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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, yeah, individual initiative. Nest read an analysis of the Charge of the Light Brigade and see how Cardigan's initiative (or stupidity) led the charge in the wrong direction, despite orders from Lucan.

For a serious discussion of how much initiative is too much or too little, read MCDP 1, "Warfighting", the USMC manual on how to run a battle. Good military forces work hard at that balance.

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Initiative is very different at sea, and was especially so before the era of effective radio communications. Nations trusted their admirals and captains to effectively be ambassadors as the effect they could have on foreign affairs during peacetime was enormous. From the USS Pueblo to the USS Vincennes the position naval captains are put is often significantly more isolated, complicated, and symbolically important than any other armed service.

Speaking of trusting naval crews - the UK Tridents subs don't require any codes being sent to authorize launches, they have all the required information and we simply trust them not to abuse it.

I think that's true for all countries that have submarine-launched nuclear weapons. One of the purposes of having nuclear missiles on submarines is for them to pose a credible threat of retaliation against a first strike, even if the first strike is successful enough to destroy land-based installations and the command chain. So the theory is that they need to be able to retaliate without a functioning chain of command.

Of course getting detailed information on these things is difficult but I've seen more than one reference claiming that UK Tridents subs are unusual in this respect - Wikipedia claims that launch keys on US Tridents subs are kept in safes to which the crew do not have the combinations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link#Two-man...

Apparently the reasoning is that the UK is so close to potential enemies that there would be no time for the PM or equivalent to give authorization - the so called "4 minute warning" being very optimistic. The US is much further away from the Soviets/Russia so there would be far more time to broadcast a launch order. Also the UK is notoriously cheap about these kinds of things!

The US had a secret launch code - Permissive Action Link (PAL) - but that code was allegedly set to 00000000 and launch operators were told this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link

The combination was changed in 1977.

Plus the famous letters detailing what to do in the event of the UK's nuclear destruction.

And it's said those Trident subs are running Windows XP.

Cardigan's fault wasn't initiative, but ego. And the orders were anything but simple and clear.

Yes, and Lt. Nolan pointed in the wrong direction.

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