It's called "controls engineering", and there are plenty of talented people in the field. But you are correct that people who sought a career in websites and cellphones have never heard of it.
(edit: s/cellphones/cellphone apps/)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Prisoner_of_war
The Russian military is organized around a land defense of their homeland since they don't have the natural barriers the U.S. has (e.g. they last got invaded in 1941, we last got invaded in 1812.)
You might think they'd invest in fixed SAM systems but mobile SAM systems are so more survivable in a war because the radar for a SAM is highly visible. You really want to hide those systems in terrain and ambush planes going by.
Systems like that are most effective when they operate in a networked mode together with AWACS airplanes like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-50
which use a "look down" pulse doppler radar which can see cruise missiles, UAVs and other low-flying threats. This is a great complement to the radar on a Patriot missile battery which is optimized to ballistic missile threats. Russia's latest S-500 system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system
has crazy long range, it competes with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
as an anti missile missile system but also it can (try to) take out a distant AWACS airplane with a direct shot.
The Russians DO NOT want an enemy to have air superiority over them anywhere.
At the very least the Patriot SAM should be redesigned to allow for vertical launching to allow shooting in all directions. If you point Patriot one way and you get ambushed from behind you're basically caught with your pants down.
At the very least you'd need four Patriot missile launchers pointing in all directions to prevent this scenario.
I find this puzzling since Greece, also a NATO member, also purchased Russian S-300 systems but weren't penalized for it.
Turkey bought S-400. Greece got S-300. Different systems.There are a myriad of versions of the S-300, from the original SA-10 introduced in the late 70's to the newest MPU version.
In my opinion it is because the American way of fighting a war doesn’t need it. Let say there is a troublesome country who would want to fly airplanes to shoot at American troops. The war plans against such a threat would start with two steps: 1st supress their air defences. 2nd gain full air dominance.
Supression of air defences is a polite way to say that they pulverize anything which can shoot US airplanes from the ground or even detect US airplanes using a radar.
Gaining full air dominance is a polite way to say that they aim to pulverize all enemy airplanes, runways, taxiways, fueling equipment and maintenance infrastructure.
If that is your method of operation why would you need mobile, survivable air defenses. People who routinely plan on destroying clouds (the source of rain) don’t need an umbrella.
AEGIS is an integrated, networked system; multiple sensors on multiple platforms (including AWACS) collaborate to detect and hit targets.
There was an AEGIS-equipped ship either in the Black Sea, or trying to get in through the Bosphorus (now closed to naval traffic). The presence of AEGIS ships in the Black Sea would be enough to explain the non-appearance of the Russian airforce.
I suspect that the engineers you know are more computer science "engineers" than people who went through a traditional engineering core.
The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system.
That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.
I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.
But even so, my calc for engineering classes suffered from basically the same problems of focus. It was frequently hard to tell what was really important vs what was an interesting sidetrack I would never use again. Which is why I distinctly remember a number of my engineering classes having week long math refreshers as the first week of class for things like Laplace transforms/etc or a math refresher TA lead study groups the prof would strongly suggest people attend at the beginning if they couldn't solve some basic math problems written on the board the first day of class. Where I went, the first week or so was add/drop and many of the professors would toss in a "prereq" quiz to scare people into dropping who weren't strong enough in the prereqs as another method. And being an engineering class grades weren't "given". For some classes it was well known that there were going to be a lot of C's and D's because the prof wasn't going to dumb down his material if you couldn't keep up because they were believers in normal distributions (and I remember a physics professor who would show the distribution for tests/etc) and that A's really meant you were excelling.
We've strongly disincentivized gaining mid-level expertise on hard engineering.
One thing I realised as a graduate student designing RF PCBs and digital circuits was that the debugger for reality sucks. It's really frustrating to be faced with a problem where you just can't get "more information by recompiling with debug flags" and can't easily (or reversibly!) change the system to make it easier to understand. Totally different skillset, and requires a different method of thinking (frankly, at times, with a lot more thought).
Pretty crazy to think about.
"The Norden [used] an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects."
The odd man out, if you will, is inertial nav, which has more in common with dead reckoning.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3865/this-is-likely-wh...
Ironically, the last one I touched was a piece of donated Russian equipment, intended for spacecraft use, with no manual.
The Trident 2 submarine missile has a gyroscope in it that costs almost as much as the nuclear warhead because it is so resistant to drift that it can be spun up and locked on in port and maintain its position when the submarine is at sea.
If you tried INS with a smart phone or wiimote the errors in velocity estimation will build up quickly and you'll get terrible drift.
In the case of the spatial computing hoop though you know the hoop never gets far away from the user so you can damp the D.C. component of the velocity, work in coordinates relative the user's center of gravity and never notice any drift in the x or y coordinates. (I don't like damping the vertical so much but I think I can live with it.)
nah fam, we've got it so much easier. You should kick up your feet and enjoy it, or you'll drive yourself crazy.
The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2S_(radar) (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known.
Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors...
https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8 is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made before the scientists were dead, so lots of gossip.
Randall and Boot should be known by more people, but magnetrons are not as awesome as the nuclear bomb.