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Sousveillance

Sousveillance is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies. The term, coined by Steve Mann, stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings) or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures).

While surveillance and sousveillance both usually refer to visual monitoring, they can denote other forms of monitoring such as audio surveillance or sousveillance. With audio (e.g. recording of phone conversations), sousveillance is sometimes referred to as "one party consent".

Undersight (inverse oversight) is sousveillance at high-level, e.g. "citizen undersight" being reciprocal to a congressional oversight committee or the like.

Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with an emphasis on "watchful vigilance from underneath" and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures. Inverse surveillance is typically undertaken by those who are subjected to surveillance, so it can be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance). Sousveillance typically involves community-based recording from first person perspectives, without necessarily involving any specific political agenda, whereas inverse surveillance is a form of sousveillance that is typically directed at, or used to collect data to analyze or study, surveillance or its proponents (e.g., the actions of police or protestors at a protest rally).

Sousveillance is not necessarily countersurveillance. Sousveillance can be used to "counter" surveillance or it can be used with surveillance to create a more complete "veillance" ("Surveillance is a half-truth without sousveillance" ). The question of "Who watches the watchers" is dealt with more properly under the topic of metaveillance (the veillance of veillance) than sousveillance.

Inverse surveillance
Inverse surveillance is a type of sousveillance. The more general concept of sousveillance goes beyond just inverse surveillance and the associated twentieth-century political "us versus them" framework for citizens to photograph police, shoppers to photograph shopkeepers, or passengers to photograph taxicab drivers. Howard Rheingold commented in his book Smart Mobs that this is similar to the pedestrian−driver concept, i.e. these are roles that many of us take both sides on, from time to time. Many aspects of sousveillance were examined in the general category of "reciprocal accountability" in David Brin's 1997 non-fiction book The Transparent Society, and also in Brin's novels. The first International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance, IWIS, took place in 2004, chaired by Dr. Jim Gemmell, (MyLifeBits), Joi Ito, Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, and Steve Mann, among others.

One of the things that brought inverse surveillance to light was the reactions of security guards to electric seeing aids and similar sousveillance practices. It seemed, early on, that the more cameras that were in an establishment, the more the guards disliked the use of an electric seeing aid, such as the EyeTap eyeglasses. It was through simply wearing electric seeing aids, as a passive observer, that it was discovered that surveillance and sousveillance can cause conflict and sometimes confrontation. This led some researchers to explore why the perpetrators of surveillance are suspicious of sousveillance, and thus defined the notion of inverse surveillance as a new and interesting facet of studies in sousveillance.

Since the year 2001, December 24 has been World Sousveillance Day with groups of participants in New York City, Toronto, Boston, Florida, Vancouver, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom. However, this designated day focuses only on hierarchical sousveillance, whereas there are a number of groups around the world working on combining the two forms of sousveillance.

An essay from Wired magazine predicts that sousveillance is an important development that will be on the rise in 2014.

Sousveillance of a state by its citizens has been credited with addressing many problems such as election fraud or electoral misdeeds, as well as providing good governance. For example, mobile phones were used in Sierra Leone and Ghana in 2007 for checking malpractices and intimidation during elections.

A recent area of research further developed at IWIS was the equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance. Current "equiveillance theory" holds that sousveillance, to some extent, often reduces or eliminates the need for surveillance. In this sense it is possible to replace the Panoptic God's eye view of surveillance with a more community-building ubiquitous personal experience capture. Crimes, for example, might then be solved by way of collaboration among the citizenry rather than through the watching over the citizenry from above. But it is not so black-and-white as this dichotomy suggests. In particular, citizens watching over their neighbors is not necessarily "better" than the alternative: an increase in community self-reliance might be offset by an uncomfortable "nosy neighbor" effect. "Personal sousveillance" has been referred to as "coveillance" by Mann, Nolan and Wellman.

Copwatch is a network of American and Canadian volunteer organizations that "police the police." Copwatch groups usually engage in monitoring of the police, videotaping police activity, and educating the public about police misconduct. Fitwatch is a group that photograph Forward Intelligence Teams (police photographers) in the United Kingdom.

In 2008, Cambridge researchers (in the MESSAGE project) teamed with bicycle couriers to measure and transmit air pollution indicators as they travel the city.

In 2012 the Danish daily newspaper and online title Dagbladet Information crowdmapped the positions of surveillance cameras by encouraging readers to use a free Android and iOS app to photograph and geolocate CCTV cameras.

Personal sousveillance
Personal sousveillance is the art, science, and technology of personal experience capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission, such as lifelong audiovisual recording by way of cybernetic prosthetics, such as seeing-aids, visual memory aids, and the like. Even today's personal sousveillance technologies like camera phones and weblogs tend to build a sense of community, in contrast to surveillance that some have said is corrosive to community.

The legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding personal sousveillance are largely yet to be explored, but there are close parallels to the social and legal norms surrounding recording of telephone conversations. When one or more parties to the conversation record it, it is called "sousveillance", whereas when the conversation is recorded by a person who is not a party to the conversation (such as a prison guard violating a client-lawyer relationship), the recording is called "surveillance".

"Targeted sousveillance" refers to sousveillance of a specific individual by one or more other individuals. Usually, the targeted individual is a representative or proponent of surveillance, so targeted sousveillance is often inverse surveillance or hierarchical sousveillance. "Hierarchical sousveillance" refers, for example, to citizens photographing the police, shoppers photographing shopkeepers, or taxicab passengers photographing cab drivers. So, for example, targeting former White House security official Admiral John Poindexter with sousveillance follows this more political narrative.

Classy's Kitchen describes sousveillance as "another way to add further introspection to the commons that keeps society open but still makes the world smaller and safer". In this way sousveillance may be regarded as a possible replacement for surveillance. In this sur/sousveillance replacement, one can consider an operative social norm that would require cameras to be attached to a human operator. Under such a scenario, any objections to the camera could be raised by another human more easily than it would be to interact with a lamp post upon which is mounted a surveillance camera. Thus, the argument is that cameras attached to people ought to be less offensive than cameras attached to inanimate objects, because there is at least one responsible party present to operate the camera. This responsible-party argument is analogous to that used for the operation of a motor vehicle, where a responsible driver is present, in contrast to the remote or automated operation of a motor vehicle.

Beyond the political or breaching of hierarchical structure explored in academia, the more rapidly emerging discourse on sousveillance within the industry is "personal sousveillance", namely the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity.

As the technologies get smaller and easier to use, the capture, recording, and playback of everyday life get that much easier to initiate spontaneously in unexpected situations. For example, David Ollila, a manufacturer of video camera equipment, was trapped for four hours aboard a Comair plane at JFK Airport in New York City. When he recorded an interview with the pilot about the situation, the pilot called the police who then removed Ollila for questioning and removed everyone from the plane.

Recording a situation is only part of the sousveillance process. Communicating is also important. Video-sharing sites such as YouTube and photo-sharing sites such as Flickr play a vital role. For example, police agents provocateur were quickly revealed on YouTube when they infiltrated a demonstration in Montebello, Quebec, against the leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States (August 2007). When the head of the Quebec police publicly stated that there was no police presence, a sousveillance video showed him to be wrong. When he revised his statement to say that the police provocateurs were peaceful observers, the same video showed them to be masked, wearing police boots, and in one case holding a rock.

There are many similar examples, such as the widely viewed YouTube video of UCLA campus policemen tasering a student. In Russia, as well as in some other countries where road users trust neither each other nor police, onboard cameras are so ubiquitous that thousands of videos of automobile accidents and near-miss incidents have been uploaded. The unanticipated 2013 Russian meteor event was well documented from a dozen angles via the use of these devices. Similarly, in February 2015, dashcams caught valuable footage of the crash of TransAsia Airways Flight GE235.

Alibi sousveillance
Alibi sousveillance is a form of sousveillance activity aimed at generating an alibi as evidence to defend against allegations of wrongdoing.

Hasan Elahi, a University of Maryland professor, has produced a sousveillance for his entire life, after being detained at an airport because he was erroneously placed on the US terrorist watchlist. Some of his sousveillance activities include using his cell phone as a tracking device, and publicly posting debit card and other transactions that document his actions.

One specific use of alibi sousveillance is the growing trend of police officers wearing body cameras while on patrol. Well-publicized events involving police-citizen altercations (such as the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) have increased calls for police to wear body cameras and so capture evidence of the incidents, for their benefit and the criminal justice system as a whole. By having officers use sousveillance, police forces can generate hours of video evidence to be used in cases like that of Michael Brown, and the video evidence can act as an important alibi in the judicial proceedings in regards to who is truly at fault. Regardless of the outcome of such events, contemporaneous audio-video evidence can be extremely valuable in respect of compliance- and enforcement-related events.

Police use
Use of wearable cameras by police officers combined with video streaming and recording in an archive produces a record of the interactions of the officer with civilians and criminals. Experiments with police use in Rialto, California from 2012 to 2013 resulted in a reduction of both complaints against officers and a reduction in the use of violence by officers. The public is shielded from police misconduct and the police officer from bogus complaints.

Because these body cameras are turned on for every encounter with the public, privacy issues have been brought up with specific emphasis on special victim cases such as rape or domestic violence. Police worry that with a camera right in front of the victim, they will not feel comfortable revealing all the information that they know. There have been two case studies done in the United States that have revealed that police officers who have cameras have fewer encounters with citizens than officers who do not have cameras, due to fear of being reprimanded for committing a mistake.

Sousveillance cultures
Prior to contemporary sousveillance cultures, Simone Browne (2015) used "dark sousveillance" to refer to the ways that enslaved Black Americans refashioned techniques and technologies to facilitate survival and escape. Browne (2015) notes how pranks and other performative practices and creative acts were used to resist enslavement from experiential insight.

In the era of web-based participatory media and convergence cultures, non-governmental and non-state actors, with their own virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders, use what Bakir (2010) calls the sousveillant assemblage to wield discursive power. The sousveillant assemblage comprises Haggerty & Ericson's (2000) surveillant assemblage (or loosely linked, unstable, systems of data flows of people's activities, tracked by computers, and data-mined so that we are each reconfigured as (security) risks or (commercial) opportunities, but data-fattened by the proliferation of web-based participatory media and personal sousveillance that we willingly provide online). Verde Garrido (2015) has also explored Mann's concept of sousveillance and reinterpreted Michel Foucault's notion of parrhesia (i.e., confronting authority and power with the truth) to explain that in contemporary societies, which are global and digital, 'parrhesiastic sousveillance' allows to resist and contest social, economic, and political relations of power by means of technology. These acts of resistance and contestation, in turn, enable civil societies to change old meanings and offer new ones, using a newborn digital agency to create new and contemporary politics of truth.

Features of sousveillance cultures: Undoubtedly, the urge and practice of dissent have been common, and people exploit the participatory media technologies at hand to mark and spread their dissent. However, the rise of web-based participatory media and sousveillance cultures have made it easier for many more to record and spread this dissent globally, unimpeded by traditional media's commercial distribution restrictions such as pre-defined circulation runs or paid-for airtime, or the need for expert knowledge in media production. Mann has long maintained that the 'informal nature of sousveillance, with its tendency to distribute recordings widely, will often expose inappropriate use to scrutiny, whereas the secret nature of surveillance will tend to prevent misuse from coming to light' (Mann, 2005, p. 641). Just as Foucault's Panopticon operates through potential or implied surveillance, sousveillance might also operate through the credible threat of its existence. As the ubiquity and awareness of sousveillance widen, it is this that may most empower citizens – by making officials realise that their actions may, themselves, be monitored and exposed at any time. The permanent potential for sousveillance from so many (as opposed to more formalised exposés at the hands of investigative reporters, a small media elite) raises the likelihood that power abuses will be captured on record which can then be used to hold power-abusers and manipulators to account, providing of course, that there is a functioning legal system and/or public sphere (with mechanisms in place to translate popular demands and moral outrage into real-world change). In the case of police body camera implementation in the US, there are multiple responses and social implications to this form of sousveillance. The case against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement has garnered an immense and impassioned following in a very short amount of time. There are two different social movements that have arisen in response to police body cameras. One school of thought that has manifested support is that police body cameras are necessary in fighting and ending police brutality. The other is the opposing stance to this one that raises the issue of privacy that police body cameras may violate. There have not been many case studies that have taken place in implementing police body cameras. This means that police worn body cameras have not been proven as a definite method to solve the problem of police brutality. Studies have also shown that people, both policemen and civilians, act differently when they are aware that they are being surveilled on camera. This leaves a lot of room for unpredictability surrounding the consequences of the use of this form of sousveillance.
 * Dissent, and holding power-holders to account, is easier
 * Emancipation, resistance and social change are unpredictable.

In Mann's original conception, sousveillance had an emancipatory political thrust, with hierarchical sousveillance a conscious act of resistance to surveillance. Yet, the nature of the social change generated is unpredictable and dependent on the sousveillant content, the context of its subsequent sharing, and, of course, the strength of the traditions of deliberation for democratic purposes. ISIS' use of sousveillance, then, may result in social change, but not in a progressive fashion. Given the lack of secrecy inherent in placing sousveillant content online, the anonymity of the sousveillers is of prime importance if hierarchical (politically or legally motivated) sousveillance is to proliferate. There is a real need for spaces online that are willing to protect users' anonymity and keep their subversive content online despite political or corporate pressure. With this sort of situation in mind, whistle-blowing websites have been set up that guarantee anonymity, such as Wiki-leaks, launched in December 2006. More such sites are needed. Social media provide what could be described as a semi-permanent, and easily accessible database of eyewitness accounts. Given that the web can be used and searched in the manner of a database to find examples of sousveillance; and given the recirculation of sousveillant footage in memes and in mainstream media, ever-hungry for new content in a media environment of convergence and expanding capacity, the longevity of sousveillant footage is perhaps what gives sousveillance its agenda-building power. It allows journalists, citizens, activists, insurgents, strategic communicators and researchers the opportunity to discover and partially relive both the eye-witnessed, sousveillant account, and the discourse surrounding specific moments of sousveillance, as well as reflecting on, and marshalling, their significance.
 * Sousveillers' anonymity is crucial.
 * Agenda-building power comes from the searchable and recirculated, semi-permanent, eyewitness archive.

In fiction
David Brin's 1989 novel Earth portrays citizens equipped with both augmented reality gear ("Tru-Vu Goggles") and cameras exercising reciprocal accountability, with each other and with authority figures, discussing effects on crime and presaging today's "cop cam" developments. Elites are allowed only temporary, cached secrecy. In Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, the Homo neanderthalensis occupying a parallel universe have what are called companion implants. These are comprehensive recording and transmission devices, mounted in the forearm of each person. Their entire life is constantly monitored and sent to their alibi archive, a repository of recordings that are only accessible by their owner, or by the proper authorities when investigating an infraction, and in the latter case only in circumstances relevant to the investigation. Recordings are maintained after death; it is not made clear what the reasoning is for this and under what circumstances and or by whom a deceased person's archive can be accessed.

The plot of the 1995 movie Strange Days is based on a future where sousveillance recordings are made and sold as entertainment. The plot of the movie revolves around the murder of a celebrity by police officers that is recorded by a person secretly wearing one of the devices. In the movie, the recordings are made by a flat array of sensors that pick up signals from the brain stem. The sensors are usually hidden under a wig, and they record everything the person wearing them sees and hears. Recordings made while the person making them dies are called "blackjack" tapes.

The plot of the 1985 John Crowley short story Snow revolves around a suspended camera recording the whole of a subject's life being sold as a consumer product.

The 2007 novel Halting State by Charles Stross and its sequel Rule 34 depict a 2020s Scotland in which wearable computing has a level of ubiquity similar to that of 2013's cell phones. The implications of a society in which anyone might be recording anything at any time are explored at length, particularly with respect to policing.

The open source science fiction role-playing game Eclipse Phase has sousveillance as a common part of life in the setting, as a result of data storage technology and high-definition digital cameras becoming commonplace and often integrated into any and all objects.

Orson Scott Card's novel, the Worthing Chronicle also investigates the effect of (apparently) omnipotent watchers, and how it can degrade human experience—the moral dilemma leading the watchers to cease. Vernor Vinge's character, Pham Nuwen presciently recognizes the stage of "ubiquitous surveillance" in the collapse-and-rebuild cycle that plagues human planetary civilization in a Deepness in the Sky.

Sousveillance efficiency or efficacy
There is a need for efficacy, efficiency or effectiveness of sousveillance, which can be met by social media, such as through widespread dissemination on social media, and when used as an output modality in conjunction with sousveillance as an input modality, is called "swollag", or gallows spelled backwards. For example, filming or streaming an abusive situation, like police abuse, doesn't always lead to justice and punishment of the abuser without some means (i.e. swollag) for sousveillance to take effect. For example, in 2014, a man named Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer in Staten Island after being arrested on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes. "'Garner's death was documented by his friend Ramsey Orta, and the video was widely disseminated. Despite the video evidence, a grand jury declined to indict Garner's killer, leading to widespread outrage and protest. (In an ironic twist, the only person indicted in connection with Garner's death was Orta, who came under police scrutiny and was arrested on an 'unrelated' weapons possession charge. Orta is now in prison in New York. Sousveillance is not without its costs.)'"

However, it appeared that a filmed abusive behavior is more likely to be punished if the video is widely spread. This makes sousveillance more efficient and politically meaningful, insofar it shows to a significant proportion of the population the abuses of the authority. Thus, the development of video platforms, like YouTube and Snapchat, and streaming platforms like Periscope and Twitch, are key components to sousveillance's efficiency. This was shown during French demonstrations against the "Loi Travail" in 2016, during which a Periscope stream showing authority forces, called abusive by one part of the demonstrators, was watched by 93,362 people. This video was posted on Twitter. Nevertheless, it can be considered whether this creates a dangerous dependence on private platforms, often ruled by Internet giants (like Google, for YouTube) which have common interests with governments, and who adapt their content through algorithms users don't have control on.

In addition, some argue that sousveillance may aid in state surveillance, despite being conducted by the people. Examples include mobile apps used to help people signal public threats, such as the Israeli app c-Now (previously known as Reporty). In January 2018, c-Now was tested in Nice by the mayor Christian Estrosi, sparking virulent public debates, with security advocates reporting spyware associated with the app Furthermore, the director of c-Now is Ehud Barack, former prime minister of Israel, who is suspected to have kept close links with Israeli and American governments. For these reasons, security advocates consider the app to serve America's global surveillance program (revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013), and raise the question of whether sousveillance really serves as "inverse surveillance".

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2003 in games

This page lists board and card games, wargames, miniatures games, and tabletop role-playing games published in 2003. For video games, see 2003 in video gaming.

Games released or invented in 2003
• .hack//ENEMY

• Alhambra

• Amun-Re

• Attack!

• Beyblade Trading Card Game

• Carcassonne: The Castle

• Coloretto

• Crimson Skies

• Dead Inside (role-playing game)

• Deliria (role-playing game)

• Diana: Warrior Princess (role-playing game)

• Diceland - Extra Space

• Diceland - Ogre

• Diceland - Space

• Don't Quote Me

• Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game

• EABA (role-playing game system)

• Epic Armageddon

• FATE (role-playing game system)

• A Game of Thrones (board game)

• Ghettopoly

• The Great Pacific War

• Gunfight in the Valley of Tears, October 9, 1973

• The HellGame

• Horus Heresy

• Huzzah!

• Inou Tsukai (role-playing game)

• Lunar Rails

• Mare Nostrum

• Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game

• Munchkin Fu

• My Life with Master (role-playing game)

• Neopets Trading Card Game

• Neuroshima (role-playing game)

• Ninja Burger

• No Middle Ground

• One False Step for Mankind

• Orpheus (role-playing game)

• Ophidian 2350

• Panzer Grenadier: Edelweiss

• Panzer Grenadier: Semper Fi! Guadalcanal

• Rag'narok

• Savage Worlds

• Spycraft (role-playing game)

• Stargate SG-1 Roleplaying Game

• Stoner Fluxx

• Strange Synergy

• The Kids of Catan

• Timelords (CORPS and EABA versions of the role-playing game)

• Vanished Planet

• Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game

• WarCry

• WARMACHINE

• YINSH

• Yu Yu Hakusho Trading Card Game

• Zendo

Game awards given in 2003

 * International Gamers Award: Hammer of the Scots
 * Origins Vanguard Award 2002: Diceland
 * Spiel des Jahres: Alhambra
 * Games: New England

Significant games-related events in 2003

 * Games magazine selects Magic: The Gathering for induction into its Hall of Fame.
 * Chris Moneymaker wins a US$2.5 million prize in the World Series of Poker.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Talk:Ovary

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 September 2019 and 12 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Aahoward13.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

'Ovary-arm' transplant a success
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3985245.stm

Separate article?
Shouldn't Plant Ovaries be a separate disambiguated article?

English
Past tense 105.112.146.3 (talk) 06:44, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

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User:Hans555

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The Corruptor

The Corruptor is a 1999 American action thriller film directed by James Foley, written by Robert Pucci, and starring Chow Yun-fat and Mark Wahlberg. The film was released in the United States on March 12, 1999.

Plot
NYPD Lieutenant Nick Chen is head of the Asian Gang Unit. His job is to keep the peace in Chinatown from a turf war that has broken out between the Tung Fung Benevolent Association tong and the Fukienese Dragons street gang. The problem is complicated by the fact that he is also an informant for the Tongs under Uncle Benny Wong and his lieutenant Henry Lee. After a bombing in Chinatown, Chen is reluctantly teamed up with Danny Wallace, who is unaware of Chen's corruption. Danny was also secretly tasked by Internal Affairs to monitor Chen. Danny lied to Chen and the Asian Gang Unit by claiming that he took the job as a means to quickly gain his detective shield.

During a police raid on a Fukienese whorehouse, Chen saves Wallace's life. Wallace, knowing that his life is now in Chen's hands, initiates a bust on a drug operation, not knowing that an undercover FBI agent was involved. After being berated by the FBI for interfering with an ongoing investigation, Wallace is introduced to Lee. Lee discusses the potential value of having another cop in the AGU on the Tong payroll, which Uncle Benny allows. Benny is able to lure Wallace into working for him by tipping him off to an underground prostitution ring. Wallace is given a commendation for valor, but Chen now suspects that Wallace is working for the Tongs.

Wallace and Chen inadvertently cross paths, throwing their initial trust for each other out the window and putting the intentions of Lee into question. Chen hates the Fukienese, but neither he nor Danny know that Lee is forming a partnership with their leader Bobby Vu. Both Lee and Vu know that there is an FBI agent undercover in their drug operation and decide to kill him.

While monitoring a drug operation, Wallace and Chen witness a violent confrontation with a Tong hit squad that leads to Chen getting berated for botching the FBI investigation. After the incident, both Wallace and Chen swear not to talk to the FBI without talking to each other first. The FBI finds out Wallace's real reason for joining the AGU and threaten to expose him unless he is willing to spy on Chen. When one of Chen's informants witnesses Vu's assassination of Uncle Benny, Chen alerts the DA, who intends to indict the Tongs under RICO. The DA, the FBI, and both Wallace and Chen decide that they want to catch Vu in the act and decide to hold off on the arrests.

Lee chooses to alert Chen of Wallace's real identity and job. During the nighttime operation, Chen draws his gun on Wallace in anger. Wallace reasons with Chen and the two fight the Dragons, killing most of them. Chen pushes Wallace out of the way and is fatally shot by Vu. Wallace then shoots Vu. While at the hospital, Wallace refuses to withdraw his original statement that Chen died a good cop. Later, Wallace leads the arrest of Lee. Chen is then given a hero's funeral with Wallace in the procession.

Cast

 * Chow Yun-fat as Lieutenant Nick Chen
 * Mark Wahlberg as Detective Danny Wallace
 * Byron Mann as Bobby Vu
 * Jon Kit Lee as Jack
 * Kim Chan as Benny 'Uncle Benny' Wong
 * Ric Young as Henry Lee
 * Paul Ben-Victor as FBI Agent Pete Schabacker
 * Bill MacDonald as Internal Affairs Captain Vince Kirkpatrick
 * Elizabeth Lindsey as Detective Louise Deng
 * Andrew Pang as Detective Willy Ung
 * Brian Cox as Sean Wallace
 * Tovah Feldshuh as US Attorney Margaret Wheeler
 * Beau Starr as Captain Stan Klein
 * Mark Williams as Co-Captain
 * Susie Trinh as Amy San
 * Olivia Yap as Tai
 * Lynda Chiu as Kim
 * Marie Matiko as May
 * Pak-Kwong Ho as Phan Ho
 * Chuck Scarborough as himself
 * Ayumi Iizuka as Bobby Vu's Girlfriend (uncredited)

Critical reception
The movie received mixed reviews from critics and audience. It currently has the ranking of 49% on Rotten Tomatoes with a critic consensus that reads "This uninspiring cop thriller doesn't measure up to Chow Yun-Fat's Hong Kong work." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said, "Even when it's transplanted to the streets of New York's Chinatown, as The Corruptor is, the Hong Kong action genre has certain obligatory requirements. Low-angle shots of bad guys looming over the camera, for example. And the sound of a metallic whoosh when there's a quick cut from one scene to the next. And what seems like more dialogue during action scenes than before and after them.... Director James Foley is obviously not right for this material. It's a shame, actually, that he's even working in the genre, since his gift is with the intense study of human behavior..."

Box office
The Corruptor grossed a total of $24,493,693 worldwide, including $15,164,492 in the United States and $9,329,109 in other territories.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack of The Corruptor features underground hip hop songs by artists including Mobb Deep, Spice 1 and Mystikal. The original score for The Corruptor contains music composed by Carter Burwell.

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Talk:Demon dialing

I object to the recent changes to war dialing and demon dialing. I can find numerous sites that define "war dialing" as dialing a range of numbers, and "demon dialing" as dialing the same number repeatedly (though sometimes it's given as a synonym for the former).   Unless someone can justify the recent flip-flopping of their definitions, I'm going to change them back. --Arteitle 07:51, Mar 15, 2004 (UTC)
 * If Arteitle's post were on Facebook, I'd give it a triple thumbs up. These definitions are completely ass-backwards.  76.10.64.30 (talk) 20:52, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * For five years. For five flippin' years.
 * The trouble with Wikipedia is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it." - Patrick Young, paraphrased. 76.10.64.30 (talk) 20:56, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I remember that MS-DOS TELNET programs would continue to "listen" on a BBS phone line until whoever was currently connected hung up; would this fit into this article as a subtype of demon dialing? ExOttoyuhr (talk) 18:52, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

 * "Automatic redial, which is essentially exactly the same thing, but for modems, and included in most telecommunications programs that use modems, including all variants of Dial-up networking ever included in the Windows operating system." This sentence is absolutely awful. 64.25.200.58 (talk) 23:50, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Usage and Subsequent Enforced Redial Delays
I owned a Zoom Demon Dialer and several subsequent devices. While calling into radio shows was a widely noted use, the more utilitarian purpose was accessing customer service phone banks such as airline reservations and performance ticket vendors. The challenge of accessing busy customer service lines existed primarily during an era of telephony before PBXs generally supported incoming call queues, call control/Interactive voice response, call-back, etc., and corporate phone service was via massive bundles of POTS lines rather than T1/ISDN services. (The busy signal problem reemerged in 2020 when millions of people tried to access under-resourced government unemployment services by phone.) Within a few years of demon dialing becoming popular (both for phones and modems), consumer devices began to include a time delay between automated redials to mitigate their effects on the telecom infrastructure. I recall on handset it was at least 10 seconds, whereas in modems the auto-redial delay was generally 30 or 60 seconds (but could be overridden by manually reissuing a dial command.) I recall reading at the time there had been some regulatory intervention/requirement for delays. That reference would be useful for this article if someone can find it. Zatsugaku (talk) 18:09, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Demon dialing


text:
Talk:WWE

Legacy Content/WWE Video Library
I changed the name of WWE Libraries to Legacy Content. WWE refers to the video library to legacy content. WWE mentions the video library department as the legacy content team in the article about the last battle of Atlanta on WWE.COM. The link is here: http://www.wwe.com/classics/last-battle-of-atlanta-rich-sawyer. WWE lists job offers in the video library department under legacy content.

New Championship
There is a new WWE championship that is coming out. The NXT Women's North American Championship. Just announced. 108.21.200.89 (talk) 18:14, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 10 April 2024
Change -Rhea Ripley defeated Charlotte Flair "on" WrestleMania 39 Night 1- to Rhea Ripley defeated Charlotte Flair "at" WrestleMania 39 Night 1. InsanityDesigns (talk) 11:56, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * ✅ Jamietw (talk) 16:53, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Addition of corporate website to external links
The only link currently featured is for the storyline website, wwe.com

Surely an informative encyclopedic entry should also include the business website. Currently I only find a link in references, but it should be featured more prominently as an external link. 2604:3D09:6A86:F300:BD51:4D39:3899:5164 (talk) 23:40, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

 * There a link to the corporate site on the front page of WWE.com. Per WP:EL, only one link to official websites should be used, and any subsequent links to subsites or social media accounts are to be done through that link, nit have redundant external links here. WWE.com isn't solely in-universe, even if results and recaps of recent shows are the first thing one sees. oknazevad (talk) 04:33, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is immediately evident however that one can access the corporate website, by going through wwe.com.
 * I do not believe linking to the corporate website here on wikipedia is redundant... 2604:3D09:927F:E900:65:53A:BA67:19D7 (talk) 18:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Whether or not you believe it doesn't change the fact that it's already policy compliant. oknazevad (talk) 18:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't appreciate your arrogant tone.
 * Thanks 2604:3D09:6A86:F300:95F2:C91E:A8B4:EF47 (talk) 23:50, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:WWE


text:
FADEC

A full authority digital engine (or electronics) control (FADEC) is a system consisting of a digital computer, called an "electronic engine controller" (EEC) or "engine control unit" (ECU), and its related accessories that control all aspects of aircraft engine performance. FADECs have been produced for both piston engines and jet engines.

History
The goal of any engine control system is to allow the engine to perform at maximum efficiency for a given condition. Originally, engine control systems consisted of simple mechanical linkages connected physically to the engine. By moving these levers the pilot or the flight engineer could control fuel flow, power output, and many other engine parameters. The Kommandogerät mechanical/hydraulic engine control unit for Germany's BMW 801 piston aviation radial engine of World War II was just one notable example of this in its later stages of development. This mechanical engine control was progressively replaced first by analog electronic engine control and, later, digital engine control.

Analog electronic control varies an electrical signal to communicate the desired engine settings. The system was an evident improvement over mechanical control but had its drawbacks, including common electronic noise interference and reliability issues. Full authority analogue control was used in the 1960s and introduced as a component of the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engine of the supersonic transport aircraft Concorde. However, the more critical inlet control was digital on the production aircraft.

Digital electronic control followed. In 1968, Rolls-Royce and Elliott Automation, in conjunction with the National Gas Turbine Establishment, worked on a digital engine control system that completed several hundred hours of operation on a Rolls-Royce Olympus Mk 320. In the 1970s, NASA and Pratt and Whitney experimented with their first experimental FADEC, first flown on an F-111 fitted with a highly modified Pratt & Whitney TF30 left engine. The experiments led to Pratt & Whitney F100 and Pratt & Whitney PW2000 being the first military and civil engines, respectively, fitted with FADEC, and later the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 as the first commercial "dual FADEC" engine. The first FADEC in service was the Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine developed for the Harrier II by Dowty and Smiths Industries Controls.

Function
True full authority digital engine controls have no form of manual override nor manual controls available, placing full authority over all of the operating parameters of the engine in the hands of the computer. If a total FADEC failure occurs, the engine fails. If the engine is controlled digitally and electronically but allows for manual override, it is considered to be an EEC or ECU. An EEC, though a component of a FADEC, is not by itself FADEC. When standing alone, the EEC makes all of the decisions until the pilot wishes to intervene. The term FADEC is often misused for partial digital engine controls, such as those only electronically controlling fuel and ignition. A turbocharged piston engine would require digital control over all intake airflow to meet the definition of FADEC. FADEC works by receiving multiple input variables of the current flight condition including air density, power lever request position, engine temperatures, engine pressures, and many other parameters. The inputs are received by the EEC and analyzed up to 70 times per second. Engine operating parameters such as fuel flow, stator vane position, air bleed valve position, and others are computed from this data and applied as appropriate. FADEC also controls engine starting and restarting. The FADEC's basic purpose is to provide optimum engine efficiency for a given flight condition.

FADEC not only provides for efficient engine operation, it also allows the manufacturer to program engine limitations and receive engine health and maintenance reports. For example, to avoid exceeding a certain engine temperature, the FADEC can be programmed to automatically take the necessary measures without pilot intervention.

Safety
With the operation of the engines relying on automation, safety is a great concern. Redundancy is provided in the form of two or more separate but identical digital channels. Each channel may provide all engine functions without restriction. FADEC also monitors a variety of data coming from the engine subsystems and related aircraft systems, providing for fault tolerant engine control.

Engine control problems simultaneously causing loss of thrust on up to three engines have been cited as causal in the crash of an Airbus A400M aircraft at Seville Spain on 9 May 2015. Airbus Chief Strategy Officer Marwan Lahoud confirmed on 29 May that incorrectly installed engine control software caused the fatal crash. "There are no structural defects [with the aircraft], but we have a serious quality problem in the final assembly."

Applications
A typical civilian transport aircraft flight may illustrate the function of a FADEC. The flight crew first enters flight data such as wind conditions, runway length, or cruise altitude, into the flight management system (FMS). The FMS uses this data to calculate power settings for different phases of the flight. At takeoff, the flight crew advances the power lever to a predetermined setting, or opts for an auto-throttle takeoff if available. The FADECs now apply the calculated takeoff thrust setting by sending an electronic signal to the engines; there is no direct linkage to open fuel flow. This procedure can be repeated for any other phase of flight.

In flight, small changes in operation are constantly made to maintain efficiency. Maximum thrust is available for emergency situations if the power lever is advanced to full, but limitations can not be exceeded; the flight crew has no means of manually overriding the FADEC.

Advantages

 * Automatic engine protection against out-of-tolerance operations
 * Safer as the multiple channel FADEC computer provides redundancy in case of failure
 * Care-free engine handling, with guaranteed thrust settings
 * Ability to use single engine type for wide thrust requirements by just reprogramming the FADECs
 * Provides semi-automatic engine starting
 * Provides high-idle control appropriate for piston engine warmup
 * Better systems integration with engine and aircraft systems
 * Can provide engine long-term health monitoring and diagnostics
 * Number of external and internal parameters used in the control processes increases by one order of magnitude
 * Reduces the number of parameters to be monitored by flight crews
 * Due to the high number of parameters monitored, the FADEC makes possible "Fault Tolerant Systems" (where a system can operate within required reliability and safety limitation with certain fault configurations)

Disadvantages

 * Full authority digital engine controls have no form of manual override available, placing full authority over the operating parameters of the engine in the hands of the computer. (see note)
 * If a total FADEC failure occurs, the engine fails. (see note)
 * Upon total FADEC failure, pilots have no manual controls for engine restart, throttle, or other functions. (see note)
 * Single point of failure risk can be mitigated with redundant FADECs (assuming that the failure is a random hardware failure and not the result of a design or manufacturing error, which may cause identical failures in all identical redundant components). (see note)
 * High system complexity compared to hydromechanical, analogue or manual control systems
 * High system development and validation effort due to the complexity
 * Whereas in crisis (for example, imminent terrain contact), a non-FADEC engine can produce significantly more than its rated thrust, a FADEC engine will always operate within its limits. (see note)

Note: Most modern FADEC controlled aircraft engines (particularly those of the turboshaft variety) can be overridden and placed in manual mode, effectively countering most of the disadvantages on this list. Pilots should be very aware of where their manual override is located, because inadvertent engagement of the manual mode can lead to an overspeed of the engine.

Requirements

 * Engineering processes must be used to design, manufacture, install and maintain the sensors which measure and report flight and engine parameters to the control system itself.
 * Formal systems engineering processes are often used in the design, implementation and testing of the software used in these safety-critical control systems. This requirement led to the development and use of specialized software such as model-based systems engineering (MBSE) tools. The application development toolset SCADE (from Ansys) (not to be confused with the application category SCADA) is an example of an MBSE tool and has been used as part of the development of FADEC systems.

Research
NASA has analyzed a distributed FADEC architecture rather than the current centralized one, specifically for helicopters. Greater flexibility and lower life cycle costs are likely advantages of distribution.

title: FADEC


text:
USS J. Fred Talbott

USS J. Fred Talbott (DD-156), named for Joshua Frederick Cockey Talbott (1843–1918), Representative from Maryland Second District from 1879 to 1885, from 1893 to 1895 and again from 1903 to 1918, was a Wickes-class destroyer.

Construction and commissioning
J. Fred Talbott was laid down by the William Cramp & Sons Ship and Engine Building Company at Philadelphia on 8 July 1918, launched on 14 December 1918 by Mrs. Robert L. Bates, niece of Representative Talbott and commissioned on 30 June 1919.

Service history
J. Fred Talbott departed Newport, Rhode Island on 10 July for the Mediterranean Sea, where she acted as a station ship at various ports acting as US representation during reconstruction. Upon her return to the United States on 21 June 1920, the ship took part in Neutrality Patrol duty on the East Coast and engaged in fleet exercises before her decommissioning at Philadelphia on 18 January 1923.

J. Fred Talbott recommissioned 1 May 1930 and immediately began shakedown training in Delaware Bay. For the ten years that followed, the ship operated along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean Sea engaging in anti-submarine training; fleet operations; and carrying out the many far-ranging duties of the United States fleet. She also helped to train reserves and midshipmen.

With the outbreak of the war in Europe, and the United States' initial effort to protect its shipping while remaining neutral, J. Fred Talbott was assigned patrol duties in the waters off the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal. Following the US entry into the war with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the ship took up convoy escort duties between New Orleans, Cuba, and the Panama Canal.

Following an overhaul in Boston in January 1944, J. Fred Talbott sailed on 13 February with her first transatlantic convoy, and, after her safe return from Casablanca, took up escort duties with convoys from Iceland southward into the Caribbean. Later in the year, after arrival on 15 September, she was converted at New York and reclassified AG-81 on 25 September 1944. The ship arrived Port Everglades, Florida, 1 November to act as a target ship for torpedo bombers, continuing this training service until the war's end.

J. Fred Talbott was decommissioned at Boston on 21 May 1946, stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 19 June 1946 and sold for scrap to the Boston Metals Corporation of Baltimore, Maryland on 22 December 1946.

title: USS J. Fred Talbott


text:
USS Schenck

USS Schenck (DD-159) was a Wickes-class destroyer in the United States Navy during World War II. She was named for Rear Admiral James F. Schenck, USN (1807–1882).

Construction and commissioning
Schenck was laid down by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation at Camden in New Jersey on 26 March 1918, launched on 23 April 1919, sponsored by Miss Mary Janet Earle and commissioned on 30 October 1919.

Service history
Schenck was attached to the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and, after shakedown, operated between New York and Chesapeake Bay. Between July and September 1920, she patrolled off the east coast of Mexico; and, in early 1921, she participated in fleet exercises in the Caribbean Sea. Her crew was reduced to 50% of her authorized complement at Charleston, South Carolina, on 7 November 1921; and she was decommissioned at Philadelphia on 9 June 1922.

Schenck was recommissioned on 1 May 1930, and trained reservists during the summer. In January 1931, she joined the fleet in the Caribbean for Fleet Problem XII and, the following year, also participated in Fleet Problem XIII off Hawaii. Due to the increased tension in the Far East resulting from Japanese military action in Manchuria and at Shanghai, China, she remained in the Pacific Ocean with the Scouting Fleet until June 1932. Schenck again returned to the Pacific in February 1933 for Fleet Problem XIV and remained there until April 1934, when she re-entered the Caribbean for more fleet exercises. Then, with intervening periods of overhaul and rotating reserve at Norfolk, Virginia Schenck trained naval reservists and Naval Academy midshipmen in cruises along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from May 1935 until the outbreak of war in Europe.

World War II
On 9 September 1939, Schenck commenced Neutrality Patrol duty off the east coast; and, after overhaul, moved to Key West for further patrols. During the summer of 1940, she made two midshipman cruises from Annapolis. She then carried out more patrols in the Caribbean, between 22 August and 8 December 1940, between 15 January and 18 March 1941, and between 27 June and 14 July 1941. Training and repairs filled intervals between her patrols.

On 15 September 1941, Schenck arrived at Naval Station Argentia, Newfoundland, for duty escorting convoys carrying vital materiel to England. She left Argentia with her first convoy on 29 September; and when the United States entered World War II, the destroyer had escorted two convoys to a guarded rendezvous with British escorts off Iceland and escorted a ship back to Argentia. She remained on the convoy route between Argentia and Iceland until April 1943, fighting heavy weather and German submarines. During two long periods, 19 February to 9 May 1942 and 18 August 1942 to 23 March 1943, she was based in Iceland escorting convoys in and out of Icelandic ports. Twice her convoy was attacked; on 15 August 1942, and from 6 to 8 February 1943. The weather also took its toll, frequently causing minor structural damage to the old ship; and, on 13 March 1943, a gale caused her to drag anchor and collide with SS Exterminator in an Icelandic port. Schenck was then sent to Boston for repairs.

Mid-Atlantic
Reassigned to more southerly routes, Schenck resumed convoy escort duties on 28 April 1943, and, during the summer, escorted convoys between east coast ports, the Caribbean, and North Africa. She returned to Chesapeake Bay with a convoy on 26 October 1943, and, after overhaul and training, joined a hunter-killer group built around the escort carrier USS Card (CVE-11). The group conducted patrols against enemy submarines near the Azores between 24 November 1943 and 2 January 1944. The high point of Schenck' war service came on 24 December 1943, when the group located a concentration of U-boats. After stalking radar and sound contacts for most of the night and making six attacks, Schenck heard an underwater explosion and saw an oil slick which marked the end of GS U-645. Almost immediately, another submarine sank Schenck's squadronmate, USS Leary (DD-158). Schenck continued her ASW operations and was later commended by the task group commander for her role in preventing a concentrated wolf pack attack on Card; for her continued aggressive action after the sinking of Leary, despite having only fourteen depth charges left; and for her skillful rescue of Leary's survivors.

In February and March 1944, Schenck made one more round-trip convoy voyage from the east coast to Casablanca, and, between 17 April and 10 June, she escorted USS Antaeus (AG-67) on troop-carrying voyages along the east coast. Between 10 July and 29 August, she provided training services for submarines at Bermuda and then entered the Brooklyn Navy Yard where she was stripped of her armament. Subsequently, she was assigned for duty under Commander, Air Force, Atlantic Fleet, as a torpedo target ship for aircraft. Reclassified AG-82 effective 25 September 1944, she provided target services for student pilots off Quonset Point, Rhode Island, until the end of the war. This service is not without its dangers. The ship was twice holed by exercise torpedoes which failed to run at set depth and once struck by a low-flying aircraft.

Schenck was decommissioned at the Boston Naval Shipyard on 17 May 1946, stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 5 June 1946 and sold for scrap to the Boston Metals Company at Baltimore in Maryland on 25 November 1946.

Awards
Schenck received one battle star for her World War II service.

title: USS Schenck


text:
USS Herbert

USS Herbert (DD-160) was a Wickes-class destroyer. She was named for Hilary A. Herbert (1834–1919), Secretary of the Navy from 1893 to 1897.

Construction and commissioning
Herbert was laid down by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation at Camden in New Jersey on 9 April 1918, launched on 8 May 1919 by Mrs. Benjamin Micou, daughter of the late Hilary A. Herbert and commissioned on 21 November 1919.

Service history
After shakedown in South Atlantic waters, Herbert trained in the Caribbean until 1 May 1920, returning there 20 July with the Atlantic Fleet destroyer squadron. Herbert participated in torpedo practices, antiaircraft drills, and short range battle practice along the east coast. She decommissioned at Philadelphia 27 June 1922.

Herbert recommissioned 1 May 1930 and joined the Scouting Fleet at Newport, Rhode Island. For the next 4 years she operated in both East and West Coast waters, playing important roles in annual fleet problems and battle practice. From 16 January 1935 until August 1939, Herbert served as a training ship for Naval Reserves and midshipmen. As war swept across Europe, she sailed to Portugal via the Azores 2 October 1939 and remained there until July 1940.

Returning to the States, the destroyer underwent overhaul and 10 October reported to New London for sound school training. Herbert's training kept pace with the steadily intensifying war in Europe as she spent most of 1941 in battle practice, torpedo drills, and antisubmarine work.

World War II
With America's entry into the war, Herbert operated as a convoy escort along the American coast from Key West north to Halifax and Iceland. Guiding virtually defenseless merchant ships through coastal and Caribbean waters patrolled by U-boats, Herbert carried out frequent depth charge attacks on marauding submarines. From April through June 1943 she visited Gibraltar and North Africa, as the build-up for the invasion of Sicily intensified. A hunter-killer patrol followed. After a second patrol, Herbert escorted a convoy from Bermuda to Casablanca, returning to Charleston 22 November 1943 for conversion to a high-speed transport.

Auxiliary service
Herbert now APD-22 sailed for the Pacific, reaching San Diego for amphibious training and continuing on to Cape Sudest, New Guinea, via Pearl Harbor 23 March 1944. She disembarked troops for the initial invasion at Humboldt Bay, New Guinea, 22 April and then spent a month on convoy escort duty before landing troops for the invasion of Biak Island 27 May. Landings at Warsai in the Cape Sansapor area 30 July followed further patrol and escort duty, and 15 September found Herbert off Morotai. Troops landed under naval cover to secure the airfield, which was within easy striking distance of the Philippines, next major step in the island-hopping war across the Pacific. On 17 October, 2 days before the initial landings at Leyte Gulf, Herbert landed Rangers on Homonhon Island which controlled the entrance to the Gulf. The destroyer remained in the Philippines, under almost constant Japanese air attack, throughout the rest of 1944; and, in January 1945, landed support troops at Lingayen Gulf.

From the Philippines, Herbert moved north for escort duty to Iwo Jima, returning to Leyte 18 March 1945 to prepare for the invasion of Okinawa, the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war. Arriving Okinawa 31 March, the day before the initial landings, Herbert took up patrol and escort duties. Kamikaze attacks wounded ships all around her, but Herbert remained untouched. After two runs escorting convoys from back staging areas up to Okinawa, the destroyer headed home, reaching San Diego 19 June. Herbert was decommissioned at San Diego on 25 September 1945, stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 24 October 1945 and sold for scrap to the Boston Metal Company of Baltimore in Maryland on 23 May 1946.

Awards
Herbert received six battle stars for her World War II service.

title: USS Herbert


text:
Jaan Kross

Jaan Kross (19 February 1920 – 27 December 2007) was an Estonian writer. He won the 1995 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Early life
Born in Tallinn, Estonia, son of a skilled metal worker, Jaan Kross studied at Jakob Westholm Gymnasium, and attended the University of Tartu (1938–1945) and graduated from its School of Law. He taught there as a lecturer until 1946, and again as Professor of Artes Liberales in 1998.

In 1940, when Kross was 20, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the three Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; imprisoned and executed most of their governments. In 1941, Nazi Germany invaded and took over the country.

Kross was first arrested by the Germans for six months in 1944 during the German occupation of Estonia (1941–1944), suspected of what was termed "nationalism", i.e., promoting Estonian independence. Then, on 5 January 1946, when Estonia had been reconquered by the Soviet Union, he was arrested by the Soviet occupation authorities who kept him a short while in the cellar of the local NKVD headquarters, then kept him in prison in Tallinn, finally in October 1947, deporting him to a Gulag camp in Vorkuta, Russia. He spent a total of eight years in this part of North Russia, six working in the mines at the Minlag labour camp in Inta, then doing easier jobs, plus two years still living as a deportee, but not in a labour camp. Upon his return to Estonia in 1954 he became a professional writer, not least because his law studies during Estonian independence were now of no value whatsoever, as Soviet law held sway.

At first, Kross wrote poetry, alluding to a number of contemporary phenomena under the guise of writing about historical figures. But he soon moved to writing prose, a genre that was to become his principal one.

Recognition and translation
Kross was by far the most translated and nationally and internationally best-known Estonian writer. He received the honorary title of People's Writer of the Estonian SSR (1985) and the State Prize of the Estonian SSR (1977). He also held several honorary doctorates and international decorations, including the highest Estonian order and one of the highest German orders. In 1999 he was awarded the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature.

In 1990 Kross won the Amnesty International Golden Flame Prize. He won the 1995 International Nonino Prize in Italy. He was reportedly nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the early 1990s.

Because of Kross' status and visibility as a leading Estonian author, his works have been translated into many languages, but mostly into Finnish, Swedish, Russian, German, and Latvian. This is on account of geographical proximity but also a common history (for example, Estonia was a Swedish colony in the 17th century and German was the language of the upper échelons of Estonian society for hundreds of years). As can be seen from the list below by the year 2015 five books of Kross' works have been published in English translation with publishing houses in the United States and UK. But a number of shorter novels, novellas, and short stories were published during Soviet rule (i.e. 1944–1991) in English translation and published in the Soviet Union.

Translations have mostly been from the Estonian original. Sometimes translations were however done, during Soviet times by first being translated into Russian and then from Russian into English, not infrequently by native speakers of Russian or Estonian. Nowadays, Kross' works are translated into English either directly from the Estonian, or via the Finnish version. A reasonably complete list of translations of works by Jaan Kross into languages other than English can be found on the ELIC website.

Kross knew the German language from quite an early age as friends of the family spoke it as their mother tongue, and Kross' mother had a good command of it. His Russian, however, was mainly learnt while working as a slave labourer in the Gulag. But he also had some knowledge of Swedish and translated one crime novel by Christian Steen (pseudonym of the exile Estonian novelist Karl Ristikivi) from that Swedish. He also translated works by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Honoré de Balzac, and Paul Éluard from French, Bertolt Brecht and Rolf Hochhuth from German, Ivan Goncharov and David Samoilov from Russian, and Alice in Wonderland, Macbeth and Othello from English.

Content and style
Kross' novels and short stories are almost universally historical; indeed, he is often credited with a significant rejuvenation of the genre of the historical novel. Most of his works take place in Estonia and deal, usually, with the relationship of Estonians and Baltic Germans and Russians. Very often, Kross' description of the historical struggle of the Estonians against the Baltic Germans is a metaphor for the contemporary struggle against the Soviet occupation. However, Kross' acclaim internationally (and nationally even after the regaining of Estonian independence) shows that his novels also deal with topics beyond such concerns; rather, they deal with questions of mixed identities, loyalty, and belonging.

Generally, The Czar's Madman has been considered Kross' best novel; it is also the most translated one. Also well-translated is Professor Martens' Departure, which because of its subject matter (academics, expertise, and national loyalty) is very popular in academia and an important "professorial novel". The later novel Excavations, set in the mid-1950s, deals with the thaw period after Stalin's death as well as with the Danish conquest of Estonia in the Middle Ages, and today considered by several critics as his finest, has not been translated into English yet; it is however available in German.

Within the framework of the historical novel, Kross' novels can be divided up into two types: truly historical ones, and more contemporary narratives with an element of autobiography. In the list below, the historical ones, often set in previous centuries, include the Between Three Plagues tetralogy, set in the 16th century, A Rakvere Novel / Romance set in the 18th (the title is ambiguous), The Czar's Madman set in the 19th century, Professor Martens' Departure set at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Elusiveness / Evasion set around 1918. The semi-autobiographical novels include Kross' novel about the ultimate fates of his schoolmates, i.e. The Wikman Boys (Wikman being based on his alma mater the Westholm Grammar School – both names are of Swedish origin) a similar sort of novel about his university chums, Mesmer's Circle / Ring; the novel Excavations which describes Kross' alter ego Peeter Mirk and his adventures with archaeology, conformism, revolt, compromise and skulduggery after he has returned from the Siberian labour camps and internal exile out there. And also the novel that has appeared in English translation is titled Treading Air, and most of his short stories belong to this subgenre.

A stylistic leitmotif in Kross' novels is the use of the internal (or inner) monologue, usually when the protagonist is trying to think his way out of a thorny problem. The reader will note that every protagonist or narrator, from Timotheus von Bock in The Czar's Madman to Kross' two alter egos, Jaak Sirkel and Peeter Mirk in the semi-autobiographical novels, indulges in this. And especially Bernhard Schmidt, the luckless telescope inventor, in the novel that appeared in English as Sailing Against the Wind (2012).

Another common feature of Kross's novels is a comparison, sometimes overt but usually covert, between various historical epochs and the present day, which for much of Kross' writing life consisted of Soviet reality, including censorship, an inability to travel freely abroad, a dearth of consumer goods, the ever-watchful eye of the KGB and informers, etc. Kross was always very skilful at always remaining just within the bounds of what the Soviet authorities could accept. Kross also enjoyed playing with the identities of people who have the same, or nearly the same, name. This occurs in Professor Martens' Departure where two different Martens figures are discussed, legal experts who lived several decades apart, and in Sailing Against the Wind where in one dream sequence the protagonist Bernhard Schmidt meets a number of others named Schmidt.

When Kross was already in his late 70s he gave a series of lectures at Tartu University explaining certain aspects of his novels, not least the roman à clef dimension, given the fact that quite a few of his characters are based on real-life people, both in the truly historical novels and the semi-autobiographical ones. These lectures are collected in a book entitled Omaeluloolisus ja alltekst (Autobiographism and Subtext) which appeared in 2003.

During the last twenty years of his life, Jaan Kross occupied some of his time with writing his memoirs (entitled Kallid kaasteelised, i.e. Dear Co-Travellers – this translation of the title avoids the unfortunate connotation of the expression fellow-travellers). These two volumes ended up with a total of 1,200 pages, including quite a few photographs from his life. His life started quietly enough, but after describing quite innocuous things such as the summer house during his childhood and his schooldays, Kross moves on to the first Soviet occupation of Estonia, his successful attempt to avoid being drafted for the Waffen-SS during the Nazi German occupation, and a long section covering his experiences of prison and the labour camps. The last part describes his return from the camps and his attempts at authorship. The second volume continues from when he moved into the flat in central Tallinn where he lived for the rest of his life, plus his growing success as a writer. There is also a section covering his one-year term as a Member of Parliament after renewed independence, and his trips abroad with his wife.

Short synopses of works available in English translation
Six books by Jaan Kross have been published in English translation, five novels and one collection of stories: The English translations appeared in the following order: The Czar's Madman 1992; Professor Martens' Departure 1994; The Conspiracy and Other Stories 1995; Treading Air 2003; Sailing Against the Wind 2012, Between Three Plagues, 2016-2018. Descriptions of the above books can also be found on various websites and online bookshops. The protagonists of several of the books listed here are based on real-life figures.

The Czar's Madman (Estonian: Keisri hull, 1978; English: 1994; translator: Anselm Hollo). This tragic novel is based on the life of a Baltic-German nobleman, Timotheus von Bock (1787–1836), who was an adjutant to the relatively liberal Czar of Russia, Alexander I. Von Bock wishes to interest the Czar in the idea of liberating the serfs, i.e. the peasant classes, people who were bought and sold almost like slaves by rich landowners. But this is too much for the Czar and in 1818 von Bock is arrested and kept, at the Czar's pleasure, in a prison in Schlüsselburg. Von Bock is released when the next Czar ascends the throne, but by that time he is having mental problems during his last years under house arrest. This is regarded as Kross's most accomplished novel, along with the Between Three Plagues tetralogy (see below).

Professor Martens' Departure (Estonian: Professor Martensi ärasõit, 1984; English: 1994; translator: Anselm Hollo). In early June 1909, the ethnic Estonian professor, Friedrich Fromhold Martens (1845–1909) gets on the train in Pärnu heading for the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Empire in the capital, Saint Petersburg. During the journey, he thinks back over the events and episodes of his life. Should he have made a career working for the Russian administration as a compiler of treaties at the expense of his Estonian identity? He also muses on his namesake, a man who worked on a similar project in earlier decades. A novel that examines the compromises involved when making a career in an empire when coming from a humble background.

Sailing Against the Wind (Estonian: Vastutuulelaev, 1987; English: 2012; translator: Eric Dickens). This novel is about the ethnic Estonian Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935) from the island of Naissaar who loses his right hand in a firework accident during his teenage years. He nevertheless uses his remaining hand to work wonders when polishing high-quality lenses and mirrors for astronomical telescopes. Later on, when living in what had become Nazi Germany, he himself invents large stellar telescopes that are still to be found at, for instance, the Mount Palomar Observatory in California and on the island of Mallorca. Schmidt has to wrestle with his conscience when living in Germany as the country is re-arming and telescopes could be put to military use. But because Germany was the leading technical nation at the time, he feels reasonably comfortable there, first in the run-down small town of Mittweida, then at the main Bergedorf Observatory just outside Hamburg. But the rise of the Nazis is literally driving him mad.

The Conspiracy and Other Stories (Estonian: Silmade avamise päev, 1988 – most of the stories there; English: 1995; translator: Eric Dickens). This collection contains six semi-autobiographical stories mostly dealing with Jaan Kross' life during the Nazi-German and Soviet-Russian occupations of Estonia, and his own imprisonment during those two epochs. The stories, some of which have appeared elsewhere in this translation, are. The Wound, Lead Piping, The Stahl Grammar, The Conspiracy, The Ashtray, and The Day Eyes Were Opened. In all of them, there is a tragi-comic aspect.

Treading Air (Estonian: Paigallend, 1998; English: 2003; translator: Eric Dickens). The protagonist of this novel is Ullo Paerand, a restless young man of many talents. He attends a prestigious private school, but when his speculator father abandons him and his mother the money runs out. He then helps his mother run a laundry to make ends meet. He works his way up, ultimately becoming a messenger boy for the Estonian Prime Minister's office. He is even offered a chance to escape abroad by going to study at the Vatican, but stays in Estonia. This semi-autobiographical novel is set against the background of a very stormy epoch in the history of Estonia, from when the Soviets occupy the country in 1940, the German occupation the next year, the notorious bombing of central Tallinn by the Soviet airforce on 9 March 1944, and a further thirty years of life in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Between Three Plagues (Kolme katku vahel, four volumes 1970–1980; English: three volumes 2016–2018; translator: Merike Lepasaar Beecher) This is Kross' first major work and his largest in volume. The idea started out as a film script, which was shelved, then became a TV serial, and finally the four-volume suite of novels which is one of Kross' most famous works. It is set in the 16th century, especially the middle, before and during the Livonian War which lasted, on and off, from the 1550s to the early 1580s. Livonia included parts of what are now Estonia and Latvia, and was by the 1550s split up into several parts ruled by Denmark, Sweden, Russia and Poland-Lithuania. The protagonist is, as is often the case with Kross, a real-life figure called Balthasar Russow (c 1536–1600), who wrote the Livonian Chronicle. The chronicle describes the political horse-trading between the various countries and churches of the day. The Estonians, mostly of peasant stock in those days, always ended up as piggies in the middle. There were also three outbreaks of the bubonic plague to contend with. Russow was the humble son of a peasant, but became a German-speaking clergyman, which was a big step up in society. The fact that he could read, let alone write a chronicle, was unusual. The tetralogy starts with a famous scene where the then-ten-year-old Balthasar watches some tightrope walkers in Tallinn, a metaphor for his own diplomatic tightrope walking later in life. He appears as something of a rough diamond throughout the books. The entire tetralogy has been translated into Dutch, Finnish, German, Latvian, Russian, and English.

Short synopses of works not yet available in English
The majority of Kross's novels remain untranslated into English. These are as follows:

Under Clio's Gaze (Klio silma all; 1972) This slim volume contains four novellas. The first deals with Michael Sittow, a painter who has been working at the court of Spain but now wants to join the painters' guild in Tallinn which is as good as a closed shop (Four Monologues on the Subject of Saint George). The second story tells of an ethnic Estonian Michelson who will now be knighted by the Czar as he has been instrumental in putting down a rebellion in Russia; this is the story of his pangs of conscience, but also how he brings his peasant parents to the ceremony to show his origins (Michelson's Matriculation) The third story is set in around 1824, and about the collator of Estonian folk literature Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald who, after passing his exams, does not want to become a theologian but wants to study military medicine in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire; meanwhile, he meets a peasant who can tell him about the Estonian epic hero Kalev, here of the epic Kalevipoeg (Two Lost Sheets of Paper). The final story is set in the 1860s, when a national consciousness was awakening in Estonia and the newspaper editor Johann Voldemar Jannsen starts an Estonian-language newspaper with his daughter Lydia Koidula and founds the Estonian Song Festival (A While in a Swivel Chair).

The Third Range of Hills (Kolmandad mäed; 1974) This short novel tells the story of the ethnic Estonian painter Johann Köler (1826–1899) who had become a famous portrait painter at the Russian court in Saint Petersburg. He is now, in 1879, painting a fresco for a church in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. As a model for his Christ, he picks out an Estonian peasant from the island of Hiiumaa. Later it transpires that the man he used as a model was a sadistic criminal, and this is held against Köler by his Baltic-German overlords.

A Rakvere Novel (Rakvere romaan; 1982) The novel is set in the year 1764. The young Berend Falck is taken on by the Baroness Gertrude von Tisenhausen. Falck is an ethnic Estonian, von Tisenhausen a Baltic-German. Rakvere (Wesenberg, in German) is an Estonian provincial town and in those days the baroness dominated. Falck soon gets involved in the struggle between the townspeople and the baroness. And as he has been employed by her, he is initially obliged to take her side. But as she begins to confiscate land, he grows disillusioned with her. The townspeople, for their part, attempt to reclaim the rights that they had had earlier under Swedish colonial rule, decades before. Sweden lost Estonia to Russia around 1710, so in the epoch in which this novel is set, Rakvere and indeed Estonia are part of the Russian Empire, despite the fact that this local dispute is between the German-speaking baronial classes and Estonian-speaking peasants. A panoramic novel of divided loyalties and corruption.

The Wikman Boys (Wikmani poisid; 1988) Jaan Kross' alter ego Jaak Sirkel will soon matriculate from school in the mid-1930s. Young people eagerly go to the cinema in their free time; at school, they have the usual sprinkling of eccentric teachers. Europe is gradually moving towards war, and this overshadows the lives of the young people. After the war has reached Estonia, some of Sirkel's schoolmates end up in the Soviet Army, and others fighting in the Nazi German military – the tragedy of a small country fought over by two superpowers. In the devastating Battle of Velikiye Luki, not far from the Russian-Estonian border, Estonians fight on both sides.

Excavations (Väljakaevamised; 1990) This novel first appeared in Finnish as the political situation in Estonia was very unclear owing to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. It tells the story of Peeter Mirk (another of Kross' alter egos) who has just returned from eight years of labour camp and internal exile in Siberia and is looking for work, in order to avoid being sent back, labelled as a "parasite to Soviet society". And he needs the money to live on. It is now 1954, Stalin is dead, and there is a slight political thaw. He finds a job on an archaeological dig near the main bastion in central Tallinn. There he finds a manuscript written in the 13th century by a leprous clergyman, a document which could overturn some of the assumptions about the history of Estonia that the Soviet occupier has. The novel also gives portraits of several luckless individuals who have been caught up in the paradoxes of German and Russian occupations.

Elusiveness (Tabamatus; 1993) In 1941, a young Estonian law student is a fugitive from the occupying German Nazis, as he is suspected of being a resistance fighter. He is accused of writing certain things during the one-year Soviet occupation the previous year. But what the German occupiers dislike especially is that this young law student is writing a work about the Estonian politician and freedom fighter Jüri Vilms (1889–1918) who was obliged to flee from the Germans back in 1918 (during another period of Estonia's tangled history) and was shot by firing squad when he had just reached Helsinki, around the time that Estonia became independent of Russia.

Mesmer's Circle (Mesmeri ring; 1995) Another novel involving Kross' alter ego, Jaak Sirkel, who is by now a first-year student at Tartu University. One of his fellow students Indrek Tarna has been sent to Siberia by the Reds, when the Soviets occupied Estonia in 1940. Indrek's father performs a strange ritual with several people standing around the dining table and holding hands – as Franz Mesmer did with his patients. This ritual is meant to give his boy strength by way of prayer. Others react in a more conventional way to the tensions of 1939. This is also where the reader first meets the fellow student who will become the protagonist in Kross' novel Treading Air. The novel is partly a love story, where Sirkel, a friend of Tarna's is in love with his girlfriend Riina. And Tarna is in Siberia... Conflicting loyalties. When the Germans invade Estonia Tarna can return to Estonia. The Riina problem gets more tangled.

Tahtamaa (idem; 2001) Tahtamaa is a plot of land by the sea. This novel is described by Rutt Hinrikus of the Estonian Literary Museum in a short review article on the internet. It is a novel about the differences in mentality between the Estonians who lived in the Soviet Union, and those that escaped abroad, and their descendants. It is also a novel about greed and covetousness, ownership, and is even a love story between older people. This is Kross' last novel and is set in the 1990s, after Estonia regained its independence.

Death
Jaan Kross died in Tallinn, at the age of 87, on 27 December 2007. He is survived by his wife, children's author and poet Ellen Niit, and four children. The President of Estonia (at the time), Toomas Hendrik Ilves, praised Kross "as a preserver of the Estonian language and culture."

Kross is buried at the Rahumäe cemetery in Tallinn.

Quotes

 * "He was one of those who kept fresh the spirits of the people and made us ready to take the opportunity of restoring Estonia's independence." — Toomas Hendrik Ilves

Tribute
On 19 February 2020, Google celebrated his 100th birthday with a Google Doodle.

title: Jaan Kross


text:
USS Chafee

USS Chafee (DDG-90) is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer guided missile destroyer in United States Navy. She is named for Senator John Lester Hubbard Chafee (1922–1999), a Marine veteran of Guadalcanal who also served as the Secretary of the Navy. Chafee was laid down by the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine on 12 April 2001, launched on 2 November 2002 and commissioned on 18 October 2003 in Newport, Rhode Island, the home state of the ship's namesake.

Service history
Chafee left her homeport of Pearl Harbor 20 May 2005 for her maiden deployment with the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) Carrier Strike Group (CSG). She returned to her homeport after a regularly scheduled deployment in support of the Global War on Terrorism.

Chafee departed Pearl Harbor 9 April 2007, as part of the San Diego-based Nimitz CSG and deployed to the U.S 5th Fleet (C5F) area of operations. On 1 June 2007, Chafee fired her main gun at Al-Qaeda suspects in the Puntland region of Somalia. The men were wanted for the 1998 United States embassy bombings. Chafee returned home to Pearl Harbor on 22 September 2007, marking the end a successful 167-day Western Pacific and Middle East deployment.

Chafee is an active unit of the Pacific Fleet and operates out of Naval Station San Diego, California; currently, Chafee is assigned to the USS Nimitz (CVN-68) carrier group.

On 10 December 2020, It was reported that Chafee tested the Tomahawk Block V missile for the first time.

Chafee participated in RIMPAC 2022.

Awards

 * COMNAVSURFPAC Intelligence Excellence Award (2021)
 * Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation (May–Jun 2007, Apr 2012 – Dec 2013)
 * Battle "E" (2007, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015)
 * Spokane Trophy Award (2006)
 * Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) Energy Conservation Award (Afloat category) (2015)
 * Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Ship-Helicopter Safety Award - (2015)

In popular culture
The construction of USS Chafee and USS Momsen (DDG-92), from initial steel cutting to sea trials, was documented in the Discovery Channel television special Destroyer: Forged in Steel. The destroyers were not referenced by name, but their numbers were visible on their bows.

Shield
"A white anchor on a background of blue surrounded by a thin wavy white border, and then surrounded by a red border that is marked with thirteen gold stars."

The anchor—at the center of the shield—is borrowed from the Secretary of the Navy's Flag, in reference to John Chafee's time in that position. The thirteen stars is a reference to Rhode Island, Chafee's home state. The wavy border symbolizes the sea and Navy. The color white represents integrity. Blue and gold are the traditional colors of the navy, and the colors denote the sea the excellence, respectively. While the color red denotes courage.

Crest
"In gold, an eagle is holding a red serpent with its beak. The eagle is clutching arrows with its talons, and it is perched on a representation of the Senate Chamber of the Capitol Building. Behind the eagle, a Naval Officer's sword and a Marine Corps mameluke in saltire points upwards. A laurel wreath serves as a back ground and encircles the eagle. The base of the crest is a blue and white decorative rope."

The two swords signify Chafee's military service in two wars, specifically the mameluke symbolizes his time in the Marine Corps. The laurel wreath is a symbol Chafee's honor and achievement during his time as a marine, Secretary of the Navy, senator and governor. The eagle is a reference to the senator's time as the Secretary of the Navy. As mentioned before, the color gold and red represents excellence and courage, respectively.

Motto
"Commanding the Seas."

Seal
"The coat of arms is the shield that topped with the crest. The coat of arms is then placed on a white background, and is surrounded by a dark blue oval that is bordered by a gold chain. The ship's name is inscribed at the top of the oval, and the hull number is inscribed at the bottom."

title: USS Chafee


text:
Fulda Gap

The Fulda Gap (Fulda-Lücke), an area between the Hesse-Thuringian border, the former Inner German border, and Frankfurt am Main, contains two corridors of lowlands through which tanks might have driven in a surprise attack by the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies to gain crossing(s) of the Rhine River. Named for the town of Fulda, the Fulda Gap became seen as strategically important during the Cold War of 1947–1991. The Fulda Gap roughly corresponds to the route along which Napoleon chose to withdraw his armies after defeat (16–19 October 1813) at the Battle of Leipzig. Napoleon succeeded in defeating a Bavarian-Austrian army under Wrede in the Battle of Hanau (30–31 October 1813) not far from Frankfurt. From there he escaped back to France.

From 1815, the area appeared of minimal strategic importance, as it lay deep within the borders of the German Confederation and from 1871 of the German Empire. German military planning presumed any war would be effectively lost, long before an enemy reached that far into the homeland. The route became important again at the end of World War II when the U.S. XII Corps used it in their advance eastward in late March and early April 1945. The U.S. advance had little consequence for Germany's strategic position, which was hopeless by that point, but it allowed the Americans to occupy vast swaths of territory which the Yalta Conference of February 1945 had assigned to the Soviet occupation zone. This did much to compel the Soviets to honor the Yalta Conference agreement, meaning that Western Allies got access to Berlin. In exchange, the U.S. Army withdrew in July 1945 from Thuringia and Saxony, to the line agreed upon in Yalta.

During the Cold War, the Fulda Gap offered one of the two obvious routes for a hypothetical Soviet tank attack on West Germany from Eastern Europe, especially from East Germany. The other route crossed the North German Plain. A third, less likely, route involved travelling up through the Danube River valley through neutral Austria. The concept of a major tank battle along the Fulda Gap became a predominant element of NATO war planning during the Cold War. With such an eventuality in mind, weapons were evolved such as nuclear tube and missile artillery, the nuclear recoilless gun/tactical launcher Davy Crockett, Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and A-10 ground attack aircraft.

Strategic location during the Cold War
The northern route through the Gap passes south of the Knüllgebirge and continues around the northern flank of the Vogelsberg Mountains. The narrower southern route passes through the Fliede and Kinzig Valleys, with the Vogelsberg to the north and the Rhön mountains and Spessart mountains to the south. More importantly, on emerging from the western exit of the Gap, encounters flat terrain from there to the river Rhine, which would have counted in favour of Soviet attempts to reach and cross the Rhine before NATO could prevent this. The intervening Main River would have been less of an obstacle.

The Fulda Gap route was less suitable for mechanized troop movement than the North German Plain, but offered an avenue of advance direct to Frankfurt am Main. Furthermore the capital of the Federal Republic in Bonn, was situated only 200 km to the west. A rapidly advancing Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack through the Fulda Gap, along the lines of Seven Days to the River Rhine, could have also potentially cut the territory of West Germany in two parts, making the long-term existence of a West German state untenable.

Strategic responses to the geographic feature

Strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain understood the Fulda Gap's importance, and accordingly allocated forces to defend and attack it. The defense of the Fulda Gap was a mission of the U.S. V Corps. The actual Inner German border in the Fulda Gap was guarded by reconnaissance forces, the identification and structure of which evolved over the years of the Cold War.

From June 1945 until July 1946, reconnaissance and security along the border between the U.S. and Soviet zones of occupation in Germany in the area north and south of Fulda was the mission of elements of the U.S. 3rd and 1st Infantry Divisions. By July 1946, the 1st, 3rd, and 14th Constabulary Regiments, arranged from north to south, had assumed responsibility for inter-zonal border security, in an area that later became famous as the Cold War Fulda Gap. The U.S. Constabulary as a headquarters was subsequently drawn down.

Individual constabulary regiments were retitled armored cavalry regiments. This coincided with the 1951 upgrade of the U.S. Army's mostly administrative and occupation responsibilities in Germany to a combat army, via the arrival of four combat divisions from the United States. Thus, from 1951 until 1972, the 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment (ACR) patrolled the Fulda Gap. After the return of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment from Vietnam in 1972, the 11th ACR relieved the 14th ACR, and took over the reconnaissance mission in the Fulda Gap until the end of the Cold War.

The mission of the armored cavalry (heavy, mechanized reconnaissance units equipped with tanks and other armored vehicles) in peacetime was to watch the East-West border for signs of pre-attack Soviet army movement. The armored cavalry's mission in a war, was to delay a Soviet attack until other units of the U.S. V Corps could be mobilized and deployed to defend the Fulda Gap.

The armored cavalry would have also served as a screening force in continuous visual contact with the Warsaw Pact forces, reporting on their composition and activities, and forcing advancing Warsaw Pact forces to deploy while the cavalry fought delaying actions. In order to defend the Fulda Gap and stop a Warsaw Pact advance, as opposed to conducting screening and delaying actions, U.S. V Corps planned to move two divisions, one armored and one mechanized, forward from bases in the Frankfurt and Bad Kreuznach areas.

From 1947 until 1951, the 1st Infantry Division was the sole U.S. division in Germany, although the various Constabulary units taken together were equivalent in size to another division. U.S. Army forces in Germany were increased in 1951 as a result of President Truman's 10 December 1950 declaration of a national emergency as a result of the Korean War, with four divisions arriving from CONUS. This included the 4th Infantry Division, which was stationed in the Frankfurt area, and the 2nd Armored Division, which was located with its headquarters at Bad Kreuznach to the west of the Rhine River. Both of those were the divisions assigned to the newly activated V Corps. In May/June 1956, the 3rd Armored Division (3rd AD) arrived, and was stationed around Frankfurt. In December 1957, the 8th Infantry Division (Mechanized) (8th ID) arrived, and was stationed in the Bad Kreuznach area. The two replaced divisions returned to the United States.

The following is a summary of US Cold War history in Germany from the 1950s. US Forces were headquartered at Frankfurt and therefore had an orientation that included the Fulda Gap. The 19th Armored Cav Group activated at Frankfurt on 2 January 1953. On 1 October 1953, the 19th Armd Cav Gp was redesignated as the 19th Armor Group. On 1 July 1955, the 19th Armor Group was replaced by the 4th Armor Group.

The Seventh Army troop list of 30 June 1956 shows 4th Armor Group attached to V Corps, along with the U.S. divisions, 2d Armored Div, 3d Armored Div, and 10th Infantry Div. USAREUR Troop Lists dated 30 June 1958 show V Corps as containing 3rd Armored Div.(HQ Frankfurt), 8th Infantry Div. (HQ Bad Kreuznach), 4th Armor Group (HQ Frankfurt), and 3rd Infantry Div., which was headquartered at Würzburg.

After the 1963 ROAD reorganization, the 4th Armor Group was inactivated, and the 3rd Infantry Division headquartered at Würzburg was reassigned to VII Corps. The deployment of the 3rd Armored Division and the 8th Infantry Division to V Corps remained stable until the end of the Cold War. In practice, it was unknown how effective V Corps would have been in the event of war, due to the vast numbers of tanks and infantry that the Soviets were able to field. In response to the quantitative superiority of the Soviet forces, the U.S. deployed Atomic Demolition Mines for many years in the Fulda Gap.

In the early '60s, the Fulda Gap was also protected by V Corps Artillery units equipped with the medium-range MGM-5 Corporal guided missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. In 1962, the more reliable solid fuel MGM-29 Sergeant missile was deployed and remained in use until 1973 when it was replaced by the MGM-52 Lance missile.

For many years, V Corps' principal adversary was the Soviet 8th Guards Army, which was to be followed by additional armies, including the four armored divisions and one mechanized infantry division of the Soviet 1st Guards Tank Army, making the Fulda Gap a key entry route for the Soviet Bloc to western Europe in any hypothetical battle in Cold War Europe. Both armies were well equipped, and held high-priority for receiving new equipment.

Beginning in 1975, the Soviet Union's strategy for attacking Western Europe involved the use of operational manoeuvre groups to outflank NATO defensive positions such as the Fulda Gap.

From 1976 to 1984, the 4th Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division was garrisoned in Wiesbaden and also subordinated to U.S. V Corps.

From 1979 onwards, the first V Corps unit detailed to reinforce the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in the Fulda Gap in the event of hostilities was the 8th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 68th Armored Regiment (1-68 Armor), stationed at Wildflecken to the south of the Gap. The mission of 1-68 Armor was to establish a defensive line across part of the Gap, providing a shield behind which other V Corps units could advance and defend. Also located in Wildflecken was the 108th Military Intelligence (MI) Btn, to which Delta Company Rangers was assigned. The Rangers' mission was to strike at the supply lines and command structures of any invading Soviet forces.

144th Ordnance Company was in charge of much of the ammunition slated for the 8th Infantry Division and the 3rd Armor Division, as well as operating ASP #3 in Wildflecken. 144th Ord. was also responsible for chemical and nuclear ammunition for the Fulda Gap sector, operating ASP #3 and multiple Forward Storage and Transportation Sites. The 54th Engineer Battalion (United States), also garrisoned at Wildflecken, was tasked with destroying critical bridges, roads, and other channels to impede any Soviet advance through the Fulda Gap, as well as provide critical engineering services to enable 1-68th Armor to ease the engagement of Soviet forces.

In September 1980, the 533rd Military Intelligence (MI) Battalion was reactivated in Frankfurt and assigned to the 3rd Armored Division. The 533rd MI Battalion deployed assets in the Fulda Gap to provide electronic warfare capability for the 3rd AD Commander. The missions of the MI battalion were to identify and target invading forces for artillery and air strikes, and to intrude on enemy radio networks using radio jamming and deceptive communications by Defense Language Institute trained Russian and German linguists. The 3rd Armored Division was reinforced with an organic attack helicopter wing, and was the first military unit to deploy the attack helicopter McDonnell Douglas, later Boeing, AH-64 Apache in 1987.

title: Fulda Gap