I'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point.
> The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined. In modern warfare, the tail is the primary target. If the tail is severed, the teeth are rendered useless.
It's always about logistics. The Three Kingdoms War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was largely enabled by the invention of the wheelbarrow.
One of the most interesting innovations in the Ukraine war is their internal market place for drones, letting each drone group decide which drones they want to procure and use in battle.
It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
this strategy worked to keep Ukraine alive, by enabling them to throw literally anything and everything they could obtain into the fight. And the system enabled rapid experimentation and evolution of what works. Also they didn't have enough of anything to equip all units equally or fully, so a market-like system of was also a way to triage short supply.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
Reminds me of the Cambrian revolution: suddenly there were all kinds of weird animals. Many of these kinds rapidly disappeared, while a few more successful ones kept on. Or at least that's my reading.
There's something hilarious, in the truly cosmic sense of the word, about discussing an "explosion" that spanned between 10 to 25 millions of years of its duration.
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).
Look at 1950s aircraft. That was the decade of really weird aircraft, as people figured out how jets were supposed to work. Supersonics. VTOL aircraft. The X-planes. Rocket-assisted takeoff. After that, more was known about what worked, and designs became more similar.
Wouldn't a fragmented, decentralized system also help make their supply chains more resilient? If they had a single large drone factory, it would be a sizable target.
During WW2 in the United States, you had all sorts of consumer goods companies reorganized to output a prodigious amount of military supplies. There were multiple companies making the same model of things, with fairly rigorous QA to ensure quality and uniformity.
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
It's not a great comparison because Germany could not hit the US mainland. Even if there had been a single giant everything factory it wouldn't have mattered.
IIRC the US did plan in case either Japan or Germany somehow became capable of bombing the states. Some factories had their roofs painted to make them blend in with the surroundings, others were built out of reinforced concrete to make them bomb proof
You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card.
Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex.
I am so curious about this. There are a lot of 3D printed drone startups now. But nobody really seems to be thinking about the electronics sourcing. Great you can print a drone shell wherever but what happens if China turns off exports?
Ukraine seems pretty paranoid about this, having backup suppliers for parts. Looks like they take efficiency hits and build more complicated things out of multiple discrete chips that would normally be ontegrated commercially so that they can go to suppliers in Oceania, eurasia, or eastasia depending on who is being helpful.
TSMC is absolutely critical for 'frontier' silicon but:
1. In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either
- Bear in mind that I doubt China would ever want to destroy TSMC though, so I'm talking about a naval blockade rather than artillery destroying the fabs.
2. Although SOTA chips are off the table, we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips. We had great missiles in 2015.
> In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either
China has enough domestic electronics production to not care. Also, in the event of a war they would probably stockpile necessary parts.
> we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips.
If the factories producing those chips are still operational. Otherwise you end up in the exact same situation as Russia, for example. They have some barely functioning old factories producing extremely outdated chips on foreign equipment.
Most drones are controlled by humans, so they don't need neural networks. Larger drones still don't use anything too advanced, as specialized neural networks actually don't need beefy hardware.
Maybe this will change in future, but the US still has enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity to produce a few million chips for drones.
You know that when there were COVID related supply chain disruptions to microchips coming out of Taiwan, Europe and the US actually found it impossible to make the right number of cars?
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
Thanks for linking this is interesting. It sounds like they are still unable to produce many of the base components though?
> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.
But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.
Taiwan is tiny, far from Ukraine, and the majority of the economy is TSMC. Just because they're also Chinese doesn't mean they have the ability to make everything China does.
It's not so much a matter of can, but willingness and (worse) economic viability. But recent worldwide instability - from leadership changes to supply disruptions to war - has given that a push.
Ukraine and Taiwan quietly cooperate in weapons development and production, especially drones.[1] They both have big, aggressive neighbors. Ukraine knows how to fight them, and Taiwan can make electronics in quantity. Ukraine is starting to get cooperation from Japan, too, but that's in an earlier stage.[2] With Taiwan, it's serious.
The paper doesn't mention Ukraine at all, yet it's all about the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting.
And if we're talking Ukraine, we have to talk Poland as it has been facilitating 90% of all Western military equipment, humanitarian aid, and crucial trade deliveries into the country.
Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.
As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.
Poland and the Baltics know they're next on Putin's list. So they're glad to help Ukraine. Better than fighting the Russians on home territory.
Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperation with Ukraine is because Ukraine figured out how to stop Russia. Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
Even the most optimistic Russian does not think Russia will ever get beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya which is not much more than Russia currently occupies. You really think they will eventually march over Ukraine on to Warsaw?? That’s as likely as the exiled Chinese government in Taiwan taking over China.
Their success is already impossible: you cannot lose half of your population and suffer millions of casualties and still consider that a success in the end, even if Ukraine was to retake most of the territory it has lost, which seems less and less likely as the years pass.
Wars of this kind never have winners. Russia also lost too many soldiers to celebrate anything.
I couldn't disagree more. In a fight for existential survival, repelling an invader at any cost constitutes a win. It may almost be pyrrhic in the end, but deterrence is invaluable.
There is a lot of resistance from the Ukrainians to going to the frontlines as we can see in the endless videos of people fighting the government “recruiters” who come to forcibly take them and the large stream of people fleeing the country. It’s hard to tell if the will to continue fight comes from the people or the government, it’s not nearly as clear as you imply.
In my view, it’s a huge crime against life for this war to continue. A compromise is the only solution. From both sides of course. But it seems both sides still consider the continuing fight and death toll is worthwhile and preferable to the compromises they would need to make to end the craziness. We will look back at this time as a huge failure of Europe and the US to manage to first prevent Russia aggression, and then even worse , prolonging the conflict for several years by simply failing to provide what was needed to defeat Russia while providing just enough for the Russians to advance only very slowly and at a high cost - the worst possible outcome since Ukraine still loses a huge amount of territory and more importantly, people, while Russia loses a much smaller proportion of its population while achieving many of its goals and proving to the West that it can challenge its political position near its borders even if war is the only way to do so.
Credit certainly that Russian logistics failed, but was it Ukrainian logistics that beat them back or was it Ukrainian logistics and heroism alongside American and British support, intelligence, and 24/7 airlifts of critical weapons and equipment that beat them back?
> and 24/7 airlifts of critical weapons and equipment that beat them back?
There were no 24/7 airlifts of criticql weapons and equipment at any point in this war.
Ukraine was expected to fall quickly, and any help it needed started arriving very reluctantly, very slowly, in small batches stretched over months and years of deliveries much much later.
That’s wrong. The US and UK airlifted anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles among other things to Ukraine while telling the world Russia was about to invade (which Europeans refused to believe).
You may be confusing European support and their lack of it (remember the famous time Germany just sent 45,000 old helmets?) with how the United States and United Kingdom helped.
> The US and UK airlifted anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles among other things to Ukraine
Was this before or after the current usa president was infamously recorded trying to extort corrupt personal favors from Ukraine as a quid-pro-quo, in exchange for giving Ukraine those javelins, and got impeached for it?
There were no airlifts into Ukraine, arms had to cross the border as they have since. The supplies were in small quantities up to the invasion. They were an important help to Ukraine, but you are overstating how crucial they were - as if stingers and NLAWs did the fighting, or as if Ukraine didn't have its Soviet legacy or homegrown systems like Stugna-P which had a much more decisive impact those early months.
Western support at any scale didn't arrive until later in the year.
There's a difference between "airlifted 24/7 since the beginning of the invasion" and:
- the two packages promised in March were delivered by April, all pushed via conventional transport through Poland and Romania (IIRC deliveries didn't start until at least mid-March, and by that time Ukraine was already suffering heavy losses, logistics collapses etc. )
- there's a nebulous commitment to <list of weapons> which we know barely trickled in as US committed, then withdrew, then commited, then withdrew support, then claimed Ukraine was too stupid to use these weapons, or that it would lead to escalation, or...
> There had been multiple YEARS of Western Special Operations inside Ukraine leading up to and during the opening phases of the war.
That is why Russia quickly reached Kiev, and Ukraine still can't win the war? Because there were inhales, screams MULTIPLE YEARS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS?
> Without UK SOF and their initial deployments of anti-armor weapons, there is a good chance Russia would have gotten much further.
No one denies that there were Western Weapons in Ukraine. What is bullshit is that they were somehow airlifted 24/7 during initial phases of the war. They decidedly weren't. Neither before the invasion, nor during the first days. Nor, indeed during any phase of the war.
>> In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons
Please do go on quoting literally the same sentence:
--- start quote ---
NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military cargo planes so they can make the trip by land to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities.
--- end quote ---
Strange how the totally prepared FOR YEARS special operations were left scrambling to deliver enough weapons before projected logistics collapse.
Russian logistics failed because of Ukrainian resistance. The NLAWs and stingers were extremely useful to Ukraine, but the more important fact is that the Ukrainian army was prepared, disciplined, and didn't melt away as Russia expected.
Poland is delivering 90% of NATO’s support to Ukraine. France is one of the staunchest enemies of Russia. In this situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do?? Sit and accept while those countries work hard to kill its soldiers and destroy its economy? I am surprised Russia hasn’t bombed transport depots in Poland that are known to be used for weapons delivery to Ukraine yet, but that seems very likely to happen in the next few months. However that is not the same as Russia invading Poland! Those reports are talking about attacks, no one in their right mind is expecting an invasion, which is what my comment was referring to.
> situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do?? Sit and accept while those countries work hard to kill its soldiers and destroy its economy
Oh no, the poor innocent Russia that is currently in year 5 of its totally innocent blameless war it's waging. "Hitler did nothing wrong" vibes.
All Russia has to do to stop its soldiers from dying and its economy from being destroyed is to get the fuck out of Ukraine.
I think they already have that, they want to make sure it stays that way
alternatively, there's a Dennis Ross piece out pointing out that China's procurement patterns over the years suggests they are not seriously thinking of invading Taiwan, they just want everyone to think that way...
That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational.
With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. With Russia, it is Putin's dream of restoring "Greater Russia". With China, it's the dream of re-unification with Taiwan on one side, and reversing what is seen as a land grab by back-then Czarist Russia in Outer Manchuria. With Trump it is the desperate desire to be beloved (and the desire of his Project 2025 handlers to turn the US into an ethno-christo-nationalist state). With Ben Gvir and Smotrich in Israel, it is the desire to wipe out anything Palestinian.
And the result of these madmen was and is an untold amount of needless suffering. There is no reason at all to not believe what China is openly saying [1] and to prepare accordingly. Better be prepared than be sorry.
It's wildly naive to think that dictators are 'nutjobs'. They are, without exception, shrewd political operators. You don't get to be dictator and stay dictator without a certain skill set, and part of that is having a good sense of which actions get you a bigger bank account and which ones end with your head on a stick.
They might be wrong like any human, but they aren't cartoon villains.
maybe not nut jobs, but I think the argument that the inherent structure that they put in place to maintain power is poor at optimizing human capital and expertise, such that they will aways make lousier decisions because they are surrounded by yes men
Granted, there is what is China is "openly saying" in terms of official warnings and such, and what they are "openly saying" in terms of what they are actually spending money on in terms of material, equipment and capability (of which there is at least some degree of logical, non-nut job type thinking behind):
To the extent Xi Jinping isn't seriously interested in invading Taiwan (and that seems dubious), he also needs to keep the PLA and other factions thinking he does. Reclaiming Taiwan is a pillar of PLA ideology and strategic doctrine. PLA culture is why China has never pushed its will in North Korea despite continued disobedience to Beijing--the old guard in the PLA feels honor bound to defend North Korea's independence, rather than making it a client state, which it easily could do. It's similar to military and policy hawks in the US regarding Middle East intervention, who have nominally always been a minority faction. Perennial Middle East intervention never made much sense, and yet it keeps happening over and over, even when the military is woefully unprepared (e.g. Iran), because that faction is adept at manipulating defense policy, and has been playing the same long game since the 1990s. Which is precisely why the Taiwan threat is real. China isn't a political monolith, and the forces pushing to invade Taiwan, even if presently held at bay, could succeed in a blink of an eye, even without China being properly prepared for a successful invasion.
> Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
China could just bomb Taiwan into submission if it chooses to. I don't think it is a problem for China to build 20-30k ballistic missile and launch them at Taiwan. Or send a million drones over there just to be sure nothing survives them.
Taiwan is, unfortunately, in a very precarious situation should China decide enough is enough and reunification must happen no matter what.
1. “Reunification” is straight Chinese propaganda. Taiwan has never been part of the PRC. Japan has a stronger claim for “reunification” than the PRC does (and that’d also be very dumb)
2. Taiwan and Taiwanese allies also have agency. China doesn’t just get to fire 20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan with no consequences. The consequences would maybe be asymmetrical, but they’d no doubt be very painful for China.
1. That I see it as payback for the KMT losing the civil war.
2. Yeah, dunno about that, who will do what exactly to China? I also think that, since you mentioned it, Japan would intervene, China will pretty much use it as an excuse for retribution on what the Japanese did to the Chinese during WW2.
China is constrained on this by near certain mutually assured economic destruction.
Even the food supply in China would basically be destroyed unless you believe that the population is going to just go back to a diet of largely rice with meat being a luxury.
20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan would cause a global depression that dwarfs the great depression. There would be almost no way the CCP survive this. That is why this subject is mostly people talking nonsense.
Reunification has to happen politically, persuasively, over time and without firing a shot.
I'd assume China wants to keep as much manufacturing capabilities of Taiwan intact. If it was just about unification, then it would have happened long time ago.
> if we're talking Ukraine, we have to talk Poland
No, we're not ;) They are where they are because they lease the ground under a NATO base, WHICH is actually doing the job. Not the Polish government.
Whis has been a very unreliable partner for the last 4 years, constantly using their geographical position to push Ukraine into submission and leverage their own political interests for internal and external programs.
> geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive, if not thrive
As long as Ukrainian military power is there, the region is safe. That's why the Baltic and Northern countries are investing so much in Ukraine + constantly taking our war experience.
In general, are they being useful? Absolutely yes. Do we need to include them in any discussions? No, since they are already misusing their position. Plus telling everyone how useful they are. Like, in case anybody can forget.
In Taiwan's case, the question is how does China see the reunification.
It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.
Wow, I just looked up how self-sufficient the island is and the answer is barely at all. Which initially seems surprising given the continual threat. But I guess they're counting on global support as a tech chokepoint.
The US strongly avoids foreign content for this reason. This policy is often the only thing keeping domestic commodity component manufacturing afloat. This is also the main reason Micron is getting a subsidized fab.
The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch.
Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.
DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.
[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"
The point is that, when PRC cuts off the parts, there are backstops for alternate sourcing most of them even if it means reopening mines to get the materials and subsidizing production.
I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.
I would bet Japan, Korea, Taiwan all produce some of the needed things in an emergency scenario (obv Taiwan may be under artillery attack, but then again, does China want a destroyed Taiwan or do they want to own it, with its priceless industries intact, as a crown jewel? They may avoid such destruction).
But honestly, I don't think China wants Taiwan "reunification" quite as much as they want to have their economy be prosperous and, just as importantly, not to have millions of people die on both sides. If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure. But I expect non-war outcomes somewhat more than I expect war.
I recognize this is a big bet on the ethics of perhaps a small group of important CPC decision makers, but I do bet on that. Xi Jinping is no Hitler, no Stalin.
Offshoring into China was literally invented by Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies.
We see high quality tech products coming out of the countries and assume that they're very good at building things. In fact they are extremely good at managing complex supply chains going in and out of PRC, while keeping certain high value add parts of the business within their own countries.
> If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure.
You think NATO would stand there with open arms in such a case? NATO membership requires agreement from all member states, and I don't sense a great appetite among the European countries for a war with China.
I agree with the overall point of your post though.
Maybe, but I wish people in these conversations would sometimes point out that China is also dependent on imports to continue to make the stuff it makes.
It is a heavy importer of petroleum, food and fertilizer, and if there's ever a sustained shortage of those things, Chinese young men are likely to start revolting and rioting like they've done dozens of times in Chinese history in response to food shortages. China relies on foreign nations for approximately 75% to 80% of its total iron ore consumption, making it the world's largest importer. Despite having had semiconductor manufacturing self-sufficiency as a top national priority for many years, it is still the case that Chinese smartphone manufacturers rely heavily on Samsung and TSMC for the SOCs that go into those smartphones -- and MediaTek (Taiwan) and Qualcomm (US), not Chinese firms, designed most of those SOCs.
Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues that the United States is the only major global power fully capable of national self-sufficiency.
Stuff like https://www.hadrian.co/ is pretty neat, but the whole "electric stack" is hopelessly Chinese from this perspective- batteries, motors, all kinds of small and crucial electrical things- and critical minerals, like Gallium for radar.
There are no truly irreplaceable components there. It's going to only be a problem if China stops _all_ the exports.
Even then, a custom supply chain can be set up domestically. You'll probably have to limit the number of variations for these servos and motors, but you can produce them even manually if you absolutely have to.
There are a lot of differences. One of the chief differences was that during World War II the United States continental homeland was pretty much untouchable, which allowed the United States and the allies access to a secure and resource rich supply chain that helped lead to victory over the Axis powers.
In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.
In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.
If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.
I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Good analysis. I agree that China could consider targeting the US mainland, but in every scenario other than "crazed madman" I think they'll know that kind of thing inevitably ends up with symmetrical (or worse for them) destruction. It would be easy to get public support for massive retaliation if Americans see proof that China has no qualms about blowing up their home, workplace, etc. The fringe will say "Nuke China - it worked in 1945!" and the mainstream will say "Blow up every power plant and dam we can."
When the dust settles, China's killed a bunch of Americans, America has killed even more Chinese, and we're in the same place we were before. I don't think China's that dumb, and they're not that evil, either.
> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet.
Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs".
Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light infantry to try and take ground because everything larger doesn't survive (and the light infantry apparently survive for only 20 minutes on average). Russia's Black Sea fleet cowers in port under its anti-air defences and even then takes losses. Their long-range bombers are not being used in the long-range bombing of Ukraine's civilians, that's all down to cruise missiles, because they're too valuable to lose (and a lot of them have been destroyed on the runway by drones).
The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
> Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless
Depends on the application. The drones have to be manufactured somewhere. You need electricity. Running water. Industrial facilities. The big bomb still matters there.
> The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny. I think mechanized infantry will continue to have a place, they’ll just be augmented by drones. But who knows you could be right depending on how things develop.
I agree and upvoted you for a good comment with a good source.
In my mind I was thinking about how humans have to actually go back to the land. In Ukraine we’ve seen what amount to drone enforced no-man’s lands where no human can really seize or make use of the land. There of course can be the case where the drones clear the land of enemy troops and drones and then your own people or soldiers move and then occupy the land.
Sure but neither side has a B-2 or F-35. Drones are great for blowing up a few conscripts or a parked plane but a stealth bomber carrying 80 JDAMs can level 5km^2.
Hilarious. You realize the US could nuke and flatten Iran tomorrow, right? Do you imagine that Trump was trying to conquer Iran and just couldn't do it with all the American military power? There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA.
They were trying to overthrow the regime, for the second time in a year, and failed.
> There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA.
It actually depends on what the you the outcome of the war to be: total conquest or regime change.
The Us can probably achieve total conquest, but not regime change. They spent 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and left there without winning anything, especially in Afghanistan. If they wanted to erase Iraq and Afghanistan, that would have a been a totally different thing.
The internet never forgets: you go and find the first speech about why the war was started and look at the outcome. You can then judge for yourself if the war was won or lost. Obviously with all its nuances.
Russia is not using their drones in the same way that Ukraine is.
Russia cannot get conventional artillery close enough to use it properly, and Ukraine is keeping personnel away from the front line so they're hard to spot and harder to hit.
Russia is bombarding Ukraine's population centres with long-range cruise missiles. This is the failed Blitz strategy that Britain goaded Germany into during WW2 - get the enemy mad enough to bomb population centres, and not military or economic assets (Germany had almost achieved air superiority by bombing British airfields). Ukraine is leaving the population centres alone and focusing on economic and military production facilities.
Russia is losing this war. And has been for over a year.
That's the thing I don't understand: why would they try to nuke Moscow if they weren't the ones attacked? And would they risk their own demise (considering the imbalance in warheads between them and Russia)?
Yup. Because a country attacking another with nuclear weapons in its mad genocidal occupational war it started under false pretenses will definitely sit back and do nothing once it showed it can and will use nuclear weapons for any cause.
I think if there is no retaliation to a nuclear strike on Ukraine, every nuclear capable country will rush towards nuclear weapons as fast as possible.
The reason being, Europe has a long term understanding they are under the nuclear umbrella of the USA which means that Europe does not need to maintain their own atomic weapons. If that long term agreement does not hold, the only way to deter Russia is to have nuclear weapons of your own since you cannot rely on deterrence from other countries.
Once everyone has nukes, Russia can no longer bully countries around because they will glass Moscow. This is a worse state than today where Russia can invade countries using conventional weapons without much consequence.
Yup. A country that starts nuking other countries in a genocidal war of conquest will not ever be seen as a threat by any other countries and will not suffer any consequences ever.
Russia has already entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them.
I maybe missing something, but it feels bonkers to me of why with all the MIRVs they have on hundreds of nukes they do not feel the need to carpet bomb Ukraine with them.
What you're missing is a simple bext step in your thought process: why are you so entirely sure that Russia will not suffer any single consequence for doing so?
(also this assumes that russia actuall has hundreds of working nukes)
> What you're missing is a simple bext step in your thought process: why are you so entirely sure that Russia will not suffer any single consequence for doing so?
There could be consequences. But I am wondering how painful would they be and if the US would get into a nuking game with them. Would it be worth it for the west to become a wasteland just because there needs to be consequences for Russia.
> Edit: you have now replied many times with "I don't understand why Russia doesn't nuke Ukraine". Perhaps you should take the time to try and understand?
Hence the question here again and again: why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
> Would it be worth it for the west to become a wasteland just because there needs to be consequences for Russia.
In your scenario you're saying that Russia is going to show its willingness to lay waste to everything in its genocidal war, including carpet-bombing a country of 40 million people with nuclear bombs. Making it surpass any war in history, including WWII.
Again, in this scenario, somehow, everything just stops, everything is handy-dandy, Russia suffers literally no consequences, everyone just says "oh yeah, the genocidal maniacs are satisfied now, they will never ever carpet bomb anyone else with nuclear bombs".
> why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
Because, once again, you seem to assume that Russia will suffer literally no consequences externally or internally for doing so.
E.g. Russia will be immediately carpet bombed themselves since we already know that their air defenses aren't worth shit.
There was lots of discussion within Russian and Ukrainian war analytics that nukes (at least tactical) are useless in this war for the following reasons:
- they would not change much on battlefield - there is no large concentrations that you can nuke - everything is dispersed
- nuking urban centers again won't change much on battlefield but would alienate China
- Russia's equipment is known to be not most reliable/maintained and worst that can happen to Russia is them trying to nuke and nukes not working
Nuking all the major population centers would pretty much destroy the ability of Ukraine to manufacture weapons in any meaningful number and it would also deprive its army of any new soldiers, no reinforcements, no food supplies and so on. I think it will change the course of the war pretty fast and pretty drastically.
How poorly informed you are. A significant portion of Ukraine's manufacturing now happens abroad, out of Russia's reach. Meanwhile, a large part of its domestic production is decentralized and widely distributed. (You can easily find snobbish and pejorative comments by Rheinmetall's CEO about this.)
Nuclear weapon use would lead to no meaningful military success, but it would immediately alienate the superpower Russia depends on in almost every way. China will not tolerate any nation using nuclear weapons. With its extremely dense population, it can't afford a modern wartime precedent to be set for their use.
Because the point of the war was part of the plan to reform the Soviet Union under Russia/Putin.
The idea was to spend a few days, a couple weeks at most, taking Kyiv and the major cities, and then absorb Ukraine into a greater Russian state.
If they have to nuke Ukraine to make them do that, then that's not going to work. Absorbing a radioactive hellhole, with all the problems that will bring, isn't the plan.
Of course, the plan has gone badly wrong, and pretty much everything has gone the opposite to the way Putin wanted it do, so he could still nuke Ukraine just out of petty spite.
There is a very very large ocean between China and the USA, you cant just assume the lessons from the Ukraine-Russian war will transfer. It would be a completely different beast, and as OP said, missiles might play an important role for both sides. In such a scenario we might see both powers having most of their industrial base destroyed before any of their soldiers (or drones) come into reach of each other.
The system is useful for many reasons, not the least of which that it provides an easy way to avoid war crimes (which hurt the war effort via bad PR in partner countries). They award units 10x as many points (which can be redeemed for drones, HIMARS strikes, etc) for a capture that they do for a kill.
The asymmetric warfare that has been enabled by inexpensive drone tech has so many vast implications that I'm not even sure we've seen every possible avenue this could explore. If either side isn't willing to completely obliterate civilian manufacturing centers, it enables long-term protracted warfare without an obvious end.
On the other hand, even obliterating civilian areas might not be an "end game" in its own right if external interests were to keep flooding the front lines with drones. FPV capabilities make conventional guidance systems a little less important, and while fiber has its weaknesses and wireless systems can be jammed, the psychological aspect of never quite knowing when a drone could be waiting in the midst of one's unit is deeply unsettling.
Ukraine / Russia war is not a real war yet. It's a gentleman's war. If parties want to go all in, even without nuclear weapons it would mean a lot of civilian casualties. Millions would die. It's waiting for when this is gonna happen. Only then we know what real war means.
It's a real war but not a total war, and the degree is different per side.
I would say it's closer for Ukraine, which has implemented forced conscription, which is pretty far down the path to a total war. There are of course tactics and strategies they have not enacted, that's not obvious which of those would be beneficial to the war effort in a non obvious way. All wars but specially modern Wars have to balance the possibility of publicity blowback or the population giving up the will to fight
As a "sitting on my couch" war expert, I think future combat should be country level semi-organized guerrilla combat style. When every structure, forest etc. tries to kill you, it might changed the adversary's opinion on how much they want your land.
On the other hand, if they just want to kill you for the sake of killing you, that's another story and the enemy will probably resort to "carpet bombing".
Units can also collect e-points to purchase more equipment:
> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
Ukraine has severe supply shortages and budget limitations. I think the most important aspects to the system is pushing down acquisition decisions and cost internalization to the frontlines to maximize efficient use of funds, and the price signaling that occurs when leadership can instantly see how demand evolves. Earning points for kills seems tertiary to that. Presumably the idea is to incentivize and reward success, though medium-term it probably poses a greater reporting fraud dilemma than traditionally. There's nothing new about earning "points" for kills; warriors have always tallied their kills and displayed their numbers, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_marking, though the rewards were typically medals and accolades.
There is nothing new under the sun. You fail to address my clear moral objection with these irrelevant historical instances. It has no rhetorical value in this context.
The point was just that gameification is just a modern word that doesn't reflect any change in behaviors. Presumably you were familiar with these practices under previous descriptors. And your moral objections would have been shared by many millions before you, long before gameification was coined.
On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they can wage war without the same consequences as befell nations before. It's fundamentally the same err, IMO. So I take moral objection to the pretense that there's something morally novel to criticize. This stuff is what happens in war, always. And things can get way worse than this, and will get worse the longer we tolerate open hostilities among nations.
I think the difference is between:
1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness.
2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.
Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.
I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games - "20 tokens for this character!" feels better than $40), this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
Sorry for the rambley and extremely verbose reply but tbh it's absolutely horrifying and sickening to see as a fellow human, and I just wanted to get it out. (I'm obviously not saying Ukraine is wrong for wanting to protect territory - but it's the other aspects that are "awesome" (or awe-full?), in the wrong way of awe.)
Nobody in Ukraine is separated from the carnage, least of all the soldiers. The value in the points system is in communicating target priorities down the line. It's just another technological improvement in the vein of, say, the radio. All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people. But war is fundamentally dehumanizing. In fact, for most soldiers dehumanizing the enemy is a necessity, because otherwise they can't pull the trigger. The dehumanization to be worried about is the dehumanization of people from the perspective of non-combatants, especially those isolated from the war, like Americans.
Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence. In that sense having a professional rather than conscripted army should be much more morally repugnant than e-points. Again, no one in Ukraine is isolated from consequences in any meaningful way.
The Ukraine War is the most televised war in history. Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed. Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality, a reality which is only hidden from one's view by choice. (After a few videos that left me crying, I figured I saw enough to ensure I was dutifully more engaged with the reality than the typical non-veteran at a comfortable remove.)
If anything drones and the necessity of having to record a kill for "points" is arguably an improvement over traditional aerially bombardment. Being forced to watch people injured and killed comes with a greater cost, even for veteran soldiers. On HN we take for granted that, e.g., Facebook employees forced to sift through child porn continually pay a price no matter how long they've been at the job, yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game. That perspective betrays a certain callousness that is in some respect even more worrisome than these technological advancements on the battlefield.
Unfortunately I'm too tired to give a more thought out reply at this time of the night, but there were a few things I wanted to add.
To clarify at the outset, I full understand your view and partly agree with it.
I just had some thoughts, and was reminded of something while reading your comment.
> All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people...
> Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence...
These were also the results of the invention of the gatlin gun.
A gun made by the creator to save lives.
Of course, if you now can shoot 100 times as many bullets, you don't use 1/100th as many men, you just shoot 100x bullets.
Which... yeah. I wish I had a solution, but I don't. And obviously no one's going to ramp down their own death causing machines™ when the enemy has no incentive to. (Nuclear proliferation was probably only sucessful mainly because of the high level of difficulty in both the processes as well as material sourcing.)
> Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality...
I don't think the debate (at least not from my side) is over e points; it's more "shit, war's already terrible, and this is even more dehumanising".
> ...yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game...
I never implied that in the slightest. My ire is primarily directed at the people making the system, which almost certainly are folks at higher ranks - not the average soldier. I fully understand humans are human(e).
> Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed.
I have also watched many of these absolutely messed up videos; but I am absolutely not convinced that the e-points system reduces this suffering in any way. Psychological distance absolutely can make it "easier" to kill, and perhaps a man with a broken down tank was already effectively a "Hors de Combat" but if you shoot him you get 12 points, and...
Also I just wanted to add - I'm nowhere claiming this is a cushy job for Ukrainian drone operators who won't get PTSD due to it being via a screen.
In my original comment, I had said
> this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
I'm saying it's far closer to CoD. It's absolutely still fucked up, regardless of whether you're an operator or a family of someone on the frontline. But I'm not claiming it's identical to a game.
This post is so insanely out of touch with reality. What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country. Trying to project criticisms of the American drone program onto Ukraine in such an openly transparent and uncritical manner is the only thing sickening here. For your platitudes about humanity you clearly care so little about such a deadly conflict to have clearly done no research into the basic facts. The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious. But really it's the arrogance of this post paired with the professed humanity that is so unnerving. It's like you took an essay about America's drone program and just copied it into the Ukranian context with no critical thought or self reflection. That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.
> What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country.
And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
I'm talking about "Shit, it's bad to dehumanise war even more".
Are you saying "No, that's a good thing if your country is under attack"?
Because if you're actually wanting to say "It's a fucked up situation for them", then, yeah, I agree... and I've never said anything to the contrary? Are we on the same page then, or not?
> The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious.
So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
If you're saying "we shouldn't be crying about gamification because there are more important things as their country's at stake", well, there are more humans dying of hunger every day than in Ukraine, so therefore the EU should put all its funds supporting Ukraine into reducing global hunger? By that logic??
Please, if you're a grown adult, have the nuance and the maturity to show it. Multiple things can be issues at the same time, and calling one out doesn't make the other justified - because that's what it feels like you're accusing me of. And please feel free to correct me if I've said anything wrong (or if you disagree with any of my options.)
> I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
What does any of this mean? You think everyone in the military gets the same gear and capabilities and support? You think incentives don't exist in the military? You think rewards for units that are more lethal in war is a new phenomena? You don't think layers exist in the military to ensure that most people do not have to fight at the tip of the spear, and those that do get constant support from other elements? What are you talking about?
> Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
Oh ok so it's not new? But it "likely" started with American drone use in Iraq or something. Ok, explain to me how this started then? Why is the analogous situation? Because you see the word "drone" in the same sentence? Are you not aware much of human innovation around war is not putting yourself at risk when attacking an adversary? This is basically intuitive. Why did it start here instead of in the first conflict where tribes of men were beating each other to death with sticks before someone invented the sling or the arrow? Please tell me what version of combat you find most humanizing.
> But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points...
Um except they aren't separated from the physicality? It's people invading their own land? How can you make a claim about being separated physically or the "physicality" and from "incentives" and think pointing out their country is being invaded is a time to ask "And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?" What species of logic is this?
You: They are separated from the physicality and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games[...]
Me: Well no, it's not really like that at all. I mean their country is being invaded. Their families are dying. Their friends are dying. They liberate towns and find dead civilians. They endure bombing on their own civilian infrastructure. How on Earth could that be separated from the "physicality and incentives" re warfare? How could you ever compare going through that to a video game?
You: And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
Um buddy have you been playing too many of these games? What are you talking about?
I'm sorry how close do you want them to get? Are all attacks from the air dehumanizing or gamified? At what range does the humanization kick in? It's "CoD" unless what the Ukrainian runs across the frontline with a club to bludgeon a Russian to death? How many drone videos have you watched? Is your claim a Ukrainian would be less likely to take the opportunity at a clear shot at a Russian via a rifle than with a drone? Because they would fear for their humanity? Do you know how humans about to be blown up by a drone act? Suddenly the Russian invader is not so aggressive. And how are they separated from the incentives? You mean the incentive of stopping an army from invading their land and ending their nation and having domination over their families? The "points" is a scrappy formalization of a system. You think a Ukrainian soldier needs "points" to want to defend his country? Gee if I wasn't about to get this CoD style achievement I'd probably just let him go?
> So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
Yes, of course I'm saying that. The closest we've come "gamification of war" is having to suffer people like...
> That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.
Ps, if you're genuinely curious, I can share a link where I got Gemini 3.1 Pro (at max thinking) to analyse this chat as neutrally as I could. Seeing as Gemini had an easier time than you did, maybe it could give you some help?
This explains so much. I truly feel sad for you. The fact you think this is a point in your column tells me everything I need to know. I wish I had seen this before wasting my time with the other reply. Have a nice day buddy. Enjoy the chatbot.
I'm intrigued (but unfortunately not surprised) by the downvote.
I suspect it's primarily due to folks missing nuance/misinterpreting thing (and/or getting emotional and running off with it).
I ran a thread to analyse hidden/missed nuance - where I tried to be as "neutral" as possible (by never identifying myself), if someone's genuinely interested I can share the link. (Hint: Gemini 3.1 Pro at max thinking mode in AI Studio says others are missing a point/some nuance.)
Can you expand on that? There is a long history of warrior codes, just war theory, war crimes, etc. Certainly they have virtually always been followed imperfectly, but I'm not sure that means that they don't exist.
Note that capturing a live Russian soldier is worth 10 times more than killing one. Think about how that affects the incentives of Ukrainian soldiers. Avoid committing war crimes, get better gear for your team.
1. Even in the insanity of war, there are rules and ethics we collectively agree to (except Israel apparently with white phosphorus use). I find that gamifying taking human lives crosses the line.
2. Not every captured soldier of course, some don't even know where they are.
> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard.
Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.
The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.
This is silly. Elite units have always gotten better gear. If this is the part of war that causes you moral outrage I think you've got some rexamining to do.
Wow, very interesting fact. If a unit is performing badly due to lack of equipment, they won't get the points to get the equipment they need. I wonder if that's a problem in practice. I'll read up on it, very interesting stuff.
Basically yes. Ukraine has a big problem with soviet commanders who waste lives needlessly. The post Soviet younger commanders have much better reputations and use that to recruit, ie 'you can join my unit and won't be conscripted'. The popular and successful units grow and split into sub units. This way they dont have to fire the unpopular soviet era but politically connected commanders, they just slowly lose relevance.
I often think about how culture impacts efficacy. Hindering individuals through reconditioning of a hierarchical top down structure (follow orders unconditionally) limits collaboration, cohesion, and creativity often in situations where it's needed most. I understand the advantages of rapid decision making, but I often think about how if any leader in the chain makes a poor decision it loses the trust of those below. Tactical, creative, non-conforming, and adaptive reduces single points of responsibility and failure. While this might exist in pockets, it's far from the norm in most traditional environments and I'm curious what a culture shift like this might yield at a wider scale.
It’s a mixed blessing because while the competition should lead to better designs it also leads to massive fragmentation in the drones used which has negative consequences for maintenance, training etc compared to the Russian approach of making huge numbers of a few proven designs
I think the actual purpose of the market is to reduce corruption. When everyone has to publish prices and Pavel pays his mate 3x for the same drone it's easier to flag for auditing.
I posted this in another reply, but this is relevant to your point about the market place (deeper in article) and for the hacker news audience - the current Defense Minister for Ukraine is a 35 year old from the tech industry, Mykhailo Fedorov
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theo...
Tooth to tail is crappy PC/corporate-approved rename. The concept used to have a bunch of arrow and spear related names and a bunch of informal phallic counterparts all of which are better suited to the fundamental workflow of mechanized offensive operations.
The spear analogy dates at least as far back as 1940. Heavy mechanized units as the tip and then reinforcing units behind them, further units to secure flanks, logistics flow. From the metal differences across the head of a spear (something that people who have a passing familiarity of artillery or naval gunnery will be able to relate to) the finish of the handle to keep the wood in good shape the analogies basically write themselves. The dick jokes are an obvious follow on.
The driving force of peacetime military procurement and organisation is bureaucracy. Hence we see the real developments in military doctrine from Ukraine, Iran etc.
The US military knows full well the importance of logistics. TFA is somehow arguing for distributed distribution networks that are harder to track and attack. Why not advocate for improved defenses along the supply lines? Or is it down to percentages where just one good hit has large effect?
Knowing logistics is important =/= able to adapt logistics to modern environment. Last 40-50 years US adversaries couldn't really contest/degrade US logistics at scale. Article is suggesting with new tech, they probably could, and hence may have to redo the entire system for distributed survivability / operate under chaos. Aka 60/70% of the force (the tail) is going to have to change the way they do things. It's hard to make 60/70% of org change, especially the boring bureaucratic/logistics part built around predictability, who are going to want to stay predictable and insist everything is fine with these minor changes, until its not.
Ukraine is deploying AI enabled drones that require no fiber optic wires and no electronic tethering. They patrol autonomously and identify targets; a human authorizes the strike and they take out targets by themselves. This is the holy grail of modern warfare; destroy the enemy’s rear staging and logistics. If they don’t have fuel or ammo, they are a defenseless sitting target.
> It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.
well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
I wonder about the feasibility of an IFF-like mechanism at the level of individual soldiers. The drone could be designed not to attack when a nearby transmitter is broadcasting a prearranged encrypted code that's dependent on elapsed mission time or some other hard-to-spoof factor. Any humans caught out in the open without the IFF signal present are fair game.
I think you can do this relatively simply with infrared led lights. Imagine "Please don't kill me" remote controls. You are a bit more visible when broadcasting, but presumably you can be selective when turning it on.
You need some thing that the enemy cannot spoof. That means two way communication and a shared secret (public private key may count).
Then we need to ask what happens if communication itself fails? An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications. Either you do nothing in that case because there might be something you can't communicate with, or you kill your own people
I think one way communication should be sufficient together with a shared secret. It's probably less reliable compared to two way communication, but it should satisfy the criteria. IR visual pattern propagation will respect this. You don't have radio spectrum that is too prone to jamming, and if the drones are visual navigation/targeting based, if they can see you to acquire the you as a target, they can identify you as a friend as long as you can ensure emitters are not occluded from your side.
It's not perfect, but it's cheap and it should work.
Give me a couple hundred k and I can probably build the prototype, haha.
An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications.
The idea being that there is no communication to jam because the drone is fully autonomous. Given that, one needs a foolproof way for it to identify the enemy.
In this case the absence of communication would be what gives it permission to engage. Jamming the drone would not save you, but you could potentially make it attack its own forces if there happened to be any around at the time it comes for you. An IR beacon would make that very hard to accomplish.
You need hardware for these things. High speed image processing and high precision control and global shutter cameras. You can't just slap a raspi on it with any run of the mill camera and call it a day.
So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.
It's not as easy as plopping a new SW on it. Have you wondered why, despite this conflict dragging on for this long, autonomous targeting is still not common? It's just much harder to do, and doing it reliably is actually super hard.
Hw access is also not as easy as you think. Try getting a Pixel 9 class SoC board that you can actually dev stuff on, you'd be surprised how hard it is to get such a thing. And when you get it, it will probably be 2x as expensive for just the board.
Oh, put the Pixel 9 on it then. Have you tried doing optical flow on rolling shutter cameras?
Then, whatever solution you get, you need sufficient volume and reliable supply of the thing. Oh, you can't find the chip anymore? Good luck porting the stack you have since the pipeline is different.
Whereas these rc FPV drones you can basically build what what you find in the back of your drawer.
The main point of this paper is that rear area bases are too vulnerable now.
This paper is from West Point, and is the view from the Army side.
It's a big problem for air forces, too.
The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more. Iran has been hitting US air bases. In the last day, they've hit US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. That's just this round. There were previous hits a few months back. It's not publicized much, but it's no secret. It's hard to protect an air base against drones. Air bases are big, everyone knows where they are, airplanes are hard to hide from drones, and are vulnerable to small explosive charges. As Russia keeps finding out as Ukraine hits their air bases. There have been hits well inside Russia. Blast-resistant hangars in Crimea have been attacked. Don't leave a door open.
China is going in for airbase hardening in a big way.[1] This is sometimes called a "concrete sky" program. The USAF is way behind in the Pacific. Too many planes parked out in the open, or in weak hangars.
Active defenses against drones and missiles do work, but they just thin them out. Some get through.
If the attacker has enough manufacturing capacity, the defenses can be overwhelmed. Ukraine is currently building about 7 million drones a year.
Maybe the US should focus more on diplomacy and open collaboration rather than letting a few dozen psychopaths convince the country we need to support a war machine that has benefited no one outside of the defense industry.
If the problem was as simple as a few individuals and had no benefits it would not persist -- this is a Hollywood view of the world that won't help you understand your opposition.
No, it's quite simple. US imperialism only benefits the select elites of the country at the expense of the poor.
Why are you denying the absolutely destructive power of the US military and it's abject failure in not only making the world safer for Americans but explicitly more dangerous?
Are you personally benefiting from US imperialism?
This was not the point of GP's comment. The point was that your reductive take on the military-industrial complex as "a few dozen psychopaths" is simplistic and won't help you understand your opposition.
Also, please refrain from making personal allegations.
What diplomatic means should the United States (why the US and not others) take to stop Russia in Ukraine, stop Iran in the Middle East, stop North Korea, and stop China and its support for Russia or insistence of attacking Taiwan?
Certainly there is some room for negotiation and diplomacy and frankly I think we've tried that and tried it until it was clearly insane and then we still tried it. We (the west) tried to invite Russia to NATO and we opened up Europe to Russian gas. We tried the JCPOA with Iran. We have no clue what to do with North Korea. And we pushed for Chinese entry into the WTO only for them to backstab the west.
Conflating China with Russia is absolutely bonkers. No need to comment when you're already engorged on propaganda.
Also don't understand what point you're trying to make outside of the US being explicitly poor actors that ignore treaties, allies, and are willing to start wars to run cover for unpopular domestic leadership while causing the unnecessary deaths of millions of people across the world.
Also WTF does backstab even mean in this context? That China didn't bend over and allow US corporations to rat fuck their country dry? Who exactly benefits from enriching US corporations here? It's assuredly not US citizens.
I'm guessing with backstabbing he means China's practice of stealing technology and closing off the market for foreign companies.
Lots of smaller and mid sized companies that tried to invest in the Chinese market lost everything because the government protected and supported local copycats, with no intention of giving the foreign company fair access to the market.
And let’s not forget China’s helping of Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine by training soldiers [1] and providing dual use technology access.
It’s interesting how the OP that you responded to was quick to start slinging accusations of propaganda and react so violently without even asking a clarifying question. Well, let’s just say some of us read those comments with a little extra interest.
Okay and how does this materially hurt Americans? The elites in the US hoard all the wealth, US corporations doing well internationally means fuck all for the domestic citizens.
This is what I mean by how much of a farce this all is. Why should I care that China's steal IP? Chinese products are actually good + cheap to a consumer like me, all I see our corporations being unable to compete with an actual competitor that has a different view of the world + vision of the future.
Hard to see why I should be willing to sacrifice Americans to uphold corporations.
Iran routinely denied inspectors access to facilities. American intelligence isn’t 100% accurate. And why should we have to effectively pay off Iran or have some special deal where they hold the world hostage less they build a nuclear bomb? Why do we only have to do that with Iran but not other countries?
I’m all for diplomatic solutions to problems, but Iran was building nuclear weapons under our nose anyway and loading up on missiles and drones to make it difficult to impossible for the US to do anything about them without severe regional casualties. Nevermind Iran’s continued funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis and their support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
russia makes sense to the extent that they're attacking other countries unprovoked, but what are you talking about stopping China, North Korea, and Iran, from actually doing? Being successful? Improving their country? Existing?
He literally said it for China: stopping an invasion. I would add limiting political influence from autocratic governments that don't respect individual rights, but I know that's opening another Pandora's box.
- "autocratic government that doesn't respect individual rights" may describe china and north korea, but also describes the usa and israel over the last couple years (who have done more invading than china)
"The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea" - Mao
Guerrilla forces have to be popular, or at minimum, have the local population cowed. They're useful for kicking an oppressor out of your own country, but not for conquest.
I agree, or at least it feels insightful. Correct I can’t personally validate. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, or ask for more?
Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
>who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen
It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
Foreign military budget numbers are largely fake and can't be attempted to be believed. China's government spending isn't publicly released and can't be independently verified. A lot of what the US considers to be military spending falls into separate categories in China. At least on a purchasing power parity basis their actual spending is probably close to ours now, maybe even higher.
This is a good point that shows the weakness in a lot of these comparing military budgets. Imagine an example where one country spends $1000 per soldier and another spends $100k per soldier. IF they both field 100 soldiers. One budget is 100x the other, but by PPP they are equal.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
> A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
Yeah, between military (active, dependents, retired, et c), elected officials who get government-paid healthcare (in any level of government), government workers (all levels, city, county, state, federal), and school workers (primary, secondary, public colleges and universities), and Medicare (old people), and Medicaid plus CHIP (poor people), and probably some others I’m forgetting, the US engages in as much government per-capita healthcare spending as some peer states do on their national healthcare schemes… but without covering everyone. However, the government does already cover a huge proportion of the population, including some of the most expensive (old people), at least partially. And that’s not counting government spending on contractors that take some of that money and pay for their workers’ healthcare with it.
It’s just split up across thousands of different budgets, instead of one.
Yeah, this is true, and PRC is pretty explicit about this too. For those who pay close attention to stuff like this, the raw comparisons in dollars spent are just not that useful with PRC has developed entire industry infrastructure around swiftly swapping over to a military purpose.
Yes. I agree, although careerism in the military is maybe not that strong an influence; it is, for sure, but not that strong yet. Careerism in the political class is probably exactly as strong as you claim it is. However, I do hope there are sensible people within that group too, and they heed the underlying message.
How can you make this comment when the US military has literally created an entire industry that has served no single purpose outside of flagrant careerism? Like the military industry complex is a real thing and is almost 100 years old at this point, all it's done is make the world drastically unsafe while doing an immense amount of harm across the planet.
It’s written by folks who want to convince the military to do better.
The fact that the US wastes a lot of money on what’s likely a very ineffective military is not a surprise, surely. Yes, they should have a better logistics system for all that money.
It is kind of interesting seeing the ukraine war tiptoe from actually striking the tail in earnest. We see some attacks on moscow refineries in recent days, yes, but why not full scale targeting of total industrial collapse of the russian state? Similarly, why doesn't Kyiv look like Gaza?
I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined.
I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
Moscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
Plus deploying nukes would be a guaranteed escalation - after WW2 nobody has ever used nukes in war because of this.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
I think you're over-estimating the capability of both sides of the fight (absent nuclear weapons on the part of Russia). Both sides appear to be using drones and missiles as fast as they can manufacture them. One could argue Russia could be more selectively targeting industrial infrastructure - I don't know if their attacks on residential areas are an inability to target well or some kind of hope that demoralization will be effective - but Ukraine is, I believe, doing as much as they can to Russia's oil & defense sectors as they are able.
example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1]
Russia has been able to target Kyiv and destroy arbitrary apartment buildings the entire war. I've just spent a few mins searching through news articles over the years, there's a story of a destroyed Kyiv apartment in 2022 and one from 3 days ago now in 2026 of course. So why the stayed hand? Clearly Russia then and now is capable of reaching out and destroying Kyiv arbitrarily. I still believe they could have turned it into Gaza within mere days or weeks 4 years ago if they really wanted to. But clearly there are factors beyond their capabilities that prevent them from using their capabilities to the fullest extent. One might wonder what the US response would look like if Kyiv was actually destroyed and some 3 million were now refugees——american boots on the ground perhaps? Yugoslav war style joint coalition?
You're missing the point. Russia simply lacks the conventional missile production capacity necessary to flatten Kyiv. They used up most of their missile reserves early in the war and are now firing them off about as fast as they can build new ones. And it's not clear that they're able to accurately target individual buildings; some of those strikes appear to be random collateral damage. Russia is simply no longer capable of large-scale precision manufacturing; it's a relatively poor country with a broken tertiary education system and most of the foreign experts left years ago.
I think you underestimate Russia. The current state of the war is still in a gentlemen state. There are so many escalation steps left. From using chemical weapons to empty Odessa to closing the black Sea to let Belarus enter the war to destroy water systems to use bioweapons in all border area to mass invasion to destruction of all Dnjepr bridges to assissination of government personel to destruction of government buildings to sinking of western oil carriers to dropping nuclear bombs on London or Berlin . Really the current war is nothing yet
Nah, you just haven't been paying attention to recent events. Russia doesn't have any forces capable of closing the Black Sea. Belarus is sitting on the fence and while they provide Russia with some logistical support they're not interested in committing suicide by shoving their own small military into the meat grinder. Russia could probably kill a lot of civilians with chemical weapons but Putin still wants to capture Ukraine somewhat intact, and this would also likely trigger economic sanctions by neutral countries such as India. Russia has already made many attempts to assassinate Ukrainian government officials with very little success.
Russia is still dangerous but it's a pale shadow of the old USSR.
Gaza is about 1/20 the size of Kyiv, has 1/5 the population, has far fewer resources to fight back, and is much closer to its adversary. Kyiv is also just one city amongst dozens, making up less than 1/10th population of Ukraine.
The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely.
Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights.
> I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move to target Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state.
With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, Americans allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas). Thus, it is politics that holds the Americans back, and not the Iranian military.
For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit:
> To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations.
That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their un...
Dude, read some proper war news ffs. During a recent single night, those russian assholes send on Kyiv around 500 shaheds, 50 kalibr missiles, 50 of something else I dont recall etc totalling around 600 long range missiles/warheads/medium sized long range drones, each capable of significant damage due to big heavy explosive load. If they could they would send more, luckily russians and competence dont meet at the same room often.
If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day.
Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.
Given the defense budget recently doubled and they lose account of trillions of dollars, I guess I don’t see how they aren’t spending money on the tail.
Many complain on negativism in HN comments, but how in the world can a sane person express anything positive when there's a hell-bent will in conjunction with the "next war"?
I consider myself an optimist, but given that the US has been in 229 wars over it's 249 years since founding, it seems highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a "next war".
Not every country or tribe has been engaged in near continuous violence for over two centuries. That isn't simply "fighting many wars" it's being "existentially bound to warfare." The US is peculiar. It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder. It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war. It's the only nation to wage nuclear war, and did so primarily against civilians. It's (for the time being) the world's only superpower, with a military orders of magnitude larger than any other. It put the right to shoot people into its Constitution because its founders wanted a government that normalized regular revolutionary violence as a civic principle.
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
That's fair criticism. The US isn't that unique in terms of colonialist expansion in the New World and I honestly forgot about Haiti. I just knew that Britain managed to end slavery without a war but I forgot about Haiti and its uprising.
I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.
And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.
I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.
In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.
So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?
Are you under the impression that humanity could reach a state where there is never another major war?
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
People were starting to think that way at the "end of history" period between the Cold War and 9/11. At that time the major powers were not involved in wars, and it was believed that regional ones could be "solved" like Yugoslavia.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
Your concern is reasonable but misdirected. This article is a publication of the "Modern War Institute", a research organization at West Point, the US Army military academy; it is literally their job to anticipate and plan for the next war, whatever it may happen to be. Deciding whether those plans ought to be used is a completely different responsibility.
Change is not going to happen until it's forced. The US military was born as a force required to rebuff existential threats. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the gravitational center of the US military has been the profit margins of defense contractors. What creates the greatest profit? Centralization. Why have a dozen logistics centers when you can have one big one? A trillion dollar fighter program more efficiently absorbs tax dollars than half a dozen specialized vehicle programs from mid-sized companies. Why get congress to pay you to make cheap drones when you can get them to pay you to build $4M Patriot missiles? The MBAs have been riding the US military into the dirt for forty years and I don't think it's going to stop any time soon.
Isn’t the American military logistics the most decentralized supply chain in the world? Famously (perhaps apocryphal) _every congressional district_ has jobs in the military logistics supply chain.
I agree with your point but it's incredibly naive to identify "the MBAs" as scapegoat for this problem.
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
In that, I agree with you. Tbh it sounds almost socialist: The government pays a lot of money to employ lots of workers in really good jobs, with only a pretty modest amount of overhead (money earned by the investors of the contractors).
And then that stimulates the economy further as those people all spend that money, and the government gets a bunch of bombs and fighter jets out of the deal.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody (even the Ukranians) imagined that 5 years later they would have their own missiles hammering Russia 2500kms in the rear. Americans need to start accepting that a) the Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years and b) Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking.
> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years
The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
This is not. Avery charitable explanation, it it takes politicians at their word during a war. (One should not do that, and you can refer to Putin’s language at 2022 as a parallel example to Trump’s)
The initial US goals clearly were:
1. Regime change
2. Denial is f nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only be current capability.
According to The Economist, the Iranian theocracy is no longer in power, the IRGC is. Still, not the regime change Trump was hoping for, that's for sure.
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
Forgive me its been a while since I read about Irans political structure, but my understanding is that the IRGC is supposed to take over in times of succession crisis, and sort of take any measures to guarantee the islamic revolution.
The test is supposed to be that they hand back power sometime after the crisis.
If you assume Khamenei Jr is still unwell, and there's still a spot of bother regarding what his succession would look like, and the civilian government is still a bit in shambles, the IRGC taking over seems very easy for them to justify. Whether they hand that power back willingly is another matter that remains to be seen.
The problem here is that Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
> Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
Your statement actually makes the way out of the spiral very explicit: Trump must stop being in power.
Once you've lost something (I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship) then even if you cant win, you also cant leave else its an admission of defeat - so it drags on and on and on.
>It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history.
Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand.
Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted to use that to gain influence. (of course not literally everybody, but this was a prevailing force)
The implication here I'm disagreeing with is that the war was the unintended consequence of mistakes. Instead of mistakes leading the continent down a dark path it was intentional, just waiting for an excuse to start fighting.
It is well documented in France as well. It was seen as a revenge for 1870. There was quite a bit of enthusiasm. At least initially, before the killing started in earnest and people got stuck in the trenches.
Stefan Zweig famously wrote a lot about it in his memoir, and he describes being in Austria and the general excitement in the lead up to and beginning of the war.
I think the current leadership in Tehran is pragmatic enough to want to avoid that. Of course, the longer this drags on, the more likely they are to be replaced by hard-liners
I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.
If that's the goal then the US and Israel are doing their best to stop it from happening. Iran is responding to provocations. Stop provoking them, no more blown up ships.
Initially it's unclear what the goal was. But now the goal must be opening the strait of Hormuz ASAP. There's going to be serious economic fallout if that doesn't happen[0]. It remains to be seen how realistic that goal actually is. Iran has big advantages in their favor.
No, unfortunately, because circumstances change. It was unbelievably stupid to attack Iran, and everyone involved knew this might happen, but now that it has happened it needs to be dealt with one way or the other.
It can't be, because if that was the goal they'd just stop attacking. The strait was open until they sneak attacked Iran. Everyone seems to be in agreement that as part of a ceasefire the strait will open. Iran has shown no particular interest in closing the strait except as a war tactic. The US clearly does not have the power to control or open the strait militarily, its been months now. They appear to be outclassed.
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
Iran charging tolls is not an acceptable definition of an "open" strait.
All the stuff about China's energy supply... it's not that deep. Y'all are trying to believe Trump is playing 5D chess when he's demonstrably shit at checkers.
What is the alternative here other than acceptance exactly? It seems pretty reasonable. Trump doesn't look like he's actually going to compensate them for the sneak attack and all the bombing runs; they have to make the money up somehow as all that destruction looks expensive. And they need a source of funds ASAP to arm up before the US comes back.
But it does imply at some level attempting to achieve them. At every stage of the war the US has taken (and continues to take) action that is more likely to close the strait than open it. To the point where people were pointing it out how this would game out years before the war actually happened.
It is possible that the US military is so incompetent that they can't plan or that Trump has lost touch with reality. But then their goals would just be incoherent and incomprehensible. Assuming they have coherent goals and some capacity to work towards them it is clear that an open strait is at best a very low priority one.
You say Trump has "lost" touch with reality as if he ever had it. He comprehends that opening the strait is important but utterly lacks the mental or emotional capacity to understand in any level of detail what that requires.
Trump has clearly stated many times the goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. Many times. Repeatedly, again and again, and all negotiations are directed towards that first and foremost.
Just the other day at the NATO summit he seemingly claimed Iran's nuclear program is so damaged the'll never be able to build a bomb. So, mission accomplished? Nothing the guy says is credible..
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
I'm not sure anything is a distraction from the Epstein files. I don't think the administration cares about the Epstein files. What would be the fallout if they were all released? We already know that a lot of wealthy people were raping children. It's not like the US is going to prosecute.
Someone's name appears on it more than the word "God" does on the bible, according to the press. I think a tangible confirmation of that, and the deeds that occurred, and the fact Epstein was a Mossad agent with Russian ties would send a lot of things crumbling.
Did Bondi not say on camera that if the list was released "the system would collapse"?
Because Trump likes being antagonistic. And the notion that plundering America is just a distraction from the files is itself a convenient distraction from the plundering of America.
> Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
I never got the logic of this conspiracy theory. If you’re trying to make money insider trading off some events, wouldn’t you want markets to be open when the events occur? You’d like to be able to enter and exit your position immediately before and after any news breaks. Markets being closed when a deal is announced makes it less efficient to trade on that news.
Rights. I think trump announced at least 50 times that a peace agreement was made. Only to be broken a few days later. He and his family are constantly pumping and dumping. He is a mafia mobster. Equals to Adolf Hitler. He need to be removed to make the world better.
You're calling it a "conspiracy theory" despite loads of evidence of insider trading, both traditional and crypto, by Trump and his cronies?
Do you think the Trump-Epstein connections are just a "conspiracy theory" as well?
1) Someone in the administration is leaking news soon before it’s announced, enabling insider trading. This is obviously supported by the evidence from markets.
2) The administrating is scheduling world events as part of a larger conspiracy to do enabling insider trading on specific predefined dates. Markets moving a few minutes early doesn’t provide evidence that this is happening.
Statements like: “There is a reason why these ‘peace’ deals are always announced on Fridays” imply the second (and aren’t even objectively true).
Lmgtfy: there are many articles and plenty of analysis available. Trades are happening on prediction markets minutes before Trump announces market altering information, trades that only make sense when you know that Trump is about to make an announcement.
I’m specifically referring to the claim that news being released when markets are closed is evidence of insider trading (replying to the comment “There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays”). The link doesn’t mention that, but I’m still interested if anyone has an explanation!
This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently. Every country with a port on the other side of the strait is going to lose access. This might not be a tolerable situation to those allies of ours and they also have the ability to force the war to drag on. Maybe we walk and pull out from our bases in those countries. maybe they suck it up and live with paying tolls. but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
Regognized by whom? This is very one sided view, obviously US sided.
This kind of shit or excuses could not be pulled if we would be talking about gulf of mexico for example.
US is not center of the world and rest of the world means >95% of mankind, rest of the world is pretty fed up with that unfair treatment and things are changing. Very slowly, but steadily.
Iran signed UNCLOS 1982 which most countries signed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_United_... in which Iran stated that only parties that signed are entitled to free passage through its maritime territory, except for warships etc. This was accepted by all. The US did not sign.
> but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently
Who cares? International law is quite clear. But regardless, the world really doesn't have a say so long as Iran (& likely Oman in the end) wants to enforce this view.
> but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
...and the strait will still be closed. It just makes zero sense.
> This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
It takes one party to start a war, but it takes (at least) two to end it.
The war ends when all involved parties agree that it ends, not because one party is tired of it.
The only way the US alone can end the war in Iran is to ensure complete surrender, and then stay put for 20 years like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave like a thief in the night and things reverts to what they were before, only with more local hate for the US than was already there (as most islamic states sees the US as the great devil).
I think most European nations learned their lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those were NATO operations btw. Article 5 was invoked for Afghanistan, but the NATO contribution was limited to a naval operation and patrolling of US airspace. NATO is a defensive treaty, not an aggressive one. The actual ground invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq was done by a US led coalition of the willing, and when the US started the Iran war, most european leaders openly declared that this was not europes war.
> the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine!
Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have succeeded. But you are never going to regime change a people who know with certainty that they will be butchered/raped/tortured by their supposed "saviors" the Israelis. There is literally nothing worse than surrendering to Israel.
the prevalence of secular jews in the state department makes them completely unable to read islamic countries. it's the third time this happens in a decade
by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology
the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
Indeed, and this breed of arabist has been relentlessly pushed out of the department since the 1960s which is why we are in the mess we are in
there's a devilish mess of evangelical wasps secular jews actual jews irishmen and not a single person who has read more than two lines about islam let alone convert into it
islam has been treated like communism or socialism ie somthkng you can root out in exchange for walmart and free stuff. thats not it. muslims are willing to die for it and they will prove it again and again, and no amount of conventional weaponry will bring afghanistan or iran to its heels for long
> The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
If it's continue 5 years, the country connected to this war in this region will go fast downstairs and maybe even end in a broken state.
I don't sympathies with any monarch country there, but no one wants more unstable countries, especially in the Arabic region.
I'm just a layman, but the goal seems obvious to me. First it's not US/Iran but US + Israel / Iran. From Israel's point of view, I assume the goal is the preemptive destruction of Iran's military capabilities (especially nuclear weapons).
People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen. Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine? Why not fire off a littany of missiles? Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
Scale doesn't really matter with an air force. The IAF is much, much stronger and more competent than the Russian Air Force. Plus, the Israelis are bombing defenseless cities (in Lebanon), and getting a lot of help from the US (in Iran).
Ukraine has a proper army with proper weapons and strong foreign support; Gaza only has a bunch of militias with outdated arms and makeshift rockets. Obviously, fighting Gaza is easier than fighting Ukraine.
To be frank, you seem to have a cartoon's idea of war.
US is the only country that maybe has a capability to carpet bomb someone to rubble. Russia has always preferred to do it with Artillery anyway, which they have done to many many Ukrainian cities.
A prolonged strategic bombing campaign that can "Wipe a city off a map" takes weeks, hundreds of bombers, and tens of thousands of tons of explosive, and either air supremacy to protect your bombers (not sufficient against a target with SAMs) or the ability to build hundreds of those bombers fresh.
Literally nobody can do that anymore. America can maybe do that once or twice. Only 60ish B52s even remain.
Russia has no ability to carpet bomb anyone anymore. They have only a handful of operational strategic bombers left and little or no capability to manufacture new ones. Much of the USSR's old heavy aircraft supply chain was in Ukraine. So Russia is unwilling to risk their aircraft in defended airspace because they need to preserve them as part of their strategic nuclear deterrent triad.
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII.
Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate.
Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit.
The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues.
It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours.
This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
Other than nukes, Russia does not have significant spare capacity. They use missiles and drones with months of their production. They fly bomber aircraft as close to the front as they can. They've burned through most of their cold war era stockpiles of equipment. 0.5-1% of their entire population is a casualty of this war (so probably closer to 5% of their working age men).
> People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP. Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
You cannot mass troops easily in the days of satellite and targeted long ranged missiles. They mass 20 million troops but they have to transport them down supply lines and house them all to get them close to the front. They'd be picked apart.
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
So if the Iran war is still going on in 5 years the global economy has collapsed. I'm not sure people realize just how quickly this situation is going to be dire. 2-3 months more of this and certain countries are going to have rolling blackouts. We will be having shortages of avgas and huge price spikes in avgas, gas and diesel. Diesel in particular is going to have a massive impact on inflation.
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
Russian goals are vastly different from US'. US has no intent to incorporate Iran or fight out for each and every mountain village. US goals might not be easily achievable either but for completely different reasons. Iran is also unlikely to get 10% of the logistical support Ukraine has.
US may not take Iran under them, but they will grip the Iran's economy by controlling their oil and gas resources. It is what US doing in Irque, all oil sales going through bank of New York, they not only take cuts from sales but also make threats like we would not send dollars if you did not do this and that.
US involvement in the Middle East has ruined those countries. It is not a just middle east where ever they involve they ruin others ex: Trump's Congo deal which locked in their mineral for decade without any benefit to poor Congos
A limited view of the threat. All very well worrying about keeping your armored brigade combat team fueled up, but that won't be much use when the same weapons that threaten the logistics have destroyed all the Abrams and Bradleys that use the fuel.
The Army is still under the delusion that its possible to win a peer conflict, not having learnt the lesson of the cold war there will be no winners in this hypothetical fight.
This piece seems logical and correct. It also seems entirely AI-generated, but I suppose we've moved into a world where that's just the way content is now.
> If history provides the theory, the ongoing war in Ukraine offers a brutal contemporary lesson: Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics, not when they run out of weapons.
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
If you know your military history, it's a lesson military planners learn with essentially every war that is then forgotten when the next generation of military planners and politicians come along.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
>the difficulty of transporting extremely heavy 155-millimeter artillery shells and guided multiple-launch rocket system pods across contested oceans and degraded theater road networks
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
According to Zelensky, there will be drones capable of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers within a couple of years. The US mainland is definitely at risk of drone attack in the near-medium term, IMO.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
I did some digging,reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane.
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
I have a friend whose dad finished his engineering career at SABRE (he retired some years before it shut down). According to him, the original concept wasn't far-fetched, but that they didn't crack some manufacturing / materials issues. He thought they should have continued to work on those, instead of redesigning to avoid them. He had retired by the time we spoke about it, and I don't know the particular model / design to which he was referring. If that's accurate, then possibly materials technology / manufacturing techniques have matured to the point that the "simpler" design he preferred could be feasible. That's all second-hand speculation, so take it with a dose of salt, but a short timeline might be reasonable.
North Korea and Iran both have orbital launch vehicles. If you can put something in orbit, that's most of the way to putting something in Times Square or DC.
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
Balloon-lofted drones seem more likely as a means for even a minor military power to strike deep within a country.
These can be launched in mass, cheaply. They're difficult to detect and/or distinguish (weather balloons are already common), and easy to cloud with dummy balloons, perhaps dangling aluminium paper to enhance radar signatures.
The drones themselves could use optical+inertial guidance, and have either minimal propulsion or be entirely glide-based. Given prevailing high-altitude winds (generally west-to-east in mid-northern latitudes) strikes could be launched many thousands of miles from targets with minimal or no fuel / propulsive storage use.
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
It could be attacked easily via an alliance with Mexico or Canada. The premise that such a thing could never happen is not a good one for military planning.
I was puzzled by this: "...the Army must reinvest in up-armoring its logistical fleet. While adding armor reduces payload capacity and increases fuel consumption, violating the peacetime gospel of efficiency, it is a mandatory trade-off for survival." Where are the armored vehicles now in Ukraine? I don't hear much about them, and I thought that was because drones can find the weaknesses in armor. Instead the emphasis now seems to be on rapidly moving logistical vehicles (and even, for the Russians, on hand-carried "stuff", which seems unlikely to be sustainable). Can someone who knows more than I do comment on this?
And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size.
It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
> But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
This is a spitball, but there are several hundred thousand ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea. Even if the Ukrainian war machine wanted to commit genocide (unclear if this is true or not, at least to me), they would be at least partially genociding their own people.
Well they did already try and blow it up at least so that thought must have not crossed their mind. One wonders why they don't continue trying to blow it up though.
> But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
It's not as easy as it sounds to put the weight of ordnance required in the very tight windows that would be needed to actually cause more than cosmetic or minor damage to that bridge.
Ukraine did pull off a spectacularly successful operation to destroy a laden fuel truck while it was crossing the bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Crimean_Bridge_explosion)... Russia repaired the damage within months and simply redirected fuel transport to other means.
Russia also has dedicated a large amount of air defense and EM jamming resources to protect the bridge, which increases the difficulty of pulling something off for Ukraine.
For a long time Ukraine didn't have the types of weapons that would be needed to even attempt it outside of saboteur types of actions. Now they have some precise ordnance like Storm Shadow but even these weapons are not destructive enough to take the bridge down except in large quantities, and those are quantities they seem to have decided are best put towards other targets.
Ukraine has recently seen substantial success in finding better weapons, with drones that can engage in "medium-range" scenarios to close off the so-called land bridge from Russia to Crimea. These weapons have also helped in degrading Russia's own defenses, but with this in mind Ukraine may feel it best to leave the Kerch bridge standing for now to allow Russian occupiers to flee across the bridge back to Russia, since Ukraine has the northern land route through occupied territories under much more effective fire control than at any point since 2022.
Holy cow, they've reinvented the armoured trains from the Civil War (late 1910s to early 1920s). In ten years, everything changes, yet in 100 years, nothing does.
"A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?"
Well, that's what I meant, where are the Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. Because I consider the areas that Russia occupies to be temporarily occupied Ukraine.
Although you (I) could ask where the armored vehicles are that the US and other countries gave to Ukraine. For awhile, Bradley Fighting Vehicles (lightly armored) and M1A1 Abrams were making a lot of news (I think the former were doing surprisingly well, and the latter not as good as expected). But lately I have heard very little about either, or about other armored vehicles that were given to Ukraine.
The most common truck used by the US army has no armor. The author is saying they need to be up-armmored despite the additional weight and fuel consumption; that is the "A2".
I would not underestimate the power of a fully mobilized USA. If we really need to, we can do a lot of things that would die to bureaucracy in peacetime - see WWII.
I read there was actually significant war exhaustion among the public towards the end, contrary to the patriotism lens this time in history is frequently shown with. There was also a lot of effort to censor what was actually happening in the war from the public, both in terms of press coverage and in screening soldier letters to home. I'm not sure how long the american war machine can actually last. All the post WWII wars are characterized by significant public war exhaustion. And these days you are going to have the other side posting on social media POV videos of american soldiers getting decimated by drones.
Both I'd say. These were both large issues for morale during Vietnam with how that war was increasingly documented and stretching on quite long with no real victory condition.
I wonder when the use of 'culminate', v. "reach a climax or point of highest development" for "cease to be effective" became the standard in military-related writing when trying to sound smart. The original usage in the specific context of an army's advance or offensive coming to an end made some sense but it's now used as basically a wordy synonym for "stops" in any context.
Not to mention the closing paragraph of the article essentially says the same thing 8 times - for such a well written paper the closing paragraph was a real disappointment in my eyes. Overall though, good write up.
I think a linear battlefield is one in which there is a "front line", which was a given for prior wars but maybe not as much anymore. Future wars might see adversarial forces mixed among each other spatially more than in the past.
What’s missing - the cost of armoring and weaponizing logistics. Maybe easier to invent a new “startup” logistics than replace the old - especially when he talks about a new autonomous delivery in kill zones.
Air power relies on fuel and maintenance and runways. It's not necessary to contest the skies if the adversary can destroy the "tail" that supplies the aircraft.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
The entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
I agree with you--but just fyi I think "antifragile" is generally used in the opposite to what you mean. If I'm remember correctly Taleb has tried to coin it as a precise word to describe the inverse of your phenomena: Systems that prioritize robustness, and therefore can handle stress, over optimizations.
Does the US have any initiatives to fix this? Like I keep hearing about reshoring manufacturing but is there actually a concerted effort? It seems like we get a major plant announcement every now and then for some behemoth but is there anything targeted for the SMB or startup space?
China has missed their window of opportunity, sadly.
For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.
For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.
No serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.
That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war. If there was political will, then the area around the Hormuz strait would’ve been seized, as well as the nuclear sites secured. Carpet bombing, too, not just surgical strikes.
It's not merely that the US has not, will not, and/or can not put boots on the ground.
It's that regional bases and sea-based platforms from which the US has operated with impunity in previous conflicts, as recently as a decade ago, are no longer safe from retaliation. This puts the US, its forces, and perhaps more significantly its friends and allies in the region at risk in both the present and any future conflict(s).
I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there. especially since rocket launches tend to be extremely static.
More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.
> I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there.
Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.
The prospect of cleanup duty has never stopped anyone at war. Fields of landmines maiming children for decades, unexploded ordinance in cities, etc etc.
Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.
Unclear how China will react to orbital/near-orbital launches that track near/over China in a hot war situation.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
I'd bet China would like nothing more than the USA basing its future war strategy on Starship, with its long history of fictional timelines and capacities.
If decisions are actually being made based on analogies instead of analysis, the whole thing is brittle.
The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe.
But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends.
The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
Not sure we need to wait for the next war. The Iran war has shown some pretty major holes in US military (mostly Navy) logistics already when they aren’t picking a fight with someone who can’t fight back at all.
Serious question: does Figure 1 in the article make sense to anyone? If you understand the symbols, do you look at the diagram and it's clear how logistics works?
Yes. It depicts how supplies arrive at a port, move via roads to a logistics organization that is brigade-sized, assigned to support a corps. It depicts the subordinate units within that logistics organization (the Army calls these "Sustainment Brigades"). From there supplies go to the corps's subordinate divisions. Within one of those divisions, the supplies go to/between sustainment batalions. From there, supplies go to support battalions and maintenance companies at the division's subordinate brigades. Also, along the top you can see supplies delivered from outside of the AO directly to airfields within a Division Support Area. They can also be moved via air from Corps-level airfields. The icons there depict medium and heavy lift utility helicopters.
This has been true for as long as war has been a thing. The Army logistics won’t break, it’ll adapt, because that’s what war machines do. What’s good today isn’t good tomorrow. It’s a nice piece but nothing Sun Tzu or a good game of hearts of iron couldn’t teach you.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadI'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point.
> The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined. In modern warfare, the tail is the primary target. If the tail is severed, the teeth are rendered useless.
It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
[1] https://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/vtproximityfuze.htm
https://airmail.news/arts-intel/highlights/masters-of-disgui...
Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex.
That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.
1. In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either - Bear in mind that I doubt China would ever want to destroy TSMC though, so I'm talking about a naval blockade rather than artillery destroying the fabs.
2. Although SOTA chips are off the table, we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips. We had great missiles in 2015.
China has enough domestic electronics production to not care. Also, in the event of a war they would probably stockpile necessary parts.
> we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips.
If the factories producing those chips are still operational. Otherwise you end up in the exact same situation as Russia, for example. They have some barely functioning old factories producing extremely outdated chips on foreign equipment.
Maybe this will change in future, but the US still has enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity to produce a few million chips for drones.
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.
But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.
The paper doesn't mention Ukraine at all, yet it's all about the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting.
[1] https://dset.tw/en/research/000491-2/
[2] https://www.technology.org/2026/03/17/japan-might-sell-weapo...
Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.
As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.
Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperation with Ukraine is because Ukraine figured out how to stop Russia. Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
Their success in the conflict is not guaranteed.
Wars of this kind never have winners. Russia also lost too many soldiers to celebrate anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kyiv_(2022)
It was the failure of Russian logistics and the triumph of Ukrainian logistics that beat them back.
There were no 24/7 airlifts of criticql weapons and equipment at any point in this war.
Ukraine was expected to fall quickly, and any help it needed started arriving very reluctantly, very slowly, in small batches stretched over months and years of deliveries much much later.
You may be confusing European support and their lack of it (remember the famous time Germany just sent 45,000 old helmets?) with how the United States and United Kingdom helped.
For example this was published in April 2022. Some of this equipment had already been delivered to Ukraine via airlift before the war even started: https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2992414/fa...
Was this before or after the current usa president was infamously recorded trying to extort corrupt personal favors from Ukraine as a quid-pro-quo, in exchange for giving Ukraine those javelins, and got impeached for it?
Western support at any scale didn't arrive until later in the year.
- the two packages promised in March were delivered by April, all pushed via conventional transport through Poland and Romania (IIRC deliveries didn't start until at least mid-March, and by that time Ukraine was already suffering heavy losses, logistics collapses etc. )
- there's a nebulous commitment to <list of weapons> which we know barely trickled in as US committed, then withdrew, then commited, then withdrew support, then claimed Ukraine was too stupid to use these weapons, or that it would lead to escalation, or...
That is why Russia quickly reached Kiev, and Ukraine still can't win the war? Because there were inhales, screams MULTIPLE YEARS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS?
> Without UK SOF and their initial deployments of anti-armor weapons, there is a good chance Russia would have gotten much further.
No one denies that there were Western Weapons in Ukraine. What is bullshit is that they were somehow airlifted 24/7 during initial phases of the war. They decidedly weren't. Neither before the invasion, nor during the first days. Nor, indeed during any phase of the war.
Something tells me that "trip by land to Kiev" is not "airlifted 24/7 into Ukraine" but exactly what I said several times already
>> In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons
Please do go on quoting literally the same sentence:
--- start quote ---
NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military cargo planes so they can make the trip by land to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities.
--- end quote ---
Strange how the totally prepared FOR YEARS special operations were left scrambling to deliver enough weapons before projected logistics collapse.
Oh no, the poor innocent Russia that is currently in year 5 of its totally innocent blameless war it's waging. "Hitler did nothing wrong" vibes.
All Russia has to do to stop its soldiers from dying and its economy from being destroyed is to get the fuck out of Ukraine.
To stay within its borders. And that counts for the others on this planet, too.
alternatively, there's a Dennis Ross piece out pointing out that China's procurement patterns over the years suggests they are not seriously thinking of invading Taiwan, they just want everyone to think that way...
That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational.
With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. With Russia, it is Putin's dream of restoring "Greater Russia". With China, it's the dream of re-unification with Taiwan on one side, and reversing what is seen as a land grab by back-then Czarist Russia in Outer Manchuria. With Trump it is the desperate desire to be beloved (and the desire of his Project 2025 handlers to turn the US into an ethno-christo-nationalist state). With Ben Gvir and Smotrich in Israel, it is the desire to wipe out anything Palestinian.
And the result of these madmen was and is an untold amount of needless suffering. There is no reason at all to not believe what China is openly saying [1] and to prepare accordingly. Better be prepared than be sorry.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/xi-jinping-vow...
They might be wrong like any human, but they aren't cartoon villains.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/mirage-chinas-military-...
China will never invade Taiwan, but they will unite politically one day.
"Putin's list" is a dishonest meme, just like the "rules-based international order" that the Western nations supposedly embrace.
There is no such list, and there are no such rules. There is only deceitful propaganda used to justify geopolitical ambitions. Don't spread it.
China could just bomb Taiwan into submission if it chooses to. I don't think it is a problem for China to build 20-30k ballistic missile and launch them at Taiwan. Or send a million drones over there just to be sure nothing survives them.
Taiwan is, unfortunately, in a very precarious situation should China decide enough is enough and reunification must happen no matter what.
2. Taiwan and Taiwanese allies also have agency. China doesn’t just get to fire 20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan with no consequences. The consequences would maybe be asymmetrical, but they’d no doubt be very painful for China.
2. Yeah, dunno about that, who will do what exactly to China? I also think that, since you mentioned it, Japan would intervene, China will pretty much use it as an excuse for retribution on what the Japanese did to the Chinese during WW2.
China is constrained on this by near certain mutually assured economic destruction.
Even the food supply in China would basically be destroyed unless you believe that the population is going to just go back to a diet of largely rice with meat being a luxury.
20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan would cause a global depression that dwarfs the great depression. There would be almost no way the CCP survive this. That is why this subject is mostly people talking nonsense.
Reunification has to happen politically, persuasively, over time and without firing a shot.
No, we're not ;) They are where they are because they lease the ground under a NATO base, WHICH is actually doing the job. Not the Polish government.
Whis has been a very unreliable partner for the last 4 years, constantly using their geographical position to push Ukraine into submission and leverage their own political interests for internal and external programs.
> geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive, if not thrive
As long as Ukrainian military power is there, the region is safe. That's why the Baltic and Northern countries are investing so much in Ukraine + constantly taking our war experience.
In general, are they being useful? Absolutely yes. Do we need to include them in any discussions? No, since they are already misusing their position. Plus telling everyone how useful they are. Like, in case anybody can forget.
It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.
If I were Xi, I wouldn't do that; I would just blockade them. You can get the same capitulation (hopefully) without firing a shot.
Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.
DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.
[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"
But honestly, I don't think China wants Taiwan "reunification" quite as much as they want to have their economy be prosperous and, just as importantly, not to have millions of people die on both sides. If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure. But I expect non-war outcomes somewhat more than I expect war.
I recognize this is a big bet on the ethics of perhaps a small group of important CPC decision makers, but I do bet on that. Xi Jinping is no Hitler, no Stalin.
We see high quality tech products coming out of the countries and assume that they're very good at building things. In fact they are extremely good at managing complex supply chains going in and out of PRC, while keeping certain high value add parts of the business within their own countries.
You think NATO would stand there with open arms in such a case? NATO membership requires agreement from all member states, and I don't sense a great appetite among the European countries for a war with China.
I agree with the overall point of your post though.
It is a heavy importer of petroleum, food and fertilizer, and if there's ever a sustained shortage of those things, Chinese young men are likely to start revolting and rioting like they've done dozens of times in Chinese history in response to food shortages. China relies on foreign nations for approximately 75% to 80% of its total iron ore consumption, making it the world's largest importer. Despite having had semiconductor manufacturing self-sufficiency as a top national priority for many years, it is still the case that Chinese smartphone manufacturers rely heavily on Samsung and TSMC for the SOCs that go into those smartphones -- and MediaTek (Taiwan) and Qualcomm (US), not Chinese firms, designed most of those SOCs.
Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues that the United States is the only major global power fully capable of national self-sufficiency.
Even then, a custom supply chain can be set up domestically. You'll probably have to limit the number of variations for these servos and motors, but you can produce them even manually if you absolutely have to.
In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.
In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.
If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.
I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
When the dust settles, China's killed a bunch of Americans, America has killed even more Chinese, and we're in the same place we were before. I don't think China's that dumb, and they're not that evil, either.
Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs".
Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light infantry to try and take ground because everything larger doesn't survive (and the light infantry apparently survive for only 20 minutes on average). Russia's Black Sea fleet cowers in port under its anti-air defences and even then takes losses. Their long-range bombers are not being used in the long-range bombing of Ukraine's civilians, that's all down to cruise missiles, because they're too valuable to lose (and a lot of them have been destroyed on the runway by drones).
The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Depends on the application. The drones have to be manufactured somewhere. You need electricity. Running water. Industrial facilities. The big bomb still matters there.
> The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny. I think mechanized infantry will continue to have a place, they’ll just be augmented by drones. But who knows you could be right depending on how things develop.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
That's changing
In my mind I was thinking about how humans have to actually go back to the land. In Ukraine we’ve seen what amount to drone enforced no-man’s lands where no human can really seize or make use of the land. There of course can be the case where the drones clear the land of enemy troops and drones and then your own people or soldiers move and then occupy the land.
Oh wait, no, the other thing.
They were trying to overthrow the regime, for the second time in a year, and failed.
It actually depends on what the you the outcome of the war to be: total conquest or regime change.
The Us can probably achieve total conquest, but not regime change. They spent 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and left there without winning anything, especially in Afghanistan. If they wanted to erase Iraq and Afghanistan, that would have a been a totally different thing.
I have to wonder what your definition of "winning" is.
My god man, Vietnam vets are still alive. You can talk with them today. There is no reason to forget all of the lessons of the past.
Oh, and planes need fuel. And large production plants for parts, and huge maintenance hangars.
Russia cannot get conventional artillery close enough to use it properly, and Ukraine is keeping personnel away from the front line so they're hard to spot and harder to hit.
Russia is bombarding Ukraine's population centres with long-range cruise missiles. This is the failed Blitz strategy that Britain goaded Germany into during WW2 - get the enemy mad enough to bomb population centres, and not military or economic assets (Germany had almost achieved air superiority by bombing British airfields). Ukraine is leaving the population centres alone and focusing on economic and military production facilities.
Russia is losing this war. And has been for over a year.
That's the thing I don't understand: why would they try to nuke Moscow if they weren't the ones attacked? And would they risk their own demise (considering the imbalance in warheads between them and Russia)?
The reason being, Europe has a long term understanding they are under the nuclear umbrella of the USA which means that Europe does not need to maintain their own atomic weapons. If that long term agreement does not hold, the only way to deter Russia is to have nuclear weapons of your own since you cannot rely on deterrence from other countries.
Once everyone has nukes, Russia can no longer bully countries around because they will glass Moscow. This is a worse state than today where Russia can invade countries using conventional weapons without much consequence.
Look up the reasons for both blocs in the Cold War withdrawing all of their (numerous) tactical nuclear weapons systems by the 1980s.
TL;DR: MAD and “escalation”
Russia has already entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them.
(also this assumes that russia actuall has hundreds of working nukes)
There could be consequences. But I am wondering how painful would they be and if the US would get into a nuking game with them. Would it be worth it for the west to become a wasteland just because there needs to be consequences for Russia.
> Edit: you have now replied many times with "I don't understand why Russia doesn't nuke Ukraine". Perhaps you should take the time to try and understand?
Hence the question here again and again: why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
Otherwise why have nukes if you can’t use them?
In your scenario you're saying that Russia is going to show its willingness to lay waste to everything in its genocidal war, including carpet-bombing a country of 40 million people with nuclear bombs. Making it surpass any war in history, including WWII.
Again, in this scenario, somehow, everything just stops, everything is handy-dandy, Russia suffers literally no consequences, everyone just says "oh yeah, the genocidal maniacs are satisfied now, they will never ever carpet bomb anyone else with nuclear bombs".
> why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
Because, once again, you seem to assume that Russia will suffer literally no consequences externally or internally for doing so.
E.g. Russia will be immediately carpet bombed themselves since we already know that their air defenses aren't worth shit.
- they would not change much on battlefield - there is no large concentrations that you can nuke - everything is dispersed
- nuking urban centers again won't change much on battlefield but would alienate China
- Russia's equipment is known to be not most reliable/maintained and worst that can happen to Russia is them trying to nuke and nukes not working
Nuclear weapon use would lead to no meaningful military success, but it would immediately alienate the superpower Russia depends on in almost every way. China will not tolerate any nation using nuclear weapons. With its extremely dense population, it can't afford a modern wartime precedent to be set for their use.
The idea was to spend a few days, a couple weeks at most, taking Kyiv and the major cities, and then absorb Ukraine into a greater Russian state.
If they have to nuke Ukraine to make them do that, then that's not going to work. Absorbing a radioactive hellhole, with all the problems that will bring, isn't the plan.
Of course, the plan has gone badly wrong, and pretty much everything has gone the opposite to the way Putin wanted it do, so he could still nuke Ukraine just out of petty spite.
[1] https://features.csis.org/hiddenreach/china-fourth-carrier/
Not wrong, but the British were outproducing the Germans in many things (e.g., aircraft[1]) even before lend-lease was a thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_producti...
The Nazis were really bad at running the economy:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
The asymmetric warfare that has been enabled by inexpensive drone tech has so many vast implications that I'm not even sure we've seen every possible avenue this could explore. If either side isn't willing to completely obliterate civilian manufacturing centers, it enables long-term protracted warfare without an obvious end.
On the other hand, even obliterating civilian areas might not be an "end game" in its own right if external interests were to keep flooding the front lines with drones. FPV capabilities make conventional guidance systems a little less important, and while fiber has its weaknesses and wireless systems can be jammed, the psychological aspect of never quite knowing when a drone could be waiting in the midst of one's unit is deeply unsettling.
I would say it's closer for Ukraine, which has implemented forced conscription, which is pretty far down the path to a total war. There are of course tactics and strategies they have not enacted, that's not obvious which of those would be beneficial to the war effort in a non obvious way. All wars but specially modern Wars have to balance the possibility of publicity blowback or the population giving up the will to fight
On the other hand, if they just want to kill you for the sake of killing you, that's another story and the enemy will probably resort to "carpet bombing".
> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarjacoby/2025/09/19/kyivs-e-...
On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they can wage war without the same consequences as befell nations before. It's fundamentally the same err, IMO. So I take moral objection to the pretense that there's something morally novel to criticize. This stuff is what happens in war, always. And things can get way worse than this, and will get worse the longer we tolerate open hostilities among nations.
Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.
#1 seems a lot more human to me.
Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games - "20 tokens for this character!" feels better than $40), this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
Sorry for the rambley and extremely verbose reply but tbh it's absolutely horrifying and sickening to see as a fellow human, and I just wanted to get it out. (I'm obviously not saying Ukraine is wrong for wanting to protect territory - but it's the other aspects that are "awesome" (or awe-full?), in the wrong way of awe.)
Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence. In that sense having a professional rather than conscripted army should be much more morally repugnant than e-points. Again, no one in Ukraine is isolated from consequences in any meaningful way.
The Ukraine War is the most televised war in history. Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed. Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality, a reality which is only hidden from one's view by choice. (After a few videos that left me crying, I figured I saw enough to ensure I was dutifully more engaged with the reality than the typical non-veteran at a comfortable remove.)
If anything drones and the necessity of having to record a kill for "points" is arguably an improvement over traditional aerially bombardment. Being forced to watch people injured and killed comes with a greater cost, even for veteran soldiers. On HN we take for granted that, e.g., Facebook employees forced to sift through child porn continually pay a price no matter how long they've been at the job, yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game. That perspective betrays a certain callousness that is in some respect even more worrisome than these technological advancements on the battlefield.
To clarify at the outset, I full understand your view and partly agree with it.
I just had some thoughts, and was reminded of something while reading your comment.
> All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people...
> Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence...
These were also the results of the invention of the gatlin gun.
A gun made by the creator to save lives.
Of course, if you now can shoot 100 times as many bullets, you don't use 1/100th as many men, you just shoot 100x bullets.
Which... yeah. I wish I had a solution, but I don't. And obviously no one's going to ramp down their own death causing machines™ when the enemy has no incentive to. (Nuclear proliferation was probably only sucessful mainly because of the high level of difficulty in both the processes as well as material sourcing.)
> Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality...
I don't think the debate (at least not from my side) is over e points; it's more "shit, war's already terrible, and this is even more dehumanising".
> ...yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game...
I never implied that in the slightest. My ire is primarily directed at the people making the system, which almost certainly are folks at higher ranks - not the average soldier. I fully understand humans are human(e).
> Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed.
I have also watched many of these absolutely messed up videos; but I am absolutely not convinced that the e-points system reduces this suffering in any way. Psychological distance absolutely can make it "easier" to kill, and perhaps a man with a broken down tank was already effectively a "Hors de Combat" but if you shoot him you get 12 points, and...
...I think you see what I'm saying.
In my original comment, I had said
> this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
I'm saying it's far closer to CoD. It's absolutely still fucked up, regardless of whether you're an operator or a family of someone on the frontline. But I'm not claiming it's identical to a game.
And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
I'm talking about "Shit, it's bad to dehumanise war even more".
Are you saying "No, that's a good thing if your country is under attack"?
Because if you're actually wanting to say "It's a fucked up situation for them", then, yeah, I agree... and I've never said anything to the contrary? Are we on the same page then, or not?
> The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious.
So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
If you're saying "we shouldn't be crying about gamification because there are more important things as their country's at stake", well, there are more humans dying of hunger every day than in Ukraine, so therefore the EU should put all its funds supporting Ukraine into reducing global hunger? By that logic??
Please, if you're a grown adult, have the nuance and the maturity to show it. Multiple things can be issues at the same time, and calling one out doesn't make the other justified - because that's what it feels like you're accusing me of. And please feel free to correct me if I've said anything wrong (or if you disagree with any of my options.)
> I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
What does any of this mean? You think everyone in the military gets the same gear and capabilities and support? You think incentives don't exist in the military? You think rewards for units that are more lethal in war is a new phenomena? You don't think layers exist in the military to ensure that most people do not have to fight at the tip of the spear, and those that do get constant support from other elements? What are you talking about?
> Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
Oh ok so it's not new? But it "likely" started with American drone use in Iraq or something. Ok, explain to me how this started then? Why is the analogous situation? Because you see the word "drone" in the same sentence? Are you not aware much of human innovation around war is not putting yourself at risk when attacking an adversary? This is basically intuitive. Why did it start here instead of in the first conflict where tribes of men were beating each other to death with sticks before someone invented the sling or the arrow? Please tell me what version of combat you find most humanizing.
> But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points...
Um except they aren't separated from the physicality? It's people invading their own land? How can you make a claim about being separated physically or the "physicality" and from "incentives" and think pointing out their country is being invaded is a time to ask "And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?" What species of logic is this?
You: They are separated from the physicality and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games[...]
Me: Well no, it's not really like that at all. I mean their country is being invaded. Their families are dying. Their friends are dying. They liberate towns and find dead civilians. They endure bombing on their own civilian infrastructure. How on Earth could that be separated from the "physicality and incentives" re warfare? How could you ever compare going through that to a video game?
You: And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
Um buddy have you been playing too many of these games? What are you talking about?
I'm sorry how close do you want them to get? Are all attacks from the air dehumanizing or gamified? At what range does the humanization kick in? It's "CoD" unless what the Ukrainian runs across the frontline with a club to bludgeon a Russian to death? How many drone videos have you watched? Is your claim a Ukrainian would be less likely to take the opportunity at a clear shot at a Russian via a rifle than with a drone? Because they would fear for their humanity? Do you know how humans about to be blown up by a drone act? Suddenly the Russian invader is not so aggressive. And how are they separated from the incentives? You mean the incentive of stopping an army from invading their land and ending their nation and having domination over their families? The "points" is a scrappy formalization of a system. You think a Ukrainian soldier needs "points" to want to defend his country? Gee if I wasn't about to get this CoD style achievement I'd probably just let him go?
> So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
Yes, of course I'm saying that. The closest we've come "gamification of war" is having to suffer people like...
Ps, if you're genuinely curious, I can share a link where I got Gemini 3.1 Pro (at max thinking) to analyse this chat as neutrally as I could. Seeing as Gemini had an easier time than you did, maybe it could give you some help?
I suspect it's primarily due to folks missing nuance/misinterpreting thing (and/or getting emotional and running off with it).
I ran a thread to analyse hidden/missed nuance - where I tried to be as "neutral" as possible (by never identifying myself), if someone's genuinely interested I can share the link. (Hint: Gemini 3.1 Pro at max thinking mode in AI Studio says others are missing a point/some nuance.)
What 'clear moral objection' did you make? You talk in cliches so it's hard to tell.
As if they want the russians alive because they care, and not because they want to torture them to extract information.
2. Assuming every pow gets tortured is an extraordinary statement which as such could use some solid proof.
2. Not every captured soldier of course, some don't even know where they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_war_in_the_Russo-...
Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.
The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.
well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...
this article says "one time test" but i, personally, can't believe it's not being used daily.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
Then we need to ask what happens if communication itself fails? An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications. Either you do nothing in that case because there might be something you can't communicate with, or you kill your own people
It's not perfect, but it's cheap and it should work.
Give me a couple hundred k and I can probably build the prototype, haha.
The idea being that there is no communication to jam because the drone is fully autonomous. Given that, one needs a foolproof way for it to identify the enemy.
In this case the absence of communication would be what gives it permission to engage. Jamming the drone would not save you, but you could potentially make it attack its own forces if there happened to be any around at the time it comes for you. An IR beacon would make that very hard to accomplish.
Hw access is also not as easy as you think. Try getting a Pixel 9 class SoC board that you can actually dev stuff on, you'd be surprised how hard it is to get such a thing. And when you get it, it will probably be 2x as expensive for just the board.
Oh, put the Pixel 9 on it then. Have you tried doing optical flow on rolling shutter cameras?
Then, whatever solution you get, you need sufficient volume and reliable supply of the thing. Oh, you can't find the chip anymore? Good luck porting the stack you have since the pipeline is different.
Whereas these rc FPV drones you can basically build what what you find in the back of your drawer.
I mean, if minefields are okay with the intention to kill anything that walks in the area, why not drones?
The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more. Iran has been hitting US air bases. In the last day, they've hit US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. That's just this round. There were previous hits a few months back. It's not publicized much, but it's no secret. It's hard to protect an air base against drones. Air bases are big, everyone knows where they are, airplanes are hard to hide from drones, and are vulnerable to small explosive charges. As Russia keeps finding out as Ukraine hits their air bases. There have been hits well inside Russia. Blast-resistant hangars in Crimea have been attacked. Don't leave a door open.
China is going in for airbase hardening in a big way.[1] This is sometimes called a "concrete sky" program. The USAF is way behind in the Pacific. Too many planes parked out in the open, or in weak hangars.
Active defenses against drones and missiles do work, but they just thin them out. Some get through. If the attacker has enough manufacturing capacity, the defenses can be overwhelmed. Ukraine is currently building about 7 million drones a year.
[1] https://www.hudson.org/arms-control-nonproliferation/concret...
Why are you denying the absolutely destructive power of the US military and it's abject failure in not only making the world safer for Americans but explicitly more dangerous?
Are you personally benefiting from US imperialism?
Also, please refrain from making personal allegations.
Certainly there is some room for negotiation and diplomacy and frankly I think we've tried that and tried it until it was clearly insane and then we still tried it. We (the west) tried to invite Russia to NATO and we opened up Europe to Russian gas. We tried the JCPOA with Iran. We have no clue what to do with North Korea. And we pushed for Chinese entry into the WTO only for them to backstab the west.
Also don't understand what point you're trying to make outside of the US being explicitly poor actors that ignore treaties, allies, and are willing to start wars to run cover for unpopular domestic leadership while causing the unnecessary deaths of millions of people across the world.
Also WTF does backstab even mean in this context? That China didn't bend over and allow US corporations to rat fuck their country dry? Who exactly benefits from enriching US corporations here? It's assuredly not US citizens.
Good grief.
Lots of smaller and mid sized companies that tried to invest in the Chinese market lost everything because the government protected and supported local copycats, with no intention of giving the foreign company fair access to the market.
And let’s not forget China’s helping of Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine by training soldiers [1] and providing dual use technology access.
It’s interesting how the OP that you responded to was quick to start slinging accusations of propaganda and react so violently without even asking a clarifying question. Well, let’s just say some of us read those comments with a little extra interest.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/04/ukraine-war-br...
This is what I mean by how much of a farce this all is. Why should I care that China's steal IP? Chinese products are actually good + cheap to a consumer like me, all I see our corporations being unable to compete with an actual competitor that has a different view of the world + vision of the future.
Hard to see why I should be willing to sacrifice Americans to uphold corporations.
I’m all for diplomatic solutions to problems, but Iran was building nuclear weapons under our nose anyway and loading up on missiles and drones to make it difficult to impossible for the US to do anything about them without severe regional casualties. Nevermind Iran’s continued funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis and their support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
- "autocratic government that doesn't respect individual rights" may describe china and north korea, but also describes the usa and israel over the last couple years (who have done more invading than china)
I guess we're all guerrilla fighters now.
Guerrilla forces have to be popular, or at minimum, have the local population cowed. They're useful for kicking an oppressor out of your own country, but not for conquest.
I agree, or at least it feels insightful. Correct I can’t personally validate. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, or ask for more?
Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
Yeah, between military (active, dependents, retired, et c), elected officials who get government-paid healthcare (in any level of government), government workers (all levels, city, county, state, federal), and school workers (primary, secondary, public colleges and universities), and Medicare (old people), and Medicaid plus CHIP (poor people), and probably some others I’m forgetting, the US engages in as much government per-capita healthcare spending as some peer states do on their national healthcare schemes… but without covering everyone. However, the government does already cover a huge proportion of the population, including some of the most expensive (old people), at least partially. And that’s not counting government spending on contractors that take some of that money and pay for their workers’ healthcare with it.
It’s just split up across thousands of different budgets, instead of one.
Deeply entrenched corruption, obviously.
The fact that the US wastes a lot of money on what’s likely a very ineffective military is not a surprise, surely. Yes, they should have a better logistics system for all that money.
I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined.
I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1]
[1] https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-car-researchers...
[1] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/kcl-fasi-paper31-win...
I’ve read that the local brain drain has been challenging too, eg https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1176769042/russia-economy-bra...
Russia is still dangerous but it's a pale shadow of the old USSR.
The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely.
Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights.
(This is why, according to a UN probe, Palestinian children and Babies were ‘special targets’ of Israeli killings - https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ ).
> I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move to target Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state.
With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, Americans allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas). Thus, it is politics that holds the Americans back, and not the Iranian military.
For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit:
> To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations.
That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their un...
If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day.
Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.
Current SecDef thinks looking like a war movie hero is more important, however, so action on this front may be delayed.
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.
And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.
I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.
In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.
So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
And between WW1 and WW2. And just before WW1, during the Belle Époque. And probably before that, too.
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...
https://youtu.be/C2gIId1dpDs
And then that stimulates the economy further as those people all spend that money, and the government gets a bunch of bombs and fighter jets out of the deal.
Yes, Pearl Harbor was a known vulnerability, prior to the Japanese attack. The US just wasn't ready to take airpower seriously, at that point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5okm8/why_d...
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
The initial US goals clearly were: 1. Regime change 2. Denial is f nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only be current capability.
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa...
Forgive me its been a while since I read about Irans political structure, but my understanding is that the IRGC is supposed to take over in times of succession crisis, and sort of take any measures to guarantee the islamic revolution.
The test is supposed to be that they hand back power sometime after the crisis.
If you assume Khamenei Jr is still unwell, and there's still a spot of bother regarding what his succession would look like, and the civilian government is still a bit in shambles, the IRGC taking over seems very easy for them to justify. Whether they hand that power back willingly is another matter that remains to be seen.
The problem here is that Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
Your statement actually makes the way out of the spiral very explicit: Trump must stop being in power.
Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand.
Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted to use that to gain influence. (of course not literally everybody, but this was a prevailing force)
The implication here I'm disagreeing with is that the war was the unintended consequence of mistakes. Instead of mistakes leading the continent down a dark path it was intentional, just waiting for an excuse to start fighting.
Again: Catastropic naïveté.
(one of many sources of this kind of information)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-war-live-us-says-iranian-...
The US and Iran agreed (Point 4 and 5) on, for the next 60 days, Iran is "chief of traffic" in the strait.
Iran say now, ships have to take the route close to Iran. But some ships like to take the route close to Oman. Iran is just shooting on these ships.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/08/business/iran-oil-trump-strai...
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
All the stuff about China's energy supply... it's not that deep. Y'all are trying to believe Trump is playing 5D chess when he's demonstrably shit at checkers.
It is possible that the US military is so incompetent that they can't plan or that Trump has lost touch with reality. But then their goals would just be incoherent and incomprehensible. Assuming they have coherent goals and some capacity to work towards them it is clear that an open strait is at best a very low priority one.
He has also stated that the war has been won many times. Why would you take anything coming out of his mouth seriously?
kneecaping china by cutting off a huge source of its oil imports. Russia will not be able to make up the difference.
It varies. Which is the problem.
I can think of a few:
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
Every time someone hits them, they learn that they wouldnt be hit if only they had a nuclear weapon.
Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you:
Did Bondi not say on camera that if the list was released "the system would collapse"?
Why are the names of perpetrators in the files censored, while those of victims remained clear?
Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
> Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
Because the perpetrators run the government.
To make certain people money by shorting the oil market. There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays.
1) Someone in the administration is leaking news soon before it’s announced, enabling insider trading. This is obviously supported by the evidence from markets.
2) The administrating is scheduling world events as part of a larger conspiracy to do enabling insider trading on specific predefined dates. Markets moving a few minutes early doesn’t provide evidence that this is happening.
Statements like: “There is a reason why these ‘peace’ deals are always announced on Fridays” imply the second (and aren’t even objectively true).
Lmgtfy: there are many articles and plenty of analysis available. Trades are happening on prediction markets minutes before Trump announces market altering information, trades that only make sense when you know that Trump is about to make an announcement.
Bombing Iran for a month because Iran fired on 4 ships that were violating its SoH rules is wildly disproportionate and optional.
This kind of shit or excuses could not be pulled if we would be talking about gulf of mexico for example.
US is not center of the world and rest of the world means >95% of mankind, rest of the world is pretty fed up with that unfair treatment and things are changing. Very slowly, but steadily.
Who cares? International law is quite clear. But regardless, the world really doesn't have a say so long as Iran (& likely Oman in the end) wants to enforce this view.
> but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
...and the strait will still be closed. It just makes zero sense.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
The war ends when all involved parties agree that it ends, not because one party is tired of it.
The only way the US alone can end the war in Iran is to ensure complete surrender, and then stay put for 20 years like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave like a thief in the night and things reverts to what they were before, only with more local hate for the US than was already there (as most islamic states sees the US as the great devil).
I think most European nations learned their lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those were NATO operations btw. Article 5 was invoked for Afghanistan, but the NATO contribution was limited to a naval operation and patrolling of US airspace. NATO is a defensive treaty, not an aggressive one. The actual ground invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq was done by a US led coalition of the willing, and when the US started the Iran war, most european leaders openly declared that this was not europes war.
islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too
the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed
the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine!
Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have succeeded. But you are never going to regime change a people who know with certainty that they will be butchered/raped/tortured by their supposed "saviors" the Israelis. There is literally nothing worse than surrendering to Israel.
by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology
the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
there's a devilish mess of evangelical wasps secular jews actual jews irishmen and not a single person who has read more than two lines about islam let alone convert into it
islam has been treated like communism or socialism ie somthkng you can root out in exchange for walmart and free stuff. thats not it. muslims are willing to die for it and they will prove it again and again, and no amount of conventional weaponry will bring afghanistan or iran to its heels for long
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
Or at least the Donbas... I can't imagine they'd want a border pressing up against nato without a rump state in between.
Distraction from Epstien Files
I'm just a layman, but the goal seems obvious to me. First it's not US/Iran but US + Israel / Iran. From Israel's point of view, I assume the goal is the preemptive destruction of Iran's military capabilities (especially nuclear weapons).
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
No new for the brackets.
The Israelis also bombed defenceless Gaza and had a lot of help from the US with that.
How would they do this?
The don’t control the sky or the ground. It’s down to ballistic missiles and drones. Many of these can be shot down.
US is the only country that maybe has a capability to carpet bomb someone to rubble. Russia has always preferred to do it with Artillery anyway, which they have done to many many Ukrainian cities.
A prolonged strategic bombing campaign that can "Wipe a city off a map" takes weeks, hundreds of bombers, and tens of thousands of tons of explosive, and either air supremacy to protect your bombers (not sufficient against a target with SAMs) or the ability to build hundreds of those bombers fresh.
Literally nobody can do that anymore. America can maybe do that once or twice. Only 60ish B52s even remain.
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII. Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate. Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit. The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues. It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours. This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-cant-fix-this-the-...
This is incorrect.
[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/07/23/russia-tightens-bo...
Which means not everyone in this age bracket is prevented from leaving, only literal draft dodgers.
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP. Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
Because it's hugely politically unpopular. There's a risk that this will happen after the parliamentary election this autumn.
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
US involvement in the Middle East has ruined those countries. It is not a just middle east where ever they involve they ruin others ex: Trump's Congo deal which locked in their mineral for decade without any benefit to poor Congos
Not ruined countries: Iraq (pre-2003) Yemen
lol
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
Napoleon
By contemporary lesson I assume she means similar lesson but more recent and keeping modern world/logistics in mind.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2042105223989035429
I did some digging,reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane.
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
It doesn’t seem impossible that some radical group of attacks the US from within.
And that’s quite apart from the US threats to attack its neighbours.
They are not cheap.
What "reactive engine" is Zelensky talking about?
These can be launched in mass, cheaply. They're difficult to detect and/or distinguish (weather balloons are already common), and easy to cloud with dummy balloons, perhaps dangling aluminium paper to enhance radar signatures.
The drones themselves could use optical+inertial guidance, and have either minimal propulsion or be entirely glide-based. Given prevailing high-altitude winds (generally west-to-east in mid-northern latitudes) strikes could be launched many thousands of miles from targets with minimal or no fuel / propulsive storage use.
"Ukraine uses military balloons to deliver drone strikes inside Russia" <https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/ukraine-uses-military-ball...>
"Ukraine Revives Military Balloons for Modern Warfare Needs: Report" <https://thedefensepost.com/2026/02/18/ukraine-balloons-moder...>
Japan used a similar strategy, though to no strategic or tactical effect (six civilians were killed in Oregon), during WWII:'
Fu-Go balloon bomb <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb>
In 1945, a Japanese Balloon Bomb Killed Six Americans, Five of Them Children, in Oregon <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon...>
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?
And as it turns out, they have indeed started adding armor to transport craft, including trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei
And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size.
It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
This is a spitball, but there are several hundred thousand ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea. Even if the Ukrainian war machine wanted to commit genocide (unclear if this is true or not, at least to me), they would be at least partially genociding their own people.
The US have have been a nightmare for Ukraine, obstructive and unreliable. The European allies have slowly stepped up, but it’s been painful.
As dependence on the US has reduced, you can see the Ukrainian attacks increase in number, range and audacity.
Distant targets are getting hit. This week shipping had been hit hard, and the Crimea has taken a lot of damage. Bridges and logistics.
It’s all happening. Keep an eye on https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/
It’s a heavily skewed perspective but it if often accurate.
It's not as easy as it sounds to put the weight of ordnance required in the very tight windows that would be needed to actually cause more than cosmetic or minor damage to that bridge.
Ukraine did pull off a spectacularly successful operation to destroy a laden fuel truck while it was crossing the bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Crimean_Bridge_explosion)... Russia repaired the damage within months and simply redirected fuel transport to other means.
Russia also has dedicated a large amount of air defense and EM jamming resources to protect the bridge, which increases the difficulty of pulling something off for Ukraine.
For a long time Ukraine didn't have the types of weapons that would be needed to even attempt it outside of saboteur types of actions. Now they have some precise ordnance like Storm Shadow but even these weapons are not destructive enough to take the bridge down except in large quantities, and those are quantities they seem to have decided are best put towards other targets.
Ukraine has recently seen substantial success in finding better weapons, with drones that can engage in "medium-range" scenarios to close off the so-called land bridge from Russia to Crimea. These weapons have also helped in degrading Russia's own defenses, but with this in mind Ukraine may feel it best to leave the Kerch bridge standing for now to allow Russian occupiers to flee across the bridge back to Russia, since Ukraine has the northern land route through occupied territories under much more effective fire control than at any point since 2022.
Well, that's what I meant, where are the Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. Because I consider the areas that Russia occupies to be temporarily occupied Ukraine.
Although you (I) could ask where the armored vehicles are that the US and other countries gave to Ukraine. For awhile, Bradley Fighting Vehicles (lightly armored) and M1A1 Abrams were making a lot of news (I think the former were doing surprisingly well, and the latter not as good as expected). But lately I have heard very little about either, or about other armored vehicles that were given to Ukraine.
https://oshkoshdefense.com/vehicles/medium-tactical-vehicles...
Sadly, most wars generate both.
... not sure what a linear battlefield would be
Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
Depends how the war starts. Russia? USA somehow attacks? Easily 6 months of buildup in Europe.
China? Again USA somehow attacks? Again buildup in Australia, Japan, Korea.
Also US air power is absolutely supreme. I don’t see how they will be fighting in actually contested skies even only 2 months in.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
We should be throwing people in prison over this.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
What is that referring to?
For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.
For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ ̶
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶
̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶
̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶
Starfall will never happen!
The situation there is an utter joke, and shows no sign of wrapping up any time soon.
It’s all very well claiming you can win, but when you don’t that’s the result you’re stuck with.
It's that regional bases and sea-based platforms from which the US has operated with impunity in previous conflicts, as recently as a decade ago, are no longer safe from retaliation. This puts the US, its forces, and perhaps more significantly its friends and allies in the region at risk in both the present and any future conflict(s).
More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.
Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.
It's fueled with methane and oxygen, and its size is known.
It can't be, say, $50m/flight in fuel for the same reason a 747's flight can't be; there's not enough space for that much fuel.
Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe.
But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends.
The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
Ask your favorite LLM for a brief tutorial on "NATO unit symbology" and "logistics-related operational terms and graphics". The relevant publication is "MIL-STD-2525D". https://www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/other_pubs...