kimbosbread

FPV drones are “easy” to solve for in that we have a good near term answer: Anti-radiation loitering munitions. Sense that microwave signal and take out the drone or the control team. Anything that has a signature can be detected and targeted. The challenge we’ll face very soon is autonomous drones that won’t emit any signals and dont need a control link. You already have cheap, fast powerful image recognition on devices like phones without an internet connection needed. Small drones already have minimal radar signature and are quiet because they are all electric. How do you detect these? Other than a Diamond Age-esque flying fence that is a km deep (which is feasible to build in next decade), I can’t think of a good solution.

Mmmm I wouldn’t underestimate him. He is extremely smart, but also a bit crazy and speaks with zero filter or forethought sometimes. He’s also terrified of Kessler syndrome and nuclear war, and rightfully thinks Russia can make that happen to the degree it makes LEO a more dangerous place, thus jeapordizing humanity going off to Mars.

I think the unmanned systems and cyber are gonna change combat significantly more in the next decade. Learning is going to have to accelerate dramatically to keep up. Just as cheap, powerful chips made cheapo quadcopters possible in the 2000s, cheap, more powerful chips + machine learning advances will make cheapo autonomous systems possible in the 2020s and beyond. We need to skate ahead of the puck here, and understand what the next set of computing advances unlocks. Same for el cheapo access to space ($10-199 per kg)… that unlocks a whole new set of capabilities for us.

I think that’s backwards. You want anit-radiation loitering munitions that will go after anything emitting a signal in the sky. No power/cooling problems compared to an active antenna, and emits no signature of their own, and obviously way cheaper.

Drone is easier to build with common off the shelf parts than a gun- it’s some electric motors and batteries and a chip, and a some sensor to guide it, and maybe a radio. I think it would be instructive for politicians and military leaders to all attend a “build your own FPV drone out of $250 in parts” day, and then guide it via headset to hit a person sized mannequin 5km away. On the other hand, a gun with any sort of range (ie not the Shinzo Abe Special) requires metal of sufficient strength for the barrel, not to mention bolt if semi automatic. A hobby machinist can still build this, but it’s more difficult than just Digikey/Mouser/Alibaba. Sure, in America guns and gun parts are plentiful and part and parcel of Freedom (TM), but everywhere else it’s a bit harder. That said, some of our favorite Latin American kleptocrats have banned drones in their countries, but I somehow doubt that will matter when the next revolution comes. The sad thing to me is that the noble guerilla in the jungle with kalashnikov is much more romantic than some four-eyes like me with a pile of drones, pupusas and whatever beer is commonly available. Nobody is gonna have the latter on a tshirt!

Anduril (Oculus guy’s drone etc. company)pings me weekly, but I imagine like any decent software engineer, the allure of jumping through security clearance hoops, bad software quality, not working remote and getting paid significantly less… is not that exciting. This is kind of a problem in my view. The US has lots of very good software engineers, but it’s going to be difficult to lure them to even the newer companies in the defence space with the low salaries and office requirements (and for a decent fraction of us, drug testing). I suspect we’ll lose out to the Eastern Europeans in short order who are more “motivated” to put it lightly.

Interestingly enough, in certain Central American countries that are rather Catholic birth control is free, women can get their tubes tied for free etc. And fertility rates for Latin America are barely above 2.0! Completely unrelated to the war other than the weaponization of refugees of course, but the pressure from this will drive many conflicts in this century.

Sure, if you define any government that steals from the poor but has no natural resources as a non-kleptocracy. Consider though that labor and charity money are easy to steal. Poor Central American dictatorships have minimal resources, but the people running these countries still manage to live quite well. That’s kind of a kleptocracy too.

Sure, there is a destabilizing effect of having lots of money all of the sudden- “people who aren’t familiar with managing money win the lottery and blow it” effect- and that can corrupt governments, especially the mafia-style-state where it’s all about extracting wealth. It doesn’t juyst apply to natural resources but also agriculture (green gold ie avocados) or industry. Ukraine has fewer natural resources compared to Russia, but still has plenty, and has lots of industries where money could be vampired out by kleptocrats- and in fact was. However, despite this Ukraine has a had a series of governments that progressively pulled themselves out of Russia’s clutches despite all the obstacles and conflict that has entailed. I vaguely recall there are a number of good counterexamples that one throws at resource curse advocates; I’ll try to find my books on the subject. Oil/gas being the thumb on the scale that tipped Russia into a mafia state? It’s plasuible, but I don’t buy it, but if you have a source for this I’d love to read it because it never come up as an example when I was studying natural resource economics in college in the early 2000s. I don’t buy it because Russia was already a decaying mafia state, where anything that was nailed down would be stolen, by anybody with the opportunity (see the 90s, for everything). Their culture was absolutely not conducive to transitioning into a western democracy. Plus everybody who valued hard work and wanted democracy left as fast as they could once the curtain fell.

Yeah, I wish the US would push energy independence, nukes and solar as national security policy. We are so favored in natural resources and everything else that a state could want that it’s pure laziness and a lack of a good vision for the next American Century that is holding us back. “The Natural Resource Curse” is honestly kind of garbage. It’s entirely about rule of law. If you don’t have rule of law, and you have billions in oil, diamonds, gold etc kleptocrats and criminals will pillage it. There are lots of countries with plenty of natural resources that do great, and the common thread is rule of law.

@kevinkin I want to know specifically what the Devil's Advocate negotiating position you are talking about is. Please tell me what improved outcome one could hope to acheive- or alternatively, what worse outcome one could hope to avoid- negotiating with Putin. What's the deal you are thinking of in your head? For everyone else, I've already given my devil's advocate position, which I think Western Europe would have taken in a heartbeat earlier in this conflict, but now perhaps not: Russia, in exchange for retreating to its borders takes all refugees + asylum seekers from Europe.

I vehemently disagree. Based on recent history, Russia will not negotiate in good faith, will renege on agreements and generally is not reliable. That's one top off the whole genocide, kidnapping children, destroying dams, threatening nuclear war, etc. Could you elaborate on the devil's advocate position? How exactly are we supposed to normalize relations with an FSB-faction government? Nobody in Eastern Europe is going to take this other than anything a giant stab in the back, and I think we can agree it means nuclear proliferation will be entirely dead, not mostly.

An expert rating site would be good fun- basically track all the online personalities, judge their expertise, sources etc. and give them a ranking from Jesus - HI Sutton - Scott Ritter.

This is correct: Ukraine negotiating while they still have military advantage is losing, when faced with an irrational enemy like Russia. However, "winning" is way less straightforward. Kick Russia out is not enough, they need to be defanged otherwise there's a serious risk of another war in a decade. Likewise, if the FSB faction holds on, we might see a Best Russia case (pariah/client state of China). Or we have Russia collapse, or a less ****ty government comes in and then we have dolchstoss etc. Is there a less ****ty scenario I'm missing? I understand the argument that a collapsing Russia is very dangerous, but I fail to see how Best Russia is not equally bad or worse. Moreover, Russia without ethnic minorities to bully and murder and conscript is not capable of waging the only kind of war it knows. Finally, Russia has managed to sow exceptional discord in the western world (as always, based on some underlying truths, but amplifying them)- removing that will be a significant win and make us stronger for the 100 years that lie ahead, where we have some series struggles: Climate change, AI/automation, and the mass ageing of society.

To further deconstruct the myth of the Germans being better, American artillery to my knowledge was significantly superior to Germans or Brits. Brits were fast to setup but inaccurate, and the Germans required precise surveys and maps so given time and preparation, were accurate. America, befitting its status as the best country of all time, needed minimal surveys and used tapes with different shell/charge/atmospheric conditions that made it easy to get fire on target fast.

In terms of criticism of not attacking at more than one place in a time, I think the minefields and fortifications slow things down enough that on a day to day basis, it may just not be possible to do coordinated attacks that have a hope of getting through the minefields. These sudden breakthroughs are the results of lots of preparation, and can be derailed in a second when a mine plough or whatever important asset gets destroyed, or bogged down. So even if you coordinate multiple attacks, there’s a very good chance they’ll get uncoordinated, and this might even drive commanders to not bother coordinating because it’s just too high a chance vs focusing on the area at hand independently. Now, if you compress time a bit, Ukraine is definitely attacking in multiple places at once, and I think once they enter the sparesely defended areas time will decompress and you’ll see multiple attacks at the same time. EDIT: Edited for clarity.

Good enough to send an autonomous loitering munition though? Re bayonets, I have no military experience at all but I always figured they are useful for herding prisoners around and keeping them at arms length without having to resort to warning shots.

The Chinese will have well over 400 PLAN ships at their disposal (and hundreds or thousands of “civilian” ships if needed) if they decide to get froggy, and we can assume at least some of their equipment is good, and the operators are competent. And the mainland has lots of missiles and rockets, and can manufacture more in a hurry. That’s the competition. There is a good chance the Chinese can sink any USN assets close to Taiwan other than submarines very quickly. How do you combat this? 155mm artillery, even guided doesn’t have the range needed, and requires trained operators. Smarter munitions require less operator training, and less ammunition to hit a target at longer distances, in theory. Of course, when all your radar and satellites are down, how do you find your targets? Probably small cheapo reconnaissance drones. The marines need lots of heavy missiles, but also smaller cheaper stuff. A number of pages back I suggested a poverty cruise missile with a thermobaric warhead to punch into the bridge of funnel of a smaller ship. Something you can buy for less than $100k, vs $5+m or whatever tomahawks cost nowadays. Ukaine’s concept is complimentary: A jetski full of HE. Super cheap, long range, and if these things carry a few hundred kilos of HE, that’s enough to wreck most ships. The US military is obsessed with expensive fancy weaponry. I wish there would be the OPFOR version of procurement to fight against this. EDIT: And none of this takes into account re-supply across the Pacific, which will be challenging. 13 tomahawks won’t make a difference. 500 sea baby’s will.

That could be the hit calendar of 2024- UA engineers clearing minefields in the buff, so sexy, it hurts!

Oh yeah, fantastic, get the US to ramp up weapons production, get the US an ally with tons of experience with cheapo drones land and sea… Winnie the Flu isn’t the brightest bear on the block, but I don’t think any of this was anticipated, and the CCP is now trying to figure out how to balance their desire to be a super power with the desire to not be associated with Russia and with their brewing economic and demographic issues. Being saddled with Russia in a forever war with the west, which by the way has ramped up production of weapons that are cheap and fast and effective, and iterating hard, and might provide a way to take out China’s ships in the South China Sea and go through their air defenses??? I can’t believe China would of its own free will give the US a laboratory on how to negate both ships and missiles and missile defences in a restricted body of water (and with allies who can make the requisite munitions on a budget). They can’t be that dumb, can they?

I cant believe all 3 top Wagner guys would be on same plane. Especially after a coup attempt. These guys aren’t idiots. Did they all get on the plane already dead? Is the manifest fake (and we tipped Wagner off)? EDIT: A friend points out that 10 passengers is a lot for a junglet jet.

Why the hell is Russia focusing on an Afrika Corps right now? Don’t they need soldiers? Is this a ruse to mobilize more men? Even if best case (for Russia) the conflict is frozen and their economy can support the adventure, it’s not like there isn’t going to be epic Russian hunting and shenanigans by various foreign services in Africa.

6.8mm NGSW is going to burn through barrels very fast- like a thousand rounds or so, unless SIG made some serious advances in barrel metallurgy. An AR-15 in 5.56x45mm can have the barrel last many tens of thousands of rounds. It is instructive shooting an AR-15 vs an AK-47. The former has next to no recoil, even in a lightweight configuration (ie a 6lb setup, vs the 12lb setup with lasers, various sights, etc). What’s the point of a rifle that can go through armor at 500m that weighs 2x as much when ammo is considered when you can just have some 250g suicide drones with rod warheads that will take a guys leg or hand off in the near future?

I imagine Sweden hasn’t already gotten them in play because there are so few available and they don’t have the capacity to build that many quickly. Maybe they ramped up real fast and will steal the US’s thunder?

So, Russian terror strikes… if the conflict goes on for another two years or worst case is frozen for much longer, how do you prevent them? It’s not like they’ll stop producing missiles, or stop attacking civilians. Ideas: Give Ukraine a Tomahawk etc. for every strike (US is too afraid to do this though, plus small stockpiles for China) Give Ukraine more AD (A bit of this has been done, but it’s not foolproof and it is very expensive) Diplomatic approach where all Russians are expelled from NATO countries and have assets seized Actually have tougher sanctions on dual use electronics Attack Russian civilian infrastructure- dams, water treatment, power plants, food storage, etc. At this stage, I think (5) would be fine. Power plants especially can be justified on the grounds that the power is used for industry. Imagine you hit Moscow and St Petersburg power plants with drones once a week the whole winter. That would at least slow down some military activity. EDIT: And we’re gonna face another major point where if Russia does something haram at ZNPP, presumably the west will just grumble but not take immediate strong action.