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?
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.
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.
> 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 the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
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".
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?"
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").
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm...
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?
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.
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.
> 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 the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
When all you have is a hammer…
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.
Who did the US bomb before 9/11? Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor? Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked? https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/east-african-embass... Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?
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?
> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?
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?
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".
Sure, but I'd hope any commenter here would be smart enough to not believe such a facile explanation.
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?"
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.
The US is a country of violence and war. Founded from a war, massive civil war, almost perpetually at war for the last many decades.
Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.
The first part of the parabellum quote matters - we have to let the people who want peace prepare for war.
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 ...
aposiopesis is followed presumably by some latin phrasing of prepare for war?
[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").
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.
Cool world we’ve built everybody! No notes
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
Even biology doesn't cross check that much. Cells are happy to copy virus materials.
The trouble with missile interceptors is that they're overkill. Drones are slow, unarmored targets that could be taken out by a bullet.
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
Elon pops up, Boring Company business card in hand: You rang?
Because who do you think will be the main customer for his millions of humanoid robots?
It’s where the author lost me. I’d bet on the Army Corps of Engineers over TBM any day of the week, especially when the stakes are warfighter lives.
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.
Precisely.
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.
[flagged]
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.
How about not attacking countries and then you don't have to worry about them attacking you?
When did Ukraine attack Russia?
You must not have read any history books.
The ones written by the empires, or the ones that empires throw in the fire with anyone that dare to pretend otherwise? :)
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.
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.
A lot of the Ukrainian drones are produced in small buildings like homes and buisness, not massive centralized factories.
Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.
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.
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.
> struggling against Iran
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.
Trump has blundered like an idiot into this in Iran ...
... 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.
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.
This is the "people are more respectful when everyone is armed" theory.
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 handguns in the US has shown that it doesn't work.
Well at the risk of making a "hasn't been tried" argument, the vast majority of people in the US don't walk around with guns.
Why not? The friendliest people in the US are exactly in the open carry states.
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.)
This really depends on what you look like. Open carry states can be very unfriendly if you look a certain way.
OK, can't argue with that. I have no first-hand experience on this, you are probably right.
We (United States) should have gone to war with Israel in 2006
The government of Israel can fight its own wars, it sure as hell doesn't need US help.
Then it should stop getting $3 billion/ year from the US. Maybe also give back the $14 billion gift from a couple of years ago.
@esseph I meant US vs Israel, not USA/Israel vs anyone else