The_Capt

But isn't populations the actual effective measure. I mean if we have 30 island nation states of perfect democracies but they only make up .1% of the global population then isn't using the state as the key metric misleading. To my eyes if India goes autocratic that is 1.4B people who have lost democratic freedoms, which has much higher weight than a single nation state backsliding. What matters is the people in those states not the number of states themselves...no?

Ya definitely a slippery slope. Something like Iron Dome - Ukraine is probably a possibility but again one is looking at western military personnel on the ground. What it could do is secure the backfield and then let the UA do the dirty in Russian territory much like they have been. But it would become so easy for us to get pulled in by this point. Western forces actively hitting targets inside Russia is the nightmare scenario that likely won't happen without a WMD release type of escalation.

My initial reaction was "nope". But the US did pretty much this in and over Israel last week so there definitely has been a precedence set. I think the major hurdle if positioning western troops on Ukrainian soil during the war to make this happen. To my mind this a western escalatory threat ladder rung. We could essentially declare a no-fly west of the Dniper but Russia is going 1) take this as a major escalation signal, and 2) milk it for all its worth to drive domestic support for this war upward. This could easily creep off-mission if manned Russian A/C start upping operations - we have to let them bomb Ukrainian civilians but shoot down the unmanned only. I think if we are going to call "no fly" we need to mean it and make damned sure we are justified in taking this next step. We are talking about global powers no longer prosecuting by proxy as we would be targeting Russian assets directly. Then if we make the call, do not be half @ssing it - just declare "no fly" like we did for Saddam and Gadhafi. Interestingly, the US president does not need blessing from congress for this as Commander-in-Chief. This would be a US military operation comin gout of in-year operations funding. I am betting it is an option on a whiteboard somewhere, but no one seems willing to take it just yet.

This really speaks to a political leader who simply does not understand how the modern world works. Of the US wants roughly the same economic footing it had pre-WW2, back when its population was about 125M, then decoupling globalization makes perfect sense. How many jobs in the US will have to go back to manufacturing and resources? Entire generations of Americans will have to go back to the coal mines and steel mills. Costs for everything will go through the roof, unless of course Vance’s plan is all JP Morgan and plans to pay future US workers next to nothing to do all the work that has been outsourced. And then there is the uncomfortable realities of the money markets and foreign investment. The US does not get to be large, powerful and rich without the global order that it built, fought for and now needs to keep fighting for. It baffles me that the average voter in the US does not really understand this let alone a senator.

Then I am doubting you know where Switzerland is on the map. Or maybe it is a colour green thing?

What data are you referring to? Everything I am seeing shows Switzerland as a full democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

And my point is that upward trend can only be sustained if we work for it and defend it. Democracy is not the natural state of large scale human affairs or political systems. History demonstrates quite the opposite. The hope was that literacy and enlightenment would allow for greater informed choice by the masses but as we have just discussed there are some serious issues in the modern age with this. Democracy using a much longer lens than even the last 100 years is a great experiment, not ordained by higher powers or a natural evolution that is enshrined in post-modern reality. It takes work and sacrifice, it is not an entitlement. Basically this could be the end of democracy if we sit back and let it happen. There is real danger in simply shrugging and declaring “slight dip” as if the upward trajectory is driven by greater forces. Democracy will only survive if we want it to and make it happen. We have seen it tried before in both Ancient Greece and Rome - albeit in different forms - and we abandoned it. We can do it again…unless we consciously do not let it happen.

You realize the article you cited from Our World in Data was: With a whole lot of data that counters your position. You picked the last hopeful line in that article when the entire thing was about the overall decline in democracy worldwide for nearly 20 years. Ok, I will play too. I think that history shows that autocracies have been the vastly more common political system. We have had democratic spasms in the past but they have always failed in the long term. I think this current spasm is about 200 years old and due to fold up completely much like democracy has done in the past. I don't think a 200 year increase constitutes am upward trend in democratization when viewed through a 6000+ year lens any more than a one year decline represents a trend in the stock market.

Ok if we are going to play "pick the data" then using the same chart democracy is a fad as of about 1850. We are just as likely to fall back into complete autocracies which have dominated human political affairs for millennia. Why can't autocracy recover in the long game if democracy can in the short? In reality this is kinda silly. It is clear democracy around the world is under strain. We have no guarantees it will work and my original point stands - we have abandoned democracy in the past (see Roman Empire) and we are at risk of doing it in the future if we do not protect it. I so not subscribe to the "it will be ok...because reasons" school of human affairs. Pulling it back to the subject of this thread, we are facing a test for modern democracy right now in this war and the USA is at the forefront. I honestly hope that democracy prevails but within the US right now some of those charged with protecting it are in fact attacking it. They are attacking it by "proving" (engineering really) that democracy is weaker in "getting things done." They are doing so to re-wire how power is distributed in the US and by extension globally.

Any chance you actually looked at the the other refs: This has been about a 20 year trend depending on how one measures "democracy". Your stated point was: "I actually think the jury is in. Loads of countries other than the US are democracies. It's obvious at this point that there are much better implementations of democracy than the US system (downsides of being first). But almost universally, people living in democracies (including the US) are better off than people living in autocracies. Democracies do collapse and revert to autocracies (and it feels like the US is currently skirting the danger zone on that). But autocracies also collapse and become democracies. And so far it appears that autocracies collapse at a higher rate than democracies. The overall trend so far appears to be towards greater democratization." 1. There is at best around 8 percent of the planet with true liberal democracies. And democracy is not in the majority by any stretch. 2. Democracies are not on the rise, they are in fact in decline and have been for some time. Liberal democracies have been on decline for nearly 20 years. Flawed democracies - like India and Pakistan - are also starting to decline. More bluntly put...the data does not match your initial opinion/position - which now seems to have shifted to "sure we are in a decline but can recover as we have in the past". Sure we might see a surge in democracies globally but likely not if the US continues a downward spiral. We definitely saw a Post-Cold War bump but the party appears to be over. This is why this war is an important test and has a lot at stake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-has-human-brain-evolved/#:~:text=With some evolutionary irony%2C the,important driver of this trend. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full#:~:text=Von Bonin (1934) wrote%2C,smaller than Pleistocene hominin crania. I do not think one can divorce psychological, physical and social evolution. Again, I think our firmware has been relatively static but our software had changed dramatically. Physically we have undergone dramatic shifts in caloric intake and exposure to diseases - one of the major evolutions over the last 10k years is a resistance to malaria. As to why they have been shrinking...there does not seem to be widely accepted agreement. Then there is the sticky issue of epigenetic impacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma Regardless, the underlying point is still valid - we have never tried a political power sharing system at the scope and scale of the US, as imperfect as its democracy is. At no time in history has this many people from a single collective construct ever tried this before. There is no guarantees that it will work any more than communism in the Soviet Union. Now this could be a factor of social evolution, but if you are indeed correct in that we really are not physically or psychologically evolving fast enough, then a social evolution on this scale may simply be doomed. In fact one could say that large scale human civilization is in itself a large scale experiment of only around 7000 short years. It may also be doomed, we just do not know it yet. Or conversely, perhaps humans need a burst of artificial evolution (eg AI) to allow these larger social constructs to work.

And on this one, the data really does not support: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-state-of-global-democracy-2022/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/how-many-people-live-in-a-political-democracy-today/ Now taking a big picture we are definitely in an era of experimentation: https://ourworldindata.org/democracy But those lines are looking downward.

This part really makes no sense to me. How can physiological and social evolution be disconnected from psychological evolution? We know we have seen significant physical evolution over the last 10k years - eg our brains are smaller. We also have seen dramatic social evolution with the creation of complex societies to sustain much larger populations than we were ever designed for. We have seen macro-social evolutions such as the introduction of monotheistic religions and ideologies on a global scale. And we have seen micro-social evolutions in areas such as male-female pairings. And yet we somehow have had our psychologies existing in glorious isolation from all this change? I have always found this "frozen psychology" argument weak. I can accept that we are living with our "firmware" from 50k year ago but our software is evolving constantly. It is what makes us such an adaptable species. https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior Regardless, your point on "our systems changing to better suite our brains" is inconsistent and illogical. If our brains are truly locked into a 6000BC chassis, then any and all systems we develop are beyond that are by default less-optimal. We had the best systems for our brains before the emergence of agrarian civilization...and by your argument, our brains prove it. We have been coping with unnatural social realities ever since.

What I find truly amazing are the inconsistencies people are willing to hold so deeply. For example: "We can't let in all these immigrants! They will destroy our nation!" "Tear the whole system down!" So on one issue we have to preserve the system while on the other we need to tear it down. So the real issue is "who" is tearing it down and power distribution post-teardown. This inconsistency demonstrates what this whole thing is really about and there is little honorable or aspirational about it. When extremist/reductionist narratives spark up they are filled with these sorts of inconsistencies and paradoxes.

"Tearing it down" will introduce massive collective uncertainty into the last global superpower and roughly 330 million primates...many armed to the teeth. It does not take a "smart and truly good person" to see how that will likely go. The American Experiment is, at its roots, a massive social test. A test to see if our species has evolved to the point where a power sharing scheme like democracy can survive at scale. I would say the jury is still out.

It is potentially worse than that. This sort of dysfunction does nothing but feed anti-democracy sentiment. Democracies die due to abandonment, history demonstrates this quite well. If the system is seen as "unworkable" democracies often choose suicide. This is the threat to the US and global stability. Trump and Greene are symptoms of something far deeper and dangerous....apathy that leads to despair.

Ok, I am still not entirely clear on your theory of change here to be honest. We can focus on C-UAS but then why would we not also focus on UAS themselves for offensive operations as well? Superiority means “freedom of own action while denying same to enemy”. We want to stop their autonomous systems cold and allow ours to maul them with impunity. This gives me deterministic options for both deterrence and compellance. Otherwise I am stopping their UAS cold and then still have to risk human lives to finish them off which is not going to be politically acceptable. Now if I can demonstrate autonomous unmanned superiority from the outset the war doesn’t even need to start (I.e. deterrence)…no? But superiority has to be for both offence and defence. And offence is going to involve those nasty ones. Fear is the arbiter of these things and our fear of losing lives will likely drive us toward more fully autonomous solutions as opposed to regulating them. We will likely try to manage these systems under existing LOAC frameworks and create collateral damage calculus to mitigate. Outliers and rogue actors will of course let the damn things off the leash and do all sorts of bad. I honestly do not see a total weapons ban standing (the existing one or a new one) based on the wind direction. Super C-UAS will spin off more super UAS that can go in and do the killing at a distance. The quest will be to the badest complete system on the battlefield.

I think the major flaw here is that somehow we can “routinely counter” unmanned systems to the point that their utility comes into question and therefore the moral ethical “rightness” can hold sway. Like other disruptive technologies unmanned will go far and wide (already has) and likely remain a competitive space for decades, if not centuries. There is no “whelp that was unpleasant” followed by “now we can go back to the way things were”. It does not apply to military application nor regulation. We cannot unsee or unknow what has already happened. There is no magic wands to make it all go away. Even unmanned counters will remain a highly competitive space where arms races to counter-counters will occur all the time. Hoping that unmanned weapons will somehow disappear is like hoping bullets disappear because we invented body armor. This paradigm shift has been decades in the making. This war has only demonstrated that it has arrived. We will likely try to regulate - hell we try to regulate every new weapons technology, but like air power, cyber and space the punchline is inevitable. So what? Dive into the game and be better and faster than opponents. Blunt the effects and understand what unmanned superiority means. Shape future battlefields now through rapid smart adoption. Not military cultural conservatism or pinning hopes on the “better angels”. We are in a new age of warfare, there is no getting past that. All that remains is how well we can navigate this new reality.

That is one hopeful theory but I think history is not entirely onside. As we see in Ukraine, warfare is not simply political, it is personal. So if/when an opponent’s unmanned bubble collapses they may very well refuse to accept defeat and fight on. They will do so by various means that will cause you casualties. There will be a lot of pressure to reduce those casualties. Autonomous weapons will be one of the best ways to do this. So I do not see a winning side simply switching modes mid-war. In fact attacks on the will to fight are very often pointed directly at populations…we are literally seeing this unfold everyday in both Ukraine and hr Middle East. So fully autonomous as terror weapons against civilian populations is tragically predictable. Further, just because one can collapse an opponent’s unmanned systems bubble does not mean it will stay collapsed without destroying that opponent’s ability to access/produce more systems. That will mean attacks on deep industrial infrastructure and varying degrees of resistance. Trying to managed semi vs full autonomy based on ethical grounds in this sort of environment is a challenge few nations will do and even fewer will do well. And this assumes the war stays a clean standup fight and does not go hybrid. Insurrection, partisan resistance and guerrilla warfare will ensure that fully autonomous stay on the forefront of any modern force. But it will also be very attractive to hybrid resistance for all the same reasons - can’t jam/EW easily, faster and more lethal, range. The advantages are too strong, the effects too deterministic, the stakes too high.

And here we have the downward slope. A cheap and effective C-Unmanned system is most likely other autonomous unmanned systems. Having a person in the loop for every c-drone drone, is just going to slow things down and likely give advantage to an opponent. So my guess we are looking at a fully autonomous forward edge (in 3 dimensions) of fully autonomous systems for peer sides. Those edges will collide and supported by other legacy systems will try and knock each other out. Deep strike plays in here etc. Once a sides bubble collapses...they are dead. Collapse enough bubbles and they lose the war. So we are back to fully autonomous race to the bottom. A lot of friction in warfare is human-based. Remove the human with a good enough AI and lose the friction. The moral high ground will always give way in the face of existential threats...this is why nukes work.

Not sure how comfortable I would be in a row boat of or Cessna around an active CWIS but fair points. I think these problems are definitely going to have problems, some unintended and some very much intended. Some bad actors will gleefully employ them on civilians to terrorize and as part of an overall genocidal campaign. In reality there is no real difference between a cruise missile striking a civilian housing complex and a cruise missile carrying a bunch of assassination drones. The drones will be far more effective and vicious but are basically doing the same job. I am saying that banning fully autonomous drones is a fools errand. Hell, regulating them is going to be pretty damned hard. Why? Because they are potential war-winners right now. Unmanned systems of all types are deterministic of outcomes. As such they become, in an existential war, non-negotiable. Some nations will try and remain on high horses - no doubt Canada will - but this will be as hypocritical as the nuclear equation. Canada has no nuclear weapons and shakes a finger in haughty disapproval of them, but our very survival has rested upon the safety of the US nuclear umbrella…that we are not even paying for. Unmanned will be the same beast in many ways. Some nations will reject them but will be first in line to have them protect any troop contributions to a western coalition. The one thing I do not know is if unmanned stand as a 3rd shift in the nature of war yet. Their impact on the battlefield is pretty much undeniable by this point.

I think it is very safe to say that NATO (and pretty much all western) doctrine is going to need major re-writes after this war.

If one cannot hide a fortified position then wire is probably not doing much for defenders in the first place. Enemy can hammer the position until wire is gone because he can see it from space. We have seen dug in defence in this war and it got severely pounded. Dispersion and mobile defence may be a better way to go. The other reason may be that most infantry killing is happening at distance. We have seen some trench clearing but a lot of the engagements are happening well out with infantry running away. I am sure dismounted infiltration is still happening but if they can see all the wire, all that effort won't do much. Wire can be tossed out but building an effective obstacle with it is labor intensive and takes a lot of time. My guess is that most troops are either not trained to do it, or have decided it is a waste of time.

That is a lot of squeeze for probably not much actual juice. ISR means fake positions are easier to spot as well. Punji sticks and all that crap looks good in the movies but really does little in reality. Wire is heavy, takes time to lay out (all out in front of enemy ISR) and can be blown through pretty quickly...likely from the air now. Based on how easy it is to make, I can only guess that it has had limited utility for both sides in this war and why they are not using it a lot.

Given the ISR environment, not sure having a bunch of wire in front of a position is such a good idea.