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Brasile
Teatro Studio, 5 giugno ore 19.30
Magie Noire (Magia Nera)
regia Laurent Poncelet
assistenti in Brasile Ernesto Filho e José W. Junior
con Daniela Barreto, Gabriela Cantalupo, Luziel Costa, Adenilson da Silva, Jonas de França, Romário dos Santos, José Ribeiro, Ricardo Santana, Alcidésio Santos, Lucas Silva, Tamires Souza, Eliene Trajano
creazione luci Mathieu Dibilio
coproduzione Cie Ophélia Théâtre (Francia) e O Grupo Pé No Chão (Recife, Brasile)
con il sostegno di Département de l’Isère, della Regione Rhône-Alpes, Consolato di France a Recife, Coléo-Pontcharra, Secours Catholique, CE ST Microelectronics Crolles e CCNG
(Photo Description: An older Jack Kilby leans over a wooden desk, his palms joined and open with microchips in them.)
Jack Kilby grew up in Great Bend, Kansas and joined Texas Instruments in Dallas in 1958. During the summer of that year, working with borrowed and improvised equipment, he conceived and built the first electronic circuit in which all of the components, both active and passive, were fabricated in a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip.
The Chip that Jack Built
It was a relatively simple device that Jack Kilby showed to a handful of co-workers gathered in TI's semiconductor lab 50 years ago -- only a transistor and other components on a slice of germanium. Little did this group of onlookers know that Kilby's invention was about to revolutionize the electronics industry.
Nobel Prize
Jack Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics on December 10. 2000 for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. To congratulate him, U.S. President Bill Clinton wrote, "You can take pride in the knowledge that your work will help to improve lives for generations to come."
Although he has over 60 patents to his credit, Jack Kilby would justly be considered one of the greatest electrical engineers of all time for one invention: the monolithic integrated circuit, or microchip (patent #3,138,743). The microchip made microprocessors possible, and therefore allowed high-speed computing and communications systems to become efficient, convenient, affordable, and ubiquitous.
Some time after earning a BSEE at the University of Illinois (1947) and an MSEE at the University of Wisconsin (1950), Kilby took a research position with Texas Instruments, Inc., in Dallas, Texas (1958). Within a year, Kilby had conceived and created what no engineer had thought possible: a small, self-contained, "monolithic" integrated circuit, in a single piece of semiconductor material about the size of a fingernail. At the first professional presentation of his invention, the IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers) Show of 1959, Kilby's colleagues were both astonished and overjoyed---and the "fourth generation" of computers was born.
Kilby went on to develop the first industrial, commercial, and military applications for his integrated circuits---including the first pocket calculator (the "Pocketronic") and computer that used them. By the mid-1970s, the computing industry was inconceivable without the microchip, which forms the basis of modern microelectronics: without it, no personal computer, fax machine, cellular phone, satellite television, or indeed any other computer or mass communication system as we know it would exist.
An independent inventor and consultant since 1970, Kilby has used his own success to promote other engineers and inventors---most notably by establishing the Kilby Awards Foundation--- which annually honors individuals outstanding in science, technology, and education. Jack Kilby is admired as much for his generosity as he is for his genius.
Brasile
Teatro Studio, 5 giugno ore 19.30
Magie Noire (Magia Nera)
regia Laurent Poncelet
assistenti in Brasile Ernesto Filho e José W. Junior
con Daniela Barreto, Gabriela Cantalupo, Luziel Costa, Adenilson da Silva, Jonas de França, Romário dos Santos, José Ribeiro, Ricardo Santana, Alcidésio Santos, Lucas Silva, Tamires Souza, Eliene Trajano
creazione luci Mathieu Dibilio
coproduzione Cie Ophélia Théâtre (Francia) e O Grupo Pé No Chão (Recife, Brasile)
con il sostegno di Département de l’Isère, della Regione Rhône-Alpes, Consolato di France a Recife, Coléo-Pontcharra, Secours Catholique, CE ST Microelectronics Crolles e CCNG
Powerful speech by Maria Zaharova on Germany's decision to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine, posted by IEarlGrey Mike Jones:
There's a big difference between what General Milley said that Russia had 100,000 soldiers killed or wounded and what Ursula von der Leyen said that Ukraine had 100,000 soldiers killed.
Retired Col Douglas Macgregor and former US WMD inspector Scott Ritter, among others, have said many times that the Russians have no problem replenishing weapons. This article just confirms that.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-west-is-losing-weapons-p...
The West is losing weapons production race to Russia, NATO ally says
Russia’s defense industry has “almost doubled” its prewar ammunition production rates, according to a senior NATO member defense official who estimated that Ukrainian forces could face as many as 10,000 incoming rounds per day.
“Russia can still manufacture a lot of dumb bombs,” the Estonian defense minister’s permanent secretary, Kusti Salm, told reporters in Washington this week. "And dumb bombs are also 152 [mm] artillery that does the most damage in the battlefield. ... Shooting 10,000 artillery [rounds] a day makes a lot of damage.”
That sobering thought punctuated a wider warning that Russia has vast resources available to conduct a protracted war in Ukraine despite sustaining heavy losses over the past year. And that assessment raised a corollary misgiving that Western defense companies have not taken the necessary steps to provide adequate supplies to Ukraine while preparing for future threats.
“The attitude from the industry [is] that ‘we will only wake up in the morning when you put the contract on the table,’” said Salm. “Our stocks are getting more depleted. So we're not only on the uphill trajectory here with the trend. We are still going down. It needs to be reversed.”
US TANKS WILL TAKE ‘MANY MONTHS’ TO REACH UKRAINE, WHITE HOUSE SAYS
That assessment complicates the picture of Western efficiency and Russian military incompetence that appeared over the last year. Russia’s logistical preparations for the war have attracted scorn in Western public discourse, dating back to the basic failures that thwarted the Kremlin’s plan to overthrow the Ukrainian government in the first days of the war.
Yet Salm, a senior defense official for one of the only NATO allies that share a border with Russia, acknowledged that “mobilization has had an effect and the line has been stabilized,” whatever the shortcomings of the mobilization process. And he expressed displeasure with those who underestimate Moscow.
“It has annoyed myself and most of my colleagues since the beginning, the ridiculing of the mobilization effort,” Salm said. “If you're a nation who can mobilize 300,000 from the street in a few weeks, in five weeks to get into the trenches — this is an effort that I don't think any Western nation can pull off just from scratch. ... There is also an element of quality in the quantity in itself.”
Some of those mobilized troops were thrown into the front lines with little or no training. Some conscripts were killed within 10 days of receiving the notifications that they would be drafted into the war, according to their bereaved families. The efficacy of those forces, whatever their flaws, points to a possible future in which the United States and its allies struggle to keep pace with Moscow’s capacity to bring power to bear in the war, even assuming that Russia has taken “significantly over 100,000” casualties, as U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated in mid-January.
“It's not actually very much if you have 30 million people in the mobilization reserve; you can afford it,” Salm said, referring to Russia’s losses. “And losing 1,400 tanks is a lot of tanks ... but it's bearable if you have done 10,000 in the stocks. Even if you can make one working [tank] out of three, still you have many times more tanks than European allies.”
It’s difficult to predict the battlefield impact of those potential reserves, he added. NATO allies recognize that Russian officials showed foresight in at least some areas prior to the mobilization drive.
“All mobilized soldiers have the new digital uniforms — all of them,” the Estonian defense official observed. “It means that their military was prepared for these numbers. Mobilized soldiers haven't showed up in Second World War uniforms. It means that they were prepared. They knew. They know what they’re doing.”
Russia always has lurked as a far larger military power than Ukraine, but the imbalance has been equalized somewhat by the nature of the conflict. An attacking force needs to be three times larger than the defenders in order to succeed, according to conventional military wisdom. Ukrainian forces also have received Western weaponry that is of higher quality than the systems available to the Russians, culminating most recently in Germany’s support for a multinational initiative to donate about 80 modern Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine.
That decision sets the stage for the tanks to arrive on the battlefield in the spring — or roughly a year after Ukrainian officials and some NATO allies began to plead for the transfers to take place.
“The allies are getting to the realization that it’s going to be a longer war. It's going to be an extremely costly war,” Salm said. “And, in order to manage this strategy, you need to have an end goal. ... The reason why we are not there, I guess, is the cost in itself, the fact that a lot of the ammunition stocks have been depleted in Europe. It’s a problem in itself that you need to deal with.”
A course correction will require the political will to make investments that dwarf the current outlays in the U.S. and Europe.
“The price tag, we know, is going to be a large one,” he said, “probably much larger than the bills that the Congress have put forward and definitely much higher than European allies have put forward.”
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But it's not just NATO running low on weapons and munitions. The U.S. is too! Is the purpose for articles like this one an attempt to increase the $816 trillion defense budget? Using drones is nothing new for the U.S. military. President Obama had used drones to kill Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS, along with thousands of innocent civilians we call collateral damage. See www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/whos-next-to-borrow-fr...
www.defenseone.com/ideas/2023/02/we-dont-have-missiles-st...
We Don't Have the Missiles to Stop China. Time For Drone Swarms
Despite all the calls to boost production, the U.S. military will be short of key missiles for at least two years. It needs ways to win with what it has now.
The war in Ukraine made plain several well-known challenges with precision weapons: they are expensive, rely on complicated supply chains, and take time to build. With Russia’s invasion stretching into its second year and military leaders warning of a looming war with China, analysts, Congress, and defense officials are all arguing for dramatically increased spending on the sophisticated long-range missiles needed for war in the Indo-Pacific.
This is a failure of both analysis and imagination by the world’s largest and most expensive defense establishment.
Decades of funding and policy decisions have led to a “right-sized” defense industry that can produce precision-guided missiles only at a peacetime replacement rate. Efforts to accumulate more PGMs could draw on the excellent recommendations made by recent studies: multi-year purchases, better management of existing stocks, and, yes, increased spending. Yet the fundamental limits remain: rocket fuel, explosives, microelectronics, and skilled technicians are all in short supply. Ramping up production of key missiles, therefore, will take two years or more.
That is time the U.S. military may not have. If Chinese leaders decide military action is necessary to achieve their goals of Indo-Pacific hegemony and a subjugated Taiwan, they are unlikely to wait for the Pentagon to rebuild its weapons stockpiles, field new B-21 bombers, and establish widespread firebases throughout southwest Japan and the Philippines. An invasion of Taiwan may not be imminent, but China’s President Xi may perceive a window opening during which he can change the status quo through a range of operations from blockades or quarantines to cyber attacks, island occupations, and bombardment.
The defense establishment must not pretend that simply opening the money spigots will provide the missiles that will enable the U.S. military to fight the way it wants to against the People’s Liberation Army. Instead, U.S. forces must adopt new concepts and tactics that can win with the weapons and systems they can field this year and next.
The war in Ukraine, recent operations by Iran, and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh offer some ideas. Faced with shortages in sophisticated PGMs due to sanctions or attrition, combatants in each of these conflicts turned to unmanned systems that help fill the gaps in some innovative ways.
As Russia ran short of many of its best long-range weapons, it began to mount large-scale strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure that combined cheap and numerous drones with cutting-edge Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. By overwhelming Ukrainian air defenses with drones, Russian attackers hoped to improve the missiles’ survivability and allow a smaller salvo to be more destructive.
A similar approach has been used by Iran and its Houthi proxies. Constrained by sanctions to building simple missiles and drones, they have nevertheless mounted strikes during the last half-decade in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. military is coming around to the idea of using uncrewed vehicles to protect and enhance smaller long-range missile salvos. Programs like the Air Force’s Skyborg and Army’s Air-Launched Effects are intended in part to build drones that can jam or confuse air defenses or precisely guide missiles to where they can do the most damage.
Although they receive less attention and funding than the PGMs they support, systems such as Air-Launched Effects and Skyborg could represent the fastest route to a more lethal U.S. force. By making each missile more accurate and survivable, these uncrewed vehicles could help stretch strained U.S. and allied magazines. Based on existing or modified vehicles, they could be fielded at scale in the time it takes a new missile production line to come on service.
Or U.S. forces can forgo the missiles entirely. Over the last two years, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Iran have all used long-endurance drones to strike enemy bases, infrastructure, and ships. Using everything from DJI quadcopters with hand grenades to Shahed-136 suicide drones carrying 200 pounds of explosives, these militaries have circumvented opponents’ air defenses through a mixture of slow speed, low radar signature, and numbers.
New technologies made these new tactics possible. Commercial automation software and microelectronics from the telecommunications, automobile, and shipping industries contribute. But more important is the emergence of commercial mission-planning and command-and-control software that can orchestrate drone and missile operations to avoid defenses, locate concealed targets, and maximize impact on the enemy.
An added benefit of commercially-derived hardware and software is in mobilization. The inability of the U.S. defense industrial base to surge production for wartime has been analyzed, described, and bemoaned during the last decade. But by shifting more of its force design toward commercially-derived technologies, the U.S. military could create the potential for commercial mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.
With a narrowing window to field a force that can thwart Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific, the Pentagon cannot afford to wait for the defense industry, evolved for peacetime efficiency, to build a military that can fight like defense planners want to fight. Instead, the DoD needs to reimagine how it can fight using the military it can get. Our adversaries and allies are showing a path to success. The Pentagon, and its supporters in Congress, need to start running toward it.
Bryan Clark is a Director of the Hudson Institute Center for Defense Concepts and Technology..