Our continent was free of war for a long time, never would have guessed Russia would attack something almost European. With asshole countries like that, we need it. And then we wonder why the alien's won't show themselves haha.
I think this is in reference to how important the defense industry has been to Silicon Valley in particular. For example, Steve Blank has this lecture on the Secret History of Silicon Valley
Off the top of my head, in this space DOD invented: CPUs/registers, random access memory, packet switched networks, internetworking, TCP/IPv4. I’m sure there’s more.
DoD did not really invent anything, but they have financed the research required to invent things according to their requirements, without which the things enumerated by you might have been invented only decades later.
All the modern semiconductor industry, including the discovery of transistors and of solar cells, has its origin in the research done during WWII, mostly at Bell Laboratories, to make improved detectors for the military radars, which lead to the development of the technologies needed to make pure germanium and pure silicon and of semiconductor diodes made with them.
Without DoD money, an electronic computer of the complexity of ENIAC would have been built only many years later. Nevertheless, both ENIAC and the British cryptographic electronic machines (and the Atanasoff computer) have been enabled by the invention of various kinds of electronic digital counters during the decade that has preceded WWII (mostly in UK), all of which had been invented for the use in experiments for the study by physicists of radioactive substances and of cosmic radiation, so there are also decisive civilian contributions (like also the discovery of nuclear fission as a precondition for the nuclear bombs and reactors).
So you're saying my original comment could be clarified to something like, "you have the US and UK taxpayers to thank for this industry, lest anyone forgets"?
So because the Department of Defense invented packet-switching networks fifty years ago, we owe them fealty? Respect? Hitler designed the original Volkswagen Beetle. Who cares?
All of us tech people used to know a fascist when we smelled one, now some of us lick their boots for a paycheck.
If I were the son of a fascist, I would tell people the truth that my father was a fascist.
If people were complaining about the influence of fascism on, say, the footwear industry, I would not tell people the truth that my father invented those plastic things on the ends of shoelaces (that are called aglets and whose true purpose is sinister) because that would come off as an apology for fascism.
That DARPA invented one small part of what would become the internet half a century later isn't germaine to criticisms of the influence of the government, intelligence or military on that internet. Silicon Valley has always been in the pocket of the military industrial complex, but most of the tech industry, to say nothing of tech and hacker culture, isn't from there and doesn't need to worry about biting the hand that feeds it.
No — but perhaps we could have negotiated a peace during a conference at Minsk a decade ago or in Feb 2022 at the outbreak of hostilities, rather than frantically send Boris Johnson to subvert it.
Russia has consistently angled for Ukraine to be a neutral border between two blocs to facilitate trade — and that clearly would have been better for Ukraine than a senseless slaughter which destroyed a generation, by maiming or killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions.
But that wouldn’t have satisfied warhawks like Victoria Nuland and the geriatric Cold Warriors (TM) who are intent on their senile, unhinged drive to destroy Russia as a nation.
Let me skip over a bunch of your points and just get to the end.
Would any of your theoretical compromises have satisfied the Cold Warriors in the Kremlin? These people literally believe that NATO is coming to invade Moscow. How do you negotiate with someone who lives in a place so disconnected from reality?
It is worse than that - No one in the Kremlin believes that NATO is coming for them. There are many proofs, but one is that Russia PULLED troops away from the Finnish border when Finland joined.
That line is merely one of dozens of bullshirt excuses they trot out to claim victimhood and "justify" their relentless aggression.
Yep. The actual answer is they believe the West is weak and easily bored. The Russian government has never cared about dead Russians, and believes just waiting us out will win them what they need at a cost they don't care about.
I mean, it's going to absolutely wreck Russia, but again: the Russian government for basically the last 1,000 years sees the citizen as a resource to be expended for it's greatness.
The only "peace" settlement Putin would have accepted by Feb 2022 would have required the permanent secession of the then-occupied regions (and likely then some) to Russia.
That clearly would have been better for Ukraine
As if you know better than the Ukrainians themselves as to what's best for them.
Indeed. And if anything, if Ukraine would have accepted such a "peace" settlement, the result would only have been the mysterious green men appearing in the next regions in Ukraine near the border. Rinse and repeat.
>but perhaps we could have negotiated a peace during a conference at Minsk a decade ago or in Feb 2022 at the outbreak of hostilities
Ukraine negotiated nonstop with Russia from 2014 (when Russia first seized some of their territory) until literally 1 week before the invasion in 2022. It was 8 years of nonstop negotiations, brokered by France & Germany. I'm always amazed more people don't know about this. How did negotiating work out for Ukraine?
Carbon copy of Russian propaganda, with central thesis that Ukraine doesn't want to fight, but Americans are forcing them to.
For example, from the article:
In March 2022, direct peace negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations and mediation efforts by the then Israeli Prime Minster, Naftali Bennet created a genuine chance for ending the war peacefully only four to five weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine. However, instead of ending the war through negotiations as Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government appeared to have wanted, he ultimately bowed to pressures from some Western powers to abandon a negotiated solution. Western powers wanted this war to continue in the hope to break Russia.
Bennett has refuted all this.
According to him:
1. There was no negotiated solution.
2. Western powers were forcing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia and reach a solution at any cost.
3. Western powers relieved the pressure to negotiate after mass grave was discovered in Bucha and leaving Ukrainians on occupied territories to the same fate became indefensible.
The entire narrative seen in your article originates from an interview with Bennett that Russian propaganda machine picked up, painting a completely different picture as if western powers had forced Ukraine into war. They equated "less pressure to negotiate" with "forcing into war".
That is not supported by facts. Western powers stalled military aid to Ukraine every way they could in the hope that forcing Ukraine into negotiations with Russia would sweep the whole thing under the rug and business with Russians could continue as usual, as it did after Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. If western powers wanted war, then where were the jets, tanks and artillery pieces that Ukraine was asking for? Why are they tiptoeing around Russia and providing too little, too late out of escalation fears?
Members of Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations have recently said that they negotiated just to satisfy western demands. Ukrainian delegation had no confidence that Russia would follow any agreements.
Furthermore, experts like Kozyrev, the former minister of foreign affairs of Russia (now living in exile), have pointed out that the negotiations deserve no attention at all, because the people negotiating on Russian side were total nobodies with no authority, and that the entire exercise looked like a stalling tactic.
This is the same bullshit line Putin spouted with Tucker Carlson: It was Poland that started WWII by forcing the Hitler to invade.
It is standard psychopathic tactics — DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse victim and Offender.
"Ukraine left us no choice to invade!" — Utter bullshit start to finish
"NATO forced us to invade!" — Mor of the same. NATO is ZERO threat to Russia's integrity, and Putin knows it. when Finland joined NATO, Russia PULLED troops from away from Finnish border, the exact opposite of what they'd do if NATO was actually a threat, or even a perceived threat.
The list is endless (because they'll always come up with more, just throw it up there and see what sticks).
A former UN official, a former NATO military official, and an academic?
Yet another example of the general rule that the fact of one having held at one point a high-status position does not, ipso facto, validate what one has to say about any particular topic.
As to the content -- some interesting history, albeit with a lot cherry-picking and selective omission; and apparently not a few simple misstatements or reversals of fact. The sibling commenters have done a better job of dissecting its content.
But beyond their words -- it's important to look at who these guys are, and crucially -- who they associate with, and who's buying them lunch.
As to Harald Kujat, from Wikipedia:
Since July 2016, Kujat is a member of the Supervisory Board of the Berlin-based Research Institute Dialogue of Civilizations[4] (DOC), allegedly financed by Vladimir Yakunin,[5] until 2015 CEO of the Russian Railways and by some sources considered a member of the Russian president Vladimir Putin's inner circle.
By some conservative German media (Bild-Zeitung, Die Welt) Kujat was criticized for his pro-Russian views in German TV talk shows,[6][7][8] allegedly being considered with misgiving by the German Federal Government.[9]
Yakunin is (or was at one time anyway) the President of the DoC, and he's definitely very close to Putin. As for the criticisms of the German Press -- there's an article titled Talkshows verkaufen Propagandisten als „Experten“ you can easily which seems to get right to the point.
As for mister Hajo Funke (translated):
In February 2023 Funke was one of the first signatories of the Manifest for Peace initiated by Sahra Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer that calls for [essentially the same "peace" plan described in the article]
Wagenknecht (former opposition leader in the Bundestag) and Schwarzer (an activist) have both held some notably weird, authoritarian views over the years (while seeming to mostly promote good wholesome left-wing views). Wagenknecht's were considered so extreme that it led to a row within her own party (The Left), some of whom said publicly that she ought to join the far-right AfD. In any case, she's generally considered to be radioactive in Germany politics right now - such that one doesn't go around signing or otherwise publicly endorsing something she says - unless one wishes to make a very conspicuous statement.
That tells you what you need to know about these guys (2 out 3 anyway).
> Are you claiming that shelling ethnic Russians in Donbas
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine diligently documented the use of lethal force and resulting casualties in the low-intensity conflict before the full-scale invasion in 2022 and did not witness anything like what you describe. The number of civilian casualties was in low tens per year, mostly due to landmines and unexploded ordnance.
> In an interview published in Germany's Zeit magazine on Wednesday, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to "give Ukraine time" to build up its defences.
What's wrong with that? Obviously, you don't think anyone has a right to defend themselves against aggression from Russia.
The main Russian negotiator for the Minsk agreements also said he did not expect them to hold. So it was all a Russian tactic to prepare their invasion?
I watched a news segment where a former government official close to Putin said people don't understand him. Putin goes into incredible detail when planning military campaigns. For Georgia and Ukraine Putin had been planning the attacks for decades. Plus he has a Plan B, Plan C etc. all that he wants he's decided already years ago and is not interested in anything else. You missed your chance for peace talks by a decade or two.
The decapitation strikes might have worked if Ukraine didn't have advance warning from very detailed intelligence, and if the Russian military was as competent as everyone assumed.
Not saying Putin should be underestimated. Even if his strategic cunning is on the level of a village idiot, he clearly has a lot of men and material to throw into the meat grinder. And pretty clearly he doesn't give a shit about casualties either.
That the West has been unable to provide sufficient support to Ukraine to stand against this aggression is a mark of shame that will take a long time to wash away.
Yeah it's incredibly embarrassing to supposedly plan for so long only to have it fail so spectacularly. Even Georgia didn't go very well.
It's hard to know if the person saying that about Putin is a plant for propaganda or if he really was being honest. He could be unknowing be spreading misinformation to benefit Putin and I could be doing the same quoting what the man said.
Frankly, what Russia would prefer to happen in Ukraine is, to put it politely, their own fucking problem. I get why they might prefer that. But when they don't get their way, they are not allowed to invade a sovereign nation and slaughter thousands of civilians. Ukraine is allowed to pick who it wants to be associated with and Russia doesn't get a say.
Also, at this point it is hilariously obvious that A) Russia will never take all of Ukraine like they wanted (huh, how would that have been for a "nuetral border between the two) and B) whatever portion they don't take will be far far more closely aligned than the west than would have been possible in the absense of their invasion.
Even if you buy it as a reasonable desire and reasonble response to not getting their way, it has very, very obviously not gotten them what they wanted.
> I only pointed out Russia’s behavior to highlight they’ve consistently worked towards an amicable settlement
In what world is annexing territory you don't even control on the basis of a referendum you canceled before rescheduling due to losses on the battlefield working towards an amicable settlement?
Since February 2022, I haven't seen much evidence that Russia has made any serious attempts to achieve an amicable settlement, much less consistently worked towards those goals.
Russia will always "be open" to negotiations if only to create cracks in the western support for Ukraine. But what are they offering?
Last I head Putin was only prepared to negotiate based on the understanding that all occupied territories would stay under Russian control.
Ukraine should have handled this better and also signaling being open for negotiations. On the condition of returning all territories that are within their internationally recognized borders.
Russia annexed those territories, following referendums, because Ukraine refused to negotiate. Russia views them as Russian territory now — and has said they’re willing to use nuclear weapons in their defense (as they would for any territory). De facto those are Russian.
Ukraine has passed a law saying they absolutely refuse to negotiate a peace settlement with Putin.
Again, you can believe that’s righteous… but all I see is a world in which Ukraine has permanently lost territory due to failing to implement peace accords a decade ago while killing or displacing ~10% of their population (4M in 45M).
I think that’s a tragedy — and for what? …a worse outcome?
Who says that Russia would have honored that settlement?
It didnt all the others.
Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, then started the proxy war in the Donbas and then a few years later came back for a full invasion. Dont forget the plethora of different reasons Putin gives for the invasion. Bio Labs, nuclear weapons aspirations, language laws, civil war(that he himself started).......There will always be more than enough reasons for Russia to invade and annexes its neighbors. And they will do it.
This is nothing else than your typical post colonial/imperial war where Ukraine fights for its independence while Russia tries to reclaim some its former imperial territories.
Just watch what Russian politicians say, what is being written in the news, what all those political talkshows say. They are not even trying to hide it. Its mostly here in the west that you have those discussions.
Putin just gave a two hour interview where he explains the efforts they made and why they view this as a US coup.
There’s nothing about this which is colonial/imperial: Ukraine was already separate for decades, peacefully, until outside nations supported violent overthrow of a democratically elected government which followed its rise to power with oppression of an ethnic group.
If we’re discussing what politicians say, then I see:
- Russia is making points about how the regions they annexed were oppressed after they made efforts to reach peace settlements
- US is frothing at the mouth about harming Russia
- Ukraine is saying crazy things, like laying claims to part of Russia.
> until outside nations supported violent overthrow of a democratically elected government which followed its rise to power with oppression of an ethnic group.
The trouble with this narrative is that it's fictional and not supported by facts. It is no different from Hitler's delusions about global Jewish conspiracy against the Germans. One can subscribe to these narratives only if they accept known falsehoods as the truth and reject many facts as lies.
Even rhetorically, arguments like the oppression of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are preposterous given how Russia has become one of the most oppressive places on the planet. Such allegations sound like Hitler justifying the bombing of London with the way the English treated the Scots or the Irish - while turning a blind eye to the Holocaust going on at home.
> - Ukraine is saying crazy things, like laying claims to part of Russia.
Do you have any links to this? I am not aware of Ukraine laying claim to any part of Russia, asides from those parts that the international community still regards as Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally annexed (namely, Crimea, Donbass, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson).
Yep, that's literally what is being said -- that Crimea, Donbas, Kherson etc are of course "part of Russia" and that it is Ukraine which is "laying claim" to those regions.
Which is completely backasswards of course. But because a well-spoken, powerful man on TV (who also aligns with his geopolitical / moral views), in this case Putin, is saying those things -- a lot of folks have no problem believing it. Ditto with the supposed "coup" in 2014 (which is somewhat more nuanced, but not all that nuanced or hard to figure out).
And not only believing this nonsensse - but sucking it up as if it were air.
BTW strictly speaking, we don't know if the grandparent actually believes in these particular bullet points -- they aren't saying this is what they believe, only "this is what politicians are saying." But it's basically in tune with other misconceptions that they (the grandparent) has been putting forth in this thread.
You very well know that Yanukovych ran his campaign on a pro EU platform. He promised the people a customs union through an association agreement with the EU. The day before signing said agreement, he got bought off by Putin and proclaimed that Ukraine would enter a customs union with Russia and Belarus instead.
I really can not see any way such an action of a massively corrupt leader selling out his people and acting against their stated interest would not result in massive protests. During which Yanu chose to flee his country.
Also there have been two elections since then so who cares.
Putin claimed at the beginning of the war that it did not seek any territory from Ukraine (to be fair, nobody really believed him). Annexation of those territories was thus an increase in the amount of war goals that Russia sought. The referendums were canceled in the wake of the Russian army suffering an embarrassing rout near Kharkiv, and hurriedly rescheduled when it looked like Russia might lose control of Kherson soon--that is, the annexation happened in response not to Russian military success but immediate Russian military failure.
The annexation should signal to the world that Russia is not interested in any serious peace settlements. Indeed, it should be a strong signal that Russia is uninterested in acknowledging that its military is not capable of achieving a state that makes concessionless peace deals possible. I will fault Ukraine for many things, but being unwilling to negotiate with someone who will not moderate their goals in line with their ability to achieve them is not one of them.
Russia annexed those regions when it became the best way to protect the people there, after the collapse of negotiations.
> I will fault Ukraine for many things, but being unwilling to negotiate with someone who will not moderate their goals in line with their ability to achieve them is not one of them.
This is something Ukraine should consider, after the massive failure of their Sprint/Summer Offensive of 2023.
Ukraine needs to moderate their aims in light of their military failures — before the fanaticism leads to their destruction.
> Russia annexed those regions when it became the best way to protect the people there, after the collapse of negotiations.
Taking into account the daily terror raids conducted with artillery and missiles on towns and villages of annexed parts of Ukraine like Kherson, I don't think you'll find many suckers who'll fall for that excuse.
If Russian government feels strongly about protecting people, particularly ethnic Russians, they could start by ordering the police not to beat and molest peaceful protesters on the Red Square anymore.
> Russia annexed those regions when it became the best way to protect the people there, after the collapse of negotiations.
Okay, since you brought this up, I have to know now. How does annexation of that territory protect the inhabitants there, compared to a world where Russia merely occupies the territory?
For bonus points, please explain why that offsets the effect it has of lengthening the war (since it makes the Russian and Ukrainian positions more, not less, irreconcilable).
I want to come to your house, steal all of your stuff and pets, then burn it down. Lets negotiate! Lets find a happy middle ground, what do you say? Oh and by the way Im already living in your attic and regularly pee in your fridge.
No treaty with Putin has ever been honored. He is attempting to rebuild the Russian Empire and "peace" agreements are merely used to get the opponents to stand down while Russia prepares aggression.
Putin and his govt have said that they have rights to the Baltics, Poland, Germany and more. They have said that Ukraine should not, indeed DOES NOT exist. The very existence of the idea of a free, and especially prosperous Ukraine is seen by them as an existential threat. And they may be right, as it certainly makes Russians wonder how those awful Ukrainians can live so well, having toilets and all.
Read Winter Is Coming by Garry Kasparov. He's a former world chess champion, former candidate for President of Russia, and deeply involved in global democracy. He knows more than you or I ever will.
No one intends to destroy Russia as a nation. It is the autocracies of Russia, Iran, NK, China, etc. who see that international law and order threaten their criminal way of life, and are working hard to destroy democracy. If you are so big on Russia, go live there and report back after a year (if you aren't conscripted and killed in one of their 'meat assaults' on Ukraine.
This reminds me of the excellent series "Blueprint for Armageddon" in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast [1]. It's about the First World War. WWI tends to get less attention than WW2 and while there are good reasons why we focus on the atrocities of WW2, in some ways WWI was far more devastating.
The artillery production mentioned here reminds me of how scales changed from the beginning to the end of the war. At the outbreak, IIRC Russia produced ~35K artillery shells per month and was using ~25K per day. By 1917, there was a battle where a combined total of ONE MILLION artillery shells were fired (between the two sides) in a period of roughly 4 hours.
Every war seems to have a defining technology that's new and makes it unlike previous wars. This is rarely clear to military leadership before the war starts so tends to mean the calculations are off. For example, the US Civil War was the first war fought with mass-produced, long-range, fast-loading and accurate rifles, which led to >600K deaths. By comparison, the US lost 400k servicemen in WW2.
In WWI, that defining technology was really artillery. To a lesser extent it was machine guns too. Air power became a factor late in the war but the concepts of aerial bombardment, strategic bombardment and air superiority wouldn't really come into their own until WW2. The real solution to artillery and fixed positions ultimately became the tank But WWi ended before this really took off. Like air power, it would become a huge factor in WW2.
Why this is important is because the war in Ukraine is in many ways similar to WWI. Air power isn't really a factor but the most defining factors are artillery, trenches, fortifications and terrain, most notably the Dnipro River.
Russia has built 3 lines of impressive fortifications that mirror German positions in WWI. Russia's strategy is essentially to dig in, use the river as a barrier and wait for the West to get bored or lose patience with supplying Ukraine such that Ukraine sues for peace and Russia gains territory east of the river, creating a land bridge to Crimea.
But in a WWI style war, artillery is incredibly important. It can be used to cover an advance into a fortified position (eg a creeping barrage [2]). These were tactics that were developed and learned through WWI.
Oh and if you want to see how devastating this can be look no further than Verdun, the so-called "Red Zone" (Zone Rouge) [3].
I saw a video of these things in action killing somebody on the battlefield, it was truly disgusting. Seeing videos like that has made me feel like I don’t care who wins the conflict anymore, it just needs to come to an end.
It's no more and no less "disgusting" than being burned in an APC, have your limbs torn off in a trench by an artillery shell, or slowly bleeding out after being shot in a field. You just normally don't see those deaths, and here you saw one. Why does that make you not care who wins this war, the ones waging a fascist colonial war or the ones defending their families from it?
Appeasement doesn't work with this aggressor; it only emboldens them and increases the likelihood of another landgrab in a few years. The only thing they understand is force.
Exactly, that's why supporting Ukraine is extremely important. As long as the aggressor still thinks there's a chance to conquer more territory, the war won't end.
Do you mean globally in general? They're obviously not the aggressor in Ukraine. My Ukrainian friends didn't have their their family home annihilated US shells directly or indirectly.
Whether you are an agressor or not depends on the conflict. One can be both in different conflicts, and even change roles over time in the same conflict.
It worked with Stalin at Yalta in 1945, when Churchill signed away vast swaths of Eastern Europe to Soviet rule. "Appeasement" is frankly nothing more than a pejorative word for diplomacy. Be wary of those who employ its use.
That's a rather simplistic view of things. Anyways I'm not going get into it and instead leave you with a quote from Mr. Sherman:
>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
Over the last thirty years or so, it's been increasingly popular to see WW1 and WW2 as the same conflict, but with a pause for populations to stabilize and stocks to be rebuilt.
It's sometimes called "The Second Thirty Years' War", although I feel that labelling is misleading, as is, potentially, the core thesis. Careful reading of the diplomatic history illustrates that WW2, despite our popular notions, was not entirely inevitable, but, at least so far as Poland was concerned, was one more in a very long list of NSDAP f#ckups. 30 Year War Part II is a workable paradigm when considering the large scale causes of the 20th century conflicts. It's deeply, bitterly ironic that Europe was done in by the same intellectual framework that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. Turns out, once you start throwing subhuman labels around, it's just a matter of time before the label lands on your neighbors.
> by the same intellectual framework that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world
People consisted other nations and ethnicities subhuman as long as they existed. Europe was, AFAIK, the first place on Earth that (1) considered subjugated people equal before the law (if they converted), (2) banned slavery and (3) imposed slavery ban on other nations.
Tell me more about how slavery was outlawed in Haiti - especially during the French Revolution with its "liberté, égalité, fraternité". Tell me about Belgian Congo. Tell me about the close relative of slavery, indentured servitude, in the British Empire.
That podcast absolutely plunged me into history in a way I never had experienced. I was astounded at how much death and horror we are capable of tolerating before the average person does something about it. WW1 history helped me get through the pandemic because no matter how bad that was I was sure living a better life than those who lived in the trenches. Cannot recommend enough.
All available evidence seems to suggest that Russia has no intentions of taking the land bridge and calling it a day. They’re vocally aiming to take the whole of Ukraine. They may be trying to wait out western support but it feels shaky. Perhaps with a trump presidency.
Ukraine’s increasing ability to hit deep targets suggests to me this strategy of Russia’s will not work. The offensive pace is too slow for the immense economic costs.
> They’re vocally aiming to take the whole of Ukraine
Putin (following Dugin) has expressed the goal of building a Russian empire stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon. I suppose that's just sabre-rattling; but Leningrad is very exposed, at the end of a long land corridor bordered on either side by NATO members. I'm convinced he hopes to dominate all the land between Russia and the Baltic.
I'm a huge Dan Carlin fan. I started my career as a mechanical engineer, and I have a deep appreciation for chemistry and materials science, as everything rests on that. Most of the early transistor legends were chemists after all. Hence, I wanted to go a little deeper on the technical side with this blog, focused on the here and now.
Weapons manufacture has an unfortunate overlap with the systems skills computer people possess. It’s easy to get sucked in. He says it best in the first paragraph.
“I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of one”
Never build a weapon you wouldn’t want to be on the other end of. The last part of creation is relinquishing control. The person operating it might not be as careful pointing it as you would.
A fine pacifist attitude to have when someone else did the fighting and the dying and the building up a military industrial complex for you. Ukrainians, for example, don't have that option, which is why a ton of IT guys there are starting and joining all sorts of miltech startups, volunteer groups, etc. Their families and their future depend on using their talents to build yucky weapons they don't want to be on the other side of.
Yeah, these pacifist-style comments are really tone deaf and out of touch.
Yes, we'd all prefer peace and leaving each other alone, but if some other nation comes to kill your countrymen and replace your democracy with a puppet, suddenly just relying on pacifist ideals doesn't work well anymore.
Most of the time, these commenters don't want to engage with reality as it currently exists. If you ask them what exactly you're supposed to do without a war machine if some other guy invades, they just have the silliest deflections and hand waving. Ultimately, they just want to say "war bad" from atop their high horse, as if other people didn't believe that war was, in fact, bad.
Ukraine is an obvious example. Ukraine wasn't doing anything to Russia other than choosing to gradually move culturally towards the West, which is their right. Before the big invasion in 2022, there were repeated attempts by Ukraine or by Western countries to try and forestall Russia's invasion by opening up negotiations and talking things out, and Putin didn't give a shit.
Diplomacy didn't work there. What would've worked? Having a stronger military, or even better, being allied with other strong militaries. Putin doesn't invade the Baltics for a reason.
I grew up in Ukraine, and I distinctly remember how little Ukrainians cared about their military before 2014. It was chronically underfunded, equipment in terrible shape, not nearly enough training, outdated tactics, etc. And Ukrainians wanted it that way, because who wants to think about war and spend resources on the military when your country is in such terrible shape financially already? I shared that attitude growing up. And this is a huge reason why the war happened in the first place. In some neighbourhoods, weakness invites aggression. Ignoring that fact won't make it go away. To have lasting peace, it is necessary (though not sufficient) to have a strong deterrent.
This comment is peak 2004 neo-conservatives logic.
Ukraine is fighting a bloody attrition land war in Russia. They are currently losing and will likely fair worse as time goes on.
Mind you Ukraine could have prevented all of this if they had decided not to break the Minsk agreement which would have ended the conflict in Donbas. Instead the US and EU used it to buy for time so they could further arm Ukraine for war with Russia.
This conflict has been an unmitigated disaster for the people of Ukraine. Entire generation of youth killed or crippled. Millions fled the country and may never return.
What part of the Minsk agreement did Ukraine break? It seems that LPR, DPR, and UKR all ignored some of the ceasefire agreements and couldn't resist saying that one area or another was an exception that they could seize through military force.
>Mind you Ukraine could have prevented all of this if
Whatever comes after the if, unless it's "surrender sovereignty unconditionally", it's wrong. Putin's goal was, and is now, to incorporate Ukraine into his empire as a client state, similar to Belarus. And eventually to take even that decorative residual bit of sovereignty. Of course at this point, taking over Ukraine will mean mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people and an erasure of Ukrainian identity and language.
Just want you to be clear about what outcome you're defending.
By diplomacy he means letting Putin have what he wants. The fact is Russia repeatedly signed agreements saying no to a divided Europe and giving countries a free choice in who to ally with.
Mearsheimer is literally on Russian payroll. His works have received financial support from Russian government through the so-called Valdai club.
Andrei Kozyrev, the minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Federation (1990-1996), had this to say about the purpose of the club and people like Mearsheimer:
I ask Kozyrev about a debate that has roiled the American foreign policy establishment in the leadup to this war. Did NATO go too far? On the contrary, he thinks it didn’t go far enough.
“One thing among many I admire about the American character is your ability to look into what you did and to be very, very critical of your mistakes,” Kozyrev says, in what I’m right to assume is a slightly philosophical preliminary to an incoming polemic. “Like when Congress unanimously passed a ban on any kind of lynching. It’s a little late, but it’s important because it’s a form of national repentance. That’s what Russia doesn’t do. Russia doesn’t repent. It hasn’t really for Stalinism or for cutting a deal with Hitler. Instead, it blames Ukraine for Nazism, which is ridiculous.”
As to the pundits and policy mandarins who think the West sleepwalked into this crisis, which now threatens to bleed out beyond the borders of Russia and Belarus and Ukraine, Kozyrev thinks that’s simply nonsense. “Unfortunately, there are many wishful thinkers especially in academia here and intellectuals who have ties to Russia. They go to Valdai [a Russian think tank forum]. They consume caviar and vodka and are treated like kings by those who exist solely to manipulate them. This argument about NATO is just propaganda fed to Americans who then regurgitate it in their opinion and journal essays. The only real analysts who come here from Russia are dissidents. The rest are front people, just like in the Soviet Union, and they manufacture Western champions of the Putin regime, chumps and useful idiots.”
I wonder what you mean by "full confrontation"? Not rolling over and surrendering meekly? Ukraine is a sovereign state, it won't be neutered and turned into Russia's client state. If it takes "full confrontation" to do so, what other choice is there?
"Out of the total 946 civilian casualties confirmed by the Mission, shelling and fire from small arms and light
weapons (SALW) accounted for 625 casualties (77 killed and 548 injured). More than 85 per cent of these
casualties occurred in Donetsk region."
Since Grozny, Putin has been a brutal war criminal for me. For me, nothing justifies this war.
It is a political question of how to deal with Russia's claims to power in Ukraine or the Caucasus. Georgia was smarter in my opinion. Ukrainian nationalists and their neoconservative supporters from the USA were less wise.
The situations are not really comparable, given that Russia's designs on Ukraine are very different. Categorically different in fact.
Perhaps in the years 2014-2022 they were somewhat comparable (when Russia was more or less trying to keep Ukraine in an extended "punishment box"). But definitely not since.
I agree that we should engage with reality as it currently exists. Davyd Arakhamia [1] is a Ukrainian member of parliament, in Zelensky's party. He was one of the negotiators early on with Russia. He stated that Russia's main demand was simply that Ukraine agree to not join NATO. Meduza has an article about it (which also links to the interview itself) here, as well as spin from various sides. [2] If you're unaware of the source Meduza is to Russia as MSNBC is to the Republican party. Here's his quote:
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"They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification,’ the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah"
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He goes on to elaborate that the main reason they didn't agree to such is because (1) they didn't trust Russia and (2) Boris Johnson told them they should "just fight." And maybe Russia would have "really" invaded with the sort of logic you put forth in your post later on, but that was clearly not their goal in this invasion. Not joining NATO is hardly some Hitler level appeasement as our propaganda spins it.
Russia was paranoid about NATO, which has gradually been working to surround it with nuclear weapons, having a base setup in Ukraine which has a geographically clear path straight into Russia's heartland. And I don't find such paranoia particularly unreasonable. Countries that strongly turn against America tend to find death and destruction at their doorstep soon enough.
And none of this is to justify Russia's invasion, nor condemn Ukraine's decision to fight. Rather I emphasize that we live in a world that's a million shades of gray, even if propaganda from one side or the other invariably frame it as the clearest thing ever. And enough people will believe such unquestionably, ensuring war will be with us til our final days.
The root issue is the culture of fear among Russian leadership. They are constantly afraid that someone is trying to stab them in the back. (And they are often right, but the backstabber is usually another Russian leader.)
Because they live in fear, they cannot afford being trustworthy. And because they are not trustworthy, Russia's neighbors seek protection from other powers. Which in turn fuels the fears of Russian leadership.
Russia could break the cycle by stopping to be afraid. They could find role models in Europe. Germany, France, and the UK are all former major powers that started behaving like normal countries. With varying degrees of success.
Imagine Russia completely disarmed itself, destroyed all nuclear weapons, deposed its entire military, and all military weapons and production capability. Exactly how long do you think it would be before the US invaded? We might debate the timeline, but I don't think you can argue in good faith that they wouldn't be invaded.
But if you accept this then it becomes clear that trust is impossible. You have a power that wants to overthrow you surrounding you with military bases and pointing countless nuclear weapons at you. That, by the way, is also not necessary to maintain mutually assured destruction type deterrence. But it is necessary if you want to consider a rapid first-strike complete annihilation type attack, hitting them before they can return fire.
Of course, vice versa, imagine the US disarmed. They'd be invaded by like 80% of the world within a fortnight. Unfortunately I think the cycle is unbreakable. I don't think there's anybody that actually likes war, but it's been with us since the advent of civilization, and I expect it to remain with us til the end of civilization.
You could replace [Russia] there with the countless other countries we invade/occupy, for far lesser rewards than Russia would offer. So, yes I'm 100% certain we would.
Nobody cares about Russia unless it invades its neighbors or tries to fuck things up for the rest in another way. Russia is a gas station with nuclear weapons that is inherently self limited due to its kleptocracy.
And again, the US cant even be bothered to kill off Russia by supplying some insignificant amount of aid and you think that there would be boots on the ground?
That's wildly delusional. Russia is aggressive and expansionist so it imagines all other countries must be the same.
In truth, absolutely nobody is interested in invading Russia, perhaps China notwithstanding as it is also authoritarian and carries some bad blood from Russia annexing its territory back in the day. Western countries have no such interest and likely would outright reject any suggestions of returning the lands Soviet Union stole within Europe.
Russia would still of course not survive in its current form without military, but that's because it's a colonial empire that would quickly break apart if given a chance.
I find this summary https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/did-ukraine-miss-an-ear... pretty convincing. It basically says that the massacres of Bucha and the disastrous Russian performance in their attack on Kyiv are the reason that Ukraine did not negotiate a seize fire. Plus, while Russia started very tough in the negotiations, after their Kyiv convoy broke down they basically agreed to everything. If you know anything about Russian military history, you know that this means they wanted to use negotiations to consolidate their forces and try again better prepared.
We in the western world tend to see such conflicts like a game/puzzle where there is always a winning door that leads to happiness for all participants. Since there are only two choices and the current situation is bad, Ukraine must have made the wrong choice and we would be living happily ever after, if they only had agreed to a deal.
Needless to say that Putin loves to play on this mindset by saying all the things all the time. There will always be many groups in the west that will pick out quotes to bolster their favorite narrative and ignore the rest.
> Russia was paranoid about NATO, which has gradually been working to surround it with nuclear weapons, having a base setup in Ukraine which has a geographically clear path straight into Russia's heartland. And I don't find such paranoia particularly unreasonable.
Sorry, I find it unlikely that even you believe this line of reasoning.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It is delusional to think that Russia is remotely at risk for a Iraq/Libya/Yugoslavia type situation.
Russia might not like its neighbors joining NATO, but maybe they wouldn't feel the need if being Russia's neighbor didn't suck so much?
In any case, Russia's actions in the last decade culminating with February 2022 have essentially convinced all post-1989 NATO inductees that it was the right move.
You need to look at the world probabilistically and over an extended period of time, not just try to guess what will immediately happen and go with that. The United States is still longing for global hegemony, when it's increasingly clear such is no longer possible. That creates a very dangerous situation, especially when we seem to keep picking rather poor leaders who lack much in the way of competence or foresight.
There's also simply misreading other leaders' intentions. If the US does not believe that Putin would respond to a conventional attack with nuclear weapons, then that also dramatically increases the chances of such an attack. And in fact one could argue that we're currently trying to probe how Russia would respond to slowly escalating types of provocations.
There's also the future. As we enter into a multipolar world it's possible the dollar could collapse, which could create unimaginable chaos. Russia could have some degree of turmoil once Putin permanently leaves office, which could be seen as an opportunity for the US. We might even develop a means of completely mitigating nuclear weapons, and so on. And so Russia is going to be looking at scenarios probabilistically. You're absolutely right the chances of the US trying to directly invade are extremely low, but they are also nowhere near 0. And that's in the current state. Who knows what the future holds? And once a country is right there, in NATO, it's there 'forever'.
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Like try to take yourself back to WW1. Tensions were of course very high, but try to imagine what you'd think would happen if a Bosnian Serb (with secret state backing) assassinated an Austro-Hungarian royal. Would you expect to see Brits killing Germans over it, and tens of millions of people being killed? It just seems like a highly improbable outcome, to say the least. And in fact we could be living in a timeline where some 0.00001% probability event played out, and has completely shaped our world ever since. Such things can, and will, continue to happen - history makes this clear.
Russia promised not to invade and then invaded, then promised not to invade, then invaded, then promised not to invade, then invaded, then promised not to invade Ukraine. Did the same trick for all former parts of Russian Empire, including Poland, Baltic States, Finland, etc.
Let's take this as a given, which it isn't. Calling actions of people like e.g. Stalin, a Georgian leader of the USSR, simply "Russia" is not entirely reasonable, but whatever. It's inconsequential. We'll not only take it as a given, but also assume that Ukraine knew, without any doubt, that if they sign this agreement then Russia will come marching in and try to "really" invade them in 5 years.
The point remains is that this war was a choice. They could fight now, or not. Ukraine could have, instead, spent the next 5 years setting up an unprecedented series of defense in depth series of barriers around the border, akin to what Russia did when preparing for the Ukrainian counter-attack. This was not an obligatory war for self existence, but a choice - a choice made at the urging of the West.
Ultimately I think the complete catastrophe this war has turned into is largely due to multiple miscalculations. Russia obviously thought they were 'ambushing' Ukraine and would be easily able to impose their demands. And the US/UK, in turn, thought they were 'ambushing' Russia and would be easily able to impose their demands. There's some extreme parallels with WW1, where I think everybody thought they were going to be able to go in and just finish the job pretty cleanly. If those nations could have seen out outcome they were signing up for (win or lose), WW1 would have never happened. And I think the same is true here.
So that leads me to wonder then, what is the future that we're signing up for now 5 years or another decade down the line? Does what sound good today, instead lead to regrets tomorrow? And that consideration is what drives my views, today.
> if they sign this agreement then Russia will come marching in and try to "really" invade them in 5 years.
5 weeks. Typical Russian tactics is to invade, then call for peace, then reinforce area, perform ethnical cleansing, solve problem with logistic, then blame other side for something and invade again.
> Ukraine could have, instead, spent the next 5 years setting up an unprecedented series of defense in depth series of barriers around the border
We spent 5 years preparing our defenses, spending 5% of GPD on that, BUT huge border with RF (1974 km) and Belarus + shore (1500 km) are not easy or cheap to reinforce. Ukraine has the largest border in Europe between two countries.
> This was not an obligatory war for self existence, but a choice - a choice made at the urging of the West.
"Talk peace, make war" is not a strategy Putin invented, and to confirm this all you need is a cursory reading of the history of Hitler's foreign policy, appeasement, etc. Of course NATO membership is, at first, "all Putin wanted" - after achieving that he can defer conquest of Ukraine until a time of his choosing, time is on his side to reform his army and try again. In fact, NATO membership is an existential necessity for Ukraine, the only possible way it can have a peaceful and stable life alongside a huge irredentist/fascist state next door. Nothing is possible without meaningful security and deterrence.
All that feigned "paranoia about NATO" talk is trivially invalidated by the fact that Finland joined NATO, it was obvious that Finland would join NATO no matter the outcome of the Ukraine invasion, and it's obvious that Putin understood this. The only threat NATO poses is to Russia's ability to re-colonize its neighbours.
I don't think it's a "problem" that we don't have enough munitions to launch at other humans. It's a testament to our time that there aren't incentives for manufacturing death.
However, knowing just how hungry modern warfare is for munitions, not having the capacity already in place to vastly ramp up production seems extremely short sighted.
In the case of Russia vs NATO, the lack is also because Russia blew up a large ammunition depot inside the Czech Republic in preparation for the invasion of Ukraine.
It's a huge problem when an army with a larger amount wants to take your land, abduct your children, kill anyone who speaks and writes in your language, and tortures all your leaders to death.
All told, better to have fewer shells in general, but in particular, one must have at least as many shells as the murderous invaders that want to kill you.
And towards that end, the more that Ukraine destroys Russia's military, the less shells everyone else needs to build to defend themselves. Because if Ukraine falls, one only has to look on YouTube to find the translations of Russian TV that show all the other places their population is geared up to invade, rape, conquer, and subjugate.
I don't think enough people understand quite what Russia has in store for Ukrainians in case they win. For example, some think Bucha or the mass graves in Izyum are one offs. But those who speak Ukrainian or Russian can find dozens of interviews with Ukrainian POWs who have come back in exchanges, and after watching them it becomes quite clear the Russians have tortured and/or brutally murdered many thousands of captives, and have a clear game plan what to do with anyone who isn't completely submissive and has any shred of Ukrainian identity in them once they occupy an area.
But even aside from what happens to Ukrainians, if this goes Russia's way it will embolden many other regimes to solve their problems through fascism and colonial invasions too. Pacifism is very nice and weapons of war are absolutely an evil thing, but if you don't have them your pacifism quickly becomes appeasement and/or submission when someone who's not as nice as you decides they're gonna go ahead and institute a few changes in their neighbourhood.
Last month I had the pleasure of hosting a woman who was originally from Georgia, who moved to Ukraine after Russia's invasion of Georgia, married a Ukrainian who fought at Avostol, and who is still a PoW, as evidenced by more recently swapped prisoners that saw him alive still. There's no need to belabor the torture that these folks saw, I have only read accounts and still have nightmares.
Pacifism is a luxury of the extremely privileged. A very nice luxury, but a luxury nonetheless.
That the US should be giving bunker busters, predator drones, and other modern long range munitions that can end a war in days instead of years to our allies proactively as a deterrent instead of trying to fund a modern war with 20th century weapons like short range artillery.
Industrialized war is unfathomable to western powers and that's not a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s a “problem” either; I think it’s good the the US is incapable of producing some of the most basic 100-year-old tech that forms our war machine.
I think the interesting parts are everything around how it got there. How decades of focusing on expensive wonder tech and unchecked MIC grift has led to the US to this state where it fundamentally can't deliver materiel it needs. The contradictions of 30+ years of end-of-history neoliberal economics vs. the fact that someone needs to run a big potentially unprofitable factory and keep large excess inventory of if the US expects to respond to long-duration conflicts like this. Whether or not the US ends up like the western colonial empires of old sooner rather than later.
So from that standpoint 155mm shell production is an excellent window into larger trends
Rather than come up with a new manufacturing process for the existing munition design, why not develop a new munition (presumably with a new scalable process) that can be fired from existing weapons?
No rounds seems like a worse condition than having equal-or-poorer performing rounds.
I don’t understand? The problem isn’t that 155mm shells are inferior tech or not fit for purpose; it’s the US let it’s capacity to manufacture them wither.
To summarize the author, no one wants to invest in ammo plants because of upfront costs and economics of dealing with .gov
Author suggests applying a new manufacturing technology, 3d printing, to help alleviate a supply shortage, but then says new mfg tech probably wont work (I'm inferring that it will not work with the existing design).
I'm proposing an alternative - make a 3d printer friendly design (OK, it may not be as good as the legacy version) but you're able to build the munition in plants that can be repurposed as soon as the "peak demand" goes away.
Guns and what they fire really haven’t changed since the First World War, not fundamentally at least. There’s incremental improvements in design and materials and manufacturing process but it’s a fundamentally mature technology. This gives them relatively low profit margins which makes them unappealing for privatized defense companies with shareholders to please.
Now the classic way to charge the government more money for the same old gun is to say there’s other benefits like nebulous “performance” and “efficiency” improvements. This also has the added benefit when your deliveries “show promise” but display at best marginal improvements, you can sell carry-on contracts, sometimes for a decade or longer!
So to bring this all back around, the author is correct that it won’t work. Enterprising defense contractors may one day attempt to replace factories to roll and stamp and mass-produce bulk firepower with bespoke 3D printable, multifunctional, agile, just-in-time shell production solutions. But if they do it’ll produce a lot more shareholder value than actual product.
If you really think artillery didn't change since WW1, you have no idea what you are talking about. Im both regards, doctrine (which changed a lot during WW1 alone) and technology (range, precision, fire control...).
This was an idea I considered, but I'm not enough of a metallurgist to know how feasible it is. In a crisis, I imagine we would try lots of things, but it's easiest to start by just getting out of our own way with proven tools and processes. After all, they're co-designed with weapons systems that are well understood and highly effective, and we'd be replacing all that with entirely new systems in a conflict. It's messy.
I mean, Israel has demonstrated much the same approach (confined to a much smaller territory) nonstop over the past four months (first missiles and now 155mm artillery and tank shells), so it’s definitely not just an Eastern Europe thing.
I don't actually understand why missiles are so expensive. You can buy an off-the-shelf turbojet engine for $1,000, and cheap toy drones are equipped with sophisticated guidance electronics. I'd have thought it shouldn't be hard to build a cruise missile with INS for under $20,000.
Of you want to level a city, you either use obe big bomb, a lot of small ones (Israel doesn't have strategic bombers so) or a shit ton of ground fired shells and explosives.
Culture has nothing to with that.
Disclaimer: I consider leveling cities with the goal to displace people to be disgusting, and a borderline war crime. Regardless of the parties or reasons involved.
In the commodities business there’s an old saw that long-term contracts solve supply problems, and spot prices solve inventory problems
And this seems like a perfect example of the first part of that.
The thing I didn’t see was how much it would cost to build a facility that produces x/k rounds a month.
I find it hard to imagine these facilities are that expensive (in the context of US defense spending) so it makes me feel there was a something else going on here…
Artillery had become a niche branch in the Western doctrine, and people didn't see a point in investing in large-scale shell production. Air forces and guided missiles had replaced artillery in many of its traditional roles.
In the Soviet doctrine, artillery had a much larger role. Both Russia and Ukraine inherited that doctrine, and they went on to fight the war they were prepared for.
The Russians apparently have 600 tanks queued up right now for an advance. And while apparently they don't use the tanks as mobile guns for their infantry there is probably a good number in support of those tanks, and it seems unlikely one would fire missiles at infantry. Which is why we were dumping 50 year old stockpiles of dumb bombs in Afganistan. Which leads to the question of how one maintains air superiority for flying bombers in the face of more advanced MANPADS...
Plus, leveling the target area with dumb shells is not necessarily working, exhibit A the Western Front in WW1. And if said target area is a city, the leveling is kind of frowned upon nowadays (depending of course on who is levelling and who is being levelled).
The alternative is guided artillery shells. And those are damn expensive.
I read that the UK Storm Shadows are configured as bunker-busters, with two warheads - one for breaking into the bunker, one to explode inside it. The French Storm Shadows (can't remember what they call them) carry cluster warheads, which I suspect are more use to Ukraine during the current positional warfare.
I am skeptical the US would really need it in a war, but our allies certainly will. The US has air superiority and integrated combat arms. Ukraine shows how essential artillery is without at least air superiority, and they have just a few years of integrating tanks and other vehicles into actions with their infantry.
I really really enjoyed the piece[0], but boy, you think this is bad, wait until we're exchanging missiles with a peer military. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles[1] in the air at the same time, in a kaleidoscopic dazzle of altitudes, velocities, sensor profiles. Every combat simulation seems to turn into what you might call a "magazine fight" - i.e., who runs out of bullets first.
We'll probably burn through the RAM/SM inventory in weeks . . but not before leaving a whole bunch of ships with empty magazines, because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs. We're just now getting a taste of this problem in the Gulf of Aden, and that's in an AoR surrounded by safe/friendly ports, versus a bunch of Iranian second stringers.
This is the core reason for the "Replicator" initiative in DoD, but, Pentagon being the Pentagon, their "replicator" systems are on course for being too expensive by orders of magnitude. They need to get focused on cheap commodity DEWS, and do it yesterday; the fact that a teenage youtuber[2] hacked up a kilowatt-class DEWS capable of burning 2-3mm steel at 200m says to me - emphatically - that there is ZERO reason to not have these things ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE. Having air defense missiles and light strike also being built on commodity would also be dandy, but harder, and also not as critical as getting mass defensive DEWS CIWS up.
[0] DoD procurement and business process is . . it's something else. I'm not sure I can communicate it to outsiders. Fighting inertia inside of defense organizations has basically turned into my career focus, although in a tiny little bubble of technical content production, and at the cost of chopping a zero off my salary. I think, at the end of the day, I'm just tired of twenty million dollar PDF files - that are also late, and wrong.
[1] I'm including armed UAS in this. They're basically missiles built on dual use chassis - the more fight you fit into commodity UAS, you get exponential returns. China's close link with their dual use industry gives them a depressing advantage here, but that might be a double edge sword in a EW-heavy AoR.
One of the less intuitive results found in RAND wargaming is that no ship needs more than 4 anti-ship missiles when fighting against a foe that's roughly matched in quality. Either you have sufficient advantage that by the time you've spent 4 everything on the other side is sunk, or the enemy has sufficient advantage that you don't get to spend 4 before being sunk. The Navy took a look at these results, and doubled it to set the allocation of missiles per ship to 8.
Similarly, ships carry more defensive missiles than they can expect to be able to fire. No defensive system anyone uses has a 100% effectiveness; Burkes have sufficient stock of ESSM and Standard that you can expect there to be leakage and the ship to be taken out before they run out.
But all this assumes a fairly mirrored matchup, with both sides using weapons of similar quality. If one side uses a lot of cheap, attritable munitions, it might not work out the same.
> My solace is that in a real conflict, all of that red tape would be put to the side and people can get about building things.
That's just not going to happen. A real conflict would involve nukes, and the war would be quickly over.
I doubt that something close to Vietnam can happen again either. (And even for a 2nd Vietnam, I doubt that any significant artillery would be used when, as you point out, missiles are an option.)
I might be a hopeless optimist, but I don't think a USN/USAF/USMC vs PLAAF in SCS/Taiwan situation would escalate to nukes. At least, I don't think it's likely. Definitely a nonzero chance, maybe a coin toss, but Taiwan isn't core territory for either Power.
Invasion, now . . well, there's the magic power that comes with having 'em. No one invades you, ever.
Also,outside factors could change the math here, like a megavolcano under the west antarctic ice sheet or something that raises ocean levels by meters. That redefines "back against the wall". If your country loses all access to fresh water, well, you might as well be under occupation or destroyed, so you might use your nukes aggressively. Just don't accidentally drop them in the water you're trying to get.
But that only means that the US would give up on Taiwan before the fight would get any serious (from USA's point of view).
I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go for Putin-like mistakes.)
China is steadily funding Fab R&D. They already managed to get from zero to somewhat modern ram and NAND (YMTC). YMTC is bad https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro..., but _very_ cheap so eventually will improve and start taking over more and more volume. In couple of years China will get to the point erasing UMC/TSMC does give them advantage.
I don't know how to parse this comment. Why would the US give up on Taiwan "before it gets serious". If the US is involved in a shooting conflict in the Taiwanese strait, they either win or lose it conventionally but if it happens at all then nukes aren't getting involved unless mainland territorial invasions go on the table - and they're not going to.
The reality is the US would very much like to avoid having to negotiate that situation: far easier to arm Taiwan to the teeth with AA and anti-shipping missiles, and let them take care of it.
EDIT: It's also worth noting nukes aren't the only deterrent forces. It's one thing to "know" that the US Navy isn't going to get involved...it's quite another to conduct an invasion of an ally while well inside the missile engagement range of the US Navy on the assumption that's actually true.
Are those missiles getting to Taiwan any time soon though? It seems current politics on the island is still uber polite oh we are China, no need for drastic measures, etc. or is that changing fast?
The US is "loosing" because it barely dipped a toe in the conflict. Motivate the US to go all in and it's a different story altogether. But I agree on the reluctance of Western Europe and the US to give support, the Ukraine conflict could have been over by now with proper support.
Much of Europe is giving support; but decades of US military support has resulted in our stockpiles being rather depleted, and supplies to Ukraine have so far been from stockpiles, not new manufacture.
Russia presents a threat to Europe that it doesn't present to the USA. Europe needs to tool-up. I say this as a former pacifist.
Loosing? How exactly so? NATO is expanding, Russia isn't gaining anything currently in Ukraine, in fact Russia is becoming dependent on China, India and North Korea.
And so far, NATO has to actively participate in the fighting in Ukraine. Since this would be a major escalation, one that is extremely hard to sell to NATO country citizens, that will obviously not happen anytime soon.
How? How US can be loosing a war it doesn't fight in? It's the same as saying that North Korea is loosing against Ukraine because they deliver ammunition to Russia. A fallacy.
And even if you'd want to use that metric. How exactly loosing zero US personnel at the cost of getting a real-life assessment of NATO combined mobile warfare against the Soviet artillery superiority doctrine is a lose situation for US?
Which assessment of NATO mobile warfare we can talk about when there's literally no NATO's biggest asset - aviation and no biggest enabler or mobile warfare - battlefield isolation?
But I'd say that this makes it even the more valuable lesson. Battlefield characteristics is still very close and Russians (now) are acting like they would act against the NATO-trained forces.
And, of course, it's liberal on my part to put Ukrainian Army in the basket of NATO forces as that is only true for maybe a year (after the first rotations ended).
That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.
>Battlefield characteristics is still very close and Russians (now) are acting like they would act against the NATO-trained forces.
I don't think they are even close to that - their meat assaults Avdiivka type is not something that would ever happen in conflict with NATO involvement, because the frontline would never stabilize in a way that would enable russia to employ those tactics.
NATO-trained is very wide statement, some African armies and Afghanistan ones were NATO trained and it went nowhere.
>That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.
Sure. There's no EW piece that russia had in 2022 and wasn't captured intact in the first few months :)
Even the attempt to make them again might provoke China to react. Eventually with an invasion, after slagging the facilities with cruise missiles or air bombardment. They will be committed to overwhelm any air defense to accomplish that.
What to do with them anyways? Taiwan would need plentiful supply of them and a reliable delivery mechanism. Japan surrendered because the US had total air superiority and bluffed about their supply of nukes. North Korea has long-range missiles and literally tens of thousands of artillery pieces aimed at Seoul.
If Taiwan sees China assembling an invasion force, why not build a nuke then, China already signaled that it's going to attack anyway.
A nuke is easy to hide, we are not talking about global second strike capability here, just delivering a couple of them to close coastal cities, even by smuggling them in some civilian transport. Can China be 100% sure that not one slipped through? Taiwan could do a proof detonation on non-city Chinese soil if things get tense.
It's open secret ROCA is thoroughly infiltrated by PRC intelligence, and Chinese missiles can hit anywhere in TW in 7 minutes. If anything, if PRC wants to unilaterally attack TW, you would expect PRC to manufacture casus belli that TW is pursuing nuclear program to preemptively strike TW before they even start assembling an invasion force. Most of the world would be left shrugging because nuclear proliferation of non recognized UN state is going to be jus ad bellum reason for PRC to start whacking TW indiscriminantly. The entire PRC invasion can be seen months away is stupid for this reason, they're not going to telegraph an amphib build up before destroying TWs military first. And as seen in exercises in response to Pelosi, they can pull that operation together in days, the hardware movement itself indistinguishable from exercise mobilization.
And how would they deliver? By the time they get a device (untested), every entrance to underground facilities would have been destroyed with persistent aerial coverage for follow on strikes to make sure they stay destroyed. If TW was credibly trying to nuclearize, both US/PRC would be coordinating to try stop it because PRC would directly attribute TW nuclear use to US negligence.
Realistically if PRC seriously think they haven't eliminated TW nuke production, they'd throw their entire airlift capabilites and drop 50-100k troops a day into the grind and if that doesn't work, nuke TW first and send in NBC teams to an uncontested husk of an island to clean up. If US+co materially impacts that effort and PRC ends up eating a nuke, then we're in global MAD territory.
Also consider nukes has hasn't deterred PRC from security interests less important than TW, they fought US (really all of UN in Korea) /USSR/India, threatened UK over HK, supplied Vietcon against French. If risking nuclear war is what it takes, then they'll (if history is teacher) risk nuclear war.
This is about PRC willingness to eat nukes for security interests independant of TW willingness to survive.
Shoot down with what, preempt air campaign would have destroyed most of TW anti air. Fantasy is thinking TW has any chance to deny the air game. Planner for porcupine model US advocates doesn't assume TW has any chance to deny PRC air superiority, only hope they sink enough amphib to deny mass invasion, and barring that, make the ground/urban fighting long enough until US comes to assist.
If scenario is actually about denying TW nuke run, then US won't be assisting. Only other actor with intelligence on ROCA comparble to PRC is probably US. Given stakes, things will get stupid real fast. PLA airlift will be dropping in zones secured by persistent CAS and a buffer soaked in chemical warfare on a one way mission to destroy TW nuclear infra in the mountains if they have to. Maybe TW resists fine alone, and nukes a few mainland targets (assuming no duds, and no intercepts). Then what, PRC nukes living resistance off surface of island and then waltz in bunny suits to breech production sites.
TW trying to nuclearize is automatic invasion redline for a reason. It's not like PRC has an exact contingency plan, only they'll throw everything and the kitchen sink to make sure it doesn't happen.
E: Dang is going to badger me for engaging this thread too long. We'll just have to agree to disagree on whether PRC will be deterred by TW nukes.
Taiwan's better option would be to build submarines with Nukes, and position them all over the Pacific.
Capturing the mainland won't help you at all in that case, and there's no way you would get them all. It would be a MAD situation, and that's all TW needs.
>Taiwan could do a proof detonation on non-city Chinese soil if things get tense.
Gaodeng is a ROC island just five miles off the mainland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaodeng_Island An atmospheric nuclear test there would be the wildest provocation imaginable that would not actually be on PRC soil.
This doesn’t make sense. The point of nukes is to say you have them so no one touches you. You become a prickly porcupine.
The only country that doesn’t follow this rule is Israel, but they just present it differently (“MAYBE I’m a prickly porcupine. Touch me and find out.”)
is not a credible deterrence. Snuggling a nuke will work maybe once, and that is not nearly enough to hit all assets Taiwan should be worried about. If the nukes work, it will strengthen China's resolve to dismantle any threat it perceives Taiwan to be. Even at the price of shooting every ship leaving the island for the mainland.
Even very plausible low thousands of artillery pieces can put out enough dakka to slag anything looking even remotely like an air defense radar or missile launchers.
Air defense radars, missile launchers and even Seoul besides northern outskirts aren't generally in a range of tube artillery, which for the 152mm soviet types utilized by NK is around 20km.
And you're not putting your guns literally at the frontline - you need them more back so they don't get counterbatteried (or just bombed, which would be more likely in case of US involvement) instantly.
That isn't the point. Under the assumption that Japan surrendered because of the nukes, Japan was made to believe that the US could and would have conducted more nuclear strikes. The US would have required many months more for the next strike though.
People thought the same about Putin, or junta in Argentina. Problem is that they couldn't understand their motivation. Some people, don't care about GDP, well being of their populace or popularity, not to mention media. They don't have to worry about reelections, or retirement.
Just maintaining their power.
And that gives them time to pursue things politicians from liberal democracies consider things of history.
Mainland China wants Taiwan back since WW2, chip fabs are a bonus, maybe that is.
The big problem of a Chinese invasion so is: the Taiwan straight. They have to get the invasion force across, that meens a lot of big, slow, fat transport vessels. Those are easily sunk, meaning not enough boots on the ground. Which leaves pounding Taiwan with missiles.
Soft blackade, that is pointless. And a hard one is basically an escalation to war (see: Cuban Missile Crisis).
A country in, maybe, panic mode is not conquered. And if said island is strategically important enough, yes, people will go to war over it. And if it isn't, there is no real point beyond symbolism to take it in the first place.
I don't really understand why people get so caught up on the fabs in Taiwan, as if their presence is the actual goal or the important thing.
An invasion of Taiwan would probably effectively destroy globalisation, China exports would be sanctioned, China imports of energy and raw materials would be heavily disrupted (China's supply of fossil fuels is very vulnerable). It would be the most disruptive event to the world order since WW2.
The chip fabs are a line item among thousands on that bill.
I guess that I am much more confident about globalization quickly finding alternative ways (consider how sanctions on Russia have trouble working, especially for oil).
People have a big tendency to overestimate how hard is to get over some temporary problema and it's long term importance, when those problems actually tend to commoditize over medium term. Now there are chips, before it was manufacturing and shipping, even before there was oil.
> I doubt that something close to Vietnam can happen again either. (And even for a 2nd Vietnam, I doubt that any significant artillery would be used when, as you point out, missiles are an option.)
Artillery would be huge, missiles are great but they're expensive and you run out quickly. Afghanistan/Iraq were already being compared to Vietnam, and while you don't see it on the news so much, most of the kills in those conflicts were with artillery.
People thought that war in Europe will be impossible. They were wrong. And now we are paying the price. Turns out large conventional war is very much a thing. Right now we have a big one in Europe, handful are brewing around the world.
Artillery is still, and for many reasons will be, a king. Shells are order of magnitude cheaper than rockets. They are smaller. Easier to manufacture. Missiles are nice if you want to destroy specific targets. Things that move or are so far away that artillery can't reach them.
Europe didn't see war since WW2, regional, nasty conflicts in the Balkans and Eastern Europe not withstanding. Conventional, near-peer warfare, involving modern armies, wasn't a thing since Korea.
Things change, organizations and people adapt. Not foreseeing these changes is not a failure.
Believing that throwing predictions at the wall, and only picking the ones that stick in hindsight, is a viable strategy is just plane wrong so.
> People thought that war in Europe will be impossible. They were wrong. And now we are paying the price. Turns out large conventional war is very much a thing.
Likely this was the biggest surprise to emerge. Even Georgia and Armenia did not foreshadow the scale and slogmatch reality of Ukraine eh. The need for stockpiles is real.
> Artillery is still, and for many reasons will be, a king. Shells are order of magnitude cheaper than rockets. They are smaller. Easier to manufacture.
>> > My solace is that in a real conflict, all of that red tape would be put to the side and people can get about building things.
> That's just not going to happen.
Check out Urgent Operational Requirements [0] in Op HERRICK (UK name for ops in Afghanistan). These led to multiple entirely new platforms, systems and capabilities being developed and deployed in weeks and months, e.g. physical and electronic countermeasures for the rapidly evolving IED threat. The downside is increased logistics / supply-chain burden because you have additional ad-hoc support contracts and staff, in and out of theatre.
I don't see how anti-missile technology isn't basically perfect by now - if a CIWS radar can track literally the (relatively) tiny bullets it's firing then it's trivial to track a missile (and you can always fall back to optical/IR); if it's trivial to track a missile then just scale the system up and build a megawatt chirped-pulse 'blaster' (outputting through a phased array so you can track and retarget instantaneously), that causes EMF above and beyond anything that's shieldable, you can only make a missile so heavy after all.
I'm relatively sure the search/track radar doesn't go with individual bullets, but yeah, you have a high PK (percentage of kill) when defending against one, two missiles. But that's not how they'll be employed - your problem is attack mass and engagement time. You'll have maybe a swarm of cheap drones, a few dozen Mig-21s revamped for drone control, a few incoming guided ballistic missiles at mach 7, fifty or so subsonic sea skimmers, maybe a dozen supersonic sea skimmers, plus maybe some airplanes somewhere out there waiting for a hole to shoot your AWACS or tankers.
If your defenses are just amazing, and you take out one every three seconds, you're still going to run out of time. You're on the right track with "firm kill" DEWS though. Gotta be a little careful with those, because the engagement range for DEWS is always going to be short, due to attenuation, mist/fog/spray, dust, and good old line of sight. Also, it's quite surprising how little it takes to shield electronics from even nuke-class EMP. But the short engagement range means you have even less time.
Towards the end of WW2 the US Navy got pretty good at anti-aircraft gunnery. The Japanese responded by sending their "guided missiles" (kamikazes) to attack in column formation. By the time the target ship shot down the attacking aircraft at the head of the column the others shielded behind it would be that much closer. Often the last one would get through to score a hit.
The weapons are faster and more lethal now, but similar tactics would probably still work to an extent. The Navy has run some computer simulations but they've never done an all-up fleet exercise of a realistic saturation attack that requires emptying the magazines. So, no one really knows for sure how well the defenses would hold up. There would probably be some nasty surprises.
At this point, I think the burden of proof is on anybody who thinks a serious saturation attack on a carrier group (hundreds of missiles and/or decoys per wave, multiplied by multiple waves) from a peer adversary wouldn't work.
If a conflict with Russia or China breaks out, I think the first thing that happens is aircraft carriers are going to immediately become obsoleted by antiship missiles as quickly as battleships were obsoleted by air attacks in WWII. Probably even more quickly.
I sure hope I'm wrong. And even more than that I hope we never find out.
I agree with the general threat, but an aircraft carrier can still project force at a distance, so a foe must strike from a great distance. It's doable but expensive. So not sure about how quickly carriers will be obsolete or ever really. Only a really advanced and large foe can threaten them.
Or a single sub. Happened more than once suring NATO maneuvers,a single sub getting into a firing position completey undetected, armed with torpedoes able to sink the carrier.
No weapon is beyond reach in war, or indestructible. And still, they have their use cases.
but an aircraft carrier can still project force at a distance
In terms of the levels of force being exchanged in a full-scale war, it's not that much force and it's not that much distance, relative to what a peer adversary like China can bring to a fight in their own backyard.
It's ~130 ship-launched guided missiles and ~75 fighter jets. They will not be operating at a stand-off distance relative to the reach of cruise and ballistic missiles launched from Chinese homeland. And the planes are not going to be able to take off and land if the carrier is executing evasive maneuvers because of missile attack.
If you were China, how would you tackle that? Is there any reason you wouldn't just send several waves of several hundred missiles their way?
Carrier strike groups are still useful. 130 missiles and 75 jets is plenty to dissaude most countries on earth. Just not the biggest ones, if they have committed to waging a full-scale war against you.
China would definitely not emerge unscathed. The CSG would be augmented with a lot of longer range stuff such as US fighters/bombers/missiles/subs launched from elsewhere. But I mean, I think the CSG gets effectively deleted in the first few hours of war. Hope I'm wrong.
On paper US anti missile intercepts has been performing well in UKR and Red Sea, but consider the actual numbers. In UKR, 6 Kinzhals, alleged moving at shit tier mach ~3 speed end up damaging a patriot. In Red Sea, shit tier Houthi/Iranian cruise (subsonic) / ballistics, launched in even less coordinated salvos, realistically singles since description of multi missile attacks report these events unfold over matter of hours. Majority intercepted, but few still slip through to hit ships protected by flight IIA/III upgraded DDGs. IMO questionable how well a stacked CSG performs against high end AShMs (Teixeira leak allege US clocked PRC DF27 tests at mach 8+).
That's before considering replenishment fleet, of which US has only 11 fast supply class that can keep up with carrier groups, would also be targetted, leaving non nuclear CSG escorts single deployment assets with days of endurance in high tempo operations. And then what does the carrier do? Operate undefended? Said supply ships would almost be hard not to sink since they have to spend hours restocking in port, in theatre.
I think there's a good reason Navy isn't being recapitalized properly, and it's more than redtape. IMO people behind the scenes also sees the writing on the wall for large surface ships.
IMO when seriously consider the math, the firepower:acquisition cost ratio doesn't make much sense, especially against PRC. SSGN with ~150 tomahawks, subsonic, easier to intercept, will likely never be reloadable at sea, and may not be able to operate permissively around PRC in due time. PRC ASW is improving rapidly, and they're deploying subsea ASW infra within 1st island chain. Not much info on projected upgrade of hypersonics to subsurface flee, but if extrapolate from zumwalt hypersonic projections current 80 cells for TLAM (tomahawks) whittles down to 12 CGHBs (common hypersonic glide bodies), that's ~20 more lethal CGHBs on subs and combined with multi week roundtrip to reload and get back into theatre, it's essentially nothing. For reference it's estimated taking out PRC SCS island bases will require 400-500 tomahawks, and that may only temporarily disable runways. Even if US can take out entire PLANavy, PRC can sustain massive war effort from mainland aviation/rocketry, the latter could feasibly hit CONUS. I think that's whats ultimately driving procurement decisions, trying to deliver the most survivable firepower which a lot of these larger projects are subpar at (again relative to PRC) if war ever escalates to homeland strikes. Hence Navy Force Design focusing on expanding with smaller unmanned ships / distributed lethality model (which will include lots of unmanned subsurface). In the meantime, large, expensive, eggs in a basket platforms that are difficult to crew, impossible to replace during war, that's been in pipeline for a long time and are being pursued to institutional inertia, because brass doesn't want to kill their baby.
VS 100+ B21s with less labour and per unit cost that can deliver around the clock, probably difficult to shoot down unless they're parked in hardened hanger or their midair tanking (if needed) gets degraded, but losing one is a couple pilots and 1/10th the cost.
Which is why, if we decide we need to take out China, we'll sail over to the coast off Yemen, and stop any oil headed their way. They'll collapse within 6 months. (Or so sayeth Peter Zeihan)
When I see statements like this, I try to think "what would they do in response that would change the calculus?"
E.g. cutting off oil...not like that has ever led to unexpected outcomes (perl harbor).
Countries generally react to mitigate your actions. What are some of the potential reactions you could see if the PRC perceived that as an existential threat?
That was fine strategy 10 years ago when he wrote Accidental Superpower / pre PLA modernization. This is the part where we circle back to developing PRC conventional hypersonics and potential to overwhelm US missile defense, and PRC increasingly able to strike CONUS at scale from mainland - PRC's version of prompt (conventional) global strike which they've been telegraphing development for years. A threat vector US planners are slowly acknowledging. Which means PRC can proportionally deny US energy by hitting critical infra like oil/LNG refineries, huge stationary targets with simple kill chain. Fortress America + shale autarky doesn't mean anything if you can't protect energy security (and by connection of fossil industrial inputs, food security), which is PRC's reverse UNO for the the entire blockading PRC oil strategy, except when applied to US, straight to extraction chain because can't blockade US from US. So next best proportional (even if escalatory thing) is just to make US as vunerable as PRC. All the resources in US sovereign soil is no good if they can't be extracted and made useful to sustain US hegemony. Saudi equipped US hardware learned that lesson when Houthis hit their refineries. Sure Us isn't incompetent like Saudi, but PRC isn't Houthis either, unless you think they actually replaced rocket fuel with water, and used said fuel for hotpot.
Zeihan of skips over the politics in geoPOLITICS when convenient, i.e. US has most waterways, but PRC actually engineered significantly more and uses more internal waterways. US has deep coasts, but PRC dredged her to make way for half of worlds top 10 ports, the other half doesn't contain US. PRC has bad demographics, except PRC has the ideal demographics for geopolitical competition in the timelines relevant to us - set to produce and coordinate more high skilled talent in next 30 years (the cohorts that actually build national power) than US is projected increase population from all sources total, AND declining population of non productive peoples (old, unskilled, unproductive) aka less import dependencies. Declining cohort also has high home ownership and savings rate because frankly they don't expect big welfare net like west. Next 30 years, PRC swapping 50 million STEM talent (already born) with tier1 city earning potential for 100m farmers, migrant workers etc (old -> uneducated die first) that earn 1/10 that. IMO PRC demographic trend (if scrutinized beyond naive pyramid reading) is more pros than cons, especially considering PRC geographic/resource constraint - they don't need 3x more people than the US where only 1x can marginally compete with US and 2x are excess mouths to feed. Better off long term with 2x US population that PRC soil can sustain, where 1.5x can out compete US.
Eitherway the point is frequently politics in geopolitics matter more.
Fortress America has always been part geographic fortress and part artificial, technologic fortress. The entire reason US built/maintains the largest high tech expeditionary military is basically to stay on the front doors of any potential adversaries so they can't get close to CONUS. Let's not forget Continental Navy couldn't hold against out British blockade during revolutionary war without French Navy entering picture. CONUS was vunerable with 1800s tech, it's the technology (politics) part that made fortress america and it's the technology (military) that ensure two oceans are moats. High end missiles circumvents that, hence US unlikely to take out PRC without PRC taking out US unless US engages PRC directly. That's without considering PRC can drag US to fight near PRC home court by hitting JP/SKR/PH to trigger security obligation. Those are island with much worse self sufficiency that'll collapse in 2 months that US is treaty bound to defend. The TLDR is entire Malacca delima / SLOC blockade strategy operates on logic from 10 years ago when ...
PRC increasingly able to strike CONUS at scale
from mainland - PRC's version of prompt (conventional)
global strike which they've been telegraphing development
for years.
So let's say China sends some conventional missiles to CONUS.
How does this not trigger MAD?
The US has no way of knowing if the incoming missiles are conventional or nukes. Would the US wait for the missiles to land to figure out if they're nukes or not? Would the US not simply launch a retaliatory (presumably nuclear) counter-strike while China's initial missiles are en route?
I honestly don't understand what value striking the CONUS would have for China. Seems like it would just instantly trigger MAD.
Realistically is US/PRC nuclear response is going to shift to launch on confirmation instead of warning against adversaries with credible capabilities to strike each others homeland. PRC certainly isn't going to be dissuaded from hitting CONUS if her homeland is struck or substantially degraded (via blockade) - PRC leadership would have domestic pressure to retaliate in way that satisfies the people, who are going to want US citizenry to go through the same food/energy shortage they are. And up until now the only thing preventing US adversaries from doing so is simply technical incapability which gives rise to this (somewaht hubris based) narrative that CONUS strikes leads to MAD. Meanwhile US is pursuing prompt global strike as well, because that's what it takes to win prolonged conventional wars - disrupt your adversaries homefront. Flip MAD fear around. Let's say US starts hitting PRC targets - how does PRC know they're not nukes and trigger MAD - almost every capable US platforms are nuclear capable.
For the actual process, I imagine it's going to be very communicated/coordinated affair to pace escalation. PRC: you stopped 40% of our energy imports, we're going to degrade 40% of your domestic energy infra if you don't stop in name of proportionality. First maybe via cyber, then via kinetic strikes, with warning ahead on list of facilities that are potential targets so they can evacuated ahead of time. Start with offshore rigs, then escalate to territorial targets. Launching X missiles at Y time at Z targets. US can either lift blockade, withdraw from PRC civil war, escalate to total war, or trigger MAD and both go back to stone age. Ideally this game theory gets played before hand, and there's no blockade or US intervention in first place - ability to hit CONUS is as much a deterrence function. But TLDR is PRC isn't going to sit back and take hits if they can dish hits as well. Meanwhile US expeditionary/military game theory has been based on fighting adversaries who can't really hit back. Which is why PRC is pouring so much resources into platforms that can.
Russia's Black Sea Fleet has been largely confined to port in Novorossiysk by Ukrainian "naval drones", having previously been used to bombard Ukrainian cities with cruise missiles. So what are these naval drones? I assumed they were fancy, expensive sea-skimming cruise missiles; nope. Apparently they're modified jet-skis with cheap FPV navigation equipment.
So I don't think you're wrong, and I think we've already found out.
A submarine with a nuclear torpedo could take out an entire carrier group.
Nuclear submarines are apparently still hard to detect underwater; but once someone figures out how to detect them, they'll be obsolete.
Anti submarine warfare is already a huge discipline. Submarines are still not obsolete, nor is it trivial for them to sink an entire carrier group. IIRC in exercises a submarine usually gets one shot before it has to run from the ASW attacks.
For any technological advance, the counter technology adapts, so it's not very common for something to actually become obsolete.
Apparently they're modified jet-skis with cheap FPV navigation equipment.
Yeah. I read about that recent sinking, momentarily cheered for Ukraine, and then thought about the larger implications and was like... man the USN is screwed, huh?
- A peer/neer-peer adversary can presumably throw a very large number of simultaneous drones at a USN vessel. I don't know how feasible it is rustle up 10 or 100 reliable simultaneous human suicide bombers.
- The jet ski drones can surely be physically smaller than a speedboat that needs to hold a human
- The jet skis can trade some of that size back and armor themselves against CIWS etc in ways that would be less practical for a suicide boat
I looked into these a little more and the main thing I took away from it was, given their size and payload these aren't really "jet skis," even though the Ukrainians are sometimes naming them such. They are definitely formidable.
I don't think I'd be so worried about them surviving hits from the CIWS. On the open ocean I'd be worried about the possibility of encountering so many drones that the CIWS runs out of ammunition. In a port, I'd be worried about the practicality of using the CIWS at all, but I think the Navy can adapt.
The main thing is that the Navy were sort of deemphasizing stuff like the Phalanx on their recent ship designs, and this is the second time the past couple of weeks that I've read something suggesting they'll probably need to reverse that trend.
In addition to running out of ammo at some point, at some point I would imagine the CIWS would need a cooldown period?
I still also think the front of a "jetski" drone could probably be hardened to withstand a certain amount of 20×102mm fire but, I am guessing and don't know how to determine how feasible that might be.
I also don't entirely understand how directed energy stuff can work against things that aren't just going on a ballistic trajectory like hypersonics. You need to nail that target for an extended period of time. And it's safe to say that if these things ever taken off then the countless sorts of passable protection (multiple layers of thick highly reflective surfaces for instance) would end up being applied to important weapons, meaning you need to hit them for even longer. And these sort of defenses could be done for quite cheap and a very low weight.
And then like you said, the engagement range is also going to be quite short - meaning all of this becomes just that exponentially more difficult.
> You need to nail that target for an extended period of time.
I think the idea of DEW is that you're not trying to literally melt the thing out of the sky, you're trying to penetrate it electrically and scramble something. To that end a very sharp pulse (chirped pulse) is the better approach as then you're more likely to cause damage once you exceed the capacity of (for example) the input isolators on the radar antenna to divert excess energy away from the very sensitive amplifier. Or, to put it a simpler way, you're trying to make sparks jump across gaps.
I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece so much. Honestly, I expected to get 20 views on the whole thing, as I felt like a crazy person researching this area for like 6 months. That collapsed in the belief I probably can't do much to help, at which point I just wanted to get it out there for anyone else in the wilderness.
I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, which I interpret as Congress' lack of urgency. In the nightmare situation of a hot war in the Pacific, that attitude would change on a dime, and I still think Operation Warp Speed is the primary example of how we would respond to direct threats. Similar to COVID, I would much rather deter such a situation with bold action now than wait until we're certain we'll need them, which will cost many more lives.
And I've heard dubious things on Replicator too, but thankfully, smart defense private money is going to truly disruptive dual-use tech that is autonomous, resilient, and ultimately attritable. That combination is the best answer for democratic countries that care about soldiers' lives vs. authoritarians sending human waves.
I'm sort of charmed the author directly replied. Thank you for your work. I'm not an arty or missile SME, but, speaking as humbly as possible, I am one in the realm[0] of technical publications, IETMs[1], specs and such.
[0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling.
[1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.
It should probably be restated that instead of the conflict in Ukraine catching our production capacity off guard, that rather it was our production posture along with denuclearization and disarmament of Ukraine that set the stage for the conflict.
I’m not a “team America world police” advocate, much more the opposite. Even as stated in the article, most production is more interested in a deterrent. Hate ‘em or hate ‘em, nukes are a deterrent to open war. Reference our posture toward retaliating against Iran-backed groups this week.
Russia didn’t like a nuclear neighbor, it said. So the US brokered a nuclear disarmament of Ukraine with the interests of reducing the tension (sic) with Russia, and on the assurance of support from the US should they need it.
Ukraine only housed Soviet nuclear missiles. They (Ukraine) would never ever had access to launch codes. That it is stated in Budapest memorandum along with the rest of the Soviet army leaving does not in any way make Ukraine a former nuclear power.
We had Soviet nukes stationed in Czechia too. Does that make us a former nuclear power? I thought not...
What do you think, how many hours does it take to remove and jury-rig launch signal electronics for a motivated nation state at the cutting edge of weapons technology? If the Soviet troops had agreed to leave the bombs in situ, Ukraine would have had some sort of nuclear capability within the week. (And even if the Russians had sabotaged it, Iran and NorK prove that obtaining or refining the fissile material is far harder than explosives lensing and ballistic missile delivery.)
"Ukraine would have had some sort of nuclear capability within the week."
For how long?
Nukes need maintenance. To maintain them, you will need to rebuild the entire supply chain on Ukrainian territory. Do you even have the necessary know-how? What percentage of GDP are you willing to spend on it?
Until today, Ukraine has lower GDP than Czechia. In the 1990s, it was even worse. With their economy destroyed by decades of Soviet rule, they were happy to survive somehow.
Tangentially, it is well possible that Russian nukes are actually under-maintained, for the very same reason: it is expensive to keep them in working order, and Russian economy is not very strong. Perhaps most of them would not explode. But we'd better not find out.
Much of the supply chain was already on Ukrainian territory; in USSR, significant parts of the missile&turbine manufacturing capacity were located in Ukrainian SSR, and the same applies for nuclear industry.
'Launch signal' isn't the issue, you'd need to work past the PAL used for the weapon to be any significant threat, and soviet PALs were relatively complex based on multiple path lengths and timing deviations.
You could just rip the PAL out and build a new detonation timing system, but then you'd be re-doing a large part of the trial-and-error phase of the manhatten project.
It's not something that could happen in hours or weeks. Realistically more like months or years.
Ukraine had various facilities and personnel used for manufacturing and maintaining the missiles. Not having the launch codes means they can't launch them at a moments notice, it wouldn't prevent them from taking the missiles to a workshop and changing the launch codes.
Ukraine wasn’t real a nuclear power though. They some of Soviet arsenal and some facilities required to maintain but it would have required significant investment to make it actually usable longterm. That was totally unfeasible during the economic collapse of the early 90s
To add, the keys, targeting coordinates, orders, and control of the weapons was with the Russians in the Kremlin. Kazakhstan and Turkey also housed nuclear weapons. No one argues they were a nuclear power stripped of their defense.
Warhead were built in closed cities, but research was done in institutes, mostly by Jews and Ukrainians. Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology was known as "Laboratory №1" for nuclear physics. Many nuclear physicists were trained there.
Unfortunately that is an illustration of what I mean. Iraq and Ukraine participated in nuclear disarmament and monitoring. Iran has continued to pursue nuclear development and gets very diplomatic kid-gloves from even US military retaliation on Iran-backed groups in the area.
The US was very clear in not attacking Iranians, though Iranian support was the vehicle by which US troops were attacked. Iran got a measured response for its allies because Iran 'carries a big stick'
How would the US not having nukes helped Irak? Conventional invasion of the US is impossible unless the the attacker has total sea superiority or a strong forward base in the Americas. The US can and will maintain its dominance there with conventional means.
Air or missile strikes against US territory are very difficult to pull off. Only China or Russia would have any chance to overwhelm US missile defenses. Anything small-scale would be answered by conventional strikes and a ground invasion. No nukes are warranted unless entire cities get slagged or nukes or biological or chemical weapons are used.
Even if ukraine had kept their nuclear weapons and processed them into something useable, would that really have deterred russia? And who knows, I wouldn't be surprised if they have nukes again, or are working on a bomb. They certainly have the know-how and access to fissile material. Not that that would help much...
Ukraine was a nuclear power in the same way Japan, Germany, or Turkey are now. No control over the actual nukes, just being protected by them as deterrence, but also thereby becoming a target in case of a hot conflict. Oh, and also the capability to develop the capability on their own, since they have lots of nuclear reactors and nuclear scientists.
The US government-owned facilities are not the only US source of 155mm rounds.
NAMMO [1] is a major manufacturer, and they have a facility in Mesa, AZ.
Here's their marketing video for 155mm rounds.[2] Nammo's management complains that they
are being offered 3-4 year contracts, and they need 10-15 year contracts to build new factories.
Peacetime demand for large-caliber ammo is very low, so when there's not a war on, factories
are mothballed.
BAE and Rheinmetall also make 155mm rounds, and many of those are going to Ukraine.
Israel is unhappy that the US stores of ammo in Israel are being sent to Ukraine, and
is ordering domestic manufacture from Elbit.
The article doesn't make a clear distinction between the foundry and machining steps in the process. The first part involves casting and forging molten metal, and the second is ordinary machining.
They don't have to be carried out in the same plant. Either or both can be outsourced separately.
Filling, where explosives go into shells, is done in dedicated plants with lots of separation between buildings, buried storage bunkers, and many other safety precautions. That's the dangerous part but not the bottleneck.
Here's a modern 155mm shell forging plant in Germany.[3]
Alright, I'll bite, because I bet there's somebody out there that knows: why isn't it allowed? What rule by the ATF says that 150mm isn't an arm allowed by the second amendment?
While the American Dream of howitzer ownership may be alive and well among the 0.01%, it's getting harder and harder for the rest of us to maintain our $4,000/round artillery habits.
A modest proposal: the US Army should offer obsolete and surplus artillery in exchange for handguns. Given the price of ammunition, correlation between poverty and gun violence, the logistics involved in large-scale artillery theft, and the comparative complexity of non-assisted suicide by howitzer, this policy seems like a sure-fire way to drastically reduce the number of lethal gun crimes committed in the US.
> (...) it's getting harder and harder for the rest of us to maintain our $4,000/round artillery habits.
The $4,000/round figure sparked my curiosity, and after checking it looks like the actual unit price is below $2,000.
There are some beefy pricetags being floated around, buy they are calculated indirectly by dividing the total cost of a ammo supply contract by the number of artillery rounds ordered. From the article, I wouldn't be surprised if those contracts also covered investments required to ramp up production, which is also covered by this article.
Cursory search suggests prices ranging from $400 to $1,800,000 per round for what I assume are wildly different types of 155mm ammunition, though I'm willing to bet the $1,800,000 figure is the total cost of a canceled production program that planned to deliver a large number of rounds, amortized across the small number of rounds actually delivered before the program was canceled.
At $1,800,000/round, firing hollow rounds loosely packed with $100 bills and a note promising another volley as soon as the target agrees to stand down would probably be a more cost-effective option.
Large caliber here would mean artillery size, maybe mortar or grenade launcher.
None of that is commonly consumed by civilians. There are routes to get there, but it seemed difficult to me (I looked once upon a time).
The largest caliber even somewhat commonly used by civilians is .50 BMG (12.7x99mm NATO). I have seen 20mm rifles and ammo for sale (once), but it is a HUGE pain in the ass to get them and probably rightfully so.
Anything over .50 is automatically considered a destructive device by the ATF unless a specific sporting exemption is given to it (that's generally only for big game rifles). Getting one of those requires a fistful of certifications last I checked; I think you effectively have to be an arms dealer to get one (or at least pretending enough to be certified as one).
None of this is legal advice, talk to the ATF and/or a lawyer before trying to buy anything too exotic.
anything larger than 7.62mm (.30, like 30-06 or 308, or maybe 12ga slugs) is comparatively uncommon -- even in the US. clearly this is disappointing, as the founding fathers intended for us to own 12 pounder cannons. "tally ho lads!", etc.
and when it comes to mortars, arty, etc, they don't fire that many rounds in training and exercises. even during the Iraqi-led pushbacks against ISIS, where US Marine artillery fired a ton of rounds in support, there was little over-all impact on supply. before that, counter insurgency work generally doesn't use much artillery -- though lord knows they tried to until around mid-to-late 2004.
by comparison, estimates are as high as 20k-50k shells per day in Ukraine.
Just waking up to find this on HN. The points you make are completely correct. I tried to keep the focus on just US production, as I was specifically interested if there was anything I could do to help. Splitting up the process was something I considered, but didn't have the bandwidth to put into knowing when/how you split it. In a crunch, I'm still not sure if it would be best to split it or to just do what's usually best and co-locate all the machines (or some combination of both). Similarly, I couldn't get good answers about how many shifts the existing facility runs. I expect it's 2, and in a war, it's easier to staff the 3rd shift (or automate it in a new facility).
The contract length part I covered, and I'm convinced that's the main issue.
Typo in original and submission: 155mm, not 155M (which could be interpreted as 155 million something--dollars?) as in the submission, nor 155m (metres) as in the original.
The author appeared surprised that 3d printing would not help. Is this a common misconception? I always figured it was common knowledge that 3d printing is a great prototyping tool. tolerable in some low-rate processes, and terrible in a high volume process.
Author here. In short, no, I wasn't surprised, I just wanted to cover it. I worked in 3D printing, albeit on the polymer side. On the metal side, there's been a lot of progress and 3D printed thruster nozzle assemblies are one of the key advancements SpaceX has made. It would never be a high volume process, but I was curious if you could get the kind of steel you needed for "surge" demand when the price matters less than total throughput.
Noah Smith (Noahpinion) had a decent post up a few weeks ago about this aspect of war - war production. He titled it "People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1]. It was quite a sobering read. The thought that we might ever need this level of commitment in the future is frightening. War is always full of nasty surprises.
That piece is not well thought out in my opinion. The "magical shield" that's been protecting people in developed nations is simple - nukes. Countries with nukes don't get invaded. Countries without nukes, do. It doesn't matter if you're a democracy (which Iran was until they dared question our control over their oil, and so naturally had to be have... monarchy... brought to them), or a little dictatorship with an affinity for rocket building. The primary point of conventional weaponry (from the perspective of a nuclear power) is to fuel proxy wars and enable the invasion of non-nuclear nations.
Of course he's right that if there is a WW3, the United States will lose. As will every other single major power. And how many artillery shells you have won't matter a lick in this. The goal in WW3 will not be to destroy the other nation's military, but to destroy the other nation, such that it can never recover to pose a threat to you again. Every single juicy high-density economic zone in every single country will end up getting nuked to oblivion. New York City, Moscow, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris - these places will, in all probability, simply no longer exist.
Striving to win an unwinnable war is not only painfully myopic, but also just seems like a great way for humanity to kill itself off.
The US is a fairly aggressive power that gets involved in a lot of overseas wars. If you backcast the same logic to WWII; the US could have had a nuclear shield then and been perfectly safe from invasion, but what it actually wanted was the ability to get involved in Europe and the Pacific.
Having an impenetrable defence is nice, but the US hasn't fought a defensive war in ... I don't know how long. Maybe a century for all I care.
But if you send us back with nukes, you'd have to do so for everybody else as well. And in such a scenario WW2 would never have happened, and WW1 damn sure wouldn't have happened. A Bosnian Serb assassinates an Astro-Hungarian royal and Brits end up killing Germans over it? The whole world needed a nice ice cold shower there, and the mere existence of nukes is that perpetual cold shower.
The US are perfectly shielded from invasion by two oceans so. Canada is an ally, as is Mexico (less close, but still). And neither would be able to launch an invasion with any chance of success anyway (in reality, movies are different).
Problem is that everybody know that nuclear war is a no win option. So they try to avoid it.
You can game that. Simply give your enemy a way out. Don't press them too hard, just take something, not so much that they would feel threatened. Instead of invading them directly, take over their trading partners. Set up rebellions, insurrections. It's still your bullets in their bodies and their country taking damage. But you have plausible deniability, and nobody is going to break out nukes about it.
Soviet union did that very well. Despite taking over bulk of central and eastern Europe, kicking western interest out of China, and thus most of eastern Asia, ending colonial rule in most of Africa, they never "crossed the line".
Iran is doing the same thing now. Russia too. And others will follow. It's a good strategy.
There was a RUSI [1] paper near the start of the war in Ukraine that pointed out that there wasn't nearly enough ordnance production in NATO countries. The one area that was in good shape was 5.56mm production, helped by the civilian "assault rifle" culture in the US using it.
I am also against the Ukraine war and believe a peaceful settlement is possible. NATO (the US) is using Ukraine to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, though having to fight two wars at once is causing them to rethink their position.
ICJ did rule against Russia, and it makes sense since they invaded, but the roots of the conflict go back to attacks on Donetsk like you say since 2014 and various aggressive moves by NATO since 1991 in violation of the gentleman's agreement.
Basically, the US should not be supplying arms to these conflicts.
Don't you know. Russians never mastered the art of written treaties. The Soviets were confused and thought that pinky swear (after all of the deception of cold war) is guarantee of future power sharing :D
Maybe not 1/2 years ago, but look at the hundreds of videos of Ukrainian citizens being forcedly taken from the streets and thrown into the frontlines only to die shortly after. There were many voluntaries when the war started, now UA forced recruitment attempts are met with civilians filming and trying to stop them.
> various aggressive moves by NATO since 1991 in violation of the gentleman's agreement.
gentleman's agreement, which was never acknowledge by the US and was with the previous regime, unlike the written agreement _Russia_ signed recognizing Ukraine's independence and sovereignty, with their 1994 borders. And NATO wouldn't have expanded East if the countries in Eastern Europe didn't feel a need to join a defensive alliance.
The roots of the conflict go back to attacks on Donetsk and moves by NATO since 1991
All I can tell you is -- just because intellectual-sounding people like Chomsky, Mearsheimer et al; not to mention Putin himself -- whom you are apparently cribbing from, knowingly or otherwise -- say things like this, doesn't make it so. If you actually walk back and look at the event chronology you'll find there's no substantial basis for either of these narratives.
NATO (the US) is using Ukraine to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,
The implication you are making here is that the Ukrainians at large have no real agency in the situation, and basically have no idea why they're actually fighting.
> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza
The front in Gaza is not Israel's only wartime front, not in the current conflict and not during past conflicts: Currently, Israel needs this ammunition to defend itself from Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon that have engaged in heavy indiscriminate rocket launching against Israeli civilian populations in the Northern Israel. At least 65,000 Israeli civilians have been forced to evacuate from their homes into temporary dorms until this Hezbollah threat is removed. Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist org with ties to Lebanon parliament, must disengage their troops, as they are breaking the UN Resolution 1701 of demilitarization of the Southern Lebanon area.
Rocket launching from South Lebanon has started concurrently with Hamas attacks against Israel that started on October 7th in the Southern Israel.
> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza
IDF usually doesn't use this ammunition against target threats in the Gaza strip. The most common explosives used are the Israeli air-force's targeted airstrikes, which are very precise and are performed to limit casualties of non-engaged civilians in the conflict.
> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza in service of genocide, which the International Court of Justice has determined to be likely to be occurring
There is no genocide taking place in Gaza. There is war, yes, and civilians die too, yes, some even plausibly innocent, but the attacks are not with intent to target civilians. IDF commanders don't issue commands that break humanitarian limits and IDF soldiers adhere to their commanders strictly (outlier cases are dealt with promptly by military court).
FYI the ICJ's court of justice has NOT determined that a genocide is likely to be occurring, in fact it only issued a provisional statement that humanitarian care for the population of the Gaza Strip should continue, which Israel has already been doing for many months now, and will continue to provide, with enabling the entry of 100-200 or more trucks full of food every day, gasoline, and other humanitarian products etc.
The attacks from Lebanon are in defense of Gaza and are part of Lebanon's legal obligation to prevent genocide. Aiding Israeli forces that are conducting illegal acts is complicity.
> are performed to limit casualties of non-engaged civilians in the conflict.
Over 20k Gazans have died, few of them resistance members because they are in tunnels. The majority of dead are women and children. Israel is attacking the families of the resistance because they cannot reach them. This is collective punishment. Almost every hospital has been evacuated or destroyed. Universities destroyed. They are wiping out all humanitarian services and cultural artifacts.
> FYI the ICJ's court of justice has NOT determined that a genocide is likely to be occurring,
Provisional measures are granted when it is determined there is a likelihood that genocide is occurring. The case will drag on for years to determine on the merits whether genocide has in fact occurred. Many scholars have opined that this case is unique because of the sheer number of open statements of intent by every level of Israeli society.
Sorry, but this is simply naive. Hezbollah and Iran are doing what they're doing out of long-standing ulterior geopolitical motives. Not because they could give a flying toss about the Palestinians.
I wonder if those geopolitical motives has something to do with Israeli expansionism and settler-colonialism, which founded the Israeli state with the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in 1948? Surrounding states have been highly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Israel invaded Lebanon multiple times.
Look, we all know the history. Please don't be so arrogant.
The main point is, if you were to break down the reasons why the theocratic regime in Iran really opposes Israel at every turn - as opposed to what the narratives that they're happy to let you believe, such as the above, say about these motives - you probably wouldn't be blithely repeating those narratives.
In fact it only issued a provisional statement that humanitarian care for the population of the Gaza Strip should continue,
This is very clearly not what the ruling says. And it is intellectually evasive to characterize as such, given that information about the ruling is widely and immediately available.
And I don't mean "evasive" in terms of spin, polish or oversimplifying. But rather, of an overt attempt to obfuscate the nature of the ruling.
There's no way that you, yourself, can plausibly believe the above statement you just made.
And more focused on the energetics stuff combines with just technology and research.
Well I did some digging and the ATF is regulated the industry to hell and back. And while I can recognise the importance of safety, I think that it also creates more additional barriers to entry. Especially considering this would a been a weekend hobby if it would have been possible.
TLDR: a lot of people talk about the logistics or the funds to start doing something like artillery production or silicon chip fabrication....and yes I agree but I think the regulation of everything has created so many barriers....you can't experiment in the backyard like you could in the 90's.
Were the 90's safe? No. But we also didn't know the real risks back then when it came to certain chemicals. Also, the growing population makes it more and more hard to have land where you can safely do things....in the north east coast its hard to find and long gun ranges, some states basically banned all the good fireworks, and all this regulation means having just more and more money to figure out how to navigate this issue....which means its not a hobby but a job.
I see plenty of cool things on YouTube from chemistry to engineering and part of me is not sure if the feds are just ignoring what these people do....because it dosnt seem legal, or if they are just lucky that they live somewhere with loosed regulations.
None of this explains HOW is it that the Russians are able to produce artillery shells at 7 times the rate of the entire Western world, while being sanctioned? If they can do it, why can't we?
Putin doesn't have to convince the manufacturers that this will be a long term profitable endeavor for their business. It doesn't matter to Putin if a company "overinvests" because the company is not a separate entity.
If the US wants that kind of control we have the Defense Production Act to force businesses to build up capacity.
It's like how during the pandemic, pretty much nobody invested in increased toilet paper or mask production in the US, because "if I invest and the pandemic goes away, I will have "wasted" my investment"
Basically its just another failure of capitalism as theorized. Turns out, it's very uncommon for someone to decide to build brand new capacity in an existing market without extreme incentives because it's too easy for them to be burned. If we want businesses to ramp up production, we need to either convince them it will be profitable, by signing expensive, long term contracts that can't be torpedoed by a future administration getting bitchy about the debt, or force them through law.
I don't think this explains it. As the original article said, The DOD offers manufacturers 15-year contracts to guarantee profitability and that still isn't enough to ramp up capacity fast enough, or even meet demand on a multi-year timeline. I think the problem may lie in a serious deficit of manufacturing capability / expertise in the US.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadWas it though? Within the last 30 years you've got Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Russia/Georgia, and the Russia/Chechnya civil stuff.
I guess no super lengthy wars in 20 years, sure.
https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
All the modern semiconductor industry, including the discovery of transistors and of solar cells, has its origin in the research done during WWII, mostly at Bell Laboratories, to make improved detectors for the military radars, which lead to the development of the technologies needed to make pure germanium and pure silicon and of semiconductor diodes made with them.
Without DoD money, an electronic computer of the complexity of ENIAC would have been built only many years later. Nevertheless, both ENIAC and the British cryptographic electronic machines (and the Atanasoff computer) have been enabled by the invention of various kinds of electronic digital counters during the decade that has preceded WWII (mostly in UK), all of which had been invented for the use in experiments for the study by physicists of radioactive substances and of cosmic radiation, so there are also decisive civilian contributions (like also the discovery of nuclear fission as a precondition for the nuclear bombs and reactors).
All of us tech people used to know a fascist when we smelled one, now some of us lick their boots for a paycheck.
If you were the son of a fascist, would you not still tell people the truth about your dad even if you told him to shove it long ago?
If people were complaining about the influence of fascism on, say, the footwear industry, I would not tell people the truth that my father invented those plastic things on the ends of shoelaces (that are called aglets and whose true purpose is sinister) because that would come off as an apology for fascism.
That DARPA invented one small part of what would become the internet half a century later isn't germaine to criticisms of the influence of the government, intelligence or military on that internet. Silicon Valley has always been in the pocket of the military industrial complex, but most of the tech industry, to say nothing of tech and hacker culture, isn't from there and doesn't need to worry about biting the hand that feeds it.
Russia has consistently angled for Ukraine to be a neutral border between two blocs to facilitate trade — and that clearly would have been better for Ukraine than a senseless slaughter which destroyed a generation, by maiming or killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions.
But that wouldn’t have satisfied warhawks like Victoria Nuland and the geriatric Cold Warriors (TM) who are intent on their senile, unhinged drive to destroy Russia as a nation.
Would any of your theoretical compromises have satisfied the Cold Warriors in the Kremlin? These people literally believe that NATO is coming to invade Moscow. How do you negotiate with someone who lives in a place so disconnected from reality?
That line is merely one of dozens of bullshirt excuses they trot out to claim victimhood and "justify" their relentless aggression.
I mean, it's going to absolutely wreck Russia, but again: the Russian government for basically the last 1,000 years sees the citizen as a resource to be expended for it's greatness.
And regardless, does any of that give Russia the right to invade another country?
That clearly would have been better for Ukraine
As if you know better than the Ukrainians themselves as to what's best for them.
Ukraine negotiated nonstop with Russia from 2014 (when Russia first seized some of their territory) until literally 1 week before the invasion in 2022. It was 8 years of nonstop negotiations, brokered by France & Germany. I'm always amazed more people don't know about this. How did negotiating work out for Ukraine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-von-der-schulenburg-hajo-...
For example, from the article:
Bennett has refuted all this.According to him:
The entire narrative seen in your article originates from an interview with Bennett that Russian propaganda machine picked up, painting a completely different picture as if western powers had forced Ukraine into war. They equated "less pressure to negotiate" with "forcing into war".That is not supported by facts. Western powers stalled military aid to Ukraine every way they could in the hope that forcing Ukraine into negotiations with Russia would sweep the whole thing under the rug and business with Russians could continue as usual, as it did after Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. If western powers wanted war, then where were the jets, tanks and artillery pieces that Ukraine was asking for? Why are they tiptoeing around Russia and providing too little, too late out of escalation fears?
Members of Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations have recently said that they negotiated just to satisfy western demands. Ukrainian delegation had no confidence that Russia would follow any agreements.
Furthermore, experts like Kozyrev, the former minister of foreign affairs of Russia (now living in exile), have pointed out that the negotiations deserve no attention at all, because the people negotiating on Russian side were total nobodies with no authority, and that the entire exercise looked like a stalling tactic.
It is standard psychopathic tactics — DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse victim and Offender.
"Ukraine left us no choice to invade!" — Utter bullshit start to finish
"NATO forced us to invade!" — Mor of the same. NATO is ZERO threat to Russia's integrity, and Putin knows it. when Finland joined NATO, Russia PULLED troops from away from Finnish border, the exact opposite of what they'd do if NATO was actually a threat, or even a perceived threat.
The list is endless (because they'll always come up with more, just throw it up there and see what sticks).
Stop falling for it.
Yet another example of the general rule that the fact of one having held at one point a high-status position does not, ipso facto, validate what one has to say about any particular topic.
As to the content -- some interesting history, albeit with a lot cherry-picking and selective omission; and apparently not a few simple misstatements or reversals of fact. The sibling commenters have done a better job of dissecting its content.
But beyond their words -- it's important to look at who these guys are, and crucially -- who they associate with, and who's buying them lunch.
As to Harald Kujat, from Wikipedia:
Yakunin is (or was at one time anyway) the President of the DoC, and he's definitely very close to Putin. As for the criticisms of the German Press -- there's an article titled Talkshows verkaufen Propagandisten als „Experten“ you can easily which seems to get right to the point.As for mister Hajo Funke (translated):
Wagenknecht (former opposition leader in the Bundestag) and Schwarzer (an activist) have both held some notably weird, authoritarian views over the years (while seeming to mostly promote good wholesome left-wing views). Wagenknecht's were considered so extreme that it led to a row within her own party (The Left), some of whom said publicly that she ought to join the far-right AfD. In any case, she's generally considered to be radioactive in Germany politics right now - such that one doesn't go around signing or otherwise publicly endorsing something she says - unless one wishes to make a very conspicuous statement.That tells you what you need to know about these guys (2 out 3 anyway).
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine diligently documented the use of lethal force and resulting casualties in the low-intensity conflict before the full-scale invasion in 2022 and did not witness anything like what you describe. The number of civilian casualties was in low tens per year, mostly due to landmines and unexploded ordnance.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/24/ukraine-unguided-rockets...
So in terms of it "violating the Minsk agreements" - no.
> In an interview published in Germany's Zeit magazine on Wednesday, former German chancellor Angela Merkel said that the Minsk agreements had been an attempt to "give Ukraine time" to build up its defences.
What's wrong with that? Obviously, you don't think anyone has a right to defend themselves against aggression from Russia.
Did Russia show "good faith" by backing the conflict in Donbas, lying about it and deploying their "little green men"?
The decapitation strikes might have worked if Ukraine didn't have advance warning from very detailed intelligence, and if the Russian military was as competent as everyone assumed.
That the West has been unable to provide sufficient support to Ukraine to stand against this aggression is a mark of shame that will take a long time to wash away.
It's hard to know if the person saying that about Putin is a plant for propaganda or if he really was being honest. He could be unknowing be spreading misinformation to benefit Putin and I could be doing the same quoting what the man said.
Also, at this point it is hilariously obvious that A) Russia will never take all of Ukraine like they wanted (huh, how would that have been for a "nuetral border between the two) and B) whatever portion they don't take will be far far more closely aligned than the west than would have been possible in the absense of their invasion.
Even if you buy it as a reasonable desire and reasonble response to not getting their way, it has very, very obviously not gotten them what they wanted.
In what world is annexing territory you don't even control on the basis of a referendum you canceled before rescheduling due to losses on the battlefield working towards an amicable settlement?
Since February 2022, I haven't seen much evidence that Russia has made any serious attempts to achieve an amicable settlement, much less consistently worked towards those goals.
Since then, Russia has repeatedly offered to negotiate a settlement, but Ukraine refuses to negotiate.
You can believe that’s a good idea, but indisputably it’s Ukraine who won’t negotiate.
Last I head Putin was only prepared to negotiate based on the understanding that all occupied territories would stay under Russian control.
Ukraine should have handled this better and also signaling being open for negotiations. On the condition of returning all territories that are within their internationally recognized borders.
Ukraine has passed a law saying they absolutely refuse to negotiate a peace settlement with Putin.
Again, you can believe that’s righteous… but all I see is a world in which Ukraine has permanently lost territory due to failing to implement peace accords a decade ago while killing or displacing ~10% of their population (4M in 45M).
I think that’s a tragedy — and for what? …a worse outcome?
This is nothing else than your typical post colonial/imperial war where Ukraine fights for its independence while Russia tries to reclaim some its former imperial territories.
Just watch what Russian politicians say, what is being written in the news, what all those political talkshows say. They are not even trying to hide it. Its mostly here in the west that you have those discussions.
There’s nothing about this which is colonial/imperial: Ukraine was already separate for decades, peacefully, until outside nations supported violent overthrow of a democratically elected government which followed its rise to power with oppression of an ethnic group.
If we’re discussing what politicians say, then I see:
- Russia is making points about how the regions they annexed were oppressed after they made efforts to reach peace settlements
- US is frothing at the mouth about harming Russia
- Ukraine is saying crazy things, like laying claims to part of Russia.
The trouble with this narrative is that it's fictional and not supported by facts. It is no different from Hitler's delusions about global Jewish conspiracy against the Germans. One can subscribe to these narratives only if they accept known falsehoods as the truth and reject many facts as lies.
Even rhetorically, arguments like the oppression of ethnic Russians in Ukraine are preposterous given how Russia has become one of the most oppressive places on the planet. Such allegations sound like Hitler justifying the bombing of London with the way the English treated the Scots or the Irish - while turning a blind eye to the Holocaust going on at home.
Do you have any links to this? I am not aware of Ukraine laying claim to any part of Russia, asides from those parts that the international community still regards as Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally annexed (namely, Crimea, Donbass, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson).
Which is completely backasswards of course. But because a well-spoken, powerful man on TV (who also aligns with his geopolitical / moral views), in this case Putin, is saying those things -- a lot of folks have no problem believing it. Ditto with the supposed "coup" in 2014 (which is somewhat more nuanced, but not all that nuanced or hard to figure out).
And not only believing this nonsensse - but sucking it up as if it were air.
BTW strictly speaking, we don't know if the grandparent actually believes in these particular bullet points -- they aren't saying this is what they believe, only "this is what politicians are saying." But it's basically in tune with other misconceptions that they (the grandparent) has been putting forth in this thread.
I really can not see any way such an action of a massively corrupt leader selling out his people and acting against their stated interest would not result in massive protests. During which Yanu chose to flee his country.
Also there have been two elections since then so who cares.
The annexation should signal to the world that Russia is not interested in any serious peace settlements. Indeed, it should be a strong signal that Russia is uninterested in acknowledging that its military is not capable of achieving a state that makes concessionless peace deals possible. I will fault Ukraine for many things, but being unwilling to negotiate with someone who will not moderate their goals in line with their ability to achieve them is not one of them.
> I will fault Ukraine for many things, but being unwilling to negotiate with someone who will not moderate their goals in line with their ability to achieve them is not one of them.
This is something Ukraine should consider, after the massive failure of their Sprint/Summer Offensive of 2023.
Ukraine needs to moderate their aims in light of their military failures — before the fanaticism leads to their destruction.
Taking into account the daily terror raids conducted with artillery and missiles on towns and villages of annexed parts of Ukraine like Kherson, I don't think you'll find many suckers who'll fall for that excuse.
If Russian government feels strongly about protecting people, particularly ethnic Russians, they could start by ordering the police not to beat and molest peaceful protesters on the Red Square anymore.
Okay, since you brought this up, I have to know now. How does annexation of that territory protect the inhabitants there, compared to a world where Russia merely occupies the territory?
For bonus points, please explain why that offsets the effect it has of lengthening the war (since it makes the Russian and Ukrainian positions more, not less, irreconcilable).
Which law are you referring to?
In the same way that the guy who tackles you in a dark alleyway and puts a knife to your neck would prefer that you submit to his demands "amicably".
No treaty with Putin has ever been honored. He is attempting to rebuild the Russian Empire and "peace" agreements are merely used to get the opponents to stand down while Russia prepares aggression.
Putin and his govt have said that they have rights to the Baltics, Poland, Germany and more. They have said that Ukraine should not, indeed DOES NOT exist. The very existence of the idea of a free, and especially prosperous Ukraine is seen by them as an existential threat. And they may be right, as it certainly makes Russians wonder how those awful Ukrainians can live so well, having toilets and all.
Read Winter Is Coming by Garry Kasparov. He's a former world chess champion, former candidate for President of Russia, and deeply involved in global democracy. He knows more than you or I ever will.
No one intends to destroy Russia as a nation. It is the autocracies of Russia, Iran, NK, China, etc. who see that international law and order threaten their criminal way of life, and are working hard to destroy democracy. If you are so big on Russia, go live there and report back after a year (if you aren't conscripted and killed in one of their 'meat assaults' on Ukraine.
The artillery production mentioned here reminds me of how scales changed from the beginning to the end of the war. At the outbreak, IIRC Russia produced ~35K artillery shells per month and was using ~25K per day. By 1917, there was a battle where a combined total of ONE MILLION artillery shells were fired (between the two sides) in a period of roughly 4 hours.
Every war seems to have a defining technology that's new and makes it unlike previous wars. This is rarely clear to military leadership before the war starts so tends to mean the calculations are off. For example, the US Civil War was the first war fought with mass-produced, long-range, fast-loading and accurate rifles, which led to >600K deaths. By comparison, the US lost 400k servicemen in WW2.
In WWI, that defining technology was really artillery. To a lesser extent it was machine guns too. Air power became a factor late in the war but the concepts of aerial bombardment, strategic bombardment and air superiority wouldn't really come into their own until WW2. The real solution to artillery and fixed positions ultimately became the tank But WWi ended before this really took off. Like air power, it would become a huge factor in WW2.
Why this is important is because the war in Ukraine is in many ways similar to WWI. Air power isn't really a factor but the most defining factors are artillery, trenches, fortifications and terrain, most notably the Dnipro River.
Russia has built 3 lines of impressive fortifications that mirror German positions in WWI. Russia's strategy is essentially to dig in, use the river as a barrier and wait for the West to get bored or lose patience with supplying Ukraine such that Ukraine sues for peace and Russia gains territory east of the river, creating a land bridge to Crimea.
But in a WWI style war, artillery is incredibly important. It can be used to cover an advance into a fortified position (eg a creeping barrage [2]). These were tactics that were developed and learned through WWI.
Oh and if you want to see how devastating this can be look no further than Verdun, the so-called "Red Zone" (Zone Rouge) [3].
[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_(artillery)#Creeping_b...
[3]: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/zone-rouge.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-produce-million...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000008299178/u...
Freedom is paid for in blood. People forget that after a few generations of peace, and then we have to pay again because we grew complacent.
>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
It's sometimes called "The Second Thirty Years' War", although I feel that labelling is misleading, as is, potentially, the core thesis. Careful reading of the diplomatic history illustrates that WW2, despite our popular notions, was not entirely inevitable, but, at least so far as Poland was concerned, was one more in a very long list of NSDAP f#ckups. 30 Year War Part II is a workable paradigm when considering the large scale causes of the 20th century conflicts. It's deeply, bitterly ironic that Europe was done in by the same intellectual framework that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. Turns out, once you start throwing subhuman labels around, it's just a matter of time before the label lands on your neighbors.
People consisted other nations and ethnicities subhuman as long as they existed. Europe was, AFAIK, the first place on Earth that (1) considered subjugated people equal before the law (if they converted), (2) banned slavery and (3) imposed slavery ban on other nations.
The Mongols and the ancient Persians didn't even make anyone convert.
> banned slavery
If you don't count all the colonies...
> imposed slavery ban on other nations
It is a very admirable thing to do, but who else could do it? They had the most powerful militaries in that era.
Colonies are exactly what I'm talking about.
> It is a very admirable thing to do, but who else could do it? They had the most powerful militaries in that era.
Nobody else even wanted to.
Tell me more about how slavery was outlawed in Haiti - especially during the French Revolution with its "liberté, égalité, fraternité". Tell me about Belgian Congo. Tell me about the close relative of slavery, indentured servitude, in the British Empire.
We see movies where artillery is always just raining down from the sky. It seemed so random.
It blows my mind we had complex patterns and essenstially formations and defensive walls and boxes to protect a position and just wow.
That must have been hell on the receiving end.
Ukraine’s increasing ability to hit deep targets suggests to me this strategy of Russia’s will not work. The offensive pace is too slow for the immense economic costs.
Putin (following Dugin) has expressed the goal of building a Russian empire stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon. I suppose that's just sabre-rattling; but Leningrad is very exposed, at the end of a long land corridor bordered on either side by NATO members. I'm convinced he hopes to dominate all the land between Russia and the Baltic.
As is the Eastern front during WW2, same thing, the sheer numbers are mind boggling.
Weapons manufacture has an unfortunate overlap with the systems skills computer people possess. It’s easy to get sucked in. He says it best in the first paragraph. “I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of one”
Never build a weapon you wouldn’t want to be on the other end of. The last part of creation is relinquishing control. The person operating it might not be as careful pointing it as you would.
Yes, we'd all prefer peace and leaving each other alone, but if some other nation comes to kill your countrymen and replace your democracy with a puppet, suddenly just relying on pacifist ideals doesn't work well anymore.
Most of the time, these commenters don't want to engage with reality as it currently exists. If you ask them what exactly you're supposed to do without a war machine if some other guy invades, they just have the silliest deflections and hand waving. Ultimately, they just want to say "war bad" from atop their high horse, as if other people didn't believe that war was, in fact, bad.
Ukraine is an obvious example. Ukraine wasn't doing anything to Russia other than choosing to gradually move culturally towards the West, which is their right. Before the big invasion in 2022, there were repeated attempts by Ukraine or by Western countries to try and forestall Russia's invasion by opening up negotiations and talking things out, and Putin didn't give a shit.
Diplomacy didn't work there. What would've worked? Having a stronger military, or even better, being allied with other strong militaries. Putin doesn't invade the Baltics for a reason.
Ukraine is fighting a bloody attrition land war in Russia. They are currently losing and will likely fair worse as time goes on.
Mind you Ukraine could have prevented all of this if they had decided not to break the Minsk agreement which would have ended the conflict in Donbas. Instead the US and EU used it to buy for time so they could further arm Ukraine for war with Russia.
This conflict has been an unmitigated disaster for the people of Ukraine. Entire generation of youth killed or crippled. Millions fled the country and may never return.
Whatever comes after the if, unless it's "surrender sovereignty unconditionally", it's wrong. Putin's goal was, and is now, to incorporate Ukraine into his empire as a client state, similar to Belarus. And eventually to take even that decorative residual bit of sovereignty. Of course at this point, taking over Ukraine will mean mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people and an erasure of Ukrainian identity and language.
Just want you to be clear about what outcome you're defending.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/public_talks/why-is-ukraine-the-...
Andrei Kozyrev, the minister of foreign affairs of the Russian Federation (1990-1996), had this to say about the purpose of the club and people like Mearsheimer:
I recommend reading it in full: https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/russias-ex-foreign-ministe...His longer account of Russia-NATO relations is also quite a bit different from how Russian lapdogs try to depict the history in 2024: https://transatlanticrelations.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...
But Ukraine's und USA's way to deal with the revanchists (full confrontation) was reckless and stupid.
Locations and dates, please.
https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/f/b/469734.pdf
"Out of the total 946 civilian casualties confirmed by the Mission, shelling and fire from small arms and light weapons (SALW) accounted for 625 casualties (77 killed and 548 injured). More than 85 per cent of these casualties occurred in Donetsk region."
It is a political question of how to deal with Russia's claims to power in Ukraine or the Caucasus. Georgia was smarter in my opinion. Ukrainian nationalists and their neoconservative supporters from the USA were less wise.
There should be a political discussion.
https://www.rnd.de/politik/krieg-in-der-ukraine-botschafter-...
The situations are not really comparable, given that Russia's designs on Ukraine are very different. Categorically different in fact.
Perhaps in the years 2014-2022 they were somewhat comparable (when Russia was more or less trying to keep Ukraine in an extended "punishment box"). But definitely not since.
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"They actually hoped until nearly the last moment that they could press us into signing this agreement, adopting neutrality. That was their biggest priority. They were willing to end the war if we took on neutrality, like Finland once did, and gave assurances that we wouldn’t join NATO. That was essentially the main point. Everything else was cosmetic and political embellishments about ‘denazification,’ the Russian-speaking population, blah blah blah"
---
He goes on to elaborate that the main reason they didn't agree to such is because (1) they didn't trust Russia and (2) Boris Johnson told them they should "just fight." And maybe Russia would have "really" invaded with the sort of logic you put forth in your post later on, but that was clearly not their goal in this invasion. Not joining NATO is hardly some Hitler level appeasement as our propaganda spins it.
Russia was paranoid about NATO, which has gradually been working to surround it with nuclear weapons, having a base setup in Ukraine which has a geographically clear path straight into Russia's heartland. And I don't find such paranoia particularly unreasonable. Countries that strongly turn against America tend to find death and destruction at their doorstep soon enough.
And none of this is to justify Russia's invasion, nor condemn Ukraine's decision to fight. Rather I emphasize that we live in a world that's a million shades of gray, even if propaganda from one side or the other invariably frame it as the clearest thing ever. And enough people will believe such unquestionably, ensuring war will be with us til our final days.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davyd_Arakhamia
[1] - https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/11/28/we-had-to-buy-time
Because they live in fear, they cannot afford being trustworthy. And because they are not trustworthy, Russia's neighbors seek protection from other powers. Which in turn fuels the fears of Russian leadership.
Russia could break the cycle by stopping to be afraid. They could find role models in Europe. Germany, France, and the UK are all former major powers that started behaving like normal countries. With varying degrees of success.
But if you accept this then it becomes clear that trust is impossible. You have a power that wants to overthrow you surrounding you with military bases and pointing countless nuclear weapons at you. That, by the way, is also not necessary to maintain mutually assured destruction type deterrence. But it is necessary if you want to consider a rapid first-strike complete annihilation type attack, hitting them before they can return fire.
Of course, vice versa, imagine the US disarmed. They'd be invaded by like 80% of the world within a fortnight. Unfortunately I think the cycle is unbreakable. I don't think there's anybody that actually likes war, but it's been with us since the advent of civilization, and I expect it to remain with us til the end of civilization.
And again, the US cant even be bothered to kill off Russia by supplying some insignificant amount of aid and you think that there would be boots on the ground?
The US is protected from 95% of the world by being conveniently located behind two oceans and having two friendly neighbours.
In truth, absolutely nobody is interested in invading Russia, perhaps China notwithstanding as it is also authoritarian and carries some bad blood from Russia annexing its territory back in the day. Western countries have no such interest and likely would outright reject any suggestions of returning the lands Soviet Union stole within Europe.
Russia would still of course not survive in its current form without military, but that's because it's a colonial empire that would quickly break apart if given a chance.
We in the western world tend to see such conflicts like a game/puzzle where there is always a winning door that leads to happiness for all participants. Since there are only two choices and the current situation is bad, Ukraine must have made the wrong choice and we would be living happily ever after, if they only had agreed to a deal.
Needless to say that Putin loves to play on this mindset by saying all the things all the time. There will always be many groups in the west that will pick out quotes to bolster their favorite narrative and ignore the rest.
Sorry, I find it unlikely that even you believe this line of reasoning.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It is delusional to think that Russia is remotely at risk for a Iraq/Libya/Yugoslavia type situation.
Russia might not like its neighbors joining NATO, but maybe they wouldn't feel the need if being Russia's neighbor didn't suck so much?
In any case, Russia's actions in the last decade culminating with February 2022 have essentially convinced all post-1989 NATO inductees that it was the right move.
There's also simply misreading other leaders' intentions. If the US does not believe that Putin would respond to a conventional attack with nuclear weapons, then that also dramatically increases the chances of such an attack. And in fact one could argue that we're currently trying to probe how Russia would respond to slowly escalating types of provocations.
There's also the future. As we enter into a multipolar world it's possible the dollar could collapse, which could create unimaginable chaos. Russia could have some degree of turmoil once Putin permanently leaves office, which could be seen as an opportunity for the US. We might even develop a means of completely mitigating nuclear weapons, and so on. And so Russia is going to be looking at scenarios probabilistically. You're absolutely right the chances of the US trying to directly invade are extremely low, but they are also nowhere near 0. And that's in the current state. Who knows what the future holds? And once a country is right there, in NATO, it's there 'forever'.
----
Like try to take yourself back to WW1. Tensions were of course very high, but try to imagine what you'd think would happen if a Bosnian Serb (with secret state backing) assassinated an Austro-Hungarian royal. Would you expect to see Brits killing Germans over it, and tens of millions of people being killed? It just seems like a highly improbable outcome, to say the least. And in fact we could be living in a timeline where some 0.00001% probability event played out, and has completely shaped our world ever since. Such things can, and will, continue to happen - history makes this clear.
The point remains is that this war was a choice. They could fight now, or not. Ukraine could have, instead, spent the next 5 years setting up an unprecedented series of defense in depth series of barriers around the border, akin to what Russia did when preparing for the Ukrainian counter-attack. This was not an obligatory war for self existence, but a choice - a choice made at the urging of the West.
Ultimately I think the complete catastrophe this war has turned into is largely due to multiple miscalculations. Russia obviously thought they were 'ambushing' Ukraine and would be easily able to impose their demands. And the US/UK, in turn, thought they were 'ambushing' Russia and would be easily able to impose their demands. There's some extreme parallels with WW1, where I think everybody thought they were going to be able to go in and just finish the job pretty cleanly. If those nations could have seen out outcome they were signing up for (win or lose), WW1 would have never happened. And I think the same is true here.
So that leads me to wonder then, what is the future that we're signing up for now 5 years or another decade down the line? Does what sound good today, instead lead to regrets tomorrow? And that consideration is what drives my views, today.
5 weeks. Typical Russian tactics is to invade, then call for peace, then reinforce area, perform ethnical cleansing, solve problem with logistic, then blame other side for something and invade again.
> Ukraine could have, instead, spent the next 5 years setting up an unprecedented series of defense in depth series of barriers around the border
We spent 5 years preparing our defenses, spending 5% of GPD on that, BUT huge border with RF (1974 km) and Belarus + shore (1500 km) are not easy or cheap to reinforce. Ukraine has the largest border in Europe between two countries.
> This was not an obligatory war for self existence, but a choice - a choice made at the urging of the West.
LOL
All that feigned "paranoia about NATO" talk is trivially invalidated by the fact that Finland joined NATO, it was obvious that Finland would join NATO no matter the outcome of the Ukraine invasion, and it's obvious that Putin understood this. The only threat NATO poses is to Russia's ability to re-colonize its neighbours.
But, by all means, keep working on countermeasures.
However, knowing just how hungry modern warfare is for munitions, not having the capacity already in place to vastly ramp up production seems extremely short sighted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
Reading that it says 150 tons of explosives and this happened 10 years ago. So, not particularly relevant today.
2017 Balakliia, Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balakliia#2017%E2%80%932019_ar...
2017 Kalnyvka, Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Kalynivka_ammunition_depo...
2011, 2015, 2020 in Bulgaria https://www.thedailybeast.com/bulgaria-accuses-six-russians-...
All in preparation for the eventual invasion, in hindsight.
All told, better to have fewer shells in general, but in particular, one must have at least as many shells as the murderous invaders that want to kill you.
And towards that end, the more that Ukraine destroys Russia's military, the less shells everyone else needs to build to defend themselves. Because if Ukraine falls, one only has to look on YouTube to find the translations of Russian TV that show all the other places their population is geared up to invade, rape, conquer, and subjugate.
But even aside from what happens to Ukrainians, if this goes Russia's way it will embolden many other regimes to solve their problems through fascism and colonial invasions too. Pacifism is very nice and weapons of war are absolutely an evil thing, but if you don't have them your pacifism quickly becomes appeasement and/or submission when someone who's not as nice as you decides they're gonna go ahead and institute a few changes in their neighbourhood.
Pacifism is a luxury of the extremely privileged. A very nice luxury, but a luxury nonetheless.
That the US should be giving bunker busters, predator drones, and other modern long range munitions that can end a war in days instead of years to our allies proactively as a deterrent instead of trying to fund a modern war with 20th century weapons like short range artillery.
Industrialized war is unfathomable to western powers and that's not a bad thing.
I think the interesting parts are everything around how it got there. How decades of focusing on expensive wonder tech and unchecked MIC grift has led to the US to this state where it fundamentally can't deliver materiel it needs. The contradictions of 30+ years of end-of-history neoliberal economics vs. the fact that someone needs to run a big potentially unprofitable factory and keep large excess inventory of if the US expects to respond to long-duration conflicts like this. Whether or not the US ends up like the western colonial empires of old sooner rather than later.
So from that standpoint 155mm shell production is an excellent window into larger trends
No rounds seems like a worse condition than having equal-or-poorer performing rounds.
Author suggests applying a new manufacturing technology, 3d printing, to help alleviate a supply shortage, but then says new mfg tech probably wont work (I'm inferring that it will not work with the existing design).
I'm proposing an alternative - make a 3d printer friendly design (OK, it may not be as good as the legacy version) but you're able to build the munition in plants that can be repurposed as soon as the "peak demand" goes away.
Now the classic way to charge the government more money for the same old gun is to say there’s other benefits like nebulous “performance” and “efficiency” improvements. This also has the added benefit when your deliveries “show promise” but display at best marginal improvements, you can sell carry-on contracts, sometimes for a decade or longer!
So to bring this all back around, the author is correct that it won’t work. Enterprising defense contractors may one day attempt to replace factories to roll and stamp and mass-produce bulk firepower with bespoke 3D printable, multifunctional, agile, just-in-time shell production solutions. But if they do it’ll produce a lot more shareholder value than actual product.
Missiles are extremely expensive and you’ll soon run out of them during a long war of attrition (especially in a symmetrical conflict like in Ukraine)
Culture has nothing to with that.
Disclaimer: I consider leveling cities with the goal to displace people to be disgusting, and a borderline war crime. Regardless of the parties or reasons involved.
And this seems like a perfect example of the first part of that.
The thing I didn’t see was how much it would cost to build a facility that produces x/k rounds a month.
I find it hard to imagine these facilities are that expensive (in the context of US defense spending) so it makes me feel there was a something else going on here…
In the Soviet doctrine, artillery had a much larger role. Both Russia and Ukraine inherited that doctrine, and they went on to fight the war they were prepared for.
A conflict like Russia/Ukraine isn’t happening with the US. A US / Russia conflict would have resulted in US air supremacy or a nuclear exchange.
But anyway, the golden bullet solutions is drones. /s
That might still be a bad tradeoff given that these 155mm shells are apparently $8,000 each, whereas a Storm Shadow is apparently $3,200,000 a pop.
The alternative is guided artillery shells. And those are damn expensive.
We'll probably burn through the RAM/SM inventory in weeks . . but not before leaving a whole bunch of ships with empty magazines, because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs. We're just now getting a taste of this problem in the Gulf of Aden, and that's in an AoR surrounded by safe/friendly ports, versus a bunch of Iranian second stringers.
This is the core reason for the "Replicator" initiative in DoD, but, Pentagon being the Pentagon, their "replicator" systems are on course for being too expensive by orders of magnitude. They need to get focused on cheap commodity DEWS, and do it yesterday; the fact that a teenage youtuber[2] hacked up a kilowatt-class DEWS capable of burning 2-3mm steel at 200m says to me - emphatically - that there is ZERO reason to not have these things ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE. Having air defense missiles and light strike also being built on commodity would also be dandy, but harder, and also not as critical as getting mass defensive DEWS CIWS up.
[0] DoD procurement and business process is . . it's something else. I'm not sure I can communicate it to outsiders. Fighting inertia inside of defense organizations has basically turned into my career focus, although in a tiny little bubble of technical content production, and at the cost of chopping a zero off my salary. I think, at the end of the day, I'm just tired of twenty million dollar PDF files - that are also late, and wrong.
[1] I'm including armed UAS in this. They're basically missiles built on dual use chassis - the more fight you fit into commodity UAS, you get exponential returns. China's close link with their dual use industry gives them a depressing advantage here, but that might be a double edge sword in a EW-heavy AoR.
[2] https://youtu.be/xNmbvaUzC8Q?si=FZcAwGRTLjyNlrQu
Wait, for real?
That seems crazy to me. Lot of those ships minus the vls are pretty useless.
I guess they rely on bases all over
Similarly, ships carry more defensive missiles than they can expect to be able to fire. No defensive system anyone uses has a 100% effectiveness; Burkes have sufficient stock of ESSM and Standard that you can expect there to be leakage and the ship to be taken out before they run out.
But all this assumes a fairly mirrored matchup, with both sides using weapons of similar quality. If one side uses a lot of cheap, attritable munitions, it might not work out the same.
> My solace is that in a real conflict, all of that red tape would be put to the side and people can get about building things.
That's just not going to happen. A real conflict would involve nukes, and the war would be quickly over.
I doubt that something close to Vietnam can happen again either. (And even for a 2nd Vietnam, I doubt that any significant artillery would be used when, as you point out, missiles are an option.)
Invasion, now . . well, there's the magic power that comes with having 'em. No one invades you, ever.
Also,outside factors could change the math here, like a megavolcano under the west antarctic ice sheet or something that raises ocean levels by meters. That redefines "back against the wall". If your country loses all access to fresh water, well, you might as well be under occupation or destroyed, so you might use your nukes aggressively. Just don't accidentally drop them in the water you're trying to get.
I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go for Putin-like mistakes.)
The reality is the US would very much like to avoid having to negotiate that situation: far easier to arm Taiwan to the teeth with AA and anti-shipping missiles, and let them take care of it.
EDIT: It's also worth noting nukes aren't the only deterrent forces. It's one thing to "know" that the US Navy isn't going to get involved...it's quite another to conduct an invasion of an ally while well inside the missile engagement range of the US Navy on the assumption that's actually true.
If the Republicans abandon Ukraine, US credibility will take a huge hit, probably worse than when the US abandoned South Vietnam.
Russia presents a threat to Europe that it doesn't present to the USA. Europe needs to tool-up. I say this as a former pacifist.
And so far, NATO has to actively participate in the fighting in Ukraine. Since this would be a major escalation, one that is extremely hard to sell to NATO country citizens, that will obviously not happen anytime soon.
And even if you'd want to use that metric. How exactly loosing zero US personnel at the cost of getting a real-life assessment of NATO combined mobile warfare against the Soviet artillery superiority doctrine is a lose situation for US?
But I'd say that this makes it even the more valuable lesson. Battlefield characteristics is still very close and Russians (now) are acting like they would act against the NATO-trained forces.
And, of course, it's liberal on my part to put Ukrainian Army in the basket of NATO forces as that is only true for maybe a year (after the first rotations ended).
That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.
I don't think they are even close to that - their meat assaults Avdiivka type is not something that would ever happen in conflict with NATO involvement, because the frontline would never stabilize in a way that would enable russia to employ those tactics.
NATO-trained is very wide statement, some African armies and Afghanistan ones were NATO trained and it went nowhere.
>That being said. I think that there's unprecedented amount of military intel US is getting out of this conflict for pennies on the dollar.
Sure. There's no EW piece that russia had in 2022 and wasn't captured intact in the first few months :)
Chinese preparations for an invasion would take more than that.
What to do with them anyways? Taiwan would need plentiful supply of them and a reliable delivery mechanism. Japan surrendered because the US had total air superiority and bluffed about their supply of nukes. North Korea has long-range missiles and literally tens of thousands of artillery pieces aimed at Seoul.
A nuke is easy to hide, we are not talking about global second strike capability here, just delivering a couple of them to close coastal cities, even by smuggling them in some civilian transport. Can China be 100% sure that not one slipped through? Taiwan could do a proof detonation on non-city Chinese soil if things get tense.
Even after a Chinese decimation attack, if the invasion force is not immediatly ready Taiwan will still have enough time to build the nukes.
Realistically if PRC seriously think they haven't eliminated TW nuke production, they'd throw their entire airlift capabilites and drop 50-100k troops a day into the grind and if that doesn't work, nuke TW first and send in NBC teams to an uncontested husk of an island to clean up. If US+co materially impacts that effort and PRC ends up eating a nuke, then we're in global MAD territory.
Also consider nukes has hasn't deterred PRC from security interests less important than TW, they fought US (really all of UN in Korea) /USSR/India, threatened UK over HK, supplied Vietcon against French. If risking nuclear war is what it takes, then they'll (if history is teacher) risk nuclear war.
> drop 50-100k troops
That's fantasy land, most of those planes would be shot down, and if not the soldiers would land in a kill zone with no reinforcements.
Shoot down with what, preempt air campaign would have destroyed most of TW anti air. Fantasy is thinking TW has any chance to deny the air game. Planner for porcupine model US advocates doesn't assume TW has any chance to deny PRC air superiority, only hope they sink enough amphib to deny mass invasion, and barring that, make the ground/urban fighting long enough until US comes to assist.
If scenario is actually about denying TW nuke run, then US won't be assisting. Only other actor with intelligence on ROCA comparble to PRC is probably US. Given stakes, things will get stupid real fast. PLA airlift will be dropping in zones secured by persistent CAS and a buffer soaked in chemical warfare on a one way mission to destroy TW nuclear infra in the mountains if they have to. Maybe TW resists fine alone, and nukes a few mainland targets (assuming no duds, and no intercepts). Then what, PRC nukes living resistance off surface of island and then waltz in bunny suits to breech production sites.
TW trying to nuclearize is automatic invasion redline for a reason. It's not like PRC has an exact contingency plan, only they'll throw everything and the kitchen sink to make sure it doesn't happen.
E: Dang is going to badger me for engaging this thread too long. We'll just have to agree to disagree on whether PRC will be deterred by TW nukes.
Capturing the mainland won't help you at all in that case, and there's no way you would get them all. It would be a MAD situation, and that's all TW needs.
- state-of-the-art submarines. Anything else can't hope to evade the Chinese, and they probably have to be nuclear as well to ensure range and stealth
- submarine-launchable missiles (ballistic or cruise), with a lot of range since China can probably deny the sea immediately off the mainland.
- nukes compact and reliable enough for the missiles
Gaodeng is a ROC island just five miles off the mainland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaodeng_Island An atmospheric nuclear test there would be the wildest provocation imaginable that would not actually be on PRC soil.
This doesn’t make sense. The point of nukes is to say you have them so no one touches you. You become a prickly porcupine.
The only country that doesn’t follow this rule is Israel, but they just present it differently (“MAYBE I’m a prickly porcupine. Touch me and find out.”)
is not a credible deterrence. Snuggling a nuke will work maybe once, and that is not nearly enough to hit all assets Taiwan should be worried about. If the nukes work, it will strengthen China's resolve to dismantle any threat it perceives Taiwan to be. Even at the price of shooting every ship leaving the island for the mainland.
Even very plausible low thousands of artillery pieces can put out enough dakka to slag anything looking even remotely like an air defense radar or missile launchers.
And you're not putting your guns literally at the frontline - you need them more back so they don't get counterbatteried (or just bombed, which would be more likely in case of US involvement) instantly.
This is at best disputed, and alternative explanations have a great deal more supporting evidence.
Just maintaining their power.
And that gives them time to pursue things politicians from liberal democracies consider things of history.
The big problem of a Chinese invasion so is: the Taiwan straight. They have to get the invasion force across, that meens a lot of big, slow, fat transport vessels. Those are easily sunk, meaning not enough boots on the ground. Which leaves pounding Taiwan with missiles.
No one is crazy enough to go to war over it, and that might put Taiwan into panic mode.
Another is to isolate it politically and create a soft blockade around it.
A country in, maybe, panic mode is not conquered. And if said island is strategically important enough, yes, people will go to war over it. And if it isn't, there is no real point beyond symbolism to take it in the first place.
An invasion of Taiwan would probably effectively destroy globalisation, China exports would be sanctioned, China imports of energy and raw materials would be heavily disrupted (China's supply of fossil fuels is very vulnerable). It would be the most disruptive event to the world order since WW2.
The chip fabs are a line item among thousands on that bill.
The US attitude to world conflict now is vastly different to the views of 1941
Artillery would be huge, missiles are great but they're expensive and you run out quickly. Afghanistan/Iraq were already being compared to Vietnam, and while you don't see it on the news so much, most of the kills in those conflicts were with artillery.
Artillery is still, and for many reasons will be, a king. Shells are order of magnitude cheaper than rockets. They are smaller. Easier to manufacture. Missiles are nice if you want to destroy specific targets. Things that move or are so far away that artillery can't reach them.
Things change, organizations and people adapt. Not foreseeing these changes is not a failure.
Believing that throwing predictions at the wall, and only picking the ones that stick in hindsight, is a viable strategy is just plane wrong so.
Likely this was the biggest surprise to emerge. Even Georgia and Armenia did not foreshadow the scale and slogmatch reality of Ukraine eh. The need for stockpiles is real.
> Artillery is still, and for many reasons will be, a king. Shells are order of magnitude cheaper than rockets. They are smaller. Easier to manufacture.
This statement is incomplete without also referencing drones. See for example: https://roguesystemsrecon.substack.com/p/drone-war-evolution...
> That's just not going to happen.
Check out Urgent Operational Requirements [0] in Op HERRICK (UK name for ops in Afghanistan). These led to multiple entirely new platforms, systems and capabilities being developed and deployed in weeks and months, e.g. physical and electronic countermeasures for the rapidly evolving IED threat. The downside is increased logistics / supply-chain burden because you have additional ad-hoc support contracts and staff, in and out of theatre.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urgent_Operational_Requirement
If your defenses are just amazing, and you take out one every three seconds, you're still going to run out of time. You're on the right track with "firm kill" DEWS though. Gotta be a little careful with those, because the engagement range for DEWS is always going to be short, due to attenuation, mist/fog/spray, dust, and good old line of sight. Also, it's quite surprising how little it takes to shield electronics from even nuke-class EMP. But the short engagement range means you have even less time.
The weapons are faster and more lethal now, but similar tactics would probably still work to an extent. The Navy has run some computer simulations but they've never done an all-up fleet exercise of a realistic saturation attack that requires emptying the magazines. So, no one really knows for sure how well the defenses would hold up. There would probably be some nasty surprises.
If a conflict with Russia or China breaks out, I think the first thing that happens is aircraft carriers are going to immediately become obsoleted by antiship missiles as quickly as battleships were obsoleted by air attacks in WWII. Probably even more quickly.
I sure hope I'm wrong. And even more than that I hope we never find out.
No weapon is beyond reach in war, or indestructible. And still, they have their use cases.
It's ~130 ship-launched guided missiles and ~75 fighter jets. They will not be operating at a stand-off distance relative to the reach of cruise and ballistic missiles launched from Chinese homeland. And the planes are not going to be able to take off and land if the carrier is executing evasive maneuvers because of missile attack.
If you were China, how would you tackle that? Is there any reason you wouldn't just send several waves of several hundred missiles their way?
Carrier strike groups are still useful. 130 missiles and 75 jets is plenty to dissaude most countries on earth. Just not the biggest ones, if they have committed to waging a full-scale war against you.
China would definitely not emerge unscathed. The CSG would be augmented with a lot of longer range stuff such as US fighters/bombers/missiles/subs launched from elsewhere. But I mean, I think the CSG gets effectively deleted in the first few hours of war. Hope I'm wrong.
On paper US anti missile intercepts has been performing well in UKR and Red Sea, but consider the actual numbers. In UKR, 6 Kinzhals, alleged moving at shit tier mach ~3 speed end up damaging a patriot. In Red Sea, shit tier Houthi/Iranian cruise (subsonic) / ballistics, launched in even less coordinated salvos, realistically singles since description of multi missile attacks report these events unfold over matter of hours. Majority intercepted, but few still slip through to hit ships protected by flight IIA/III upgraded DDGs. IMO questionable how well a stacked CSG performs against high end AShMs (Teixeira leak allege US clocked PRC DF27 tests at mach 8+).
That's before considering replenishment fleet, of which US has only 11 fast supply class that can keep up with carrier groups, would also be targetted, leaving non nuclear CSG escorts single deployment assets with days of endurance in high tempo operations. And then what does the carrier do? Operate undefended? Said supply ships would almost be hard not to sink since they have to spend hours restocking in port, in theatre.
I think there's a good reason Navy isn't being recapitalized properly, and it's more than redtape. IMO people behind the scenes also sees the writing on the wall for large surface ships.
Considering this and Taiwan, it's funny that Congress isn't pushing for more SSGNs and accelerating the SSN(X) program.
VS 100+ B21s with less labour and per unit cost that can deliver around the clock, probably difficult to shoot down unless they're parked in hardened hanger or their midair tanking (if needed) gets degraded, but losing one is a couple pilots and 1/10th the cost.
E.g. cutting off oil...not like that has ever led to unexpected outcomes (perl harbor).
Countries generally react to mitigate your actions. What are some of the potential reactions you could see if the PRC perceived that as an existential threat?
And it's not enough, at least for the next ~decade. The ocean supply route is to large and too strung out for a navy lesser than the USN to defend.
That was fine strategy 10 years ago when he wrote Accidental Superpower / pre PLA modernization. This is the part where we circle back to developing PRC conventional hypersonics and potential to overwhelm US missile defense, and PRC increasingly able to strike CONUS at scale from mainland - PRC's version of prompt (conventional) global strike which they've been telegraphing development for years. A threat vector US planners are slowly acknowledging. Which means PRC can proportionally deny US energy by hitting critical infra like oil/LNG refineries, huge stationary targets with simple kill chain. Fortress America + shale autarky doesn't mean anything if you can't protect energy security (and by connection of fossil industrial inputs, food security), which is PRC's reverse UNO for the the entire blockading PRC oil strategy, except when applied to US, straight to extraction chain because can't blockade US from US. So next best proportional (even if escalatory thing) is just to make US as vunerable as PRC. All the resources in US sovereign soil is no good if they can't be extracted and made useful to sustain US hegemony. Saudi equipped US hardware learned that lesson when Houthis hit their refineries. Sure Us isn't incompetent like Saudi, but PRC isn't Houthis either, unless you think they actually replaced rocket fuel with water, and used said fuel for hotpot.
Zeihan of skips over the politics in geoPOLITICS when convenient, i.e. US has most waterways, but PRC actually engineered significantly more and uses more internal waterways. US has deep coasts, but PRC dredged her to make way for half of worlds top 10 ports, the other half doesn't contain US. PRC has bad demographics, except PRC has the ideal demographics for geopolitical competition in the timelines relevant to us - set to produce and coordinate more high skilled talent in next 30 years (the cohorts that actually build national power) than US is projected increase population from all sources total, AND declining population of non productive peoples (old, unskilled, unproductive) aka less import dependencies. Declining cohort also has high home ownership and savings rate because frankly they don't expect big welfare net like west. Next 30 years, PRC swapping 50 million STEM talent (already born) with tier1 city earning potential for 100m farmers, migrant workers etc (old -> uneducated die first) that earn 1/10 that. IMO PRC demographic trend (if scrutinized beyond naive pyramid reading) is more pros than cons, especially considering PRC geographic/resource constraint - they don't need 3x more people than the US where only 1x can marginally compete with US and 2x are excess mouths to feed. Better off long term with 2x US population that PRC soil can sustain, where 1.5x can out compete US.
Eitherway the point is frequently politics in geopolitics matter more.
Fortress America has always been part geographic fortress and part artificial, technologic fortress. The entire reason US built/maintains the largest high tech expeditionary military is basically to stay on the front doors of any potential adversaries so they can't get close to CONUS. Let's not forget Continental Navy couldn't hold against out British blockade during revolutionary war without French Navy entering picture. CONUS was vunerable with 1800s tech, it's the technology (politics) part that made fortress america and it's the technology (military) that ensure two oceans are moats. High end missiles circumvents that, hence US unlikely to take out PRC without PRC taking out US unless US engages PRC directly. That's without considering PRC can drag US to fight near PRC home court by hitting JP/SKR/PH to trigger security obligation. Those are island with much worse self sufficiency that'll collapse in 2 months that US is treaty bound to defend. The TLDR is entire Malacca delima / SLOC blockade strategy operates on logic from 10 years ago when ...
How does this not trigger MAD?
The US has no way of knowing if the incoming missiles are conventional or nukes. Would the US wait for the missiles to land to figure out if they're nukes or not? Would the US not simply launch a retaliatory (presumably nuclear) counter-strike while China's initial missiles are en route?
I honestly don't understand what value striking the CONUS would have for China. Seems like it would just instantly trigger MAD.
For the actual process, I imagine it's going to be very communicated/coordinated affair to pace escalation. PRC: you stopped 40% of our energy imports, we're going to degrade 40% of your domestic energy infra if you don't stop in name of proportionality. First maybe via cyber, then via kinetic strikes, with warning ahead on list of facilities that are potential targets so they can evacuated ahead of time. Start with offshore rigs, then escalate to territorial targets. Launching X missiles at Y time at Z targets. US can either lift blockade, withdraw from PRC civil war, escalate to total war, or trigger MAD and both go back to stone age. Ideally this game theory gets played before hand, and there's no blockade or US intervention in first place - ability to hit CONUS is as much a deterrence function. But TLDR is PRC isn't going to sit back and take hits if they can dish hits as well. Meanwhile US expeditionary/military game theory has been based on fighting adversaries who can't really hit back. Which is why PRC is pouring so much resources into platforms that can.
So I don't think you're wrong, and I think we've already found out.
A submarine with a nuclear torpedo could take out an entire carrier group.
Nuclear submarines are apparently still hard to detect underwater; but once someone figures out how to detect them, they'll be obsolete.
I think the Senior Service may be doomed.
For any technological advance, the counter technology adapts, so it's not very common for something to actually become obsolete.
- A peer/neer-peer adversary can presumably throw a very large number of simultaneous drones at a USN vessel. I don't know how feasible it is rustle up 10 or 100 reliable simultaneous human suicide bombers.
- The jet ski drones can surely be physically smaller than a speedboat that needs to hold a human
- The jet skis can trade some of that size back and armor themselves against CIWS etc in ways that would be less practical for a suicide boat
I don't think I'd be so worried about them surviving hits from the CIWS. On the open ocean I'd be worried about the possibility of encountering so many drones that the CIWS runs out of ammunition. In a port, I'd be worried about the practicality of using the CIWS at all, but I think the Navy can adapt.
The main thing is that the Navy were sort of deemphasizing stuff like the Phalanx on their recent ship designs, and this is the second time the past couple of weeks that I've read something suggesting they'll probably need to reverse that trend.
I still also think the front of a "jetski" drone could probably be hardened to withstand a certain amount of 20×102mm fire but, I am guessing and don't know how to determine how feasible that might be.
I think aircraft carriers are already obsolete, not due to antiship missiles but due to small, quiet diesel subs.
Pretty much any NATO navy operating these has stories from NATO exercises where their small, unimpressive sub managed to score hits on a carrier.
This isn't new. Around two decades ago, the US felt the need to ask Sweden to loan them their HSMS Gotland to learn how to do something about them.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/think-us-navy-aircraf...
And then like you said, the engagement range is also going to be quite short - meaning all of this becomes just that exponentially more difficult.
I think the idea of DEW is that you're not trying to literally melt the thing out of the sky, you're trying to penetrate it electrically and scramble something. To that end a very sharp pulse (chirped pulse) is the better approach as then you're more likely to cause damage once you exceed the capacity of (for example) the input isolators on the radar antenna to divert excess energy away from the very sensitive amplifier. Or, to put it a simpler way, you're trying to make sparks jump across gaps.
this protects from lasers, but also makes it glaringly obvious to EW and radar systems.
I did speak to a few missile manufacturers facing the same thing, including DOD's lack of urgency, which I interpret as Congress' lack of urgency. In the nightmare situation of a hot war in the Pacific, that attitude would change on a dime, and I still think Operation Warp Speed is the primary example of how we would respond to direct threats. Similar to COVID, I would much rather deter such a situation with bold action now than wait until we're certain we'll need them, which will cost many more lives.
And I've heard dubious things on Replicator too, but thankfully, smart defense private money is going to truly disruptive dual-use tech that is autonomous, resilient, and ultimately attritable. That combination is the best answer for democratic countries that care about soldiers' lives vs. authoritarians sending human waves.
[0] I keep my sanity by staying grounded in lightweight markup and developer tools - there's really nothing you do in the Big XML world that you can't do in vanilla Asciidoc on standard tooling.
[1] Real hard for me to not put that acronym in quotes. The IETM as a thing is a bit of an open joke. Each IETM implementation is basically a completely nonstandard, homebrewed content browser. Think if you went back in time to Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and then just had every single hardware manufacturer go absolutely nuts making their own idea of what that means. Then you make up "IETM Levels" of capability defined by total non-sequiturs.
I’m not a “team America world police” advocate, much more the opposite. Even as stated in the article, most production is more interested in a deterrent. Hate ‘em or hate ‘em, nukes are a deterrent to open war. Reference our posture toward retaliating against Iran-backed groups this week.
Russia didn’t like a nuclear neighbor, it said. So the US brokered a nuclear disarmament of Ukraine with the interests of reducing the tension (sic) with Russia, and on the assurance of support from the US should they need it.
The stage was set on the thin hope of peace.
We had Soviet nukes stationed in Czechia too. Does that make us a former nuclear power? I thought not...
Slava Ukraini
What do you think, how many hours does it take to remove and jury-rig launch signal electronics for a motivated nation state at the cutting edge of weapons technology? If the Soviet troops had agreed to leave the bombs in situ, Ukraine would have had some sort of nuclear capability within the week. (And even if the Russians had sabotaged it, Iran and NorK prove that obtaining or refining the fissile material is far harder than explosives lensing and ballistic missile delivery.)
For how long?
Nukes need maintenance. To maintain them, you will need to rebuild the entire supply chain on Ukrainian territory. Do you even have the necessary know-how? What percentage of GDP are you willing to spend on it?
Until today, Ukraine has lower GDP than Czechia. In the 1990s, it was even worse. With their economy destroyed by decades of Soviet rule, they were happy to survive somehow.
Tangentially, it is well possible that Russian nukes are actually under-maintained, for the very same reason: it is expensive to keep them in working order, and Russian economy is not very strong. Perhaps most of them would not explode. But we'd better not find out.
You could just rip the PAL out and build a new detonation timing system, but then you'd be re-doing a large part of the trial-and-error phase of the manhatten project.
It's not something that could happen in hours or weeks. Realistically more like months or years.
This is demonstrably false. Nukes have allowed those who have them, to bully (wage asymmetric warfare on) those who don't.
Would the USA have been so cock-sure about murdering 5% of Iraqs population, if it didn't have nukes?
The US was very clear in not attacking Iranians, though Iranian support was the vehicle by which US troops were attacked. Iran got a measured response for its allies because Iran 'carries a big stick'
Air or missile strikes against US territory are very difficult to pull off. Only China or Russia would have any chance to overwhelm US missile defenses. Anything small-scale would be answered by conventional strikes and a ground invasion. No nukes are warranted unless entire cities get slagged or nukes or biological or chemical weapons are used.
BAE and Rheinmetall also make 155mm rounds, and many of those are going to Ukraine. Israel is unhappy that the US stores of ammo in Israel are being sent to Ukraine, and is ordering domestic manufacture from Elbit.
The article doesn't make a clear distinction between the foundry and machining steps in the process. The first part involves casting and forging molten metal, and the second is ordinary machining. They don't have to be carried out in the same plant. Either or both can be outsourced separately.
Filling, where explosives go into shells, is done in dedicated plants with lots of separation between buildings, buried storage bunkers, and many other safety precautions. That's the dangerous part but not the bottleneck.
Here's a modern 155mm shell forging plant in Germany.[3]
[1] https://www.nammo.com/product/our-products/ammunition/large-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrUV1uktRZg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNtmrYeBwWQ
Yes, they have their own ground-leveling to do after all..
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/13/...
> [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNtmrYeBwWQ
That appears to be a Serbian company, though?
Even in the US?
It just makes sense.
ATF is empowered to interpret these laws. The law is quite clear that a howitzer is regulated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destructive_device
A modest proposal: the US Army should offer obsolete and surplus artillery in exchange for handguns. Given the price of ammunition, correlation between poverty and gun violence, the logistics involved in large-scale artillery theft, and the comparative complexity of non-assisted suicide by howitzer, this policy seems like a sure-fire way to drastically reduce the number of lethal gun crimes committed in the US.
The $4,000/round figure sparked my curiosity, and after checking it looks like the actual unit price is below $2,000.
There are some beefy pricetags being floated around, buy they are calculated indirectly by dividing the total cost of a ammo supply contract by the number of artillery rounds ordered. From the article, I wouldn't be surprised if those contracts also covered investments required to ramp up production, which is also covered by this article.
At $1,800,000/round, firing hollow rounds loosely packed with $100 bills and a note promising another volley as soon as the target agrees to stand down would probably be a more cost-effective option.
None of that is commonly consumed by civilians. There are routes to get there, but it seemed difficult to me (I looked once upon a time).
The largest caliber even somewhat commonly used by civilians is .50 BMG (12.7x99mm NATO). I have seen 20mm rifles and ammo for sale (once), but it is a HUGE pain in the ass to get them and probably rightfully so.
Anything over .50 is automatically considered a destructive device by the ATF unless a specific sporting exemption is given to it (that's generally only for big game rifles). Getting one of those requires a fistful of certifications last I checked; I think you effectively have to be an arms dealer to get one (or at least pretending enough to be certified as one).
None of this is legal advice, talk to the ATF and/or a lawyer before trying to buy anything too exotic.
and when it comes to mortars, arty, etc, they don't fire that many rounds in training and exercises. even during the Iraqi-led pushbacks against ISIS, where US Marine artillery fired a ton of rounds in support, there was little over-all impact on supply. before that, counter insurgency work generally doesn't use much artillery -- though lord knows they tried to until around mid-to-late 2004.
by comparison, estimates are as high as 20k-50k shells per day in Ukraine.
The contract length part I covered, and I'm convinced that's the main issue.
[1] https://archive.is/Ih3pm
Of course he's right that if there is a WW3, the United States will lose. As will every other single major power. And how many artillery shells you have won't matter a lick in this. The goal in WW3 will not be to destroy the other nation's military, but to destroy the other nation, such that it can never recover to pose a threat to you again. Every single juicy high-density economic zone in every single country will end up getting nuked to oblivion. New York City, Moscow, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris - these places will, in all probability, simply no longer exist.
Striving to win an unwinnable war is not only painfully myopic, but also just seems like a great way for humanity to kill itself off.
Having an impenetrable defence is nice, but the US hasn't fought a defensive war in ... I don't know how long. Maybe a century for all I care.
You can game that. Simply give your enemy a way out. Don't press them too hard, just take something, not so much that they would feel threatened. Instead of invading them directly, take over their trading partners. Set up rebellions, insurrections. It's still your bullets in their bodies and their country taking damage. But you have plausible deniability, and nobody is going to break out nukes about it.
Soviet union did that very well. Despite taking over bulk of central and eastern Europe, kicking western interest out of China, and thus most of eastern Asia, ending colonial rule in most of Africa, they never "crossed the line".
Iran is doing the same thing now. Russia too. And others will follow. It's a good strategy.
You fail to mention that the US are the best example for this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_United_Services_Institut...
ICJ did rule against Russia, and it makes sense since they invaded, but the roots of the conflict go back to attacks on Donetsk like you say since 2014 and various aggressive moves by NATO since 1991 in violation of the gentleman's agreement.
Basically, the US should not be supplying arms to these conflicts.
It's always refreshing to see what the West never does what it says, never did.
So you believe that most Ukrainians actually want to surrender to Russia?
gentleman's agreement, which was never acknowledge by the US and was with the previous regime, unlike the written agreement _Russia_ signed recognizing Ukraine's independence and sovereignty, with their 1994 borders. And NATO wouldn't have expanded East if the countries in Eastern Europe didn't feel a need to join a defensive alliance.
All I can tell you is -- just because intellectual-sounding people like Chomsky, Mearsheimer et al; not to mention Putin himself -- whom you are apparently cribbing from, knowingly or otherwise -- say things like this, doesn't make it so. If you actually walk back and look at the event chronology you'll find there's no substantial basis for either of these narratives.
NATO (the US) is using Ukraine to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,
The implication you are making here is that the Ukrainians at large have no real agency in the situation, and basically have no idea why they're actually fighting.
The front in Gaza is not Israel's only wartime front, not in the current conflict and not during past conflicts: Currently, Israel needs this ammunition to defend itself from Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon that have engaged in heavy indiscriminate rocket launching against Israeli civilian populations in the Northern Israel. At least 65,000 Israeli civilians have been forced to evacuate from their homes into temporary dorms until this Hezbollah threat is removed. Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist org with ties to Lebanon parliament, must disengage their troops, as they are breaking the UN Resolution 1701 of demilitarization of the Southern Lebanon area.
Rocket launching from South Lebanon has started concurrently with Hamas attacks against Israel that started on October 7th in the Southern Israel.
> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza
IDF usually doesn't use this ammunition against target threats in the Gaza strip. The most common explosives used are the Israeli air-force's targeted airstrikes, which are very precise and are performed to limit casualties of non-engaged civilians in the conflict.
> these shells have been redirected to Israel and are being used in Gaza in service of genocide, which the International Court of Justice has determined to be likely to be occurring
There is no genocide taking place in Gaza. There is war, yes, and civilians die too, yes, some even plausibly innocent, but the attacks are not with intent to target civilians. IDF commanders don't issue commands that break humanitarian limits and IDF soldiers adhere to their commanders strictly (outlier cases are dealt with promptly by military court).
FYI the ICJ's court of justice has NOT determined that a genocide is likely to be occurring, in fact it only issued a provisional statement that humanitarian care for the population of the Gaza Strip should continue, which Israel has already been doing for many months now, and will continue to provide, with enabling the entry of 100-200 or more trucks full of food every day, gasoline, and other humanitarian products etc.
- targeted destruction of civil infrastructure (check rules of warfare regarding that)
- intentional destruction of a city
- a specified goal of displacing Palestinians living in Gaza
- blocking escape routes forbthose people
And all that after:
- turning Gaza into an open air prison
- controlling all utilities for Gaza
- blocking Gaza's access to the Medditeraneab
- blocking and controlling all border crossing into and out of Gaza
Maybe not yet Genozid yet, but clearly Apatheid and on-going ethnic cleansing. Stop defending that.
Just some numbers:
Displaced people, 1.8 million in Gaza, 3-5 million in Ukraine
Civilian casualties, 10,000 in Ukraine between Feb '22 and Nov '23 and 28,000 in Gaza as of Feb '24.
> are performed to limit casualties of non-engaged civilians in the conflict.
Over 20k Gazans have died, few of them resistance members because they are in tunnels. The majority of dead are women and children. Israel is attacking the families of the resistance because they cannot reach them. This is collective punishment. Almost every hospital has been evacuated or destroyed. Universities destroyed. They are wiping out all humanitarian services and cultural artifacts.
> FYI the ICJ's court of justice has NOT determined that a genocide is likely to be occurring,
Provisional measures are granted when it is determined there is a likelihood that genocide is occurring. The case will drag on for years to determine on the merits whether genocide has in fact occurred. Many scholars have opined that this case is unique because of the sheer number of open statements of intent by every level of Israeli society.
https://www.icj-cij.org/taxonomy/term/409
Sorry, but this is simply naive. Hezbollah and Iran are doing what they're doing out of long-standing ulterior geopolitical motives. Not because they could give a flying toss about the Palestinians.
Look, we all know the history. Please don't be so arrogant.
The main point is, if you were to break down the reasons why the theocratic regime in Iran really opposes Israel at every turn - as opposed to what the narratives that they're happy to let you believe, such as the above, say about these motives - you probably wouldn't be blithely repeating those narratives.
This is very clearly not what the ruling says. And it is intellectually evasive to characterize as such, given that information about the ruling is widely and immediately available.
And I don't mean "evasive" in terms of spin, polish or oversimplifying. But rather, of an overt attempt to obfuscate the nature of the ruling.
There's no way that you, yourself, can plausibly believe the above statement you just made.
They would need all kinds of license's and regular inspection from the BATFE and shit.
I was interested in doing some hobby and research chemistry sorta like a combination of the precision projects I see from
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8i-4EpLBXMzekETNXwcZjA
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC06HVrkOL33D5lLnCPjr6NQ
And more focused on the energetics stuff combines with just technology and research.
Well I did some digging and the ATF is regulated the industry to hell and back. And while I can recognise the importance of safety, I think that it also creates more additional barriers to entry. Especially considering this would a been a weekend hobby if it would have been possible.
TLDR: a lot of people talk about the logistics or the funds to start doing something like artillery production or silicon chip fabrication....and yes I agree but I think the regulation of everything has created so many barriers....you can't experiment in the backyard like you could in the 90's.
Were the 90's safe? No. But we also didn't know the real risks back then when it came to certain chemicals. Also, the growing population makes it more and more hard to have land where you can safely do things....in the north east coast its hard to find and long gun ranges, some states basically banned all the good fireworks, and all this regulation means having just more and more money to figure out how to navigate this issue....which means its not a hobby but a job.
I see plenty of cool things on YouTube from chemistry to engineering and part of me is not sure if the feds are just ignoring what these people do....because it dosnt seem legal, or if they are just lucky that they live somewhere with loosed regulations.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufactur...
Sorry? When did Russia became dependent on the Western steel or explosives?
If the US wants that kind of control we have the Defense Production Act to force businesses to build up capacity.
It's like how during the pandemic, pretty much nobody invested in increased toilet paper or mask production in the US, because "if I invest and the pandemic goes away, I will have "wasted" my investment"
Basically its just another failure of capitalism as theorized. Turns out, it's very uncommon for someone to decide to build brand new capacity in an existing market without extreme incentives because it's too easy for them to be burned. If we want businesses to ramp up production, we need to either convince them it will be profitable, by signing expensive, long term contracts that can't be torpedoed by a future administration getting bitchy about the debt, or force them through law.