HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
54% Positive
Analyzed from 11345 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#war#world#more#drones#don#military#countries#before#iran#need
Discussion (291 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
How does this work exactly? It doesn't. It's a misunderstanding of public debt.
When you say stops buying US bonds, you're talking about the secondary market for US government bonds right - because in practice, contrary to the econ textbooks and common understanding, only a small number of institutions are allowed to purchase them in the primary market, not only that but these purchasers are compelled by law to continue buying them, to continue bidding for them at a fair price, and if they don't have the reserves to buy them then these purchasers will be given the reserves to continue to buy them. The entire premise of the argument falls apart as soon as you step away from the econ model and look at the legislation governing what actually happens by law.
And "just printing dollars" has well-documented inflationary effects inside the US too.
QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.
Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.
Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.
Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.
You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.
The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
I don't think you can quite generalize that much.
Additionally cooperation is an evolutionary advantage and world war is a species level threat now that we have nuclear weapons.
I don't believe that everyone wants peace. I believe the people who have the ability to shape policy and invest capital would want peace.
Which I think is also complicated. Kind of harkens back to the cliche that WW1 was caused by old people romanticizing war. Most letters between the heads of states confirmed they were anticipating industrial destruction and death but they felt the pressure to initiate war anyway.
Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:
> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).
We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.
Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.
Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.
“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”
The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm
(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)
Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.
If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.
I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.
Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.
The idea that you can mark a map and define property and consolidate identities to property is so anti-human.
If you embrace humanity then you should also reject the premise that there is any Other humanity.
It's historically supremacist.
Societies that are split along these lines are doomed to fail. Take a simple example of a new neighbor moving next door to you. If they don't speak the same language, do you think you'll form much of a relationship? Possible, yes, but more likely no. Now add religion, tradition, etc into the mix.
Because nature is filled with examples.
Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.
And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.
War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.
Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.
Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
Sounds like you're buying into reddit propaganda. The US spends more on social programs than it does on war, so apparently we have and can definitely find the courage to improve healthcare and hunger.
In fact, hunger is mostly not an issue in the united states.
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
significant parts of the current world order evolved when the US was very much a contested superpower, c/o the USSR. While many things have changed since the dissolution of the USSR, many things have remained the same.
Further, you can guarantee that if Russia had announced in the days of war rumors re: Iran that they would militarily (not just intelligence & logistics, if stories are to be believed) support Iran, the US would likely not have attacked in anything like this way. That they did not doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested", merely that Russia wasn't interested in that sort of positioning of its own (nuclear) military threat over US action in Iran.
And they would totally not enter a nuclear war with US for Iran.
The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.
Ignoring the one sided benefits of that even though you shouldn't it kind of reminds me maybe of the US and Britains relations?
Not a 1:1 but the continental separation, the "greed" of external companies trying to exploit the natural resources and work force.
And yet we're allies today.
If you're interested in the topic I'd highly advise checking out Sarah Paine and her lectures. An interesting view point of Mao and the rise of China.
You mean after the fall of the Soviet Union? Because Soviet Union used to contest US power.
>Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either.
So you believe relations between countries are a 0 sum game?
aggregate economic growth is positive sum, but the things that actually matter in geopolitics, namely who controls chokepoints, who sets standards, whose currency denominates trade, who has military primacy in a given region are zero-sum or close to it. china getting richer grows the pie. china getting rich enough to contest US naval dominance in the South China Sea does not. both are happening simultaneously. pointing at the first doesn't make the second disappear.
How is it that Hacker News people can be so smart on tech, yet lack Econ 101 understanding that the world is not a zero-sum place? The pie can grow for everyone.
Why do you suppose that the World Bank and the IMF make loans to developing countries? Under a zero-sum frame, wouldn't it be better to keep them underfoot by denying them credit?
The World Bank/IMF were designed to integrate developing countries into a system on WESTERN TERMS as suppliers of raw materials and labour, as markets for Western goods, as borrowers denominated in dollars. The loans weren't charity but architecture. They worked great as long as the recipients stayed in their lane. The tension now is precisely that countries like China used that system to climb the ladder and are now competing for the parts of the pie that were never supposed to be on the table, semiconductor fabs, AI leadership, alternative financial infrastructure, military projection in their own regions.
Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point.
That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace.
I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.
There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.
Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.
While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.
Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.
But we are reaching the limits of it.
In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
When all you have is a hammer…
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
With fours times the population
And I'd be all for "nation building" if it actually worked and moved countries to be democratically run. The +$6T spent on Iraq and Afghanistan are an indictment of our efforts to "help".
We just fucked with Venezuela -- where are the reports of us "helping"?
I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?
There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?
Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.
> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?
Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.
I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?
> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it
As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".
Korea, Vietnam, Laos...
You did not read that GP was saying. He's saying that many conflicts are not started because US bombed a place.
Afghanistan
Yugoslavia
Before 98:
Libya
Panama
Iraq
Kuwait
Somalia
Bosnia
Iran
Sudan
Afghanistan
Before 88:
Korea
China
Guatemala
Indonesia
Cuba
Guatemala
Belgian Congo
Guatemala
Dominican Republic
Peru
Laos
Vietnam
Cambodia
Guatemala
Lebanon
Grenada
Libya
El Salvador
Nicaragua
Iran
Japan
Before Pearl Harbor:
Dominican Republic
Nicaragua
China
Mexico
Russia
Wow, that's a lot of bombs! Hope this helps.
Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.
/s
Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.
Unacceptable, more children must be bombed. ‘Tis the only thing to do.
It was obvious ten years ago that this was coming, but saying so just made you sound crazy.
I said a similar thing when the Nordstream pipeline was popped. Basically anyone with, say, $400k to rent a boat and a work class underwater ROV could have done it. Sure, pricey, but that's low enough that a single individual could have financed it.
I dunno anyway. Buying a roll of a thousand of some component here and there wouldn't appear on anybody's radar. Maybe the motors would be a problem, but then, Mexico has enough good enough motor factories.
The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.
Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.
Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.
Si vis pacem ...
[edit, found the real version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum ]
adapted from a statement found in Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract De Re Militari (fourth or fifth century AD), in which the actual phrasing is Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").
They voted in the orange turd twice, a third of their population didn't even vote.
The US has become a laughing stock worldwide and internally looks like a prelude to Idiocracy.
Well, at least they know how to hire smart people, from China/Russia/Germany/India.
Bringing it back to your message, they love this! To be the center of attention, show off how strong and powerful of a nation they are.
Except, they messed with the wrong region. Same mistake Russia made.
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of practicality.
There are entire civil engineering textbooks that focus exclusively on the types of scenario you are alluding to. It is a very mature discipline and almost all of it has been tested empirically.
I used to have a civil engineering textbook that was solely about the design of structures to resist the myriad effects of nuclear weapons. It was actually pretty damn interesting. Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)
I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.
I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.
TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".
Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
> visibility
There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.
Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.
> susceptibility to attack
Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.
> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce
I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.
I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.
It sounds more like somebody from WWI suggesting the entrenchments absolutely _needed_ to be staggered and zig-zagged so that artillery blast shock waves don't kill everbody.
Which was a solid observation.
Now the solid advice is to leave _nothing_ above ground and parked for very long - roll everything .. including radar .. in and out of bunkers to protect assests when wave upon wave of wooden cheap arse semi smart bombs come in on the back of Chinese / Russian / Indian / US satellite targeting.
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
Drones work for Ukraine and Russia because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them had, they'd win without the need for drones. They work for US because political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force.
> political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force
Are you arguing that destroying a country of 90M's entire basic infrastructure is an "appropriate" use of force?
Just as i say: problem is not the technology. Guided bombs are cheaper than drones, more precise and a lot more powerful, US can use them and Iran uses drones simply because they don't have a viable air force. Problem is that they are fine attacking "anything of value" and Americans aren't.
We do not know exactly how much Iran can really destroy, because regardless if they can or they cannot destroy more, their current strategy of threatening to destroy much more than they have destroyed is the correct strategy.
If they had destroyed everything they can, then the adversaries would have no reason of further restraint. As it is, the adversaries are still fearful of greater retaliation, which has forced them to enter negotiations.
Also the fact that the Americans are not attacking "anything", is only partially true.
Of course, the Americans could destroy much more, but they have already destroyed many civilian targets, including the oil exporting infrastructure, bridges, rail stations, etc., in some cases also taking care to hit again the first responders.
> And of course to defeat such underground networks you need vast armies of small intelligent drones that can go in there and explore every tunnel where no human wants to risk setting foot in.
In the book they're defeated by biological warfare.
Admittedly that's "soft" rock, but 30 foot is shallow underground mining compared to major league underground mines and open cut super pits.
15-30ft holes in the ground can be constructed with bog standard earthmoving machinery that isn't even "wide load" so it's "within normal capabilities" by professional or military standards.
No the military doesn't do 30ft deep tunnels on the frontline, and it has no equipment to do it.
Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
The simple fact is that rules matter if and only if they are enforced effectively by a community. And power is the ability to direct and control that enforcement.
The international order has declined in the past one or two decades because the UN security council was hamstrung by the enormously powerful veto rights held by Russia, China and the U.S. This has slowly emboldened those countries to de-value the UN and pursue their own interests.
Because who exactly, outside of those major powers, is going to enforce anything?
You can defend yourself with letters of strong condemnation only as long as someone stronger doesn't want what you have.
I think it's sort of laughable when people try to invoke international law about the strait being closed when the country closing it was being bombed in the first place. Once your civilian infrastructure is being attacked all gloves are off.
What people fail to understand is that international order being respected favors the stronger and more developed countries first. Those are the countries that depend more on complex supply chains, on more expensive infrastructure, etc.
That the US of all countries would be the one dismantling an order that favored it first and foremost is sort of fascinating to watch, especially when it is replacing it with nothing. Definitely not something I would have guessed even a few years ago.
I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.
The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
They already have the system you describe. The German one's with radars are expensive compared to the technicals aimed by soldiers. Neither has very large effective range and the drones do not fly straight paths. You'd need millions of them.
They are mass producing interceptor drones for a reason.
What used to cost millions per unit now costs tens of thousands. That's significant.
It's like saying artillery isn't that big a deal in 1914. After all, it's been around since 1452.
Therefore the only solution is drones.
You could try an idealistic approach like making drones illegal and attempting to control proliferation, but as we've seen with other weapons that's really not an effective strategy.
Anyway, this idea goes back to long before The Matrix, try H G Wells The War of the Worlds, ably voiced by David Essex and Richard Burton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAwrLzhnzQ
This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.
You can do a tremendous amount of damage with off the shelf consumer drones, and a minimal budget. Ukraine did an billions of dollars of damage to Russia's airfleet with a couple million dollars of drones hidden in trucks. Well in the range of cartels and terrorist groups.
> The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy.
You are very much correct that the way to not get into this situation is to not start a war.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.
I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.
"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this
> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.
> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate
How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.
Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"
I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.
NYC on the other hand has the biggest number of jerks per capita I ever seen. (No offence to all nice people from NYC, which there are still plenty.)
Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.
I guess there's just no other option. Freedom isn't free.
I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.
Ukraine didn’t attack anyone, but that did not keep them safe from being attacked. Clearly not attacking anyone doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about being attacked.
Fixed civilian infrastructure has never been safe. The way you protect it is diplomatically, by having that region not be attacked in the first place or putting incentives such that certain bits of infrastructure are considered off limits.
Secondly, people whose only experience of war comes from fictional media have a drastically distorted view of the impact of chemical explosives. The science of chemical explosives became a mature discipline pre-WWII. Our best chemical today are maybe 1.7x more dense than TNT and our standard chemical explosives are often sometimes less energy dense because we prioritize safety over explosive power.
The science of rocketry became mature in the 60s, for a given fuel quantity, we can roughly lob X mass Y distance at Z speed.
The only area we've made massive advancements is precision, relevant if you want to put a small bomb through a window to kill one guy, not so relevant if you want to hit an oil refinery that is several square km wide.
The long and the short of it is that there's a massive, misunderstood gap between temporarily disabling something and destroying it. Take the Crimea bridge for example, back in 2022, there was a massive, high profile truck bombing that completely destroyed the center part of the bridge. However, it was fully repaired within 4 months. Subsequent, there have been 3 more attacks, and repaired every time and still transporting vital war materiel [1]. Concrete and steel are heavy. Even if left 100% undefended, the amount of weaponry needed to totally destroy the bridge, such that it could not be used for 3 years+ is a substantial chunk of Ukraine/US weapon's arsenal. Same goes for every power plant, oil refinery, airplane runway, tank factory etc. There's a reason why Ukraine still has reasonably reliable power after 6 years of Russian bombardment and the allies were never able to degrade German production abilities all the way down to zero despite near saturation bombing campaigns over cities like Dresden.
Bombs just aren't that powerful and our ability to produce them definitively peaked at the tail end of WWII. Currently, globally we're about at 1/20th of of that ability to produce that quantity of explosives and we likely never will reach that amount again.
The only way to actually truly destroy civilian infrastructure energetically is tactical nukes but that's an entirely other ball of wax.
In short, any time you see an expert in one field confidently expound in another field, you should be wary because, while they might be high IQ, their priors could be wrong in drastic ways that make any analysis foolish. The entire essay is arrant nonsense and would be laughed at by anyone with any degree of military analysis.
(Disclaimer: I did use AI to help me generate two numbers: the energetic ratio of WWII vs modern day high explosives and estimates of global military explosive production over time. All writing was my own).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge#Attacks_after_t...
The only reason anybody is thinking of destroying civilian infrastructure (wealth) is because everybody took off the table the prospect of sending in cavalry and infantry to seize and hold it.
The chances of success of such an action are very low, unlike for air strikes, as it has already been demonstrated by the failure of the incursion attempted by USA one week ago, which resulted in significant US material loss, e.g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes.
Be careful not to compare absolute sizes of militaries (which matter in a long term, strategic sense) to the number of soldiers deployed to a specific battlefield (which matter in a short term, tactical sense, for that particular battle). Adversaries who deploy large numbers of troops into a small area make them vulnerable (to foreign air power, yes, but mainly artillery). Adversaries like Iran may have staggering military sizes on paper but their ability to deliver significant numbers of troops to a battleground, particularly when roads, airstrips, and paratrooper transports are destroyed first (by air power), is far more limited.
But you're alluding to a separate concern, which is whether the US military has enough manpower for long-term strategic purposes, particularly since we can't do much about the size of adversary militaries before wartime, but can do something about the size of our own.
> significant US military loss, e g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes
If the loss of two measly planes is ever enough to be a "significant" military loss, then God help us. The military wastes far more, even in peacetime. We should be so lucky that the enemy continues to hurt us less than we hurt ourselves.
... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.
It is a bad time to be an invading force.
Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.
If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed, I have no doubt about that.
The author is quite misguided if he thinks wars can only be fought defensively and never offensively.
Bombing China would be an insane course of action to take for virtually any reason.
That aside consider this: You currently have the power to buy a handful of the shelf parts and assemble your own deadly drone at home. You don't need very specialized parts to do this. Bombing drone factories would do nothing to stop the use of drones.
For proxy wars, super powers won't bomb each other. But if one of them is attacked by weapons from another, then they will.
> You don't need very specialized parts to do this.
So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes? Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?
I'll understand if you aren't a hardware person, but I think you severely overestimate how complex a drone needs to be if you only intend for it to be single use (which is apparently all the rage in modern war).
You don't even need drone specific parts, the parts you need are used in all kinds of other applications...many are even in your home right now whether you know it or not.
To destroy the supply of these generic parts you would have to destroy...basically everything.
> Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?
This statement alone makes me not take your argument seriously. You aren't arguing in good faith.
No? Flat out arming proxies is literally the point of overt proxy warfare. Sometimes one tries to to be deniable and source other weapons, but other times it's just, enjoy quagmire, cry about it. It's like suggesting PRC going to start blowing up Lockheed plants if they ever lose anything to US munitions.
Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.
In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry. But this is easier said than done; they tend to be deep inside enemy territory. And drones are made out of commonplace consumer electronics parts, which could be made in thousands of factories around the world.
The rest of the drone is all stuff that can be fabricated in small batches in a garage... of course bigs factories are more efficient at fabricating just about anything so to the extent that's possible it's done, but bombing all the big factories won't stop it.
The US will do none of that shit because they wont be able to do it. Given the US is struggling against Iran, couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield yet they want to force down China which is an order of magnitude bigger than Russia.
Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.
> couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield
??? What does this even mean?
It's not like the US is in a wartime economy.
I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.
Its well reported in the western press that the US and Europe haven't been able to outproduce the Russian side regarding shells, drones and missiles etc.