You keep repeating the same thing over and over about how some traitor can compromise everything with a thumb drive. Well, hey, some guy can pick your car lock, so what don't we get rid of them too, because there's always some chance that someone will get in, why bother in the first place? Let's never, ever, try to make a lock that's practically impossible to pick just because some guy can steal your keys while you're eating lunch. Your "argument" is a non sequitor, a complete fallacy, and is not really an argument, but an attempt to distract from the topic.
When was the last time you took your entire life savings out in cash, along with that of your parents and family members, and left it locked in your car on a busy street in a bad section of Chicago slums for a month? We're not talking about an enemy soldier stealing a jeep. We're talking about an enemy country or alliance running the tables on our military through a coordinated effort to:
1) infiltrate our data networks at the highest levels
They've already done this repeatedly.
2) subvert people entrusted with our communications security.
They've already done this repeatedly, such as the famous cases in the NSA and Navy
3) subvert people at high levels of US intelligence agencies.
They've already done this repeatedly, such as with Aldrich Ames.
Along with that is the constant leaking of highly classified information by flaky people with an axe to grind, a grudge to settle, or because they think the left will crown them heroes for undermining the evil military/industrial complex.
But in most of the past cases the political and public relations damage was very limited due to the dry nature of the subject matter, amounting to thousands of pages of
boring.
Leak one picture of a girl (who looks amazingly like Danny Bonaduce) pointing at a naked human pyramid and your quiet little war becomes a nightmare insurgency that drags on for years and costs hundreds of billions of extra dollars and thousands of American lives. Imagine if Wikileaks had gotten a hold of live video footage back in 2003 showing an ambiguous engagement that could be painted as American soldiers executing civilians?
Of all this video your wanting to create, 99% of it will be watched by nobody, not even in the military, because it will show a corporal staring at weeds and slurping from his canteen. Of the exciting 1% that shows actual combat, 90% will show American soldiers shooting at a shadowy something way out in the distance, 6% will show American soldiers shooting at a definite bad guy, 3% will show American soldiers shooting at somebody who could, out of context, definitely be portrayed as a civilian, and 1% will show American soldiers doing an oops and definitely shooting a civilian, possibly repeatedly to make sure they're dead.
Since we'll be getting video of every engagement from every perspective, all the time, even the 3% of righteous shoots will look bad from one angle or another. An increased op tempo should give us several apparent civilian executions a day.
Those videos will bounce all around the command HQ, get bounced over to a bunch of IG's, up to the Pentagon, forwarded to some JAG people, thumb-drived over to the State Department (in case there's any fallout with the host government), and even bounce into new departments specifically created to handle such incidents, an inevitable result of previously leaked videos. Some of the videos will be trumped up and misconstrued by military people whose promotions depend on prosecuting such cases to the fullest. This has already happened constantly in Iraq, so pretending it won't happen in the future is absurd.
Since the video will be sent to a wide range of people with political axes to grind or who oppose whatever war we're fighting, it will be leaked to the media, including the foreign media, and it will be leaked in volume. I trickle will become a torrent and the occasional scandalous news story will become a drumbeat of public outrage from around the world.
And hey, since the idea of a remote command post with a complete picture of the battlefield is so cowardly, let's make those generals man up. Stick them in bright red coats and plant them on horseback with a revolver and a sabre. If they want to figure out what's happening they better learn bugle signals. This is ultimately an appeal to emotion, also a fallacy, and therefore also a bankrupt argument.
Yeah, like Patton, Rommel, and all the other great generals who actually rode with their troops and got shot at. Rommel was under fire pretty frequently, as was the commander of German forces at D-Day, Hans von Luck, who was under fire almost constantly during various stages of the war.
Patton was actually killed by the enemy at nearly point blank range, and as an aside, I'm partly named after Lt. General McNair, under Patton, who was killed at St. Lo in 1944. (My uncle served in Patton's 5th Army and was personally cussed out by Eisenhower while on guard duty in the woods.) Major General Rose, commander of the 3rd Armored division and the first across the Siegfried line, was likewise killed in combat when he found himself pulling a pistol on several German tanks in close quarters.
From my home state of Kentucky, the son of our governor (a former confederate general himself), Lt. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr, was killed by enemy fire at Okinawa.
Major General Clarence Tinker (an Osage!) was killed in direct combat, flying a B-24 against the Japanese forces attacking Midway.
In more modern times, Major General Keith Ware, commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam, was shot down in combat near Loc Ninh as he made repeated low passes over the battlefield.
Along with those famous figures are all the generals in Iraq, where of course they were completely safe in between daily mortar and rocket attacks.
But all those generals were just fallacies....
Your talking points are ridiculous, they're not even arguments, and repeating them ad nausium in an attempt to browbeat someone is trolling. I'm not going to feed the troll anymore. I'm done.
I'm not trolling, I'm trying to illustrate that just because we
could field some really nifty high-bandwidth gadgets in combat doesn't mean we should, especially not without very carefully weighing the potential harm against the arguably slight benefits. After all, if live video was such a war-winning force mutliplier how come we're still facing an uphill battle in Afghanistan, almost ten years after we put boots on the ground and cameras in the air?
It's certainly useful to have aerial video and attack capabilities, vastly more useful than yet another ground view of rocks and trees, which is what helmet cams are going to show. But even more useful to use would be if the Taliban started broadcasting video feeds or anything at all.
I say this since modifying a Sidewinder to attack a
particular cell-phone in a city teaming with cell phone traffic is pretty simple (the Isrealis already did it), so having a Chinese cell-phone sweat shop modify a Chinese or Egyptian knockoff of a Russian SA-7 Strella missile to target
any high-frequency signal out in the middle of the desert should be pretty trivial.
We would of course use burst mode radios, but you can't use burst mode for live video because you'll still have a 30 Hz pulse repetition frequency, almost perfect for missile guidance updates. So we would immediately stop broadcasting video and use our radios more sparingly. Then our soldiers would dig a hole and bury the useless accessories. Finally, the sergeant would take charge because the detached, uninformed Tweets coming from somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon would be worse than useless. And we're back where we started except without the close links between our troops and their chain of command, since all the officers would be in the condiment line at a Fudruckers in Virginia, mumbling "But it's 256 bit!"
