kimbosbread

I could see 90’s eco-terrorists a la Rainbow Six being a thing. A home built bio lab is remarkably easy to build now and the CRISPR genie is out of the bottle. But for nation states, it’s all China for now.

What’s our escalation space? For air defense, it would just be more missiles, unless we have friggin space lasers or something. For aircraft, it would be modern NATO aircraft or flying tigers (which we should have had in month 3). For tanks and ifvs, we are already doing that, though perhaps not in desired quantity. For artillery and standoff weapons, already doing but not in quantity and range desired. For information, it’s not clear Russians are super vulnerable to information warfare. For diplomacy, obvs Transnistria, Belarus, Chechnya, Dagestan etc are very interesting. For navy… now there we have some options. Why don’t we lease a Walrus to Ukraine, or have letters of the marque to pursue Russian oil tankers? I could easily rustle up some fellow idiot boaters to go chase tankers off the Barbary coast on a RIB with some RPGs. EDIT: Open Wagner Safari would also be an option in Africa, and hurt their cashflow.

Strongly agree. Those quarter size hunks could each have a camera on them and a free-spinning rotor on a clutch that can be used for steering.

Related to Belarus, I consistenly fail to understand how the Transnistrian garrison has not been bribed or threatened out of existence. If Belarus and Transistria were to fall out of Russian orbit, in conjunction with the "SMO", that seems like it might precipitate political collapse in Russia, as it gives the other regions the green light to consider breaking away. EDIT: Less related but still related, how do the elections in Turkey and Pakistan affect/get affected by this?

I assume many of the young who left are city dwellers- there have to be numerous “rural youth” who didn’t have the good fortune to be able to leave, and might fight.

So what would happen if Minsk would erupt in street protests right now? Does Russia have enough soldiers on hand to stop things?

A robot snake would be way better (ur-77 but 1m long) but all of these things really depend on decent artifical muscles existing. More realistic is a remote control barbie corvette with a gopro, mr hanky plush and a brick of explosive and some ball bearing riding shotgun driving down the trench.

One can imagine spending a few months in soggy fortifications if not in active combat, and having zero creature comforts or decent equipment would really ruin your desire to fight.

This is totally feasible right now for a hobbyist with sufficient time. A while back I was trying to implement depth-first-search for a drone to explore my house room by room. It’s doable with the right training data, which has been a big focus for DARPA (constructing precise 3d cities etc for to train ml-based optical distance estimation, so just use camera for navigation no lidar nothing). But then I got a new job and wife had a kid. I think I’ve said this before, but the real innovation will be intelligence on the control side, ie ChatGPT but for translating complex commands to autonomous systems without requiring 1000 lines of code. “Drone Swarm, please go take out the trucks at the head of the column, but wait for infantry to dismount before attacking them”.

If Russia was smaller, perhaps. But without military to oppress some central asians and enough working rail infrastructure to move said military and regular goods, you cant hold together the empire. And thats on top of awful demographics. I doubt it. I think India could benefit, but they have enormous structural problems, exacerbated by awful bureacracy and corruption. For example, water- they still have tons of issues with open irrigation ditches, losing something like 50% of their water to evaporation, and water tables are dropping badly. Mexico and Egypt solved this problem in the 70s IIRC, and economists have basically recommended to India to follow the same fixes since then. Hasnt happened. I do think India will move closer to US orbit, however. There is zero reason that the major democracies shouldn’t be very close. You know who’s gonna come out on top? Who is the greatest empire since the Romans, except 1000x better? You know who. The major competitors to US power- Russia, China, the EU, maybe India, maybe Brazil seem content to shoot themselves in the foot over and over. Europe wants to be a continent wide retirement home. Russia, well that ship has sailed. China wants to be #1, but their covid response and pissing off their neighbors and moving back 50 years politically… yeah no, not with their demographics. Brazil, the country of the future. SE Asia, yeah no, not with demographics and climate change. Here’s a question- is their a better western leader than Biden? I say that as someone who is not a fan, but figures he is by far the best of the lot. And I don’t think our competitors have anyone better either. Noted political philosopher Douglas Adams positited that permanent brain damage or gross stupidity were things that could elevate an ordinary politican or military leader to true greatness.

Yeah despite Russia’s loss of jets and helos and pilots this has been a consistent theme. Or poverty Shaheeds. I think we can assume that any major mechanized movement will be preceded by a long range drone/missile strikes and/or sabotage on Crimean airfields. Don’t need to wipe out everything, but damage a few jets, kill some pilots, blow up fuel or weapon storage…

Psssh, you could cause a stampede just by dropping a bunch of dollar bills over a public event. Way cheaper than a nuke.

The problem with person-in-the-loop is the signature: Thermal, or EM, or anything really. If land warfare is going to become more like submarine warfare where stealth is the overriding concern, autonomy is going to be critical. Also, in a war with China, you won’t be able to depend on a satellite or radio link. There’s also the staffing aspect of it: If you have autonomous systems, it’s periodic training that’s pushed out to each unit, and everybody learns the same. In a war with China, will we be able to regenerate forces fast enough? In an era of demographic decline, obesity and all the other fun parts of modern society, we are having trouble recruiting enough personnel even in peacetime. If you don’t have to human rate a “thing”, it is way cheaper and easier and faster to build. The US simply cannot build ships or missiles or anything else with the speed China can. We need to be able to crank things out, fast.

Oh, but the nice thing is you don’t even need to have a person on here. Just leave it in place, give it a car battery and you can re-use software written 10+ years ago for tracking people and use it for drones. Essentially a remote gun turret that looks for drones, until it runs out of ammo. I still think detecting small drones is harder to do optically, and you need a loitering anti-drone munition that looks for the signal, essentially (either drone or operator). HARM, but for drones. Alternatively, I really like the remote turret for static position defense. You don’t even need anything special or long range, even a pistol with a silly drum mag on a little tripod/servo mount would slow down a few guys trying to hop in. You’d be looking in even small production a cost of $1000 or less for such a thing (not including the gun).

I meant more in the sense of you have all of those resources, and you have 1000 sqkm to search. How do you prioritize where to look first? Do you do Bayesian search, or some something more basic? Edit: Let’s say you want to prioritize where to search. Do you look near previous firing positions, or places where there is a known road, or places where artillery has been seen stopped before?

How does one search for artillery? I'm imaging the recon version of John Craven searching for frequently potential target locations, but that's only from spending too much time in school doing statistics.

There are a few things that are harder to simulate though: Smaller maintenance footprint Reduced logistical tail (including spare parts for maintenace) Ease of operation; ie do you just need a gps coordinate and can send it, or do you need to learn how different charges work, how to aim the damn thing etc.? On the last point, I think LLMs will be really interesting for interacting with complex weapons systems. If you could talk to it like a reasonably smart person and just tell it to do stuff, that would get very interesting. For example, "I think there are some Russians in the forest 10km over there. If you find any, report back and then attack any attached missile teams or commanders you can find".

What is the inflection point for price/payload where it makes sense to have way less tank guns and tubed artillery (and less associated maintenance and logisitcs burden)? I was looking at the cost of tank and artillery rounds, and given the cost of the gun platform, it seems like we'll be rapidly approaching a point where it just isn't worth all the effort. I suppose that's the point of GLSDB, where slow and long range and cheap and smart-ish is the winning formula. 120mm APFSDS round (M829A4): 18kg, 3km range, $8-10k 155mm unguided (M795): 35kg, 24km, $800 155mm excalibur: 48kg, 40-70km range, $68k Javelin (just missile in tube): 15.9kg, 2.5-4km range, $240k, 8.4kg tandem HEAT warhead GMLRS (M31) 90km, $100k, 90kg warhead GLSDB: 130kg, 150km range, $40k (for just the bomb, not the rocket motor kit), 16-93kg warhead Switchblade 600 (drone, no launcher): 23kg, 40km range(with 40 minutes loiter), supposedly cheaper than a Javelin but has a Javelin warhead Warmate drone: 6kg (drone, no launcher), 30km range (70m flight time), $12k unit cost in 2018, 300g HE-FRAG warhead I can't help but think a big way to reduce cost is a cheaper, lighter launch platform. You could build a povery mini-HIMARS off an LC70 pickup (which can hold 1000+kg plus) and just toss a 50x 10kg drones on the bed. Not necessarily great for blowing up buildings, but for trashing a column of IFVs or infantry or trucks, seems like a decent setup. Gets even better if drones don't need terminal guidance or are entirely autonomous and choose targets once they get near (which triples the range as no datalink is needed).

Oh yeah, I was thinking in general, not the Kerch bridge. How does one degrade 100-1000s of km of railroad without spending ****loads of money, and with minimal risk. The point of it is that Russia without rail will collapse. A siege of Crimea might take a while. If you can degrade Russian rail and thus society, military, push ethnic republics to "alternate" arrangements a la Galeev, that's a big win. 100%

There is nothing I know that exists currently that does this out of the box. To degrade the system without the pain of destroying the rail: If you knew where all the signals and control boxes were (gps) that are difficult to replace, and had suitably long range small drones with 1kg HE, you could cause significant degradation to the rail network, but that's because you are knocking out difficult to replace stuff all over. Alternatively, hit the rail yards and destroy enough locomotives, again with your long range drones/cruise missiles/saboteurs. Let's say we want to take out a 100km line of rail. That's a ton of steel, wood, dirt and gravel to move, and it's easy and fast to fix.I can imagine two possibilities to "move": [Mechanical] A track unlayer, which rides the rails and somehow tears up the track behind it (explosive, or just mechanical) [Explosive] Drones that drop charges at periodic intervals along the track (say every 5-10m), for several km. Agricultural drones already can drop/plant seeds in complex patterns; in this case it's a matter of can you carry enough charges that each can cause serious damage to a section of track. Imagine an airborne UR-77, if you will. I don't know enough about trains to know if there's some other target; I guess if you had time you could wait for them to run out of spare parts.

What we need is time. They have about 10 years of demographic runway left. They know, we know and they know we know. We need both credible deterrence and the capability to fight a short war and a long war. China is betting they can win a long war. All the missiles get used, and the ships get sunk? They can build more, fast. Us, not so much. China's assumption is that they can win if they can get troops to Taiwan and hold for two weeks. My worries: Does the US have a big enough submarine force? We have 53 fast attack boats; lets say emergency we have half those are in the area. Do they carry enough weapons to sink a ****load of Chinese ships? Los Angeles and Virginia class carry 26 torpedoes (and up 12 missiles for some boats). Seawolf class carry double that. That's 1300+ weapons. Chinese navy is 300+ armed vessels and growing fast; plus they have lots of merchant ships. We can sink of bunch of ships, but they'll have more. How do we resupply our subs in a timely manner? Given Chinese antiship missiles, can we get surface vessels anywhere close to Taiwan? Are large surface ships on a blockade near Singapore viable? Would we be better off playing pirates on RHIBs in those sorts of waters and moving the surface ships back to the Indian Ocean/Australia/Indonesia? What do we do about drone ships/subs/mines? We need to be building these, fast, but I bet China can do it faster, and better. If we need to boots on the ground in Taiwan, can we get marines 400 miles from Okinawa in a contested environment? What do we do about transiting the Panama canal, which China effectively owns nowadays? On the other hand: If all the satellites get taken out day 1, we have a credible shot at getting a replacement constellation back up, fast. China does not have a counter to this besides building more anti-satellite missiles. The longer they wait, the more ridiculous our space overmatch becomes. China imports food + fuel. How much can they stockpile? That dam is a big target and single point of failure. They'd lose Wuhan, Shanghai, and bunch of power plants, tons of military bases etc. Are they willing to risk it? Also, I used to work with a bunch of mainlanders who are all very pro-China. Around 2021 they had kind of given up on Pooh-bear and were much more bearish, no pun intended.

If you are any good, why the hell would you join the military to be an IT guy? If you wanna be a soldier sure, but IT... what's the point? If you are even halfway decent, there are thousands of tech companies, many in military adjacent areas that pay well enough to afford an apartment in a tier1 US or Candian city without roomates (or in SpaceX's case, half of a FAANG with longer hours). You don't have to be a stanford grad or anything like that either; it's purely ability to pass coding and design interviews at the entry level, which I've seen average but motivated people do easily.

In terms of detecting potential leaks, I would hope the approach is similar to what we do in the cybersecurity industry: Essentially have model of normal user or process behavior, and then for every behavior or non-behavior that falls out of that scope, we increase the risk score.

Yeah do we have a giant moving castle, or should we be a submarine? Or do we go the 3rd way and go full Zerg, since if you can't beat them join them. Beyond the cost of adding $500-$Nmillions of APS for each truck, the ammo is such a big problem. The economics just suck if the APS is more expensive than a bunch of munitions. An FPV drone with a bunch of explosives on it is really cheap, and really accurate. And this isn't even touching on munitions that do their thing outside of APS range, or swarms combined with that.

Re Trophy, I don't think that's a good long term solution, especially against smarter munitions that don't just attack from the sides, let alone a grenade dropped from a drone. It's definitely not gonna handle multiple drones/missiles attacking simultaneously from various angles.