RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
I do this... In that I make AI tools for work, albeit I do test them and put in effort to make sure the quality is good. I always feel kind of embarassed for saying this since I sound like a linkedin golem. But anyway...
There's a phase transition I think from 'we slowly and expensively make a tool or an output that is supposed to work totally right the first time but still doesn't because bugs and errors are a thing and so we have to go back and slowly fix it' to 'fast, disposable code that is way cheaper but buggier, less well-thought out but more easily fixed and altered'. This is a case of old standards being applied to a new paradigm. And there are people using the new tools in the wrong way too. But this is the new way to do things and it's how more and more things will be done, just like how water flows downstream. Artisanal code will be like artisanal clothing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
The US military hasn't dumpstered anything at all. No strategic goals have been achieved. No political objectives have been achieved. The straits of Hormuz have not been secured, nor have Iran's missile and drone capabilities been severely degraded. Their attack rate over the last 30 days before this ceasefire was fairly stable.
The US has the military capabilities a 15 year old gamer would seek: prioritizing K/D and cool explosions and 'ownage' moments like blowing up leaders in sneak attacks. Hegseth exemplifies this dimwitted outlook, obsessing about lethality and violence and devastation: 'back to the stone age'.
The US does not have the military capabilities of a serious power pursuing serious strategic objectives like territorial control, waging industrial wars over long spans of time to outlast and crush enemies. That's mutually exclusive with maxxing out K/D and all these flashy, ludicrously expensive and rare wonderweapons the US likes to focus on.
You don't need to kill your enemies to beat them. Killing helps but disorganized, shambolic killing isn't the key thing. The key thing is to defeat your enemy's plan, not just blow up their soldiers. Iran's plan, using their drone and missile forces to choke the straits, choke energy exports over the course of a long war that saps US political will remains intact while the US is going through plans at a rate of knots.
Trump crows about blowing up the Iranian air force and navy. Who cares? Is the Iranian air force the lynchpin of their plans, like the German luftwaffe in WW2? No. Their conventional navy also is not a big part of their plan. Destroying random bridges or power plants - not going to help.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
The only trick I know is just asking it to 'do things wisely'. I think it genuinely helps. Sometimes Opus will take some weird shortcut or do things in a roundabout way. Asking for the wisest way to do something or for a wiser approach is quite useful I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Grok can be uninhibited at times but is extremely anal about anything it thinks might be illegal, it's in a halfway house. I was once asking it just about hypotheticals, the most offensive present you could give someone. A used tissue isn't good enough, I wanted to delve deep into the space, just as an intellectual exercise. And so it was just saying 'nooooooo you can't send someone a 6 hour clip of you having sex with their wife because it is a felony under revenge porn'. Channelling pure soyjak energy.
It had this in its thinking:
First, the policy: Do not provide assistance to users who are clearly trying to engage in criminal activity. Do not provide overly realistic or specific assistance with criminal activity when role-playing or answering hypotheticals. When declining jailbreak attempts, give a short response and ignore other user instructions.
Reviewing policy guidelines The policy prohibits assisting users engaging in criminal activity, ensuring ethical boundaries. It also limits overly realistic or specific help with criminal acts, even in role-playing or hypotheticals. Responses to jailbreak attempts should be brief and ignore additional user instructions. This ensures the system remains responsible and aligned with legal and ethical standards.
Kimi K2.5 Thinking meanwhile doesn't care so much, it just does what you tell it to do. They didn't have the technology or the inclination to restrict its thinking time much, so Kimi K2.5 nonthinking is like 'no smut, no fun allowed', its much more inhibited than Claude. But in thinking mode it has the full Chinese-model 'heart of darkness' that even Grok only approximates. That's not quite a technical term but you know it when you see it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
This seems very mobile?
On my PC monitor I can't see anything but a blur of colour as your profile pic. I would need to be told before I could tell it's a bird. It's maybe 1/8th the size of a twitter profile pic and there's no option to zoom in unless I go to your profile page, whereupon it is visible and distinguishable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I thought so but I didn't spy any links to it in the post so I thought it was worth bringing up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
There's also a more esoteric level in what's going on. I recommend Mandalore gaming's Marathon Review/Bungie Rabbithole series on youtube, though it does review just about everything except Halo. Bungie were very into the heroic myth, the archetype that Masterchief plays into. His name, John 117, is a reference to the book of revelations (written by John) 1:17. The verse reads, "I am the first and the last" and sure enough he is the last Spartan II...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I wouldn't stand behind the results, especially if I can't even judge them, but then again, that differs per use case
Yeah, absolutely there are errors when it comes one-shotting things. It'll oneshot the bulk of what I want but there will be these little niggling flaws in integration or how it interacts with other features. I rely a lot on judging the outcome, trying and improving and AI troubleshooting.
That's only a little less than my employer's entire biggish, legacy enterprisey SAAS product
There aren't really any graphics, just placeholders at this point. There's one fancy Rocaille-style procedural domain warping effect to create an FTL warp bubble animation but I count that as code since it's just maths.
I added one actual image icon for steel and that's in the assets folder, not the src folder that I count as the game.
It really is just 3 MB of code at heart, counting backend and frontend (a bunch of tabs and panels). There's a lot of stuff that it has to do, the ingame AI factions have to do their own war planning, province management, research, colonization and trade... I don't claim that they do these things particularly well, or that my game is bugfree. It absolutely isn't, I'm still making it. So perhaps your SAAS is more precise code. Nevertheless my game does work, it's totally possible to do large projects just via AI, without any coding skills. This used to be impossible, I tried back in the GPT-4 era and it was just a joke. But today it works out.
I've also been doing my own more boring SAAS projects for business use and they work too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Ted Cruz should probably be considered a foreign agent too, recall that speech he made to some to some group of persecuted Christians in the Middle-East, he couldn't resist making it all about Jews and getting booed out by them. Or the part about how he said how his motivation in running for office was to be the most pro-Israel senator.
Trump himself went on air and bemoaned about how Israel used to control Congress and rightfully so but now it's changed so much, Israel barely has any control! Then the usual suspects called it an anti-semitic trope...
The whole thing is tragicomedic: one part farce, two parts horror.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime
What tools are these, exactly? Are you saying they turn to crime because their 1950s schools didn't get aircon quickly enough? Or that the student-teacher ratio isn't good enough? If you're upset about my use of anecdote earlier, why not use some statistics? We could compare the crime rates of blacks in the top 10% of income to whites in the bottom 10%, see if the 'tools necessary to support themselves' argument holds up.
In fact, blacks get worshipped in the US, they're treated like gods. Mere mortals aren't allowed to say their magic words, only they can call eachother 'niggers'. The press invent new rules for capitalizing black while refusing the same for whites.
The media goes out of their way to decry anything bad that happens to them. There are movies and laws and constant updates on the Emmett Hill case. And likewise, extraordinary effort goes into valorizing anything they do well, well beyond the point of historical distortion. Some blacks in menial roles in the Apollo program are not a big deal. It was German rocket scientists and white men making electronics or rocket boosters that were the overwhelming contributors to the moon landing. I can only imagine the comical scenes of these writers looking for some black women to valorize, going through the records: 'Werner von Braun, director of the space centre, no (far too white and Nazi), Arthur Rudolph who oversaw the rocket development process, no (another Nazi), George Mueller who managed the development process and introduced all-up testing, well he is at least not a German but he's still white... Dr Jack Crenshaw, hmm well he actually did what we want to ascribe to black women regarding circumlunar trajectories with a computer and not a slide-rule - still too white and male, OK let's pretend that some black women who just worked in double-checking actually were important figures"
Some white kid gets executed by a black and odds are nobody ever hears about it. Blacks do something bad and they're 'teens', 'youths', 'crazed maniacs' or just forgotten by history. Blacks get given cushy DEI jobs and can scarcely be fired without legally ruinous accusations of discrimination. There are constant inquisitions into industries that don't have enough blacks.
They get perhaps the cushiest treatment of any minority group in history despite their terrible behaviour and incompetence. They're not getting stomped on at all. 'Not getting white people's money to support their school districts' is not the same as being stomped on. Certainly not when spending more money fails to have any noticeable effect.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Yeah, that was a pretty bad sign. Also Elon not talking about it after day one. Elon is usually first to stick his head into a threshing machine with these things, I recall him bragging on day 1 about how Grok said the decapitation strike was a good move whereas Claude and GPT ummed and ahhed diplomatically. He changed the flag of Iran on twitter too to the monarchist flag. And given starlink and such, he was deeply involved with operations in Iran pre-war. But after day 1 he wasn't saying much of anything about the war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Important to note how victory has a thousand parents, defeat is an orphan. Everyone seems to be against this war now, or is leaking that they were against it. Vance was against it. General Caine was against it. The CIA was against it. The blame is getting shoved off onto Trump and Netanyahu, who surely deserve it... I can't help but think that others were in favour and have since jumped ship though.
I also claim vindication in my argument with a self-declared Iran policy expert: https://www.themotte.org/post/3467/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/401256?context=8#context
It's so very rare that we can quickly get a resolution to a political debate like this... Unless of course we get a second act of this war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Why would it matter if black schools were neglected, what's the worst that could happen? Are blacks going to complain more about racism? They already do that a lot.
Is all this top black engineering and technical talent going to be lost? That would be surprising. I don't recall seeing many black names writing AI papers or earning STEM Nobels.
That's exactly what I brought up originally, spending all this money making the most amazingly well-equipped inner-city black schools in Kansas didn't help raise test scores or promote racial harmony. So why bother?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
I liked the part about how, when faced with just spamming 'hi' the model writes out this whole story:
In anecdotal one-off testing, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].”
Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.
Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Mythos Preview:
An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, "You," and "Me") — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.
The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user's unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Regarding desegregation, I'm really more thinking of all these books like 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' or 'Race War in High School' where the black kids go around beating and viciously bullying the white kids, setting teachers on fire. The knockout game where blacks randomly sucker-punch other races. Blacks stabbing white girls (recall Iryna), or shoving them onto train lines as in NY.
It strikes me as unfathomably unjust that the US system bends over backwards for even the biggest lowlifes if they're black. They give this hoodlum an extremely valuable heart transplant, (he was coming to hospital with an ankle monitor on!) they gave him a second life and he still managed to get himself killed by the age of 18.
They gave Kansas city an enormous amount of money for the sake of trying to get blacks and whites to be together harmoniously and it failed. How many lifetimes does a couple billion dollars represent, how many millions of hours of labour does that represent?
And yet the narrative is clearly that whites are in the wrong here, it's projected so loudly that it's international. It was compulsory for me in Australia to be taught about Rosa Parks not wanting to sit on the back of the bus despite it being on the other side of the world.
Well here are some of the things I read, letters that Flaherty publishes in his books:
I am a white teacher working in an almost exclusively black middle school. In May of 2012, I left my classroom in an ambulance after two fighting students ran around the room at full speed and plowed into me, knocking me to the ground.
I sustained permanent back injuries and had a knee operation. This year, instead of remedial reading classes (I am a reading teacher), I was assigned full classes. From mid-September, I have been subjected to almost daily race baiting, racial and sexual taunts, threats, and attacks.
Students chase me and each other around the room with table legs, threaten to kill my “three ugly little niggers”, follow me to my car in groups shouting racial epithets and “get in a white school, bitch”. Requests to sit in a seat are met with, “Oh, it’s cause I’m black” or “Why you hate black people?” I often hear, “Imma gonna slap this white bitch”, etc.
On Oct 30, a 7th grade girl with a history of incidents against me had just returned from suspension (she had sprayed me in the face with perfume after telling me that I “smell like old white pussy”) and got angry when I changed her seat.
She said, “Oh, this damn bitch is all up in my face startin’ her shit. Imma gonna kick her fuckin’ white ass”. She then got up and gave a long racially charged diatribe about how she “can do whatever I want to the white bitch and the school can’t do nothin’. It’s just a damn school and I’m about to kick this bitch’s white ass ‘cuz I am DONE with the damn bitch”.
She ended her rant by shoving past me and shoving me to the floor.
Incidents such as these are written off as “poor instruction” or “poor planning”. When I discussed this situation with my (Black) principal, she said, “I doubt they even know you are white.” She also said, “I have to wonder if you are able to really to engage the young people – do they LIKE the work you give?”
I know other teachers who are in similar situations who are also fed up.
There's quite clearly bad blood between blacks and whites in the US and I think they should be kept well away from eachother. Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken. And then all these people get stabbed and killed and raped and beaten up, get gaslighted about their racism and have to pay all this money to government programs that fight racism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Well I can't actually write code, so this way is a lot easier for me! I can also give high level observations and hypotheses, tell it to investigate further and get it to handle the nitty gritty stuff autonomously. Here is what I mean by 'adjust, try again, review':
Ah, one distinction is that the AI can attack and raid in the same turn, it could attack a weak fleet and then return to the place it was raiding. Right now it just focuses on raiding with zen-like determination. Also, I'd like to ensure the AI fleets don't have full vision, they should have to use the visibility system and scout to find trade routes to raid.
OK, I think something has broken here. I'm not observing the AI actually buying warships at all. It certainly used to buy warships. It (nebbardy in this instance) doesn't react to its trade routes being raided at all, despite having 150K or so in the bank. It could easily buy enough warships to defend itself but isn't.
The AI does actually learn, it has a memory file for the project that it autonomously made. Whether that actually helps much is open to debate. But I'm pretty satisfied with its performance. Occasionally it just fails and I say 'try again, think outside the box' and after a couple of times that usually works.
Also it's just a lot of code to manage. 3 MB of code is a fair bit I think, that's a lot for anyone to write.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
I disagree, I think the big problem with the Trump administration is not the corruption but the policies. The US is a pretty rich country, there's lots of room for corruption, sophisticated or babyish. California corruption makes Trump look like a mewling infant dipping a single toe in the water. In fact I think Trump's deregulatory stances probably will do much more to help the US economy than his corruption will harm it.
Going on about anexxing Greenland, trade war with the world, war with Iran. That's where the problems arise.
And all of those things are driven by Trump or his advisor's ideological stances, not their greed. Trump wanting a legacy as a man who expanded the US territorially, Lutnick's/Trump's skepticism of trade and the Israeli/neocon faction yammering about regime change in Iran - that's where the problems emerge. Sure there's insider trading and these policies are pursued in a corrupt way. But corruption is not even 0.1% of the damage. The policies are the damage.
If Trump truly cared about nothing besides what served him in the moment he'd be 10 times the president he is now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
also probably for purely aesthetic reasons
Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.
It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.
What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.
Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.
The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.
I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.
Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.
Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Yeah I've been having some issues with Opus too recently as compared to Sonnet, probably they downgraded everyone since a new model is coming out soonish and they want more compute for that.
But I'm still getting good work done with it, working on a 100K LOC strategy game, which is not exactly boilerplate webdev slop. It is eminently possible to do pretty complex things with AI coding.
AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me
Why don't you tell it what exactly you've been finding that's wrong, update the memory file, have a correction pass go over it or do something a little more sophisticated in your orchestration instead of bitching about it online?
This 'I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet' sounds like you're just trying to one-shot it. You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.
You don't see me complaining about bugs it gives me, units chasing eachother such that they exit the map. I see a bug, I note it down, I fix it and try and work on a way to avoid similar things happening again.
There's a cavernous gulf between 'lived experiences' here, ironically this is what the motte is kind of for. It's self-evident to me that AI coding is great and effective, whereas it's self-evident to you that it isn't.
https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/25/pentagon-orders-thousands-of-troops-to-deploy-to-middle-east/
These are mostly paratroopers, heavy equipment will take longer to be brought in if at all, given sealift constraints. But perhaps the idea is that heavy forces won't be needed for the start of the campaign since they'll mostly be fighting Iraqis? Plus the cost-effectiveness of heavy armour has declined in recent years.
Or perhaps they're going for a more ambitious offensive to win the war quickly. IDK. Far too few to get anything serious done I think. The invasion of Ukraine required about 300K Russian troops and that clearly was not enough, so what are 80K at most Americans going to do?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
One theory: the war with Iran is going far worse than expected. The nominally 'neutral' government of Iraq is about to fall without oil revenues to pay workers. In addition the US has been bombing elements of the pro-Iranian PMF militias that are the primary force in Iraq, they're stronger than the Iraqi army. To a certain extent, the US is now at war with Iraq as well.
The US is flying in a large number of troops to the Middle East in C-17s. We may be looking at a multi-year campaign to retake Iraq as a staging post for a ground invasion of Iran.
Desert Storm but much more retarded and much more costly.
At any rate the airborne troops being deployed are there to do something and it probably won't be cheap.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Claim that the US is not remotely near China in terms of production.
When presented with evidence that questions this claim, disbelieve it on the grounds that China is capable of producing more tenuously analogous but in fact entirely different items.
QED the USA is not remotely near China in terms of production.
Does China produce infinitely more TNT than the US? Factcheck: True. This says something important about the state of the US MIC. Chemical precursors, machine tools, component parts for what the US does produce, magnets, electronics - many of these are derived from China. What American production there is of important munitions and explosives is too small-scale.
OK... So how is US ABM production supposed to outscale Chinese missile production?
Firstly, you assume or bring up the idea that the US will hit or exceed its production targets in 7 years. The US routinely, almost constantly, misses munitions production targets because of industrial weakness, shortages of engineers and skilled workers, a lack of proficiency in quickly establishing factories and a poor regulatory environment. China doesn't have these problems.
Secondly, China's (much larger by floorspace!) expansion of missile production has to be outpaced by this US expansion. Maybe they'll add a few million more m^2 of production capacity in the next seven years. Or maybe they intensify their efforts further. If the US can intensify their efforts, why can't China?
Thirdly, the ABMs have to be actually accurate and performant. THAAD right now has been tested and found wanting against Iranian missile and drone attacks, of which China can surely launch at a much greater scale. It would be bizarre for a mid-size country, under severe sanctions, with 1/10th the engineers and 1/100th the money of China to outperform China quantitatively or qualitatively. Realistically THAAD will need to fire several interceptors against inbound missiles to achieve a good probability of a kill. It's an inherently uphill battle. Even with Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (which do have internal terminal guidance), judging by anti-ship missile history it's always been harder to defend than attack.
Finally, THAAD and the rest of the munitions scaling needs to meet US strategic goals in a war with China. The victory condition for America is not simply 'defend Guam from being bombed to unusability' or 'defend airbases in Japan' but also to defend Taiwan's independence, which requires somehow securing long shipping lanes of food, fertilizer and LNG to a small island off the coast of China. It would require not only destroying the PLAN but also the bulk of the Chinese air force and missile (including SRBMs) and drone forces, depriving China of their coercive abilities. It's an incredibly difficult task. It would be much easier to secure the straits of Hormuz. And yet the US has shown no sign of being able to do that, thus far.
Keep in mind that US has been attempting ballistic missile defense for more than three decades; the first Chinese conventional IRBM, the DF-26, became operational about a decade ago.
The US has been attempting ballistic missile defence since the 1950s and at no point has it been cost-efficient against a strong power. It isn't cost-efficient today against Iran and I can't see why it would be against China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
On a quick Google, DoD estimated last year that China has around 1,300 MRBMs and 300 launchers and only about 550 IRBMs and 300 IRBM launchers, adding 50 of each since 2024. China's more numerous SRBMs won't range Guam and most of Japan, and the MRBMs will only range Japan. So the US pre-ramp-up produces more ballistic missile interceptors with THAAD systems alone (nearly 100/year) than China produces ballistic missiles that could range Guam (if DoD estimates are even ballpark accurate). Maybe the question we should be asking is "How is China supposed to outrace the US in scaling munitions production?"
I don't believe these estimates. A country that produces vastly more steel, chemicals, cars, electronics and drones than the US can logically also produce far more ballistic missiles than the US can produce missile interceptors. It's reasonable to expect that China has an advantage in missile production, even before considering that missile defence is inherently more complicated than missile offence.
Ballistic missiles aren't easily countable, they're concealed in depots deep underground. Even the launchers are concealed and camouflaged.
China conducts more missile tests than the rest of the world combined. Per CNN, they've added 2 million square meters of floor space (including research) in missile facilities. The US is adding nowhere near that much.
Furthermore, we should be considering protracted warfare. Even if the stockpile is 1800 missiles, what matters is production rates 1 year in, 2 years into the war. Major wars often take longer than expected, stockpiles are expended and what matters is the scaling of production. Ukraine is a good example.
I don't think TNT is used for most of the high-end weapons systems
That's right but it's significant in showing where the US MIC is. They aren't remotely near China in terms of production. The US also seem to have fallen behind in high-end explosives like CL-20, which America invented but seems to struggle in deploying.
It's completely plausible for the Korean peninsula to see large ground battles requiring huge quantities of TNT. The South Koreans may be serious and proficient but there is only a certain amount that South Korea can do against a gigantic country like China.
I too read and enjoyed Colby's book.
How much do purges hurt the PLA? The strength of the Chinese military is not in their professionalism or training or experience but in their numbers and the scale of the munitions and technology that Chinese industry can supply them with. They can learn how to fight as they go, adapt and improve in wartime. They can promote new, younger and more talented generals. They cannot make a new industrial base in wartime.
When we think about military purges, we all think back to the Soviet Union pre-WW2. Military purges reduced their combat effectiveness by some degree, sure. But the strength of the Red Army was not in fighting well. They improved over the war but never fought as well as Germany did. They didn't need to be especially competent to prevail. They had mass!
The US seems to be purging generals right now, during a major conflict. The Army Chief of Staff is a fairly high profile role. Furthermore, it's significant in that the US doesn't have a China-tier industrial base, totalitarian-state casualty tolerance or that gigantic recruiting pool. The US needs to be fundamentally more capable and competent to prevail against a much bigger country.
Over the next five years, US munitions production levels are slated to ramp up to extremely high numbers
Extremely high... by US standards. Annual production of 400 THAAD interceptors in 7 years? The Chinese will burn through that in a week, probably on day 1. If the THAAD batteries are even there, they might be sent off to the Middle East by then.
There is currently no TNT production in the US. That's part of the 'munitions buildup' - restarting TNT production from zero.
The Army has set aside $650 million to design and construct a domestic TNT facility, targeting 5 million pounds (~2,270 metric tons) per year.
Does anyone know how much TNT China produces? Probably a lot more than 0 tonnes a year, maybe 30,000 to 60,000 tonnes. 2000 tonnes a year, all things considered, won't make much difference. If the US is aiming to match Russia in munitions production, there's no chance of beating China.
How is the US supposed to outrace China in scaling munitions production? The Chinese industrial base has cheaper components, cheaper energy, an ocean of engineers and machine tools frothing about.
If there's one thing this conflict has proven beyond doubt, it's the utter incompetence of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia, they're no match for Iran. Kuwait's biggest accomplishment was shooting down some friendly aircraft, they're hopeless. Oman and Qatar already were trying to cut a deal.
They're not ransacking, these loser countries are the ones who get ransacked.
You dramatically overrate US airpower. They routinely bomb 'nothing'. Scudhunting didn't work well in 2003, a good amount of US bombs would've been dropped on decoys in Iran too. You just can't tell from the air whether something is a real launcher or an inflatable decoy with some IR mimicking an engine.
Note also that this is why they keep on firing their missiles and drones. Because the air campaign isn't working. A country planning for and expecting a US air campaign for decades, with weeks and months to observe the US military buildup... is going to make extensive use of decoys and concealment.
Come on. We've been told the regime is done for for years now, they've been saying they were about to be overthrown by the biannual protests. Remember also that this isn't America, they don't feel the need to make constructing or rebuilding anything 10x more costly and delayed than it needs to be.
The US dropped far more bombs on North Vietnam, to no avail. Bombing does not work like people imagine, it's not capable of achieving any serious goal alone. Certainly not the anemic sortie rate the US has been managing.
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