Tuesday, November 11, 2014

A nerdy Remembrance

I decided last evening to break the Monday-Wednesday-Frivolous-Friday pattern of this blog to make a tech-related post relevant to Remembrance/Veteran's Day.   Arguably, drone warfare is the ne plus ultra (and probably the reductio ad absurdam besides) of the earliest military apps--namely, target acquisition.  But having already covered that plus some origins of the wireless communication that also make drone strikes possible, I was casting about for a fresh twist on the intersection of military and technological history.

WWII buff husband (and kindred geek soul) to the rescue!

I want to make it absolutely, Waterford-crystal-clear that my intent tonight isn't to glorify military applications of technology.  But when Dennis mentioned something called the Norden bomb-sight, I was intrigued.  Because, after all, the whole point of the contraption was ultimately to drop fewer bombs overall by having them land on people who (arguably) "deserved" them...as opposed to collateral civilian damage.  (Which, in turn, requires fewer missions in which "the good guys" will fly into harm's way.)  For that to have a reasonable chance of happening, altitude, airspeed, the vector of the aircraft (relative to the target), the speed and vector of the wind (relative to the aircraft) all have to be taken into account.  (Remember that the next time you're assigned quadratic equations by the dozen in Algebra.  Also, please be grateful that you don't have to solve them while being shot at.)

What Dennis described over dinner frankly sounded like what you'd see nine months after a gyroscope, a telescope, and a slide-rule all woke up during a hazy weekend in Vegas.   That's not too far off in some ways, though later incarnations of the device also plugged into the plane's autopilot and even controlled the bombs' release because its precision was thrown off by human reaction-times.

Not surprisingly, this was top-secret stuff, at least until toward the end of The Good War.  Norton-made (and rival Sperry-made) bomb-sights cooled their gears in safes between flights, and were supposed to be destroyed in the event of impending capture--even at the cost of American lives.  British allies offered to trade the Crown Jewels--meaning sonar technology, rather than the shiny gew-gaws currently on display in the Tower of London--for its use. 

Ultimately, however, it was an evolutionary dead-end in technology.  It was sold to the Nazis by spies, but never used by a Luftwaffe that preferred dive-bombing.  American bombers eventually adopted the carpet-bombing tactics of their RAF counterparts.  So why care?  (Well, besides the fact that I'm kind of a sucker for analog computing...though I have yet to learn how to use a slide-rule.  Bad me.)  Alas, it's also a grand textbook-quality example of a technology's life-cycle.  
  • Usability issues?  Check.  Earlier versions of the device almost required an advanced degree in Mathematics...and pure math nerds could arguably be more useful at Bletchley Park or Nevada.  (To its credit, such issues were addressed in future iterations.)
  • Prima-donna egos?  Check.   Its eponymous developer, Carl Norden, had originally worked with his future rival Elmer Sperry, but the two geniuses had parted ways before the onset of the First World World War.
  • Over-hyped promises that didn't hold up under field conditions?  Check.  Jet-stream winds, cloud/smog cover, higher-than-anticipated altitudes (required to avoid detection and anti-aircraft fire) and a host of other issues put the lie to marketing claims of dropping bombs into "pickle-barrels," and users were forced to develop workarounds (literally) on-the-fly.  (Worse, failures have been too often blamed on operator error.  Oh-so not cool, yo.)
  • Engineering vs. Management?  Check.  Mercifully, the Navy paired up Army Col. Theodore Barth as yin to Norden's yang.  The two became not only a formidable combination but good friends.
  • Politics?   Check, check, and check.  Army vs. Navy. U.S. vs. U.K.  Not to mention Round II of Sperry vs. Norden, when the former was called on to take up the slack in the latter's ability to keep up with wartime demand.
  • Prolonged obsolescence due to bureaucratic inertia?  Check.  When last sighted (pun intended) Norton bomb-sights were dropping reconnaissance equipment in Vietnam.
None of the above is intended to cast the technology as a failure.  Even its incremental improvements during wartime were impressive.  Doubtless, its successes saved lives that would be difficult, if not impossible, to count.  And the impulse to minimise loss in an era of total war is nothing if not praiseworthy.

Then, too, as a programmer--particularly one married to a recovering manufacturing engineer--I flatter myself that I have some appreciation of the problems of scaling something new.  Sometimes it seems like the real world is nothing but edge cases.  At the same time, once it latches onto something better than the former status quo, it typically relinquishes it only after a bitter fight.  I sympathise--really, I do.

Yet, if the Norden example is how old men behave when they send young people into possible death and mayhem (with PTSD, addiction, divorce, homelessness, neglect, labyrinthine bureaucracy, and who-knows-what evils to come), the least we can do for current soldiers and future veterans is to give them better old men (and nowadays, old women). 

So do me a favour and keep your poppy handy for the next time you head to the polls, okay?  For those of us who don't work directly for veterans/soldiers week-in and week-out (i.e., most of us), that's the only kind of "remembrance" that truly matters.

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