Ilithi_Dragon

With the possibility that we might actually manage to not destroy ourselves before becoming a significant, interplanetary civilization, with cheap and easy means of energy production, and manufacturing and production of both raw materials and sophisticated equipment looking to be more and more of an actual real chance every day, what kinds of dangers of potential "weapons of mass destruction" do you foresee? Not just expensive, highly-classified, and highly-controlled military weapons, but also garage-built devices that could, intentionally or unintentionally, have devastating effects?

To enlisted personnel, the words "rely on the skill, calm temperament and professionalism of the... officer corps," don't exactly inspire confidence. Officers not having any idea what they're doing, and the enlisted guys being the ones who actually do all the work and get everything done is something of a half-joke/half-truth in the military.

All jokes aside, though, at least in the sub force (I can't speak for the surface fleet, nor the other branches), -most- officers who make it much past LTJG are usually pretty competent, capable, and generally very intelligent (though JOs having high intelligence is generally much more reliable than them having high competence). We also have the advantage, unlike the militaries of many other countries, of having a highly-trained, and usually well-educated enlisted corps, who are very active in both training the officers and providing back-up (sometimes "forceful back-up") when they try to do something particularly stupid.

Have you ever considered the possible outcomes of a civilization dominated by nations who take a much more old-school/traditional approach of having gentrified officers strictly from the nobility commanding uneducated and minimally-trained enlisted personnel, vs the model we use?

How different do you think the world might be today if the US military had stuck with the old-school approach of educated officers vs uneducated enlisted? How much of an impact on civilization do you think the differences between those two models has?

Well, you certainly are the Titan of Transparency, Dr. Brin. } ; = 8 P

To touch on that, though, and play a bit of a devil's advocate, how do you think transparency could be used to stop the guy building a "small" fission bomb in his basement, either as a hobby because he was bored and owned a large property he liked to blow things up on, or to further some terroristic agenda? It's not feasible today, but in a few decades, it's not beyond the realm of plausibility that even mid-range, consumer-level 3D printers and CNC-like fabricators could produce equipment of sufficient sophistication to create an implosion-type bomb (and the hardware of an gun-type fission bomb can be manufactured easily enough, today).

If a person is willing to settle for less than the ideal isotopes for nuclear weapons, and accrue small amounts over time, how would we be able to catch them, and either prevent them from doing something stupid with their backyard destruction project, or from building and deploying such a device for terroristic purposes?

Yes, that's pretty much what I was describing. About ten percent or so (give or take) of the total crew compliment of any US Navy ship consists of commissioned officers. The rest consists of enlisted personnel, a huge percentage of which are varying levels of non-commissioned officers (and a significant majority percentage on subs, where advancement rates are much higher than the surface fleet). Our enlisted personnel are highly-trained system experts, and excluding the new guys who are still learning/qualifying in the basics, everyone is expected to have a solid, working knowledge of how their equipment operates, and how to keep it operational in the field.

The Russians, in contrast, take a very different approach. They still have the officer/enlisted divide, but it is much more substantial, in multiple ways. Roughly half of their crew compliment is commissioned officers, with the other half being enlisted conscripts, who serve for two years and are strictly trained as system operators, not system experts. They operate out of rote procedure, and are not trained, nor expected to have a working knowledge of how their equipment does what it does, or how to keep it working in the field, beyond basic, pre-written maintenance instructions.

It is also worth noting that we're not the only ones who follow the system expert model. Some of our closest allies, like the Brits, follow the same model, with minor variations. I can't speak for every nation, but it does seem like Western/democratic nations tend to prefer the system expert model over the system operator model.

Thank you for your response, Catherine. I was thinking more along the lines of a 22nd Century high school science project resulting in the construction of a fission bomb in somebody's garage, or a hobbyist accidentally creating a deadly bioweapon, by the concerns of cybersecurity, "information warfare," and the like are also huge, and probably a far greater danger to civilization than many think.

On that vein, then, what possible counters and defenses do we have now, or could we come up with, to protect ourselves against the intentional (or unintentional) weaponization of information and cybernetic interconnectivity?