[ExI] the eagles are coming!

Dan TheBookMan danust2012 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 10 20:43:20 UTC 2016


On Feb 10, 2016, at 10:38 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote: 
> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
>>  
> ​>…Thanks for all the info but I think you ducked the question (pun intended).  Or maybe you don't know just how low a radar can detect something.​..
> 
> What I meant was that radar isn’t the right tool for spotting low and slow camera drones, the kind of stuff you can train eagles to foil.  Radar waves are too long for that.  Those are better at spotting planes way out there.  For that kind of thing, you would use a microwave emitter/receiver, and move up from there.  A toy drone would be easy to spot a mile away with a microwave detector, and the whole rig is small enough to fit in the back of a light pickup truck.
> 
> If someone is speechifying and a bad guy wanted to launch from a couple km out, fly in close and hand her a small  but deadly explosive device for instance, it would be easy to set up a dual spectrum or multispectrum detector and the means to foil that plan.  I do hope this protection system is used.
> 
> >…Is 'under the radar' still applicable?  Or maybe it would be a satellite?  I know they can read newspapers from up there​.  But can they scan for low flying drones?  Our defense dept. has to be working on that.
>  
> Ja there are some types of radar planes can get under, but consider what radar was developed for: seeing a bunch of WW2-style bombers coming in at a couple hundred knots while they were still far enough out there to man the battle stations.  The attack on Pearl in 1941 would have turned out a lot differently had the Yankees been given one hour notice.

The US did have radar and spotted the planes coming in, but communications and interpretations issues trumped that. The same can happen with more modern systems. I think the lesson of Pearl Harbor was more one of not looking for what you don't expect: the US was expecting sabotage not an air raid. So it looked for and planned against sabotage while ignoring signs of and planning against an air raid. But that is hindsight bias.

A bigger lesson is that in order to not be surprised too often one has to be a little more imaginative and do a lot more intelligence collection. And the latter doesn't mean listening in on every phone call. It would've been far better to have a few spies in well placed positions in the Japanese government and military than listening in on every communication in Japan.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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