Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

204National Energy SecurityDespite designers’ best efforts to decouple complexity from unreliability,however, a correlation persists. For example, as American fighter planes evolvedfrom the relatively simple (A-10) through the moderately complex (A-7D, F-4E)to the staggeringly complex (F-15, F-111F, F-111D), not only did the capital costper plane rise by three-to fourfold, but the time unavailable for missions doubled;the maintenance time per sortie rose two- to four-fold; and the mean flighttime between failures fell three- to sixfold, from about seventy minutes to the F-111D’s twelve minutes. 81 Clearly the drive for better performance throughgreater complexity is encountering rapidly diminishing returns. It would nottake much more complexity to make the aircraft fail before it even took off.As important as how often a system fails is how much its failure hurts. Ifthe failure of an MK-86 fire control system results in the loss of a vessel costingthousands of lives and billions of dollars, the complexity of the systembore a high price. Some years ago, there was reportedly a debate in thePentagon about which of two control systems to buy for a major missile system,supposedly vital to national security: a rigidly hierarchical system whichworked only if all its subsystems were in perfect order, or one with less monolithicarchitecture, designed so that it would work even if about a third of itssubsystems had been destroyed. The former was selected because it lookedabout ten percent cheaper. In the event, the missile was not built anyway.Today, after more experience of oversophisticated, under-reliable weaponssystems, 82 one would hope the decision would be different.Limited demands on social stability For any system whose collapse bears anintolerable price, the demands placed on reliability are so great as to requirea degree of social engineering to protect the fragile technical systems.Whether this is tolerable in a free society is a profound political issue, not primarilya technical one. The origin of this concern is worth tracing moreexplicitly. At some level of complexity and at some level of requirement thatfailures be extremely rare, reliability ceases to be an engineering problem—thefailure rates of pipes, motors, and transistors. It becomes a people problem—the unavoidable fallibility and the occasional irresponsibility, irrationality, ormalice of the people who must design, build, run, and maintain the system.Systems designed by geniuses and run by idiots do not always work, nor viceversa. Technologies which require “great vigilance and the highest levels ofquality control, continuously and indefinitely,” 83 may not get it. Many criticswonder if our society—hardly one that is peopled by angels and robots—is reallyup to handling such demanding technologies. 84 They are skeptical thatenough people can be found to fill positions in which they “must not makeserious mistakes, become inattentive or corrupt, disobey instructions or the