1668 tons, about one-sixth the size of a destroyer. It has a crew of 35.
The Spearhead with a crew of 22 can berth 150 passengers, transport another 312 troops, and can serve as a base for a medium sized helicopter while traveling at 43 knots.
A variant on this concept is the concept of "distributed lethality" which includes the notion of placing more powerful weapons on ships such as the LCS and high speed transports that traditionally have had only minimal standard armaments, such as in the concept of a JHSV-1 outfitted with a railgun shown below.
Military Systems For Ground Troops
A Medium Grade, C-130 Transportable Missile Tank, Manned or Unmanned
A British Army Light Missile Tank
An Anti-Aircraft Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle
An Anti-Tank Missile Variant of the 13-15 ton Turkish ACV-15 Infantry Fighting Vehicle
A C-130 transport aircraft can only carry 19 tons. One Army vehicle designed to conform to that limitation, which makes it much easier to deploy rapidly, is the Stryker armored personnel carrier.
The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle weighs about 35 tons (but half of the 70 tons of an M1-A Abrams main battle tank which has heavier armor and a crew of three or four) and holds a similar number of infantry to the Stryker, but with heavier armor and anti-tank missiles in lieu of a central tank gun. Despite having anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, the Bradley was just as effective at destroying Iraqi tanks in the Iraq War as U.S. M-1A tanks.
It would be useful to have a vehicle with a tank sized crew, rather than an infantry carrying role, anti-tank missiles rather than a main gun, and armor closer in strength to the Bradley than to the Stryker, yet within the 19 ton and dimensional limitations of the C-130 transport aircraft. This would provide the most heavily armored and armed rapidly deployable armed military vehicle in the U.S. military and would rival comparable vehicles anywhere in the world.
Simply eliminating the infantry crew capability from the existing Bradley design, shrinking it in length, would go a long way towards trimming the necessary 16 tons from the weight of a regular Bradley to fit this role.
This lighter narrower missile tank could also be used in urban and mountain areas where passages are too narrow for a full sized main battle tank without considerable engineering work on the passage, and it could be used in places where civilian bridges are not U.S. military grade using existing infrastructure.
In a more radical version of this concept, weight could be reduced by removing all crew in a remote controlled drone version of this medium grade missile tank, rather than just reducing the size of the crew.
The 13.5 ton British Stormer would be an example of the system in this class, as is China's 13.75 ton HJ-9. A smaller 4.5 ton Ferret, Mk5 Scout Car has a similar role. A concept using Hellfire missiles is realized here and loosely based on a prototype M-113 Hellfire missile launcher.
A Next Generation Combat Patrol Vehicle
The Oshkosh L-ATV won the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contest to replace the Humvee
This vehicle would replace the armored Humvee and smaller interim MRAP vehicles to provide transportation for four soldiers and their gear on patrol in hostile territory where small arms fire and IED attacks could be expected. As a purpose built armored vehicle, it could avoid the problems of associated with aftermarket armor that the vehicle wasn't designed to bear which plagued the Humvee.
A program to design and produce this vehicle already exists and the winner is shown above.
Long Range Sniper Rifles With Assisted Aiming And Guided Exacto Bullets
Advanced sighting systems can allow a novice to shot a sniper rifle with the precision of an expert.
Smart bullets (0.50 caliber) that swerve in flight to hit targets in motion or around corners or behind walls further ups the ante. Combine the two and the lethality of a sniper using this advanced weapon system is profoundly increased.
Short Range Grenade Launchers With Range Control
The XM-25 was proposed to give U.S. soldiers a short range grenade launcher with "smart" grenades that can detonate at a specific distance (e.g. above an enemy position in a trench or foxhole). Prototypes were tested in Afghanistan starting in 2010, but the non-experimental version is not scheduled to enter service until 2017. It has a range four times as great (600 meters) as the M203 grenade launcher (which uses "dumb" grenades) that it replaces.
Each weapon costs about $35,000 and the rounds cost about $55 each.
Carbines That Can Shoot Around Corners With Video Sights
An accessory called Corner Shot allows soldiers to shoot around corners with video sights, thereby eliminating the need to expose themselves to enemy fire in order to shoot at them from behind cover.
Mobile Point Defense Vehicles
The Army's Centurian C-RAM system puts a Navy Phalanx point defense system on a semi-trailer that can be trucked to provide active point defense to a military base or other potential target.
A prototype Army high energy laser mobile demonstrator (HEL MD)
This would be a glorified flatbed truck or semi-trailer with either a modified Phalanx close in weapons system or active defense laser weapon that could be moved to a location to provide point defense to a small military base or a civilian facility from air to ground missiles, artillery shells, and armed drones.
Active defense laser weapons are becoming standard on U.S. warships, even though land vehicle based and aircraft based laser systems have largely been duds so far.
Rapid Response Forward Observer Vehicle
The Dutch Fennek Armored Reconnaissance Vehicle is a forward observer vehicle in current military service that also has an anti-aircraft missile bearing version.
A fictional prototype vehicle called the Tumbler from the movie Batman Begins captures the concept well.
The concept here is that it is sometimes no longer necessary for the military system that is used to order a strike with a guided bomb or missile to a target to carry the ordinance itself. Instead, it merely needs a targeting system and some means of communicating the coordinates of the target to an artillery battery, aircraft with bombs, cruise missile battery, or ship or submarine with sea to land missiles like the Tomahawk, which would launch their missile or smart bomb at the target.
This would allow the vehicle itself to be small and fast, although protecting the occupants would remain a priority.
Epiphany And Non-Religious Living
[Originally written January 6, 2011.]
If I were a religious man, I might call my blog Epiphany, which is today, as this blog is all about revelations that turn knowledge into true understanding. In modern iconography, we represent epiphanies with light bulbs in thought bubbles over people's heads.
Epiphany is the first day of the third liturgical season of the year. The first is Advent (starting the fourth Sunday before Christmas), the second is Christmas (from December 25 until Epiphany), the third is Epiphany, and the next is Lent which begins Ash Wednesday, followed by the liturgical season of Easter and then by the liturgical season of Pentecost. It is less important, in the Western Christian tradition, than Christmas and Easter and Lent, but arguably more notable than Pentecost, the other "in between" season.
At one point, Epiphany was celebrated for forty days (the same length as Lent) with Candlemas closing that season on February 2, thereby Christianizing Groundhog Day (notable because it is the day halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox). A more common modern liturgical practice is to end the liturgical season of Epiphany with Mardi Gras (the day before Lent begins), which floats to different days from year to year out of a design to have some link between the Jewish holiday of Passover, the date of which is set in a lunar Jewish calendar, and Easter, which has powerful biblical echoes of the Passover story.
The date that the Roman Catholic Church assigned to Epiphany was the date that the Eastern Orthodox Church assigned to Christmas (i.e. the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, although in the Eastern Church the Baptism of Christ was also celebrated at this time as part of a larger celebration of Christ's involvement in the world).
In the Western church, Epiphany, sometimes know as "Three Kings Day," marks the moment when the divinity of Baby Jesus was revealed and the three Wise Men from the East gave Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh (being old men, they didn't know much about what families really need at a baby shower), and then, most generously, left for home without telling King Herod where Jesus was living in breach of their agreement to inform him. It is also celebrated as the twelfth day of Christmas (per the carol).
The fact that I can write this entire post for you from memory is proof that I have way too much religious education in a Western Christian liturgical tradition for any reasonable atheist.
I was baptised and confirmed as a Lutheran, and was a parishioner, college youth group member, and Sunday school teacher at the local Episcopal Church when I was an undergraduate, despite not really believing in God at that point, and also spend about a year regularly attending my wife's parents Korean Presbyterian Church when we lived near them and some time attending a Presbyterian Church in Grand Junction, Colorado. Some habits are hard to break and I wanted to give the possibility that the denomination rather than the underlying religious worldview was the issue. My religious education was bolstered by a college minor in history, a large part of which in my case involved medieval European history which was in large part a history of the Roman Catholic Church, since nobody else was literate enough to do much history writing in Western Europe, and involvement with classical choral music, much of which is drawn from the Latin version of the Roman Catholic liturgy.
The going to church part, the music, the regular bible readings, the church tradition, and pastoral musings of the pastor, were all quite tolerable parts of being a Christian. And, the part of Christianity I was a part of growing up, unlike the more prominent parts of the Christian faith today, was not particularly evil. Honestly, if it weren't for the whole not believing in God thing, I'd probably have seriously considered going to divinity school and becoming a minister, instead of going to law school. There are a lot of very congenial elements to being a minister, and ministers have the opportunity to do a lot of good in the world.
Most American Christians who are active church participants today are part of a religious movement deeply rooted in hate, selfishness, self-righteousness, bigotry, willful ignorance of science, sexism, and entirely too little guilt for their own sinfulness, and are also increasingly detached from millennia of church tradition. But, that isn't why I am not a Christian and I could easily have found a Christian community that wasn't morally screwed up. There are quite a few denominations of Christianity out there that are not mostly evil and are more still that try very hard to avoid questions of good and evil and morality entirely, although most of the not evil churches seem to be in dire straights as their pews grow emptier year after year. I am, I suppose, ethnically Christian, and certainly share a lot of the worldview of the minority of Christians who are committed to being morally good people.
There was a time not so long ago when "doing the Christian thing" or "acting Christian" meant something along the lines of being compassionate and merciful and tolerant. Sometime along the way, it is hard to pin down when in the late 19th century or in the 20th century it happened, that ceased to be true.
There are even Christians who can escape the trap of Biblical literalism and accept the existence of divinity, Jesus and a higher power who is active in the lives of his worshippers who can comfortably still view the anti-scientific propositions of Genesis and other parts of the Bible as a morally meaningful legend rather than as a scientifically accurate descriptions of pre-history, and those folks are particularly unlike to be evil morally. One of the fundamental tenants of Methodism, more forgotten on dusty shelves than lived these days, placed reason and experience at the core of canonical ways to understand God and to assemble a worldview, something that is hardly anti-scientific. But, I am not so pliable that I can feel at peace with myself, honoring the traditions and reciting the words, without believing that there is not a more or less biblically described divine being behind them, a position that Bishop John Shelby Spong is famous for advocating.
I ceased to be a Christian, not because Christianity or God was evil, or because I didn't like going to church, but because the more I read the Bible, learned about science, learned about history, learned how the Bible came to be, and so on, the less I believed that it was true.
Simply reading the Bible, rather than receiving it second hand, was probably the biggest reason I stopped believing. The more I read the Bible, the more obvious it became that Christianity was based on stuff that wasn't true. I didn't become aware of existing atheist philosophical arguments until long after I'd reached the conclusion myself by reading the Bible. Of course, reading well honed and researched discussions after the fact did confirm the beliefs that I had tentatively come to already.
It is hard to be an honest, self-respecting Christian if you don't believe that the God of the Bible exists, don't believe that any Biblical miracles happened for supernatural or divine reasons, don't believe that Jesus Christ had any special powers or divinity or relationship with a divine being, don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, don't believe in angels or demons, and don't think that there is any extranatural being or force in the world acting with moral purpose in human lives. Without this foundation upon which Christianity flows, it becomes nothing more than literature and some beliefs that other people have held and some rituals that other people (including my past self) carried out.
For me, Christianity fits in the same category as Greek mythology. It is interesting and has interesting insights buried in it. It is part of something that educated people should know because it is part of a historical cultural legacy that produced the world whose culture I lay claim to myself. It was something that some people once believed and honored with elaborate rituals. But, I don't believe that any of it is true and have no reason other than nostalgia or whimsy to carry on its traditions. And, the logic by which my worldview arrived at this conclusion encompasses all of the other world religions of which I am aware as well.
I don't have any great beef with people who have religious beliefs but aren't morally deficient as a result and don't ignore science in ways that matter in real life. Religious beliefs that I just can't bring myself to share strike me as a little odd, but I'm not adverse to people who hold them any more than I and anyone else has a strong aversion to people who put faith in horoscopes, spend money on lottery tickets because they believe that have some source for lucky numbers, avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks for superstitious reasons, think that ghosts are real, or are convinced that they are alien abductees. Whatever. Lots of reasonably good people believe some harmless but odd things.
It would be very convenient to be religious and to be part of an organized practicing religious community. But, in order to be honest to myself, I'd rather be moral without resort to higher powers, and find other ways to address the needs in life that religious practice and belief fills in the lives of others.
It turns out that once you get the hang of it, it is lot less difficult to be non-religious that I would have expected it to be. Pascal's wager notwithstanding, I feel not the slightest twinge of worry about the fate of the soul that I don't believe that I have in a metaphysical sense. Even in moments of extreme emotion and stress, I feel no impulse to pray. Having Sunday mornings free turns out to be terribly convenient. Reading the Bible and thinking about metaphysical ideas less often leaves much more quality quiet time to explore other more worthwhile ideas. Hell, even reading the Bible is more satisfying when you are reading it as a non-divine relic of a past civilization, instead of trying to use it as a guide to what you should believe and how you should live your life. Lack of religious belief has made moral decision-making and thinking much more straightforward and I certainly don't think that I am any less moral as a person as a result of it, nor do I miss in any way the role that the church would have played in the moral instruction of my children. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that it has made the moral instruction of my children easier.
I don't sing as much as I used to, and that is unfortunate. Sacred music has an extraordinary share of the market share of choral music activity, particularly for B grade singers, and I'm not such a great singer that I could be a part of the elite musical choral groups that make up a large share of the not religiously affiliated choral music groups. If I were really bothered, I'd help organize an alternative (something hardly without precedent, for example, in the case of popular barber shop quartets for a good stretch of American history), but it isn't enough of a priority for me to justify that effort, so I enjoy music, classical and otherwise, mostly as a spectator and in privacy with no one else around to hear now. It is far easier to find secular alternatives to church patronage of art, architecture, elite musical and dramatic performances, and philosophical discussion, than it is to find alternatives to participatory roles in making choral music.
I had a religious wedding, and have been to many religious funerals in my life. But, having attended some non-religious weddings and funerals, which I found more satisfactory and emotionally pleasing than the standard issue religious versions, I no longer feel that religious weddings and funerals are indispensable or even very helpful as I once had thought.
Some people feel that infant baptism or an equivalent ceremony is crucial as a naming ceremony and introduction of children into the world. We skipped it (to my late mother's great dismay), and the closest we came to an alternative was a Korean style First Birthday celebration which was entirely satisfactory as an alternative. I feel no fear that we won't be able to adequately honor our children's coming of age without religious trappings when the time comes.
I have a lot of respect for the pastoral care model of dealing with difficulties in one's emotional and family life, as an alternative to the medical-disorder model of psychiatry and psychology. Indeed, one idea that floats around in my head now and then that I've never quite managed to develop very well is a way to incorporate that into secular people's lives in a sort of chaplaincy or institutional counselor role that is demedicalized. But, the truth of the matter is that while I know people who availed themselves of those resources and benefited greatly for help in dealing with grief, to deal with impending mortality, for resolving conflicts in families, for reinventing themselves after incarcerations and addictions, and other life struggles, it isn't anything that I every experienced personally outside of a pre-marital counseling session that to put it politely, added no value. It is hard to miss what you haven't experienced all that much.
The distance I've gotten from day to day involvement in Christianity has made me more aware of the annoying sides of pervasive Christian linked practices in society. Without a belief in the divinity of Christ to give them meaning, Christmas and Easter can become something of an irritating drag, especially if you were, like I was when I was I Christian, someone who had always downplayed the commercial and pagan aspects of those holidays in favor of their uniquely Christian components. The "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance bugs me a little, and when asked to swear or affirm something, orally and in public, I prefer to affirm, even though most people these days are completely oblivious to the religious element of the concept of swearing an oath at all.
Really the biggest downside to not being a Christian is that churches are ready made social communities of families similar to you without any real specific goal or purpose whom you can count as your friends and neighbors. People are meant to live in communities, not as isolated households alone in the world, and creating those social communities without the benefit of designated volunteers, paid full time community leaders, deep ancestral ties, and "script" of interactions and events to follow is much more work. Church membership is a form of genuine interactive citizenship in a group of people who happen to be, while most "extracurricular" involvements in life, like the bar association, PTA, neighborhood association, or special interest clubs are more about some purpose than about fellowship and the pure well being of the members in a holistic sense. Every book I have read on secular living points out this institutional shortcoming, but I haven't seen those kinds of institutions emerge. My intuition, informed by involvement at one point with a group trying to organize a "Church of Freethought" that ultimately failed is that they need to emerge naturally, rather than by copying existing religious organizations, and that as institutions do emerge that fill these needs they will not be strictly parallel to churches, because they will have a different organizing principal of common bonds between participants and meet a different portfolio of needs, probably in different bundles. Even the most complete realizations of these kinds of visions, like the Unitarian-Universalist churches, haven't really thrived and become widespread even as the "target audience" for these institutions has exploded.
Indeed, the traditional "business model" of churches themselves is changing. Mainline denomination parish churches that continue to operate as they have for the last two hundred years without significant innovations what purposes they serve and how they go about carrying out those ends are in trouble. Contemporary music has made its way from something confined to black Pentecostal churches, to once stodgy, traditional liturgical denominations. The big tend it towards non-denominational megachurches that offer rec centers, pre-schools, group therapy, niche interest groups, contemporary music and more, in the context of Evangelical leaning but studiedly vague religious instruction. They wouldn't survive on the "core" business of church services alone.
Still, as the years pass, I become more and more convinced that a post-Christian culture in the United States not only can emerge, but is emerging and indeed is well on the way to becoming inevitable, even though I can't envision what all of its core elements will look like once is gels and stabilizes with great clarity. My intuition is that these institutions will be mostly secular, rather than explicitly non-religious. My intuition is that they will serve a different portfolio of needs than an traditional mainline Christian parish church. My intuition is that these institutions will be developed by people who happen to lack strong connections to religious organizations who are interested in meeting particular needs and desires that they have rather than by people who have an "anti-religious" or expressly "non-religious" agenda. Most people will probably never even notice that some of these new institutions serve needs that have historically been filled by churches. They may instead look simply like a revival of institutions that build "social capital" after an across the board decline in all non-work, non-family organizations that require the active participation and presence of their members rather than mere check writing.
These new institutions also have more than one gap to fill. In addition to filling for the non-religious some of the functional roles once filled by churches, there are other gaps in civil society that are open and waiting to be filled by new institutions. The withering of civic organizations like the Freemasons and Elks, the fading of labor unions, the shuttering in many communities of libraries driving by lack of tax revenues. Full service country clubs are shrinking at the expense of single purpose health clubs or golf clubs, as they find it hard to attract affluent thirtysomething or forty somethings.
If I were a religious man, I might call my blog Epiphany, which is today, as this blog is all about revelations that turn knowledge into true understanding. In modern iconography, we represent epiphanies with light bulbs in thought bubbles over people's heads.
Epiphany is the first day of the third liturgical season of the year. The first is Advent (starting the fourth Sunday before Christmas), the second is Christmas (from December 25 until Epiphany), the third is Epiphany, and the next is Lent which begins Ash Wednesday, followed by the liturgical season of Easter and then by the liturgical season of Pentecost. It is less important, in the Western Christian tradition, than Christmas and Easter and Lent, but arguably more notable than Pentecost, the other "in between" season.
At one point, Epiphany was celebrated for forty days (the same length as Lent) with Candlemas closing that season on February 2, thereby Christianizing Groundhog Day (notable because it is the day halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox). A more common modern liturgical practice is to end the liturgical season of Epiphany with Mardi Gras (the day before Lent begins), which floats to different days from year to year out of a design to have some link between the Jewish holiday of Passover, the date of which is set in a lunar Jewish calendar, and Easter, which has powerful biblical echoes of the Passover story.
The date that the Roman Catholic Church assigned to Epiphany was the date that the Eastern Orthodox Church assigned to Christmas (i.e. the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, although in the Eastern Church the Baptism of Christ was also celebrated at this time as part of a larger celebration of Christ's involvement in the world).
In the Western church, Epiphany, sometimes know as "Three Kings Day," marks the moment when the divinity of Baby Jesus was revealed and the three Wise Men from the East gave Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh (being old men, they didn't know much about what families really need at a baby shower), and then, most generously, left for home without telling King Herod where Jesus was living in breach of their agreement to inform him. It is also celebrated as the twelfth day of Christmas (per the carol).
The fact that I can write this entire post for you from memory is proof that I have way too much religious education in a Western Christian liturgical tradition for any reasonable atheist.
I was baptised and confirmed as a Lutheran, and was a parishioner, college youth group member, and Sunday school teacher at the local Episcopal Church when I was an undergraduate, despite not really believing in God at that point, and also spend about a year regularly attending my wife's parents Korean Presbyterian Church when we lived near them and some time attending a Presbyterian Church in Grand Junction, Colorado. Some habits are hard to break and I wanted to give the possibility that the denomination rather than the underlying religious worldview was the issue. My religious education was bolstered by a college minor in history, a large part of which in my case involved medieval European history which was in large part a history of the Roman Catholic Church, since nobody else was literate enough to do much history writing in Western Europe, and involvement with classical choral music, much of which is drawn from the Latin version of the Roman Catholic liturgy.
The going to church part, the music, the regular bible readings, the church tradition, and pastoral musings of the pastor, were all quite tolerable parts of being a Christian. And, the part of Christianity I was a part of growing up, unlike the more prominent parts of the Christian faith today, was not particularly evil. Honestly, if it weren't for the whole not believing in God thing, I'd probably have seriously considered going to divinity school and becoming a minister, instead of going to law school. There are a lot of very congenial elements to being a minister, and ministers have the opportunity to do a lot of good in the world.
Most American Christians who are active church participants today are part of a religious movement deeply rooted in hate, selfishness, self-righteousness, bigotry, willful ignorance of science, sexism, and entirely too little guilt for their own sinfulness, and are also increasingly detached from millennia of church tradition. But, that isn't why I am not a Christian and I could easily have found a Christian community that wasn't morally screwed up. There are quite a few denominations of Christianity out there that are not mostly evil and are more still that try very hard to avoid questions of good and evil and morality entirely, although most of the not evil churches seem to be in dire straights as their pews grow emptier year after year. I am, I suppose, ethnically Christian, and certainly share a lot of the worldview of the minority of Christians who are committed to being morally good people.
There was a time not so long ago when "doing the Christian thing" or "acting Christian" meant something along the lines of being compassionate and merciful and tolerant. Sometime along the way, it is hard to pin down when in the late 19th century or in the 20th century it happened, that ceased to be true.
There are even Christians who can escape the trap of Biblical literalism and accept the existence of divinity, Jesus and a higher power who is active in the lives of his worshippers who can comfortably still view the anti-scientific propositions of Genesis and other parts of the Bible as a morally meaningful legend rather than as a scientifically accurate descriptions of pre-history, and those folks are particularly unlike to be evil morally. One of the fundamental tenants of Methodism, more forgotten on dusty shelves than lived these days, placed reason and experience at the core of canonical ways to understand God and to assemble a worldview, something that is hardly anti-scientific. But, I am not so pliable that I can feel at peace with myself, honoring the traditions and reciting the words, without believing that there is not a more or less biblically described divine being behind them, a position that Bishop John Shelby Spong is famous for advocating.
I ceased to be a Christian, not because Christianity or God was evil, or because I didn't like going to church, but because the more I read the Bible, learned about science, learned about history, learned how the Bible came to be, and so on, the less I believed that it was true.
Simply reading the Bible, rather than receiving it second hand, was probably the biggest reason I stopped believing. The more I read the Bible, the more obvious it became that Christianity was based on stuff that wasn't true. I didn't become aware of existing atheist philosophical arguments until long after I'd reached the conclusion myself by reading the Bible. Of course, reading well honed and researched discussions after the fact did confirm the beliefs that I had tentatively come to already.
It is hard to be an honest, self-respecting Christian if you don't believe that the God of the Bible exists, don't believe that any Biblical miracles happened for supernatural or divine reasons, don't believe that Jesus Christ had any special powers or divinity or relationship with a divine being, don't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, don't believe in angels or demons, and don't think that there is any extranatural being or force in the world acting with moral purpose in human lives. Without this foundation upon which Christianity flows, it becomes nothing more than literature and some beliefs that other people have held and some rituals that other people (including my past self) carried out.
For me, Christianity fits in the same category as Greek mythology. It is interesting and has interesting insights buried in it. It is part of something that educated people should know because it is part of a historical cultural legacy that produced the world whose culture I lay claim to myself. It was something that some people once believed and honored with elaborate rituals. But, I don't believe that any of it is true and have no reason other than nostalgia or whimsy to carry on its traditions. And, the logic by which my worldview arrived at this conclusion encompasses all of the other world religions of which I am aware as well.
I don't have any great beef with people who have religious beliefs but aren't morally deficient as a result and don't ignore science in ways that matter in real life. Religious beliefs that I just can't bring myself to share strike me as a little odd, but I'm not adverse to people who hold them any more than I and anyone else has a strong aversion to people who put faith in horoscopes, spend money on lottery tickets because they believe that have some source for lucky numbers, avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks for superstitious reasons, think that ghosts are real, or are convinced that they are alien abductees. Whatever. Lots of reasonably good people believe some harmless but odd things.
It would be very convenient to be religious and to be part of an organized practicing religious community. But, in order to be honest to myself, I'd rather be moral without resort to higher powers, and find other ways to address the needs in life that religious practice and belief fills in the lives of others.
It turns out that once you get the hang of it, it is lot less difficult to be non-religious that I would have expected it to be. Pascal's wager notwithstanding, I feel not the slightest twinge of worry about the fate of the soul that I don't believe that I have in a metaphysical sense. Even in moments of extreme emotion and stress, I feel no impulse to pray. Having Sunday mornings free turns out to be terribly convenient. Reading the Bible and thinking about metaphysical ideas less often leaves much more quality quiet time to explore other more worthwhile ideas. Hell, even reading the Bible is more satisfying when you are reading it as a non-divine relic of a past civilization, instead of trying to use it as a guide to what you should believe and how you should live your life. Lack of religious belief has made moral decision-making and thinking much more straightforward and I certainly don't think that I am any less moral as a person as a result of it, nor do I miss in any way the role that the church would have played in the moral instruction of my children. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that it has made the moral instruction of my children easier.
I don't sing as much as I used to, and that is unfortunate. Sacred music has an extraordinary share of the market share of choral music activity, particularly for B grade singers, and I'm not such a great singer that I could be a part of the elite musical choral groups that make up a large share of the not religiously affiliated choral music groups. If I were really bothered, I'd help organize an alternative (something hardly without precedent, for example, in the case of popular barber shop quartets for a good stretch of American history), but it isn't enough of a priority for me to justify that effort, so I enjoy music, classical and otherwise, mostly as a spectator and in privacy with no one else around to hear now. It is far easier to find secular alternatives to church patronage of art, architecture, elite musical and dramatic performances, and philosophical discussion, than it is to find alternatives to participatory roles in making choral music.
I had a religious wedding, and have been to many religious funerals in my life. But, having attended some non-religious weddings and funerals, which I found more satisfactory and emotionally pleasing than the standard issue religious versions, I no longer feel that religious weddings and funerals are indispensable or even very helpful as I once had thought.
Some people feel that infant baptism or an equivalent ceremony is crucial as a naming ceremony and introduction of children into the world. We skipped it (to my late mother's great dismay), and the closest we came to an alternative was a Korean style First Birthday celebration which was entirely satisfactory as an alternative. I feel no fear that we won't be able to adequately honor our children's coming of age without religious trappings when the time comes.
I have a lot of respect for the pastoral care model of dealing with difficulties in one's emotional and family life, as an alternative to the medical-disorder model of psychiatry and psychology. Indeed, one idea that floats around in my head now and then that I've never quite managed to develop very well is a way to incorporate that into secular people's lives in a sort of chaplaincy or institutional counselor role that is demedicalized. But, the truth of the matter is that while I know people who availed themselves of those resources and benefited greatly for help in dealing with grief, to deal with impending mortality, for resolving conflicts in families, for reinventing themselves after incarcerations and addictions, and other life struggles, it isn't anything that I every experienced personally outside of a pre-marital counseling session that to put it politely, added no value. It is hard to miss what you haven't experienced all that much.
The distance I've gotten from day to day involvement in Christianity has made me more aware of the annoying sides of pervasive Christian linked practices in society. Without a belief in the divinity of Christ to give them meaning, Christmas and Easter can become something of an irritating drag, especially if you were, like I was when I was I Christian, someone who had always downplayed the commercial and pagan aspects of those holidays in favor of their uniquely Christian components. The "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance bugs me a little, and when asked to swear or affirm something, orally and in public, I prefer to affirm, even though most people these days are completely oblivious to the religious element of the concept of swearing an oath at all.
Really the biggest downside to not being a Christian is that churches are ready made social communities of families similar to you without any real specific goal or purpose whom you can count as your friends and neighbors. People are meant to live in communities, not as isolated households alone in the world, and creating those social communities without the benefit of designated volunteers, paid full time community leaders, deep ancestral ties, and "script" of interactions and events to follow is much more work. Church membership is a form of genuine interactive citizenship in a group of people who happen to be, while most "extracurricular" involvements in life, like the bar association, PTA, neighborhood association, or special interest clubs are more about some purpose than about fellowship and the pure well being of the members in a holistic sense. Every book I have read on secular living points out this institutional shortcoming, but I haven't seen those kinds of institutions emerge. My intuition, informed by involvement at one point with a group trying to organize a "Church of Freethought" that ultimately failed is that they need to emerge naturally, rather than by copying existing religious organizations, and that as institutions do emerge that fill these needs they will not be strictly parallel to churches, because they will have a different organizing principal of common bonds between participants and meet a different portfolio of needs, probably in different bundles. Even the most complete realizations of these kinds of visions, like the Unitarian-Universalist churches, haven't really thrived and become widespread even as the "target audience" for these institutions has exploded.
Indeed, the traditional "business model" of churches themselves is changing. Mainline denomination parish churches that continue to operate as they have for the last two hundred years without significant innovations what purposes they serve and how they go about carrying out those ends are in trouble. Contemporary music has made its way from something confined to black Pentecostal churches, to once stodgy, traditional liturgical denominations. The big tend it towards non-denominational megachurches that offer rec centers, pre-schools, group therapy, niche interest groups, contemporary music and more, in the context of Evangelical leaning but studiedly vague religious instruction. They wouldn't survive on the "core" business of church services alone.
Still, as the years pass, I become more and more convinced that a post-Christian culture in the United States not only can emerge, but is emerging and indeed is well on the way to becoming inevitable, even though I can't envision what all of its core elements will look like once is gels and stabilizes with great clarity. My intuition is that these institutions will be mostly secular, rather than explicitly non-religious. My intuition is that they will serve a different portfolio of needs than an traditional mainline Christian parish church. My intuition is that these institutions will be developed by people who happen to lack strong connections to religious organizations who are interested in meeting particular needs and desires that they have rather than by people who have an "anti-religious" or expressly "non-religious" agenda. Most people will probably never even notice that some of these new institutions serve needs that have historically been filled by churches. They may instead look simply like a revival of institutions that build "social capital" after an across the board decline in all non-work, non-family organizations that require the active participation and presence of their members rather than mere check writing.
These new institutions also have more than one gap to fill. In addition to filling for the non-religious some of the functional roles once filled by churches, there are other gaps in civil society that are open and waiting to be filled by new institutions. The withering of civic organizations like the Freemasons and Elks, the fading of labor unions, the shuttering in many communities of libraries driving by lack of tax revenues. Full service country clubs are shrinking at the expense of single purpose health clubs or golf clubs, as they find it hard to attract affluent thirtysomething or forty somethings.
About Venture Capital
The federal tax code bends over backwards to encourage investment by taxing it very preferentially relative to earned income. The round of tax changes signed by the President this week gilded the lily with yet another round of tax breaks designed to do just that.
But, maybe tax rates on profits from investments aren't really a good tool for achieving that end. As long as an investment is profitable and the tax rate is less than 100% there is some incentive to make that investment. And, as long as the return on investment is taxed similarly for all different kinds of investments, there is no really obvious reason that tax rates should affect the amount of investments made in the aggregate very strongly.
Generally speaking, one can't easily substitute earned income for investment income. A particular person has a certain amount of abilty to earn income and a certain amount of funds available for investment. Perhaps lower tax rates on investment will encourage people to invest rather than consume, but the famous paradox of thift says that while it may be in some individual's interest to save in hard times, it may not necessarily be helpful for everyone to save more rather than consuming in economic hard times.
There is a quite fundamental and intractable problem with a loan based approach to financing young businesses. They have a relatively high rate of failure, which means that banks making loans to them share in a big downside loss risk, but also I potential for immense growth, which banks don't share in, hence the unattractiveness of debt financing for young businesses.
The alternative, of course, is to make equity investments in young businesses.
No country in the world has a big business equity investment sector as large as that of the United States.
We have divided our banking system into two parts. Commercial banks make loans, mostly as principals although sometimes reselling loans in a secondary market, with money borrowed from depositors and other banks and funds invested by their shareholders. Investment banks facilitate the process of securing loans (in the form of corporate bonds) and equity investments (in the form of initial public offerings of stock) by serving as brokers between firms that need money and individuals and institutional investors who have money to invest in "public offerings." Investment banks also broker similar arrangements where only small numbers of institutional investors and high end individual investors are allowed to invest and the investments aren't as easily bought and sold in what are called "private offerings."
But, investment banks are an expensive way to finance businesses that involve costs sufficiently high that they only make sense as a way to get very large sums of money. Also, raising money from "the public" only works well for businesses that are basically turnkey operations where investors don't have to monitor their investment very closely to be sure that it continues to be managed well.
Commercial bank lending and lending by finance companies, turns out of be a pretty decent substitute for corporate bond offerings for smaller scale debt financing at a quite affordable cost. But, the same is largely not true in the case of equity financing.
A company that wants equity financing in smaller amounts than are economically to raise with a public offering of stock usually turns to a venture capital firm, or if the amount is smaller, to a small number of individual "angel investors" who are often successful entraprenuers in the same industry themselves. Smaller amounts still are typically secured from the owner's personal resources, and investments by family and friends.
The amount of equity investment available from venture capital firms and from angel investors is much, much smaller than the amount available in the public offering market, and was particularly hard hit during the financial crisis.
Venture capital firms typically invest in businesses that have already established themselves to some extent with less formal investment arrangements, and are typically focused strongly on businesses with very rapid growth potential in very rapidly growing industries, with an eye towards putting money in and then recovering it by making a public offering or sale of the developed business to some other big company in a time horizon on the order of about five years. Venture capital firms very actively monitor their investments, typically insisting that management of the firms that they assist put some of their representatives on the board of directors, put some professionals they trust in select management positions and often secure various kinds of business consulting in areas that the venture capital firms see as weaknesses of the current management team.
Angel investors typically buy shares of common stock, sit on the board of directors, routinely visit the firm's facilities and management on a day to day basis, and also have an orienation towards making a profit by selling their interest when a venture capital firm, public offering or sell of the business to a larger one comes along. But, the tend not to be as formal, as intrusive in how the business is managed, or as short term in their time frame for bringing the business to the next level. They too tend to be heavily focused on businesses with extremely high growth potential in industries that are growing rapidly. But, there are typically few formal institutions that help them connect their funds available for investment with businesses that need equity investment.
There a lot of good reasons why equity investing by third party investors is so rare in the small business sector. Gathering together the information needed to make full disclosure in that kind of investment is expensive. And, in a typical stock ownership arrangement, there are lots of ways for the management to deprive the owners of a fair return unless the devote a lot of time to monitoring the investment. It isn't hard to increase compensation to the point where it makes a company look less profitable.
The headquarters operations of franchises and shopping mall leases typically address the difficulties involved in measuring profits by receiving their share of the bounty as a percentage of gross sales, much like retail sales taxes imposed by state and local governments. Shopping malls are effectively making equity-like investments in their tenants by offering lower rent in exchange for a percentage of gross revenues from their tenants.
Still, the weak U.S. small business sector compared to other countries, may in part reflect poor institutional arrangements for venture capital financing of small to medium sized businesses that are not publicly held, particularly from a non-tax perspective.
But, maybe tax rates on profits from investments aren't really a good tool for achieving that end. As long as an investment is profitable and the tax rate is less than 100% there is some incentive to make that investment. And, as long as the return on investment is taxed similarly for all different kinds of investments, there is no really obvious reason that tax rates should affect the amount of investments made in the aggregate very strongly.
Generally speaking, one can't easily substitute earned income for investment income. A particular person has a certain amount of abilty to earn income and a certain amount of funds available for investment. Perhaps lower tax rates on investment will encourage people to invest rather than consume, but the famous paradox of thift says that while it may be in some individual's interest to save in hard times, it may not necessarily be helpful for everyone to save more rather than consuming in economic hard times.
There is a quite fundamental and intractable problem with a loan based approach to financing young businesses. They have a relatively high rate of failure, which means that banks making loans to them share in a big downside loss risk, but also I potential for immense growth, which banks don't share in, hence the unattractiveness of debt financing for young businesses.
The alternative, of course, is to make equity investments in young businesses.
No country in the world has a big business equity investment sector as large as that of the United States.
We have divided our banking system into two parts. Commercial banks make loans, mostly as principals although sometimes reselling loans in a secondary market, with money borrowed from depositors and other banks and funds invested by their shareholders. Investment banks facilitate the process of securing loans (in the form of corporate bonds) and equity investments (in the form of initial public offerings of stock) by serving as brokers between firms that need money and individuals and institutional investors who have money to invest in "public offerings." Investment banks also broker similar arrangements where only small numbers of institutional investors and high end individual investors are allowed to invest and the investments aren't as easily bought and sold in what are called "private offerings."
But, investment banks are an expensive way to finance businesses that involve costs sufficiently high that they only make sense as a way to get very large sums of money. Also, raising money from "the public" only works well for businesses that are basically turnkey operations where investors don't have to monitor their investment very closely to be sure that it continues to be managed well.
Commercial bank lending and lending by finance companies, turns out of be a pretty decent substitute for corporate bond offerings for smaller scale debt financing at a quite affordable cost. But, the same is largely not true in the case of equity financing.
A company that wants equity financing in smaller amounts than are economically to raise with a public offering of stock usually turns to a venture capital firm, or if the amount is smaller, to a small number of individual "angel investors" who are often successful entraprenuers in the same industry themselves. Smaller amounts still are typically secured from the owner's personal resources, and investments by family and friends.
The amount of equity investment available from venture capital firms and from angel investors is much, much smaller than the amount available in the public offering market, and was particularly hard hit during the financial crisis.
Venture capital firms typically invest in businesses that have already established themselves to some extent with less formal investment arrangements, and are typically focused strongly on businesses with very rapid growth potential in very rapidly growing industries, with an eye towards putting money in and then recovering it by making a public offering or sale of the developed business to some other big company in a time horizon on the order of about five years. Venture capital firms very actively monitor their investments, typically insisting that management of the firms that they assist put some of their representatives on the board of directors, put some professionals they trust in select management positions and often secure various kinds of business consulting in areas that the venture capital firms see as weaknesses of the current management team.
Angel investors typically buy shares of common stock, sit on the board of directors, routinely visit the firm's facilities and management on a day to day basis, and also have an orienation towards making a profit by selling their interest when a venture capital firm, public offering or sell of the business to a larger one comes along. But, the tend not to be as formal, as intrusive in how the business is managed, or as short term in their time frame for bringing the business to the next level. They too tend to be heavily focused on businesses with extremely high growth potential in industries that are growing rapidly. But, there are typically few formal institutions that help them connect their funds available for investment with businesses that need equity investment.
There a lot of good reasons why equity investing by third party investors is so rare in the small business sector. Gathering together the information needed to make full disclosure in that kind of investment is expensive. And, in a typical stock ownership arrangement, there are lots of ways for the management to deprive the owners of a fair return unless the devote a lot of time to monitoring the investment. It isn't hard to increase compensation to the point where it makes a company look less profitable.
The headquarters operations of franchises and shopping mall leases typically address the difficulties involved in measuring profits by receiving their share of the bounty as a percentage of gross sales, much like retail sales taxes imposed by state and local governments. Shopping malls are effectively making equity-like investments in their tenants by offering lower rent in exchange for a percentage of gross revenues from their tenants.
Still, the weak U.S. small business sector compared to other countries, may in part reflect poor institutional arrangements for venture capital financing of small to medium sized businesses that are not publicly held, particularly from a non-tax perspective.
Old Tech Guns A Problem In Afghanistan
The XM-8.
Before the surge of troops in Afghaninstan, the U.S. Army was considering an new model of carbine to replace the M4 used today (and variants for several other kinds of small arms used by infantry). The new design, called the XM-8, promised to weigh a little less than its predecessor, easier for non-infantry like truck drivers to use in close quarters, and most importantly, to be significantly less prone to jamming when receiving heavy use in dusty environments.
The primary opposition to the change came from soldiers who feel that the NATO standard 5.56mm round used by the M4 and M16 is too small, and should be replaced by a larger 6.8mm round, and from defense contractors who weren't happy with the bidding process. A process had been in place to pick a replacement, but it crashed and burned after several name changes, with upgrades to the existing M4 design looking likely to prevail. While the program would have an immense impact on the daily life of soldiers, changing the primary weapon of hundreds of thousands of them, the program wasn't very expensive, because the technology involved is not revolutionary and small arms aren't expensive compared to vehicles and other major weapons systems. (Subsequently, there were changes made to ammunition, basically favoring a version of hollow point bullets, but the size has been maintained. Also, far more troops have shifted from the full sized M16 to the M4.)
Now, a draft lessons learned report on a recent U.S. battle in Wanat, Afghanistan that went badly says that one of the factors in the battle's bad outcome was that a lot of U.S. M4's jammed during the long firefight. While the battle was small, it was one of the bigger defeats the U.S. has suffered in Afghanistan.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. Soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.Alternatives to the M4 have performed much better in terms of jamming risk.
This wasn't the only problem, or even the only procurement related problem. The unit there was also short on purified water, because U.S. troops in Afghanistan have only rudimentary water purification equipment.
This isn't to say that procurement was the only, or even the primary problem that the report identifies. But, it strikes a nerve because the military procurement problem is very prone to making big ticket investments in programs like new attack submarines, destroyers and fighter jets, while not focusing enough attention on lower budget, incremental improvements in the basic tools of the trade, like carbines and water supply systems, that get heavy use and may have a greater impact on U.S. troop casualties.
While military outsiders were not in agreement over which alternative to an M4 was best, and agreed that the Vietnam era M4 was a good design for its time that had provided long and decent service, almost nobody participating in the discussion said that the last few decades had not produced any possible replacements for the M4 that were better than what our troops were using by our troops.
The Law Of Averages And Genetic Models
A phenotype is an observable and measurable quality of a person or organism, like hair color, eye color, lactase persistance (i.e. the ability to digest cow's milk as an adult), IQ, height, introversion, sexual orientation or schitzophrenia.
There are a whole host of phenotypes that have been determined to have some genetic component through means like twin studies, studies of the correlation of the phenotype with genetic relatedness, adoption studies, and so on. These methods can rule out or confirm the hypothesis that a phenotype has no genetic component, and can make a mildly model dependent estimate of the extent to which genetic or non-genetic factors are more important in causing the phenotype to arise.
But, knowing that a phenotype has a genetic component doesn't give you a genetic model to look for when you sequence genes.
To do that you would like to know a few things.
You would like to know if almost all instances of the phenotype are due to a small number of common mutation variants as in hair and eye color, or a small number of rare mutation variants as in achromotopsia (a rare genetically caused form of color blindness), or a large number of rare mutation variants as in the case of schizophrenia (more than 540 variants), or a large number of common variants as in the case of IQ.
One would also like to know how many genes in any given person are causing the phenotype. Lactase persistance, for example, is caused mostly by one or two genes at a time - even though the gene mutations in question aren't precisely the same in Africa as they are in Europe as they are in Asia. IQ and height, in contrast, seem to be caused by the concerted effort of scores or hundreds of genes at the same time in the same person, each of which contributes to the overall cumulative effect.
The law of averages can help with this task in principle. Traits with lots of genes of roughly equal importance determining them should show less variation from generation to generation. Traits with fewer genes should so more intergenerational variation because large variants leave an effect that won't be averaged out.
There are quite a few mathematical considerations that go into determining how many genes are involved from observed phenotypes, most importantly, the difficulty of properly measuring the phenotype and excluding environmental effects. But, in principle, it ought to be able to get a good order of magnitude estimate of how many genes contribute to missing heritability in most cases.
There are a whole host of phenotypes that have been determined to have some genetic component through means like twin studies, studies of the correlation of the phenotype with genetic relatedness, adoption studies, and so on. These methods can rule out or confirm the hypothesis that a phenotype has no genetic component, and can make a mildly model dependent estimate of the extent to which genetic or non-genetic factors are more important in causing the phenotype to arise.
But, knowing that a phenotype has a genetic component doesn't give you a genetic model to look for when you sequence genes.
To do that you would like to know a few things.
You would like to know if almost all instances of the phenotype are due to a small number of common mutation variants as in hair and eye color, or a small number of rare mutation variants as in achromotopsia (a rare genetically caused form of color blindness), or a large number of rare mutation variants as in the case of schizophrenia (more than 540 variants), or a large number of common variants as in the case of IQ.
One would also like to know how many genes in any given person are causing the phenotype. Lactase persistance, for example, is caused mostly by one or two genes at a time - even though the gene mutations in question aren't precisely the same in Africa as they are in Europe as they are in Asia. IQ and height, in contrast, seem to be caused by the concerted effort of scores or hundreds of genes at the same time in the same person, each of which contributes to the overall cumulative effect.
The law of averages can help with this task in principle. Traits with lots of genes of roughly equal importance determining them should show less variation from generation to generation. Traits with fewer genes should so more intergenerational variation because large variants leave an effect that won't be averaged out.
There are quite a few mathematical considerations that go into determining how many genes are involved from observed phenotypes, most importantly, the difficulty of properly measuring the phenotype and excluding environmental effects. But, in principle, it ought to be able to get a good order of magnitude estimate of how many genes contribute to missing heritability in most cases.
Affirmative Action Still Exists
[Originally written August 6, 2013.]
As an essay based on first hand experience in University of California-Berkeley engineering school admissions candidly explains (a conclusion that is backed up by statistical studies and book length treatments by others which the essay writer does not cite), affirmative action remains the norm in higher education admissions.
Grades and standardized test scores provide a base line. Extra curricular achievements and compelling personally essays provide the gravy. Academic superstars with few extracurricular activities and essays that are either incoherent or sound like they were crafted by a marketing firm instead of the student have to settle for second or third tier schools.
The plus factors are well known: African-American or Hispanic or otherwise disadvantaged minority ethnicity, excellence in sports, likelihood of paying large tuition bills with little financial aid, legacy status, and close association with great fame, fortune or power. Hailing from a location that helps the school expand the number of states or countries from which it has students in its entering class is also a plus.
The biggest minus factor these days is membership in a model minority, mostly Asian-American, worst yet when the applicant is likely to need financial aid and lives someplace where the institution already admits many students. Discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions is well documented and quite heavy handed.
The other losers in this process are poor, working class and even lower middle class whites whose parents share their socio-economic status. They are much less likely to be admitted than similarly situated minority students, despite the fact that low income students of all ethnicities who perform well academically are uncommon. In part, these students lose out because they are hard to distinguish from the legions of truly middle class whites or "temporarily poor" children of middle class or upper middle class whites (e.g. graduate students or medical residents or public defender lawyers or divorce but formerly affluent parents) who are undistinguished academically and in extracurricular activities and personal experiences, despite the fact that they faced no particularly epic personal or economic struggles in their lives as high school students and earlier in their lives. Some ethnicity neutral efforts rewarding first generation college students and students who are high in class rank despite mediocre test scores and an undemanding set of high school courses on their transcripts seek to counterbalance the system in their favor, but do so imperfectly.
I have mixed feelings about the affirmative action process.
On one hand, the perception that affirmative action prevents qualified applicants from obtaining admission to some college or university is mostly wrong. The nation still has plenty of opens admission institutions that will allow anyone with a high school diploma or a GED to start taking college classes despite mediocre grades and test scores. The incredibly high dropout rate of students with the bare minimum qualifications to go to college somewhere strongly suggests that the college admissions process is almost entirely brokering prestige and not access. Moreover options well beyond open admissions institutions are available for students with better than a 3.0 GPA and average or above standardized test scores who were considered college worthy by traditional standards. A high school graduate who earned a 3.45 GPA or better and scored in the 75th percentile in standardized test scores, who completed a college preparatory course of classes and requires no remedial work in mathematics or English, even if that student didn't take a single AP course and participated only in an undistinguished manner in at least one extracurricular activity, has still greater options available.
Even as a means of prestige storing, the downside of the affirmative action system for those who are hurt by it rapidly gets much more modest as you work your way down the U.S. News and World Reports rankings. The down side of being Asian-American at a Miami University of Ohio, or a Colorado State University is no where near as great as it is at UC-Berkeley or Yale or Harvard or Stanford or Amherst or the University of Chicago.
There are benefits to attending a higher prestige school, and in all but the most extreme cases, those benefits clearly outweigh any disadvantages associated with going to school with peers who are clearly out of the affirmative action admitted student's league. But, those benefits are frequently overstated. Students at the most selective colleges and universities are high achievers, on average, when they graduate, mostly because they were high achievers when they applied, not because of value added by one school relative to a less prestigious one.
One the other hand, the example of the essayist, illustrates examples of a system that approaches one that allows almost unqualified applicants to be ranked almost on a par with students of exemplary academic ability is questionable. The system in Berkeley engineering school admission ranks applicants from 1 to 5 (with only those scoring 2.5 or better receiving further consideration) and admits just 12% of applicants (less than the 21% admitted to the university as undergraduates overall). He provided two examples:
One student got a "2" ranking:
Another student got a "2.5" ranking:
The fact that two students so markedly different in academic achievement can be ranked so similarly in the admissions process, particularly when the better performing but weakly ranked student is Asian-American, part of a group hurt by affirmative action, and a Mexican-American student, part of a group helped by it.
An expressed preference for "unweighted GPA" (many schools give grades in AP courses one grade point more than the same grade in a non-AP course) at Berkeley also seems like overkill. While it may be fair to give a student who gets an A in the most demanding available course in a subject at his school which has no AP class offerings the benefit of the doubt, relative to a student who got an A in an AP course in the same subject (particularly if extracurricular performance or SAT scores indicate aptitude in that subject), a student who gets a B in an AP class probably does deserve some adjustment relative to a student who gets a B in a less demanding non-AP class in the same subject area. We should reward students for taking the risk of getting a B in a more challenging course rather than taking the easy route of a less challenging course in order to get a better grade.
Also, strong affirmative action seems more questionable in an engineering program where academic ability really is the overwhelmingly most important consideration, relative to many other college programs. Engineering students with weak academic backgrounds are set up to fail in a way that humanities and social science students are not.
As an essay based on first hand experience in University of California-Berkeley engineering school admissions candidly explains (a conclusion that is backed up by statistical studies and book length treatments by others which the essay writer does not cite), affirmative action remains the norm in higher education admissions.
Grades and standardized test scores provide a base line. Extra curricular achievements and compelling personally essays provide the gravy. Academic superstars with few extracurricular activities and essays that are either incoherent or sound like they were crafted by a marketing firm instead of the student have to settle for second or third tier schools.
The plus factors are well known: African-American or Hispanic or otherwise disadvantaged minority ethnicity, excellence in sports, likelihood of paying large tuition bills with little financial aid, legacy status, and close association with great fame, fortune or power. Hailing from a location that helps the school expand the number of states or countries from which it has students in its entering class is also a plus.
The biggest minus factor these days is membership in a model minority, mostly Asian-American, worst yet when the applicant is likely to need financial aid and lives someplace where the institution already admits many students. Discrimination against Asian-Americans in college admissions is well documented and quite heavy handed.
The other losers in this process are poor, working class and even lower middle class whites whose parents share their socio-economic status. They are much less likely to be admitted than similarly situated minority students, despite the fact that low income students of all ethnicities who perform well academically are uncommon. In part, these students lose out because they are hard to distinguish from the legions of truly middle class whites or "temporarily poor" children of middle class or upper middle class whites (e.g. graduate students or medical residents or public defender lawyers or divorce but formerly affluent parents) who are undistinguished academically and in extracurricular activities and personal experiences, despite the fact that they faced no particularly epic personal or economic struggles in their lives as high school students and earlier in their lives. Some ethnicity neutral efforts rewarding first generation college students and students who are high in class rank despite mediocre test scores and an undemanding set of high school courses on their transcripts seek to counterbalance the system in their favor, but do so imperfectly.
I have mixed feelings about the affirmative action process.
On one hand, the perception that affirmative action prevents qualified applicants from obtaining admission to some college or university is mostly wrong. The nation still has plenty of opens admission institutions that will allow anyone with a high school diploma or a GED to start taking college classes despite mediocre grades and test scores. The incredibly high dropout rate of students with the bare minimum qualifications to go to college somewhere strongly suggests that the college admissions process is almost entirely brokering prestige and not access. Moreover options well beyond open admissions institutions are available for students with better than a 3.0 GPA and average or above standardized test scores who were considered college worthy by traditional standards. A high school graduate who earned a 3.45 GPA or better and scored in the 75th percentile in standardized test scores, who completed a college preparatory course of classes and requires no remedial work in mathematics or English, even if that student didn't take a single AP course and participated only in an undistinguished manner in at least one extracurricular activity, has still greater options available.
Even as a means of prestige storing, the downside of the affirmative action system for those who are hurt by it rapidly gets much more modest as you work your way down the U.S. News and World Reports rankings. The down side of being Asian-American at a Miami University of Ohio, or a Colorado State University is no where near as great as it is at UC-Berkeley or Yale or Harvard or Stanford or Amherst or the University of Chicago.
There are benefits to attending a higher prestige school, and in all but the most extreme cases, those benefits clearly outweigh any disadvantages associated with going to school with peers who are clearly out of the affirmative action admitted student's league. But, those benefits are frequently overstated. Students at the most selective colleges and universities are high achievers, on average, when they graduate, mostly because they were high achievers when they applied, not because of value added by one school relative to a less prestigious one.
One the other hand, the example of the essayist, illustrates examples of a system that approaches one that allows almost unqualified applicants to be ranked almost on a par with students of exemplary academic ability is questionable. The system in Berkeley engineering school admission ranks applicants from 1 to 5 (with only those scoring 2.5 or better receiving further consideration) and admits just 12% of applicants (less than the 21% admitted to the university as undergraduates overall). He provided two examples:
One student got a "2" ranking:
[He had] a 3.95 unweighted grade point average and 2300 on the SAT, was not among the top-ranked engineering applicants to the University of California, Berkeley. He had perfect 800s on his subject tests in math and chemistry, a score of 5 on five Advanced Placement exams, musical talent and, in one of two personal statements, had written a loving tribute to his parents, who had emigrated from India.A combined score of 2300 is either the 98th or 99th percentile and would be in the top quarter of admitted students at every college in the United States except Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and the California Institute of Technology. A 3.95 GPA probably means that the student got just one B in his entirely high school career and the odds are good that the B was in a more demanding AP course.
Another student got a "2.5" ranking:
[He was] a Mexican-American student with a moving, well-written essay but a 3.4 G.P.A. and SATs below 1800. His school offered no A.P. He competed in track when not at his after-school job, working the fields with his parents.A combined score of 1800 on the SATs is approximately the 85th percentile. His GPA means that he got Bs more often than A.
The fact that two students so markedly different in academic achievement can be ranked so similarly in the admissions process, particularly when the better performing but weakly ranked student is Asian-American, part of a group hurt by affirmative action, and a Mexican-American student, part of a group helped by it.
An expressed preference for "unweighted GPA" (many schools give grades in AP courses one grade point more than the same grade in a non-AP course) at Berkeley also seems like overkill. While it may be fair to give a student who gets an A in the most demanding available course in a subject at his school which has no AP class offerings the benefit of the doubt, relative to a student who got an A in an AP course in the same subject (particularly if extracurricular performance or SAT scores indicate aptitude in that subject), a student who gets a B in an AP class probably does deserve some adjustment relative to a student who gets a B in a less demanding non-AP class in the same subject area. We should reward students for taking the risk of getting a B in a more challenging course rather than taking the easy route of a less challenging course in order to get a better grade.
Also, strong affirmative action seems more questionable in an engineering program where academic ability really is the overwhelmingly most important consideration, relative to many other college programs. Engineering students with weak academic backgrounds are set up to fail in a way that humanities and social science students are not.
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