Intro to Mortars and Missiles

I got a few emails after people found about the bomb attack on troops in Mosul well I’m ok but, I know people out that way so my mind is wondering but, I’m playing the odds game and figuring that they weren’t the four contractors killed. But, to me that’s not saying much. Wounded only means you weren’t killed that doesn’t mean are in one piece. When I get my new camera I’ll take pictures of what shrapnel from a missile does to a steel cargo container from a distance of 30 yards. Anyone who wasn’t instantly knocked to the ground (lucky) will probably have to spend the rest of their life pushing shrapnel out of their bodies.

How do I/(we) feel? Same way you feel at home, we get CNN, Fox, Google and all that stuff just like you do the soldiers and Marines we get news 24 hours a day. If anything I would say that the Soldiers and Marines are more informed about the world than the average American. The news we get is all from an international point of view. So we saw it like you saw it. It comes off as something that is far away and not part of our “reality”. My heart goes out to the families that were already on pins and needles. Now they can hope to get an auto signed letter for Christmas.

I was going to save this for another post but I figure I’ll discuss it now.

Mortar attacks:

A mortar is defined as a muzzle-loading high-angle gun with a short barrel that fires shells at high elevations for a short range. The typical ordinance that the insurgents use 82mm rounds I’m sure someone can tell you the exact range but I would suspect that they couldn’t reach more than 3 or 4 k and that is a liberal estimate. The problem for the insurgents is that to use them on a military base they have to wade deep into US territory. Besides the regular patrols that are out there you have "other" defenses that make any attack on a base with a mortar a suicide mission. A typical plot now is that they set them up somewhere and rig them to fire by some mechanism (i.e. filling the mortar tube with water and freezing it then placing the round on top of the ice then they place it somewhere and wait for the ice to melt or set it to fire with an egg timer). The mortars cause chaos and the perpetrators are hours away by the time it launches. From what little I know if they were able to perpetrate this with mortars that would be the most likely scenario. Mortar attacks are the most unpredictable and the most likely to not cause damage.

Missile attacks:

These are far more dangerous simply because they have a much further range (6 to 8 miles) so they are very much in the range of safety for the insurgents. The flaw with them is that they need to be set with coordinates to hit their targets and most of the missiles that they have out there are surface to air missiles and not surface to surface missiles so they either miss the target or they are duds because they don’t have enough time before impact to prime the fuse. If they have something like an exact GPS location then they can easily find whatever target they want.

The reality is that the US military did a great job of convincing people who actually knew how program the missiles via GPS to stop doing it and not to show others how to do it (via lead lined contracts). There are people out here that know how to prime them to launch (it’s like hotwiring a car) but not to prime the fuse it’s by pure luck if they can. CNN is reporting that it was possibly a mortar attack or bomb attack but I think a missile attack was far more likely.

The other thing is that missles come in batteries that means you aren't going to get one missle you are going to get a volley of 4 to 10. From what I know that attack on Mosul sounded like a rocket attack.

Years ago when I was a young and dumber engineer than I am now I took a crypto class from a man named Doug Stell and I never forgot the first thing he told us.

He said, “Always assume the enemy knows what you already know.”

After that he went into the theory or pubic key cryptography and some modulus equations and lost me within 4 minutes. That is something that is so true here. We have Iraqis that work on the base doing jobs around here and I know that some of them by conviction or fear are playing for the other team and they go back and tell the insurgents where everything is located. There is no spoon and there are no secrets.