I’ve spent probably four hours over the past two days explaining to people that no, it is *not* possible to hack a Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and cause it to run into an oil tanker. There are two separate hydraulic systems controlling the rudder, one of which is entirely mechanical (no electronics at all) and the other is attached to an *analog* “autopilot” that just keeps the ship going in a specified compass direction. Neither of these can be hacked, nor can the gas turbine controls, which are basically the same as the controls in a commercial jet airliner (yes, jet airliners are driven by gas turbines, albeit their gas turbines are driving fans to shove air out the back of the engine rather than driving propeller shafts). Yep, Arleigh Burke class destroyers are basically driven by a shaft-driving version of the CF6 jet engine that powers the 747 jet airliner! The gas turbine controls are digital now, but they’re still potted boxes not connected to any external network — i.e., you aren’t going to hack them without physical access, and they are *triple* redundant so you’d have to hack *three* of them.
In short: Nope, none of this is hackable. And yes, you can hack GPS, but all that an Arleigh Burke uses GPS for is for general location-finding. Collision avoidance is via radar and the Mark II Eyeball, and depends upon a) the ship’s rudder not jamming due to hydraulic system failures, and b) a crew that isn’t so tired and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep that they can remember how to kick in the backup rudder control system, or how to hit the collision alarm, or how to jam the engine controls to full speed ahead to outrun an oncoming oil tanker.
Oh yeah, the other stupid conspiracy theory is that the tanker was hacked to run into the destroyer. Puh-LEEZE. It takes around 15 miles for a tanker to go from its normal cruising speed of around 16 knots to a full stop. When they’re coming in to port, they start slowing down *six hours* before docking. These suckers (and their giant diesel engines) have a *lot* of momentum, they don’t speed up or slow down very quickly, they aren’t going to suddenly speed up and hit a destroyer. And changing course is similarly lethargic, taking miles to change course. An oil tanker doesn’t suddenly veer into a destroyer. These things give new definition to the word “lumbering”. The largest supertankers are almost 1/4th of a mile long, longer than the Empire State Building is tall, and weigh more than the Empire State Building too. Changing course takes miles. Basically, the only way a tanker can run into a destroyer is if the destroyer places itself in front of the tanker, whether due to mechanical failure, lack of training on the part of the crew, lack of sleep on the part of the crew, whatever. Because a tanker in a shipping lane is the closest thing to an immovable object that you’ll find afloat, it’s going where it’s going at the speed it’s going, and that’s pretty much that.
Finally: The admiral in charge of the 7th Fleet is being relieved of command. Shit may flow downhill. But when four ships under his command get wrecked in embarrassing accidents, the buck stops at the Admiral’s desk. My guess is that many, many of his underlings are also very, very nervous right now…
– Badtux the Hacker Penguin
The fact that an admiral is getting canned tells me the root problem, and source of the blame is far above his pay grade.
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Oh, yup. Too bad he seemed like a decent guy. Guess no Pentagon time for him now.
But, on an off idea, to save wiring, the may have crossed over the line on ship safety, a contractor may have, connected, steering, to an electronic box, like in some of the ai cars. So if proximity radar is off?
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Uhm, there are two independent hydraulic systems. No electrics involved at all in steering an Arleigh Burke. If there were, you can bet that they’d be triple redundant like the engine controls, it’s a warship, not an automobile, meaning that in a combat zone they’re dead if they lose steering. The Arleigh Burke is an old design, and probably the best designed warship we’ve ever made, reliable, easy to maintain, cheap to operate, punches *way* above its weight class, and with only one real flaw — not enough berths for the manpower *really* needed to crew her, meaning that her crews are overworked and are invariably really, really tired after a month or two at sea. And that’s when she’s fully crewed. If she’s short-staffed and the crew is also being forced to fix shit that should have gotten fixed at depot, they might damn well be delirious from lack of sleep.
Proximity radar alarms were almost certainly turned off, they usually are in a crowded shipping lane because they’re useless there. The Mark II Eyeball is the primary collision avoidance mechanism in crowded shipping lanes. As far as I know, nobody’s figured out how to hack the human eyeball so it won’t see a frickin quarter-mile-long oil tanker!
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Yeah doesn’t make sense. If I was to start a conspiracy theory, I would go with Russia hitting it with a torpedo and the administration is covering it up.
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[…] of President George the Worst; the other argues persuasively against the theory that, in some way, the guidance system of one of the ships was hacked. I commend them both to your […]
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I was one of those who wondered whether some sort of malicious electronic tampering could have caused the recent destroyer collisions, but I accept your explanation that it was more likely that human error caused it. My suspicion, and the reactions you cite at the top of this post, got me thinking about the prevalence of paranoia in modern society. Which is a job requirement, because I’m surrounded by florid paranoiacs at work.
No matter what happens, people (including me) are quick to worry that hidden malign actors DIRECTED the event. Even in the Navy — remember the battleship turret explosion in the mid-1990s where the official USN version was initially that a jealous homosexual lover did it deliberately? The World Trade Center collapses are the most obvious example, but the trail goes back to the JFK assassination, at least. I reckon that in American society, that was the first major historical event to light the paranoid mindset in a large segment of society. Emphasis on “large” segment — there have always been conspiracy theory nutters. See the John Birch Society, f’rinstance. I wonder whether the groundwork for JFK conspiracists was laid by a decade of “secret Reds in the State Department” ravings by the Joe McCarthy mob.
I can see why human minds jump in that direction. We like simple solutions, and it’s easier to grok that a single source of evil caused something bad to happen than a complex chain of causality such as undermanning, exhaustion and sloppy training. That’s too squishy!
I wonder whether people as a whole are more paranoid these days? I suspect so, and not just because of the nutters I encounter on the wards. (It’s amazing how many people believe their Faceschnook accounts have been hacked, that unnamed people have been putting information out about them on the Internet for the WHOLE WORLD to see or they’re being spied on via their phone’s camera. It’s so much easier to be paranoid on a grand scale with the .www) When the Reichstag burned down, an ACTUAL conspiracy, I haven’t seen anything about masses of Germans saying “It was an inside job!” It wasn’t until at least the 1980s that large-ish numbers of people started spouting that FDR let the Pearl Harbor attack happen intentionally so he could drag the U.S. into war.
I reckon the paranoia level in humanity as a whole has gone WAAAAAY up in the past generation. It’s likely to get worse in one more generation, as people across the world grow up with the background noise of EVERYTHING being electronic. Even in Third World countries such as Cambodia, there was big percentage of the local population sporting mobile phones when I cycled through earlier this month. Ditto for what I’ve read about Africa. And in those societies, they have real things to be paranoid about. I think we’re in the midst of a new pandemic, a virus that’s psychological, not caused by microorganisms. No telling where it’s going to lead — although I have my paranoid ideas about that! Pandemics don’t tend to end well, though.
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To many fan fic versions of The World is Not Enough Brosnan/Price Bond Film… What is more distressing is the absolute silence over 2 major Navy “accidents” and 3 major military helicopter “accidents”. While I do not recommend and would not use the deaths of military members as political pawns, that ghoulish method was employed over and over and over by Republicans, including Benghazi were mercs and CIA operatives died but, no active duty service members. There must be accountability leveled at the Federal Government as it is entirely controlled by the Republican Party.
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