Stardate 20030123.1411

(Captain's log): This question has come up in my mail several times, so I thought I'd answer it publicly. Waylon writes:

I may be mistaken, but I recall seeing something on TLC or Discovery channel about the Russian made jets and tanks. Instead of transistors they used mostly vacuum tubes for their electronics, the reason was it was easier to make the tubes, and it made them more resistant to EMP.

Since Iraq's military is made up of mostly older Soviet equipment, would it negate much of the anti-transistor weapon's effectiveness?

I think part of what's going on with this question is the basic assumption that anything short of perfect success is absolute failure. We don't have to destroy absolutely everything in order to cripple and immobilize a military force.

It's true that a lot of their equipment still uses vacuum tubes. But a lot of what they're using and relying on is actually civilian equipment, and a lot of what they're using can't be created using vacuum tubes.

Tubes have virtues but many flaws. They're big, they suck power, they get hot, they're heavy, and their mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) is several orders of magnitude lower than for semiconductors. The first programmable digital computer was ENIAC and it was made out of tubes; it had a MTTF of about fifteen minutes because that was how long it took statistically before some tube, somewhere within it, would die.

I'm not sure I believe that all of Iraq's military equipment is tube-based. But even if that were true, a lot of what they're using is civilian equipment and it's modern and it uses semiconductors and it isn't hardened. They are not using tube-based radios, for instance; and their phone system isn't tube-based. A lot of the vehicles they use are just civilian cars and trucks. They unquestionably are using computers, and those will basically be commercial equipment and not special military ones.

If you knock enough pieces out of a system, it will collapse even if you didn't get everything. If you knock enough equipment out for a military unit, it won't be able to fight effectively even if a lot of stuff still works.

If they've got civilian cars and trucks which are being used militarily, and they do, and if they were built in the last fifteen years, then they're going to be vulnerable to an HPM. Everyone in the world has been relying more and more heavily on electronics in their engine designs since the late 1980's, and modern engines in western cars all have computers in them which monitor the behavior of the engine and control it to make it perform optimally. (That's part of what they've done in order to increase gas mileage, for instance.) Knock that microprocessor out, and the engine won't even start.

Are they using cell phones? Do they have transistor radios to listen to the golden words of Saddam? Do they have a wired telephone system running out to where the troops are in bivouac? Are they relying on any kind of electronic door locks (card keys or digital combination locks) in their facilities? A lot of that would cease to work.

And a lot of their radars and missile guidance systems are too sophisticated to be implemented using vacuum tubes. Or rather, they may well use tubes in part, but they'll also have semiconductors in them too.

And anything which only uses tubes is going to be inferior. What this would do is to knock out all the best stuff they've got, leaving them only with the most inferior, oldest, least capable electronics still working. Even that is valuable.

But the point I was trying to make about using HPM against the main Iraqi troop formations was more about psychological warfare than about direct military effect. When you're trying to convince enemy troops that fighting against you is hopeless, then the psychological effect of suddenly having a whole lot of their equipment die, just because you said so, would be more important than the value of the equipment itself. It is a graphic demonstration of your power; it shows that your threats are not to be taken lightly.

And, paradoxically, it simultaneously proves your ability to slaughter and your willingness to not slaughter. We've been dropping leaflets on the Iraqi military formations telling them that we won't kill them if they don't fight against us. A demonstration HPM attack would simultaneously destroy a lot of their equipment, prove our overwhelming power, and harm virtually no one which would demonstrate that we're still doing our best to avoid slaughtering them. It means both that we can kill them all if we choose to, and that we mean it when we say we won't. And the effect would be even greater if it were, as I suggested, followed by one (only one) more leaflet drop which took responsibility for the failure of some of their equipment and promised that the next attack would be far more deadly if they provoked such an attack. The dual message is: surrender to us and we will be merciful; but if any of you fight us we'll kill you all.

Even if its practical value on a purely military level were not great, I think that proper use of HPM weapons could be tremendously valuable for purposes of psyops.