I had this idea for a "drill" that I'd like to make someday.
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
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?
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.
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.
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.
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.
I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another.
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.
> People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
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.
“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings?
“Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings,
“Ere the drowsy street hath stirred—
“Every masked and midnight word,
“And the nations break their fast upon these things.
“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!”
As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.
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.
>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out.
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 emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
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.
I think the reason we can imagine conflict easier than peace is pretty structural. Wars usually happen because of disequilibrium, and we're sitting right in the middle of a big one.
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.
I don't think there are major unresolved economic tensions between US and Iran or the likes. US isn't, somehow, mad because Iran or Venezuela are suddenly very rich and prosperous and independent - that simply isn't true.
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.
Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.
Trump may be a violent moron, but this goes back further. US sanctions and intimidation of Iran and Venezuela has been supported by both parties when in power. It's a US regime thing, not a party/administration thing (that stuff is for the mugs who believe they have a democracy).
> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
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.
That's a property shared by any large scale government spending.
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.
A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators.
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.
The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military.
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.
> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily
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.
I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.
I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.
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?
The US are also the major enabler of Israel's colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This was clearly expressed by Bin Laden himself as one of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks.
> 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".
No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question:
"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."
And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.
Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).
You asked "who did the US bomb before 9/11" and you got the answer. Now you're arguing that they shouldn't have reacted even if the US bombed them before (calling it "an excuse")?
As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".
I did not get a serious answer. Really, 9/11 because the US bombed Iraq (that invaded Kuwait? and fired Scud missiles for no reason into Israeli population centers?). The peace process with the Palestinians was such a sham that Israel allowed the PLO leadership to return from exile, it trained and armed Palestinian police, and it gave Palestinians security and civil control over their cities, and it offered them a two state solution that they refused (yes, without Jerusalem and without the right of return, which they will never get anyways). Clearly a sham.
"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?
West bank and Gaza were never under full Palestinian control since 1967 both were under brutal occupation or blockade + contant Israeli meddling into internal affairs.
Area A in the west bank has generally been under full Palestinian control and not under blockade or meddling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_A
Gaza wasn't under occupation or blockade when Israel withdrew in 2005. Only after Hamas won the elections and after Gilad Shalit was abducted from Israel in 2006 into Gaza did Israel start imposing more restrictions. I know this is a recurring claim from anti-Israeli but the fact remains that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and so there was no occupation in any meaningful sense of that word. Gaza also has a border with Egypt.
Here from an age were the BBC still had some decency: "Disengagement did remove one obstacle to peace - the settlers' presence on occupied Palestinian land in Gaza.
But the optimism of 2005, such as it was, has evaporated and Gaza today is completely outside the peace process.
That is a result of the rise to power of Hamas and the boycott of it by Israel and the international community.
But even in 2005, critics of disengagement said it was being used by the Israeli government as a substitute for a peace agreement with the Palestinians."
The withdrawal was without agreement and unilateral but it was a full withdrawal.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-192849/ is from the UN which has bias but here are some nuggets:
"Infighting between Palestinian families and between factions
increased in the weeks leading up to the disengagement and after
the IDF withdrawal on 12 September. More than 97 violent incidents
involving families, militant factions and PA police forces have
occurred between 12 September and 31 December. These incidents
include gunfights, kidnappings, beatings, house burnings, threats
and theft. Forty-seven Palestinians have been killed in the clashes
and at least 298 were injured"
"Discussions were suspended following a Palestinian
suicide bombing in Netanya (Israel) on 5 December"
"However, since 16 December, Erez Crossing has remained closed in
response to Palestinian militants’ firing of rockets from the northern
Gaza Strip into Israel."
"Following the IDF withdrawal on 12 September, Palestinian militants
have fired at least 283 homemade rockets towards Israel from the
Gaza Strip."
It's Iran. When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time. One North Korea is already one too many.
Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East for decades now, and not at all shy about it. They support armed proxies and radical insurrections in the entire region - many of them internationally acknowledged as terrorist organizations.
I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime. Long overdue, the moment was picked reasonably well, the military has performed well. The broad scope planning, however, simply wasn't there. What transpired reeks of Russia style "we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?"
Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated".
They were "allegedly obliterated" by bombing the relevant facilities, which is exactly my point.
I'm honestly not sure what the goals were/are on the current Iran campaign. I'm not sure the White House knows exactly, which is a very concerning thing.
If it was a campaign to inflict lasting economic damage on Iran by choking its income streams, or perform a boots on the ground regime change, or to cover for a land operation to extract nuclear materials, we would see different events.
But what we saw instead was a very successful strike campaign and no follow-up. No strait seizure, no land operation. I have a lingering suspicion that the assumption was "Iran will want to negotiate after the first strike exchange" and that assumption was proven wrong fast. And I already made my distaste for "only plan for the absolute best case scenario" clear.
Why are we ignoring the problems inside of North Korea? I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.
That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).
> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
> Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East
I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.
That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.
Well yes, and actually instead of wasting billions creating understandable cause of hate, this could be injected into domestic social spendings, and there would probably still be a lot staying on the table to throw in humanitarian endeavors around the globe creating love through so called soft power.
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").
> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day
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?
That cover dirt materially adds to the resistance of the structure.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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".
"The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it."
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.
> This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat.
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.
Against subsonic, low supersonic threats, short / medium term it's still about magazine depth and interceptor economics and sheer attrition math, i.e. PRC can build cheap interceptors at scale... has magnitude more targets due to sheer size, many of which are hardened, entire underground civil/mic infrastructure etc etc.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
In Reddit hand wringing land where your 3-gal homeowner air compressor gets called a bomb, yeah sure it's a major undertaking.
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.
There is a layer over this that should be noticed. Nowhere is safe, because international order is a joke. You can conduct invasions for land, to exterminate population, to whatever Trump is doing, every instrument of international law was just useless, or even cooperative with the stronger offender. Which will be the ones taking advantage of this situation? China, Brazil?
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 same line of reasoning leads to constitutions and laws being jokes, too.
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.
It is not that laws are being jokes or not because are not in place, but ends being that way when they are in place and they are blatantly ignored, specially for some power groups or communities. Then they can break those laws with impunity, and then others follow example with varied success, but still, those laws are already a joke.
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.
Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance.
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.
it’s basically smart grenades that “throw” themselves, high tech shit, there’s def going to be some kind of automatic helmet-mounted counter devices coming
I find this vaguely analogous to the proliferation of cheap handguns in America. If drones are a response to asymmetrical power, the solution would be diplomacy. It undermines existing power paradigm, the solution isnn't complicated. Don't pick needless fights with your neighbors and allies. Maybe drones ultimately make better neighbors.
Yes, it's called MAD. It doesn't work for very large groups with many unstable individuals but seems to have worked so far for the small group of nations.
I think it would be really interesting to study the costs/ benefits of digging a tunnel 10 meters underground compared to placing a sturdy building where you want it, and using bulldozers to cover it with 10 meters of earth and rock.
Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut and killed a kid from a message board I posted on at the time. Haven't liked Israel since. I was young and didn't really have an opinion on Israel until then.
Killed isn't a strong enough word. I should have said, "2006 was when I learned that IDF indiscriminately murders humans who are just trying to live their lives, and many of those humans are children."
Do drones just appear out of thin air? Or are they made in factories, which as far as I know are "high value fixed civilian infrastructure" - which is vulnerable to attack?
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.
> If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed
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.
And making drones and drone parts for massive assaults on stationary targets in the US is not an insane course of action?
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?
> So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes?
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 they're exactly right: drones need cheap, powerful parts which have only become possible due to highly concentrated mass production in places like China. You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs in a shed in Ukraine, and the cheapness of the parts depends on large unfettered supply chains. They're not "with some skill, you can build a lathe and then machine a pipe gun" simple.
In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.
In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.
But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.
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.
Yes, if mainland China is successfully invaded by a country being supplied with American military equipment and having their fixed infrastructure destroyed - like described in the article - you can be dead sure that they will try to destroy American military plants.
None of the super power countries will ever accept defeat in their homeland and being conquered without using all means possible to hinder it. That's why the USA has strong opinions on how the Ukraine uses long range weapons in the war with Russia.
They're assembled in small buildings, but at least some of the components require sophisticated factories. There are with all certainty weapons in orbit right now, locked on to these crucial factories, ready to fire if needed.
The sophisticated factories they need are basically just for chips. And the problem with chips is that civilian life is just as dependent on them as military armaments.
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.
In orbit? Probably not. No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets. They would need to launch missiles or send drones.
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.
> No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets.
Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.
And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.
> It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
No idea how actually efficient that would be even in theory. I guess it's not technical technicaly impossible, but would it really bring any benefit compared to launching possibly many more cheaper transcontinental rockets from earth were maintenance and control is definitely easier.
You think the US will unleash nuclear holocaust of the human race for some drone parts?
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.
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.
The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict. The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
It’s a shame there’s inherent performance cost to homomorphic encryption. If there were not it could make sense at least on the compute front to treat it as a commodity and just put it everywhere l, importantly including untrusted locations and have a control plane handle coordination for low latency.
Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.
I think it's more the performance cost of building the servers themselves, and their density, why put compute in a flood basin or tornado hotspot if you know the latency improvements won't be immense enough to offset the cost of their destruction
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
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.
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
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.
“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)
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.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With fours times the population
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.
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?
Korea, Vietnam, Laos...
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".
"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."
And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.
Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).
As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".
"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?
Area A in the west bank has generally been under full Palestinian control and not under blockade or meddling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_A
Gaza wasn't under occupation or blockade when Israel withdrew in 2005. Only after Hamas won the elections and after Gilad Shalit was abducted from Israel in 2006 into Gaza did Israel start imposing more restrictions. I know this is a recurring claim from anti-Israeli but the fact remains that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and so there was no occupation in any meaningful sense of that word. Gaza also has a border with Egypt.
Here from an age were the BBC still had some decency: "Disengagement did remove one obstacle to peace - the settlers' presence on occupied Palestinian land in Gaza.
But the optimism of 2005, such as it was, has evaporated and Gaza today is completely outside the peace process.
That is a result of the rise to power of Hamas and the boycott of it by Israel and the international community.
But even in 2005, critics of disengagement said it was being used by the Israeli government as a substitute for a peace agreement with the Palestinians."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-11002744
"After the settlements have been evacuated and knocked down, Israel will turn Gaza over to Palestinian control for the first time."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/22/israel1
The withdrawal was without agreement and unilateral but it was a full withdrawal.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-192849/ is from the UN which has bias but here are some nuggets: "Infighting between Palestinian families and between factions increased in the weeks leading up to the disengagement and after the IDF withdrawal on 12 September. More than 97 violent incidents involving families, militant factions and PA police forces have occurred between 12 September and 31 December. These incidents include gunfights, kidnappings, beatings, house burnings, threats and theft. Forty-seven Palestinians have been killed in the clashes and at least 298 were injured"
"Discussions were suspended following a Palestinian suicide bombing in Netanya (Israel) on 5 December"
"However, since 16 December, Erez Crossing has remained closed in response to Palestinian militants’ firing of rockets from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel."
"Following the IDF withdrawal on 12 September, Palestinian militants have fired at least 283 homemade rockets towards Israel from the Gaza Strip."
Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.
/s
Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East for decades now, and not at all shy about it. They support armed proxies and radical insurrections in the entire region - many of them internationally acknowledged as terrorist organizations.
I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime. Long overdue, the moment was picked reasonably well, the military has performed well. The broad scope planning, however, simply wasn't there. What transpired reeks of Russia style "we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/sunday-shows-pre...
I'm honestly not sure what the goals were/are on the current Iran campaign. I'm not sure the White House knows exactly, which is a very concerning thing.
If it was a campaign to inflict lasting economic damage on Iran by choking its income streams, or perform a boots on the ground regime change, or to cover for a land operation to extract nuclear materials, we would see different events.
But what we saw instead was a very successful strike campaign and no follow-up. No strait seizure, no land operation. I have a lingering suspicion that the assumption was "Iran will want to negotiate after the first strike exchange" and that assumption was proven wrong fast. And I already made my distaste for "only plan for the absolute best case scenario" clear.
That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.
IRGC sympathizers across the world that would rather have the current government than the more progressive predecessor.
Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.
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").
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".
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.
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
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.
I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
... 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.
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.
In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.
In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.
But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.
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.
None of the super power countries will ever accept defeat in their homeland and being conquered without using all means possible to hinder it. That's why the USA has strong opinions on how the Ukraine uses long range weapons in the war with Russia.
Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.
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.
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.
Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.
And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
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.
Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.