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The US Navy and Your Autonomous Vehicle
Damage to the USS John S. McCain
The United States Pacific Fleet seems to be having a run of bad luck. Or is it?
There have been five major accidents in the last 12 months.
- August 18, 2016: The USS Louisiana (SSBN 743, Ohio Class Nuclear Submarine) collided with a USN support ship, the Eagleview (T-AGSE-3) in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the waterway between Washington State and British Columbia.
- January 31: USS Antietam (CG-54, Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser) ran aground in Tokyo Bay.
- May 9: USS Lake Champlain (CG-57) collided with a South Korean fishing vessel.
- June 17: USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62, Arleigh Burke-class destroyer) collided with the Philippine freighter ACX Crystal.
- August 21: USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) collided with the oil tanker Alnic MC.
How does the world’s most technologically advanced navy keep hitting things? The answer may be found in the question itself. Two separate Navy officials told CNN that the McCain experienced a sudden loss of steering control right before the accident, only for it to reappear just as suddenly afterwards.
The McClatchy news service reports that on June 22 in the eastern Black Sea someone highjacked the GPS capabilities of some 20 vessels. Their navigation systems, all of which were operating fine, suddenly placed them 20 miles inland near an airport. This is the first reported instance of widespread “GPS spoofing.”
The Navy acknowledges that they may have been hacked. Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. John Richardson said there are no indications of a cyber intrusion in any of these instances at the present time but the Navy remains open to the possibility. It’s not a new thought, either. In 2006 the Academy at Annapolis ceased teaching celestial navigation but the sextant was returned to the hands of the Middies in 2016 although the Navy denied at the time that they were worried about hacks.
As Google and vehicle manufactures begin a serious push for autonomous cars and trucks think of the chaos and destruction a terrorist or foreign government could inflict in one day if enough driverless vehicles were on the road at any given time. Somebody needs to be in control. Right now, it’s not clear that is us.
Published in Technology
Seriously…DOD contracts anything military to China? If that is true, We deserve to be hacked and conquered. Sheesh.
Twice recently, when using different federal government computer systems I received error messages in Chinglish.
Could have been Chinglish. Could have been Hinglish. Could have been standard engineer “scraped through Freshman Rhetoric on a wing and a prayer and enough of that noise.”
Very interesting. Here’s the issue – Actel / Microsemi is going to point out that the actual wafer fabs and dies are manufactured elsewhere, but a huge amount of the semi industry still sends those finished dies to China for die-bonding and packaging. It’s hard to argue that these are “made in China” when the work is done likely at 3 or 4 different plants worldwide, but sending the raw dies to China for the finish work still exposes them to tampering or substitution, and it’s no coincidence that the massive growth in counterfeit parts on the market all traces directly back to these die bonding and packaging plants in China.
Here’s how semiconductor manufacturing works.
Various import/export laws only ever count the last country that touched a product as the Country of Origin, which is why so many parts are tagged as “made in China”. They’re really made worldwide.
But that does mean that the Chinese government / military has ample opportunity to intercept, tamper with, doctor, or even substitute the raw dies before they get to us. If there is Chinese tampering, that’s how it is happening.
No. Very specific error unique to Chinese.
Let’s talk about this. I did background investigations for various branches of the federal government for an unspecified number of years. And I’m retired military.
The background done on military recruits is, to be kind, minimal. One passes the “background” (BI) by basically getting all “no records” reports. And the scope of what is checked is, well, limited. It is practically designed to find nothing. To the best of my knowledge, there is no actual security clearance issued. Depending on your job specialty, s/he may or may not go through a more extensive BI, and have any actual security clearance issued. But starting with the Clinton Administration, the depth and quality of BI’s throughout the federal government were severely curtailed. It seems that the Clintons didn’t want investigators going around asking probing questions about people’s behavior.
Those of us who worked in the field are not exactly surprised by the explosion of leaks, defections, espionage and generally rotten stuff going on these days. We, um, saw them coming.
Consider my personal experience in the military. The last five years before I retired, I held a position that required a Top Secret clearance. I did all the paperwork, took all the proper steps. The BI was never done, and I was never issued that clearance.
So can we say with any assurance that there weren’t human operatives aboard any of those ships, in positions capable of causing accidents of this sort, by any means? Absolutely not.
Happened to talk to a former coworker today about the recent collisions. He’s got experience with Navy communications and computers, and he thinks that the likelihood of our ships being hacked is pretty high. All of my OOD underway time was on older platforms which didn’t use computers to control the ship steering and speed control systems, so I’m unfamiliar with the systems used on the DDGs, such as Fitzgerald and McCain.
To learn more about current systems, I checked Google and found this. It’s a thesis written by a Navy officer in 2009, discussing the hazards to automated control systems, including those on U.S. Navy ships. It’s pretty dry reading, but troubling. The problems faced by commercial companies and utilities in the U.S. are paralleled by Navy ships, and the risk is real.
I know what you mean.
@ejhill @tedley
Instapundit posted a link to an article in Ars Technica this afternoon that is just excellent. Lots of charts, and good, well-informed discussion of the facts, policies, and trends.
Highly recommended.
Most military malfunctions can be summarized in one sentence.
We did it to ourselves.
Thanks for sharing, very informative, especially the video of VesselFinder. From where the accident appeared to happen, when the Alnic suddenly stopped at about 51 seconds into the video, there were ships to her port and starboard. This may have limited her ability to avoid the collision, assuming she had a chance to try. Since the accident appeared to happen at the entrance to the traffic separation scheme, according to my memories of entering port as an OOD U/W, McCain should have already had the Sea and Anchor detail in-place for entering port. This would normally include manning a watch in Aft Steering, in case there’s a loss of steering. This wasn’t such a unique event, all my COs (FF and CVN) wanted the midwatch to practice steering from Aft Steering.