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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 05:31pm Apr 19, 2001 EST (#2405 of 2414)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I think the Osprey case, including Mr Augustine's involvement in it, connect well to concerns about deception, and imbalances of evidence presented and considered, with respect to some government matters, notably Missile Defense.

The Osprey issue hinges in large measure on an issue of vortex ring state , as Dao's piece makes clear.

With Steve Kline, I've done a great deal of work on the engineering of vortex flow fields, particulary for mixing, and have several patents on the subject, and much technically successful experience.

Vortex dynamics is a technical area that does not lend itself, nor is it likely to lend itself in the near future, to adequate computational study for Osprey's purpose.

Nor is it clear now that ANY experimental fluid mechanical investigation can assure that Osprey passangers will be safe for vortex ring state caused fatalities.

The reasons were partialy reviewed, (considered as subsets of a more general set of cases) in a recommendation letter Steve Kline wrote about me http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/klinerec .

A visual sense of the difficulties in dealing with the matter experimentally can be gotten in reference to Van Dyke's An Album of Fluid Motion , referred to also in that letter.

I believe that if the fluid mechanicians who knew the subject best (including many of the best of them at Condaleeza Rice's own Stanford University) had been involved, the difficulties with vortex ring state on Osprey would have been more carefully considered, and given more weight.

Can the military-industrial complex evade clear answers, and, in practical effect, lie to the American people? I believe that this affair shows, rather clearly, that it can do so, and shows the essential means.

Casts of characters are chosen.

Someone of "total authority and integrity" lies, or evades in a way that has the effect of a lie, and does so in public.

And he is trusted.

rshowalter - 08:24pm Apr 19, 2001 EST (#2406 of 2414)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

rshowalter 4/17/01 12:15pm

lunarchick - 04:09am Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2407 of 2414)
lunarchick@www.com

Broadcasting: The only 'free' radio station in Moscow, 25% owned by the GasCo, is under attack.

Can Putin TURN THE CLOCK BACK ?

Could King Alfred the Great of Britain STOP THE WAVES & Tide coming in ?

The move on democratic expression via the Moscow Air Waves is met with disapproval by would be investors, and suggests that the Oliarchy Managers of Russia (some say 'Mafia') have much dirty laundry they don't want aired by the people. If Russia is broke, broken and bereft ... then it should take heed of external comment regarding the 'freedom of the press/people'.

rshowalter - 05:48am Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2408 of 2414)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

But it may also be that, for essential purposes - a STATE press, that is reasonably serving RUSSIA's interests, may have to have a role -- and perhaps, in the beginning, the leading, the decisive role.

There ought to be ways, with feedback and checking and openness in important parts of the process, to do this with both apparent and real balance and honesty.

Dealing with Russian responses to "free markets" - outsiders may make assumptions about the legitimacy of the actors in the markets, and the market mechanisms, that work for the experience of the outsiders, but do not work right now for Russia.

rshowalter - 05:50am Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2409 of 2414)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Russia, like other nations, is going to have to deal with some internal contradictions -- some of them inescapable. She needs to do a much better job of doing so in the future than she has sometimes done in the past. But she cannot be asked to meet a standard that no other nation, no other system, could meet either.

(No nation, no social group, could survive without fictions, nor could any social group, or any individual's personal life, be maintained without some privacy - some things not to be discussed -- some past to be protected.)

There need to be accomodations, that work for the people involved, that meet practical requirements of complex cooperation, for groups both small and large, and that meet emotional needs.

rshowalter - 05:51am Apr 20, 2001 EST (#2410 of 2414)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A journalistic system including a great deal of freedom (but public spiritedness, too) is going to be essential to Russia, and as a practical matter cannot be escaped without prohibitive costs -- costs that have nearly beggared Russia in the past.

But not only journalism, but the whole Russian society, has to be reformed at a temporal scale, and in the incremental stages that are necessary and that can only happen carefully, incrementally, with much discussion at many levels, and in ways that outsiders, no matter how perceptive, no matter how much good will they feel, are going to regard as "messy."

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