Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
Originally Posted By: L_Sludger
Originally Posted By: oil_film_movies
This stuff is unclassified? Productive to discuss openly in a U.S. military magazine? For Pete's Sake....
hey look, an OPSEC hall monitor. There is always one. Hint: there isn't any junior G Man badge at the end of this train ride.
Yer funny, in a naive sort of way!
I guess discussing certain things is OK. Maybe the
military has given up on keeping some secrets. Could be part of an actual overall strategy.
The main point is "no methods or performance details" can be discussed to help the enemy.
When I worked on highly secret projects, they always threatened to jail us for any leaks. In the name of "diversity" I worked right next to an ex-national Iranian, and an ex-Chinese too, showing they were more serious about affirmative action
than actually keeping vital defense secrets. Sad, but true. You can bet all the stuff I worked on is likely in Iran/China etc. now.
They didn't classify this rather informative ABM tech video - and this was at the height of the Cold War.
How about this rather more detailed technical, also unclassified, also approved for general release article on radar signal propagation over the horizon? Do you think that the State Prize-winning, highly renowned technical experts of the Democratic people's Republic of Maximum Korea would take this information to build a doomsday device?
http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2012/1210690.pdf
post script: I worked on sensitive, do-not-export jet engine stuff and have kept my lips sealed tightly about what I did. Not because any of the stuff was groundbreaking - it wasn't - I'm just scared to death of getting hauled away in a black van on account of ITAR's onerous regs. But among the things I worked on was the CFMi LEAP-1C which is going to China, for their COMAC C919 jet engines. The information relating to that engine was also marked for non-export. But the engine itself is being exported to them. Kind of cognitive dissonance there.
The Chinese used the CFM-56 engines that they were able to get their hands on in the 80s and tore them apart to discover their secrets. Then they used the core design of that engine to be the heart of their military jet engine design that will be used in aircraft hostile to American interests. I wonder why we gave them those engines in the first place? And now they are getting bleeding-edge technology in the CFMi LEAP engine - great!
There isn't a shortage of design information that is available to our enemies. What our enemies lack are advanced metallurgy for things like single crystal nickel engine blades, or the extremely high precision machining needed to make those parts. And that's what has held the Chinese and even the Indians behind. The Chinese still can't build a reliable long-lived high performance jet turbofan engine for their fighters because they haven't mastered the materials and manufacturing aspect.