Market Forces Might Delay Moore's Law
Late in September, the Athlon Corporation, which makes computer chips, announced a 64-bit chip for personal computers. Because it works in slices that are twice the size of the usual 32-bit words, the new chip should be substantially faster, as long as it uses software adapted to the longer words. The question is whether there is a market for such chips, or at least a market sufficient to underwrite the cost of the new fabrication plant needed to produce them. This is a perennial issue, and it has some very important defense implications.
One of the key facts of current life is Moore's Law. As formulated several decades ago, Moore's Law states that the unit cost of computing will halve every 18 months. This is usually now taken to mean that computer power will double every 18 months, at least until some physical barrier, perhaps a quantum barrier, is reached. Current calculations suggest that will happen in about 30 years. Some have suggested that the rate of change is even faster than every 18 months.
At the very least, if Moore's Law is interpreted in the current way, it literally is impossible to design military electronic systems in a fully modern way because the design and production cycle is far longer than 18 months. At best, a system can be designed with an inbuilt upgrade path. At least one company, Mercury, has prospered by selling flexible systems designed with upgrades in mind. Conversely, some systems, such as the Australian Collins-class submarine's command system, have failed because development of the series of chips for which they were designed was abandoned before chips of sufficient power appeared. Upgrading suddenly changed from a relatively simple process to one demanding total redesign.
The Athlon announcement is interesting because, unlike many previous announcements of new powerful chips, it was not greeted by universal acclaim. Some commentators asked where its market was. They generally agreed that computer gamers would want more power, but apparently the gaming community is not in itself large enough to support the technology inherent in the new chip. Many computer users already seem to suspect that the main limitation on their machines' performance is poorly written software rather than insufficient hardware. If that is true, they might see adopting better software as a preferable alternative to the usual current practice of replacing a computer every few years.
It is by no means clear whether the personal computer market is the main engine driving chip sales, but it is at least plausible that it is. In that case, a slowdown in that market might well derail Moore's Law-or, at the least, push it toward a collapse in chip prices rather than continued escalation in chip computing power. Because military applications depend on commercial chips, the future of Moore's Law is of deep concern.
If Moore's Law is about to hit a wall, then we are about to enter an era of stability in electronic design. Alternatively, we might be back in the situation of the 1950s and 1960s, in which the military drove the high-performance end of the market. In any case, we no longer would be seeing the headlong development to which we have become accustomed. The evidence for such a development is to be found in the very flaccid personal computer market.
Continued doublings also will have profound consequences. For example, when an airplane or a ship or a missile is described as stealthy, in effect the statement means that its shape so reduces the signal-to-noise ratio it generates that a typical sensor cannot detect it. Nothing is entirely undetectable, because any man-made object leaves a signature in the random noise of nature. If that signature is weak enough, however, the sensor's signal processor will not detect it. Imagine an object that takes 15 years to go from basic design to operational employment-a perfectly ordinary history. Fifteen years is ten doublings, a factor of 1024. Another 15 years might bring the system to half-life-and a factor of about a million improvement in signal processing. Because stealth resides mainly in the shape of the object, it cannot benefit much from change after it is conceived and its shape is fixed. What is stealth worth over the long run, then?
Weapons of Mass Destruction Probably Buried
Some observers are suggesting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that the U.N. inspectors effectively disarmed him before they were ejected in 1998. While this claim is open to serious question, it raises an interesting point. The argument is that in a ferocious dictatorship such as Iraq, everyone lies to the dictator to let him keep believing whatever he wants. In this case, it was clear that Saddam wanted to believe that he had weapons of mass destruction, and, moreover, that he was paying his own scientists and engineers quite well to keep developing them. If the program was failing badly, no one wanted to admit that to Saddam, particularly given his ways of retaliating for unpleasant news.
Believing that he had the weapons, Saddam did his best to prevent inspectors from finding them. That included attempts at intimidation, apparent evasions, blocking inspections, and, in 1998, ejecting the inspectors altogether. These attempts convinced many in the U.S. administration not only that Saddam had weapons, but that he was getting ready to use them in another run for hegemony in the Gulf. In fact, the apparent threat triggered, or at least justified, the offensive that toppled Saddam. In the end, then, not only did Saddam not receive the means to defend himself against invasion, but his belief in the weapons he did not have helped cause the invasion in the first place.
Leaving aside for the moment whether any of this is true, it is interesting that the Iraqis who have advanced the idea seem to have no doubt that the concept is plausible. No one tells an all-powerful dictator the truth, particularly if that truth is unpalatable. Saddam, of course, is not the only dictator in the world. al of our current potential enemies can be described as more or less equivalent to Saddam.
One plausible theory of why wars break out is that they occur when two governments have radically different views of the likely outcome. If each thinks it can win, neither is willing to step back and seek a settlement short of war. Conversely, settlements are worked out when one side knows there is no practical recourse to war. For example, in the fall of 2002 Saddam seems to have imagined that he could stand off a coalition attack. He believed assurances, probably mostly from the French, that the attack could be stopped in the United Nations. he seems also to have believed that he could make an attack so costly for the coalition that it would have to withdraw. The latter idea was reflected in numerous articles claiming that Baghdad was about to become a Stalingrad-like death trap for U.S. troops. For its part, the U.S. government thought it obvious that Saddam would lose if he chose to fight. It probably never understood why he did not seek some settlement that would have preserved him, or even some of his power. It does seem clear in retrospect that, as events moved so slowly, Saddam did have the opportunity to make an offer the U.S. government could not have rejected, however much it wanted simply to banish him. That he did not do so suggests that he had no idea of what awaited him.
So what about the weapons of mass destruction? They probably are still buried in the Iraqi desert. It is not so very difficult to hide things there. For example, about a month ago U.S. forces discovered, to their surprise, that the Iraqis had buried many of their aircraft, carefully covered in plastic (see photo on left). Those airplanes were not covered to avoid admitting their existence. Presumably they were buried in the expectation that the U.S. occupation would be transient (if it occurred at all), and that the postoccupation regime (restoring Saddam to power) would need its weapons.
Remember that Saddam particularly valued weapons of mass destruction as his means of extending his power throughout the Gulf. It seems unlikely that, having made the effort to expel U.N. inspectors in 1998, he did not revive his programs. There would have been no reason for him not to have done so. After 1998, the international embargo became looser, not tighter, so presumably he would have found it easier to obtain what he needed from abroad. Given past Iraqi evasions, moreover, it seems unlikely that a few weeks of inspections in 2002 would have uncovered very much. We know, for example, that inspectors never found the Iraqi nuclear program: the program, insofar as it was found, was discovered only after defectors described it. Those defectors, incidentally, did not come forward until about four years after the 1991 Gulf War. Why should we be surprised that equivalent defectors have not yet come forward much less than a year after we proclaimed victory this time?
The problem of finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is tied to the problem of continued resistance by Baath Party members. The Party members want to believe that the war is not really over, and that Saddam can come back. They almost have to believe such things because they have considerable blood on their hands. If Saddam is gone, at some point a post-Saddam regime might call them to account. Their neighbors might want revenge, as many did after 1991. Given that Saddam has not turned up, dead or alive, fantasies of revival might not seem as absurd as they are.
Whoever buried the Iraqi weapons, assuming they exist, would have been the custodians of the single commodity most important to Saddam Hussein. As long as Baath activists survive, their attitude will be that disclosing the location of such weapons is the worst sort of treason. It would seem to follow that few, if any, weapons will surface until all Iraqis feel certain that Saddam is finished. Is it any surprise that we have not yet seen the weapons?