Chapter 11: The Marines Step It Up a Notch

After a bourbon and coke settled my nerves I wrote out an after-action report. I sent it to the marines, c/o commander-in-chief, Parris Island. I tried to give a minute-by-minute analysis of the event, from the first alert of the breach of our ten-mile radar limit until the weapons systems were re-supplied and secured. I reminded myself that I owed the Browning a barrel cleaning within the next 24 hours.

We were invited back to the Marine base for a 'refit'. That sounded ominous to me. I wondered how much of the ship would belong to me and how much to the U.S. Government by the time we were done. This sounded like the camel's nose to me. We didn't really have any definite port in mind so we powered up across the gulf, around Florida and back to Parris Island to see what they had in mind for us.

Once there we were invited to partake of the base hospitality and a few training exercises. Meanwhile, a fire control radar and computer were added to our ship. I argued that this broke the man/machine barrier protocol that we were testing. I was informed that the modular fire control systems that had just come out alleviated the need for intermediate human-controlled ordnance in a clean environment such as at sea. Land based systems had other issues such as ground clutter and target acquisition, as the computer generated firing solutions were not reliable.

I thought that I was being a smart-ass when I fired back, "Why not incorporate what the helmets see; use bidirectional digital image transmission. Consider the distributed processor model and aim for incremental database convergence."

Holy shit! You'd think I was Jesus. I got a quick ride to the Naval War College where a whole bunch of guys and gals with all sorts of chickenshit on their sleeves wanted to hear what I said. I shrugged and blue-skied with the best of them.

I talked while I thought. I brought up the idea of pulsar maps--easily identified low-count map artifacts that give you a quick way to lock maps into the same coordinate system. If you jump the resolution one click you get gross features that match. Click it again and you get a higher resolution, more time consuming scan with a better correspondence.

Using a binary search-type of algorithm, you quick jump until the correspondence lock is lost. Then backing off a click you should get a fast and useable target lock from multiple vectors. It is similar to the bees-to-honey approach. It was an adaptation of image recognition too. It was not just coding for multiple cores but multiple sensor input stations.

I ended my 'lecture by holding up both arms and saying "Bless you my children. Now go forth and murder all the heathen scum."

I got a good laugh, and later I got another 'attaboy' from the Naval War College, along with a rank of commodore admiral, retired and an invitation to teach at the war college. Wow. I could fuck up a whole generation and get away with it! Of course, that's what they wanted.

It was too bad that my type of insanity wasn't transferable to those young, innocent, clean-cut, ultra-respectable men and women. I'd have to take them on a couple of dockside bar crawls before they began to get the idea. Oh, the marines knew the real deal but the naval and air force officer graduates were a bit ... ah... , 'programmed'.

We got four automated launchers mounted on the wheelhouse roof. The M2 gunner would have to take care not to chop them off at the knees. At least they were all in a row as far as the turret was concerned. However, with the online target acquisition and fire control there wasn't much of a chance of needing the Browning unless we got attacked by troops on foot or divers. There was a cool manual control for the launchers to take out things like truck bombs or land-based targets like tanks or APCs in an urban setting. Cool shit.