Looking
Back . . .
This
website was launched on May 22, 1995, when the World Wide Web was in the
midst of an accelerated adolescence.
The site's original purpose was to make a centralized repository of
hard-to-find information on specific military-related subjects available
to researchers on the Internet. At first, its focus was the organization
and aircraft of U.S. carrier-based aviation, based largely on research
files that I had been diligently maintaining since my youth. Over the next
few months I extended the website's scope to cover other research topics,
most notably Russian naval developments in the post-Soviet era and the
1991 Gulf War air campaign. For most of the last six years, the delivery
of information in these three main subject areas has remained the
fundamental raison d'etre of
this website.
Two
important changes have since taken place.
First, the web is a much larger place than it was six years ago.
There are many more sources of information online today than there were in
1995, a fact that has diluted much of the value of the original site
content. As an example: the centerpiece of the original Vulture's
Row was a squadron-level accounting of deployed carrier air wings,
which in 1995 was (for someone with no direct service or industry
connections) something that had to be painstakingly assembled by means of
a great deal of open source research. Today, the same information is
available at the casual researcher's fingertips through at least a
half-dozen websites, including official U.S. Navy information channels.
The Naval Historical Center's section on naval aviation has become so
complete in recent years that much, if not all, of the current content
offering on Vulture's Row is now
superfluous. This general situation applies in varying degrees to most of
the website in its current form.
The
second major change took place in my own personal circumstances. In 1995,
I was an undergraduate in political science at the University of
California at Berkeley, specializing in international relations and
security studies, with something of a minor regional focus on Russia and
the former Soviet Union. There was therefore a great deal of natural
subject-matter overlap between my "occupation" at the time and
the research and maintenance of this website. Indeed, I think that much of
the original value of the State of
the Russian Navy stemmed from the fact that I had (a) regular and
continuous access to U.C. Berkeley's academic research stacks, including
its collection of FBIS daily translations of Eastern European open media
reports; and (b) both the time and an academic reason to undertake the
laborious process of sifting through these and other open sources in hopes
of finding rare gems of relevant information.
For
better or for worse, six years later I find myself in a somewhat different
position. The demands of my current professional life jealously lay claim
to the majority of my waking hours, and while my occupation remains
fundamentally analytical in character, it does not ordinarily involve work
with sources directly relevant to the subject matter of this website. The
unhappy reality is that I no longer routinely have time in the quantities
necessary to consistently work with the open sources, build the analytical
picture, and engage others in the collaborative exchange of information
that was the underpinning of the site as I originally envisioned it.
. . . Looking Forward
In
light of these changes, the site needs to be reoriented if it is to
continue to serve a useful purpose. First, I have two observations, both
of which relate to what I am convinced that I (and this site) should not attempt to do.
- Any
kind of "current reporting" orientation is no longer
tenable.
In 1995, there might have been some hope of delivering value to the
research community by clipping relevant news items on a weekly basis;
on specialized subjects, you took what you could get at the time.
Today, there are a great many alternative sources of raw current
information, most of which are far superior to the collection product
that I would reasonably be able to offer today. Rather than attempt to
duplicate, poorly, the efforts of those that are much better
positioned to collect and report open source intelligence in raw or
lightly-processed form, this site simply needs to abandon all
pretensions to the current reporting business.
- The
technical character of "hardware" is best covered by
specialized alternative sources.
There was a time when public technical specifications for specific
pieces of military hardware were difficult to come by. This was
particularly true before 1991, but continued to be true after the
sudden and unexpected increase in the number and diversity of known
Soviet/Russian weapons systems after the breakup of the USSR, when
confusion reigned. Ten years after the event, this is no longer the
case. Floods of organized public data on once-exotic systems like the
S-300/SA-10 surface-to-air missile complex can now be found with a
single query using a general purpose web search engine. Amateur
aircraft spotters worldwide have made their collections accessible to
all, making photographs (and even individual aircraft serials)
available to anyone who cares to look. Large collaborative
order-of-battle and TO&E projects have shed much light into the
structure of military organizations worldwide. Within the natural
limitations of what open sources can reasonably be expected to
provide, the tangible material implements of conventional military
power are closely watched and well-covered by existing sources. Again,
this site would bring little to the table by attempting to duplicate
those efforts.
A
few years ago, when many of the really valuable information sources were a
step or two removed from a lot of potential consumers, there was a real
need for intermediaries to perform the aggregation and reporting function.
Today, in a web now populated with primary sources and professional or
near-professional collectors and aggregators, I am no longer equipped to
usefully serve as one. Let me be clear: this is really no tragedy. From
the perspective of an open-source researcher concerned with high-quality
data, my obsolescence is a very good thing. But this cause for celebration
does leave behind a website designed and built around a requirement that
has since evaporated.
With
all of this in mind, I intend to shift the primary focus of this website
away from fact collection and toward the preparation of processed material
at an "intermediate" level of analysis. To elaborate: imagine an
analytical spectrum that measures the total amount of filtering and
analysis required to prepare a particular information product, beginning
with simple collection of raw unprocessed data at the "low" end,
and ending with the preparation of highly-contextualized "politico-econo-socio-military"
analytical product at the "high" end. In more concrete terms,
the "low end" is represented by factual answers to specific
questions such as "what is the diameter of the bow torpedo tubes in a
submarine of class X?" The
"high end" is represented by general analytical conclusions,
estimates, and educated guesses derived from many raw facts placed in
context, which seek to answer very broad questions such as "to what
extent is the defense industrial base of country X
(including submarine design and production) being realigned toward the
export market?" There are plenty of existing resources serving both
ends of the spectrum, with the low end largely covered by the general
media and specialized news sources, and the high end largely covered in
the public arena by foreign and defense policy journals. But the area that
I am targeting lies between the extremes, at an altitude sufficient to
discern important trends in the critical intangibles (which can be nearly
invisible if one is too narrowly focused on the hard details), but well
below the dizzying heights of strategic policy.
This broad middle ground is characterized by a free-ranging level
of inquiry, and embraces the sort of educated speculation about
specialized topics that inspired amateurs like myself have always found
engaging.
What This All Means . . .
Anyway,
so goes the overtheorized conceptual explanation of what is about to
happen to this site. Coming
back down to more practical terms, I am reorganizing this site into
several primary research directions called "programs," a term
that I have intentionally selected for its breadth and flexibility.
As I use the term here, a "program" describes a cluster
of related open source research activity, which may include the
maintenance of any combination of knowledge resources such as articles,
databases, FAQs, current development notes, and annotated catalogs of
links. The reorganization will be a gradual process, and it will
proceed on a section-by-section basis.
Needless to say, there is a great deal of work to do.
I
have drawn up some preliminary design plans for the overhaul of the site,
although I do expect those plans to change as things progress.
Some things that are currently in the design specification:
Updates
to Existing Content
- State
of the Russian Navy (Maritime Programs). Update
and expand Russian naval ship name index to include additional
information on individual unit status. In light of continued
stagnation in major shipbuilding programs, shift general focus to
small combatants, discrete weapons systems, and the naval export
market. Develop materials
on naval organizational, industrial, and (to the extent available)
doctrinal/tactical developments in the decade following the collapse
of the USSR. Update and
expand dedicated links library.
- Vulture's
Row (Maritime Programs). Update
all content to 2001, with particular attention to organizational
tables. Track changes in
the posture of U.S. carrier aviation over the last ten years: a
typical CVW today looks quite different from a typical CVW at the end
of the Gulf War. Begin
focused commentary on future plans and programs for naval aviation.
Possible long-term objective: expand coverage of Vulture’s
Row to include non-carrier naval aviation.
- Gulf
War Air Campaign Tables (Airpower Programs). Ten years after the
conclusion of the war, new information about the details and
prosecution of the air campaign has been emerging.
These historical tables were largely based on the handful of
sources available immediately after the end of the Gulf War; they
badly need to be revised and updated.
New Content
- Post-Desert
Storm Air Operations (Airpower Programs).
As news reports sporadically remind us, U.S. combat air forces
routinely have been engaged shooting incidents around the world almost
continuously through the 1990s. These
uses of force have ranged from isolated small-scale strikes against
point targets (e.g., raids against SAM radars interfering with the
enforcement of the Iraqi NFZ) to major multinational sustained air
campaigns (e.g., Operation ALLIED FORCE in Kosovo/Serbia). This program will attempt to tabulate the shooting incidents
that have occurred between the end of the Gulf War in March 1991 and
the present. I currently
have a dataset that is more or less complete through August 1999.
- Information
Warfare (Horizon Programs). The
concept of “information warfare” has been kicking around in
mainstream thought for perhaps half a decade, and in
the thinktank community for much longer than that.
The boundaries of the subject have always been somewhat
unmanageable; discussions of “information warfare” encompass
everything from the technical and faintly mundane (computer and
network security) to the visionary and faintly fantastic (RMAs,
strategic infrastructural warfare, and the configuration of armed
forces in the year 2025). At the moment, I am primarily interested in how evolving
information technologies create new threats, vulnerabilities, and
capabilities that are converting the “problem” of national
security from what was predominantly a public-sector issue into
something in which the private sector has a tremendous direct role.
This program is designed to focus on that aspect of the
information warfare dialogue.
- "Punch Stack." Like
all researchers, I collect information like a packrat.
While I have taken some tentative first steps toward the
promise of a completely electronic library, I still find it quite
convenient to work with a lot of material in print form.
In order to lend some semblance of order to this flood of
paper, I have taken to organizing these materials into serial
looseleaf binders, roughly organized by subject.
I keep newly collected, unsorted materials on a shelf next to a
three-hole punch, where they await processing.
The "Punch Stack” is the electronic analog of that stack of
papers; items that I have flagged as “interesting” but which I
haven’t yet had a chance to analyze and fully integrate into
individual programs. This
is as close to a “news” section as I’m likely to manage, a grab
bag of subject-matter relevant items that I think will be of interest
to the readership. Because
the analysis required is very light, I expect this to be the most
frequently updated of the new sections.
As
I mentioned before, this process is going to require a great deal of work,
and by necessity will be a gradual one.
Nevertheless, I am committed to making it happen.
My primary motivation is a selfish one: this will allow me to
maintain some degree of currency in the subjects for which I have held a
deep-seated intellectual passion during all of my adult life.
But I do hope that there are others out there, both
“professionals” and “inspired amateurs” alike, who have found and
will continue to find this site interesting, and perhaps useful.
I’d like to thank all of you who have written over the years,
whether to provide or request information, exchange thoughts, or simply to
provide a few words of encouragement. I look forward to interacting with many of you in the years
to come.
Robin
John Lee
August 11, 2001
Mountain
View, California
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