Shrike
8mo ago
They established Area 51 out in the middle of nowhere on government land and forbid people from flying over it. This might be a classified government project but it's very different M.O. from Area 51.
Shrike
8mo ago
Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey? At night, even with a good camera, you're just going to see the little lights. Not sure how much you'd see even with an IR sensor with little drones unless you were close.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is pen-testing and/or sending a message, perhaps by a foreign actor. I really think it's hard to counter small UAS and even if you can counter them, hard to finger anyone specific for doing it. This would track with the relatively recent appearance of drones over a number of US bases, including outside the United States.
I guess it could be a classic UFO flap, but the objects seem to be described as being drones, so I'm not really inclined to leap for anything paranormal unless there's a legitimate demonstration of unusual capability.
Shrike
8mo ago
The human mind can in fact adapt to 40 as "very hot" and "0" as cold instead of 100 = very hot and 32 = cold.
In the United States, 100 is hot and 0 is cold, and anything below 0 or above 100 is very hot or cold. Which I find very intuitive!
Shrike
8mo ago
I actually think there's a good chance the moon does very well for exactly these reasons - there's water ice there, there's enough gravity for useful things but barely enough to stop you from traveling, and we could make a space elevator from conventional materials. Basically has most of the benefits of a space habitat but doesn't require space infrastructure assembly.
One thing that I think planets have that space habitats don't is more room for error. If you are building on Mars it's pretty easy to build e.g. a "panic room" for a colony - food stockpiles, an extra reactor, etc. (And if something does go badly wrong you at least have resources on hand that don't have to be flown to you.) You can build redundancy on a space colony as well, but I imagine it as the difference between designing a ship with that versus a land-based colony. Both are doable, but it's probably going to have a marginal impact on the ship's cost moreso than that of the colony.
This isn't to say that space habitats won't be a thing, though - they seem plausible to me.
Shrike
8mo ago
ENDORSED. We have finally gotten enough technology to RETVRN.
(I think there will always be organizations - the military, groups working across state lines - that will have to used a fixed time. But sundial time would be awesome. If you need something less weird, use GMT.)
Shrike
8mo ago
There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming
I don't think this is true at all. It's possible we never colonize Mars, or wherever, or that if we do it's just basically a scientific research outpost.
But Mars has water. So humans would be able to breathe and grow food. From what I can tell - although I am happy to be corrected - colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.
Shrike
8mo ago
Why do you think they would be parallel constructing, to protect unknown technical knowledge?
I'm pretty confident dowsing been used to (attempt to) find oil in the past, though. I know someone who used to work in the industry, a very long time ago, and he talked about dowsing in that context, although it might have only been for water.
If you get any of your pals to cop to dowsing (or to know of dowsing being done) you should report back.
Shrike
8mo ago
I think at least some of the people in the "CIA remote viewing unit" were on a contract basis. As I understand it, the intelligence agencies (reasonably!) had a lot of questions about if remote viewing was a thing that would work, so at least part of their M.O. was to go out and get people who were supposed to be good as psychic stuff and test them. I don't think this involved making them full-time employees. Maybe you wouldn't consider them part of the "CIA's remote viewing unit" even if they were getting tasked by the CIA (or whoever) to do remote viewing as part of the ongoing remote viewing project, I dunno.
Obviously Jimmy Carter is reporting something somewhat vaguely that he wasn't directly involved in, and perhaps the CIA went and got a psychic in a manner that was completely unrelated to the ongoing investigations into remote viewing, I haven't dug into it. The entire saga of the government's remote viewing project is kinda convoluted to me and I don't claim to be very familiar with the ins-and-outs of it – it moved around between different agencies and departments, with different sources of funding, and then was supposedly shut down, and then some people who were supposedly former staffers then came out and talked about the program, and who knows if they are telling the truth or not.
But that seems to me, off the top of my head, as the best example of "the CIA used a psychic to accomplish a tangible intelligence task" that seems somewhat credible because Jimmy Carter verified it.
Shrike
8mo ago
Shrike
8mo ago
But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.
Sure – the implication is there, though. It seems to me that Randall is nudging readers towards believing that relativity and quantum electrodynamics are true. And Randall doesn't put the check-mark next to the dowsing (or the hexing/cursing!) even though, arguably, he should.
Shrike
8mo ago
I don't think so but I can't prove it's never been used that way. I don't think the oil companies need parallel construction, though, they have a lot of other methods of searching for oil that are public.
Shrike
8mo ago
Oil companies use it (or at least did in the past) so the implication is that it works, yeah.
Shrike
8mo ago
(At some point I’d like to write a post about an implication of this comic which Randall perhaps did not intend.)
A bit of an aside, but I'd be interested to read this. (The unintended implication that strikes me as funny is that dowsing works!)
Shrike
8mo ago
I think part of this is a sign of affluence and disposable income. But it's also worth noting that in 1962 most everyone had either served in the military or had a dad who did. I think World War Two was immensely unifying for the States, both because it saw us struggling against a common foe and also because it involved putting a lot of people through the military, which can also be a pretty unifying experience.
Shrike
8mo ago
Well, firstly, 2004 was two decades ago! But secondly, right-wing ethnonationalists aren't going to get back the well-off white voters that flipped Democrat due to Trump by running on an enthonationalist platform. They might do better with the Hispanics (again, ironically!) – but in either case running an explicit white nationalism platform would be a case of massive self-sabotage for right-leaning ethnonationalists, unless you're so fixated white nationalism that there's no real overlap with normal right-wing things. (I guess here I'm working out a distinction between righties who believe in ethnonationalism being the default state of things but have other, normal political priorities like "lower inflation" versus people who are right-wing almost purely by virtue of being terminally-obsessed ethnonationalists.) Wouldn't be the first time an ideology had sunk itself in the pursuit of a purity spiral.
I find this question also very interesting on the side of the Democrats: I get the vibe that some Democrats are coming out and saying that Being Woke is a nonstarter and it should be shelved. But it remains to be seen if they'll end up having the upper hand: Woke has entrenched positions now!
Shrike
8mo ago
I think the real issue with this kind of rhetoric on the Right isn’t that they’re “evil,” but that they’re stuck in a feedback loop of resentment, much like the Left. They’re taking a legitimate frustration with cultural decline and turning it into an obsession with victimhood, which only makes the situation worse.
To bounce off of this elaborate a bit, I think what's happening here is that some people model a deviation from an (at least aspirationally) color-blind way of viewing the world and one's fellow-man as a choice, perhaps a moral one. At its highest, this is about treating humans as sacred; at its lowest, it is about forming a benign social construct for greater harmony and social cohesion.
Other people, including, I think, some on the right, have concluded that [the identitarian part of] the left is actually correct about identity politics - perhaps not in their direction or intent, but in the basic premise that ethnic groups are going to show in-group loyalty to each other and that it's a sucker's game to think otherwise. Some of them might view this as a choice, perhaps a tactical or moral one, but I think others view it as more of a fact of life. In their view, to not harbor at least some ethnic identity is a mistake along the lines of, say, socialism - not as much a moral choice as it is about respecting the base view of reality and those who try to convince you otherwise are either trying to pull a fast one or they are out of touch with reality.
I think it's very ironic that some portions of the right are coming around to this view just as the right is making huge inroads into the ethnic groups that have been part of the left-wing coalition for years. Tactically-speaking, now is probably the worst time to adopt such views, or at least advocate them openly.
But if you want to defeat such views, you need to do more than call them evil. You need to show that they are actually wrong. This is, of course, one of the great contributions of both religion and nationalism: imposing a higher reality than than an ethnic one. It's probably not a coincidence that with religion and nationalism both taking body blows in the past three decades that people are giving another type of identity a second look.
Shrike
8mo ago
I think it's possible to have some good ideas and some bad ideas at the same time, but I am very, very skeptical of his assessments of armor. However, it's worth noting that naval warfare hasn't changed much since the Iowas were reactivated. When they were, though, they were filled to the brim with Tomahawk cruise missiles.
In principle a long-range naval gun is actually pretty swell, because bullets are cheap and naval support gunfire is good. I think it's too bad we haven't made more progress on railguns.
Shrike
8mo ago
I'd be curious to hear your opinion on this article
I thought it was fairly sensible. I have a quibble and a comment or two:
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He writes off the LCS as an anti-submarine platform. But as I understand it, a lot of ASW warfare is done by helicopters. The LCS is relatively small and, uh, "attritable." It might actually make a relatively good platform to patrol off of Taiwan's eastern side. It's not going to be great in a situation where it's facing the Chinese fleet or air threats, but if we keep the Chinese fleet bottled up it might make a decent makeshift escort simply by virtue of the helipad. This isn't praise of the LCS, just noting that it is probably not entirely useless.
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He writes off our airborne ASW capability. While it's probably true the P-8 and MQ-4 should avoid close encounters with the Chinese air-defense net, they will probably have utility operating out of Japan and the Philippines to bottle up Chinese SSKs. (Here's another area where we see that naval capabilities compound: if China can operate a carrier battle group in the SCS a bit aggressively, they might be able to open gaps in our air ASW coverage and slip submarines through to Taiwan's eastern seaboard.) Of course, I have no idea how reliably the P-8 is at catching transiting submarines anyway, but I assume it will have an edge against non-nuclear submarines in open water.
Furthermore, the US has a number of stealth reconnaissance assets, of which we don't know much. Might the RQ-170's speculated AESA radar have snorkel-detection capability? How well will it hold up to China's anti-stealth radar capabilities? I don't know the answer to that. But it wouldn't surprise me if those assets were tapped in an SCS fight, even in a makeshift fashion.
I do agree with you on that. I think the linked article is way off base to think we can somehow "bring back manufacturing" and then mass produce drones like they're WW2 liberty ships and have it be effective.
I think it would be good to "bring back manufacturing," but imho the key isn't to print drones or ships, but rather munitions. If you look at the war in Ukraine, it's good that Russia has a robust manufacturing system, but being able to make munitions. And of course suicide FPV drones are munitions in that war. In a war with China, that's going to be anti-ship missiles, mines, etc. I think that ideally the US needs to be able to make a lot of anti-ship missiles, quickly, because if they are utilized correctly there will be relatively little attrition to the launch platforms, in theory.
Obviously it's ideal to be able to make ships, planes, and missiles overnight. But in terms of manufacturing, I think the first focus should be on munitions. And that's something that the US is aware of and working to mitigate. I really think people are sometimes unaware of just how many air-to-ground munitions the US manufactures (e.g. Wikipedia says 7,500 JASSM stealth cruise missiles and more than half a million JDAM bomb kits produced). I think the US is behind where it needs to be in terms of anti-ship weapons specifically but if China gives it two or three years to manufacture weapons like the LRASM the Navy/USAF will have thousands of them.
Shrike
8mo ago
Ports require lots of heavy machinery to do their job, you can't 10x their capacity in a few days.
Sure – but Taiwan has at least some of that machinery on their eastern side. The question is whether or not they can receive sufficient emergency supplies from eastern ports, not whether or not they can do business as usual from eastern ports.
LNG terminals (Taiwan imports 98% of energy) also cannot be easily migrated.
This does seem like a serious weakness, although it looks only around 40% of Taiwan's imported energy comes from LNG specifically.
They could all be shut down with well placed missiles, crippling resupply.
Allow me to register some skepticism that this would amount to anything more than a temporary inconvenience.
This is all ignoring submarine warfare/anti ship ballistic missiles.
I specifically mentioned submarine warfare and ballistic missiles in my prior post as options China had outside of a surface blockade. Happy to discuss:
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Antiship ballistic missiles are useless without a way to cue them. This would traditionally be satellites, recon aircraft, or surface ships. In the event of a war going hot, satellites are likely to be a prime target, and it's hard for them to hide, particularly in the face of superior American surface-to-orbit throw weight. If China's plan is to sit and defend their territorial waters, satellites or recon aircraft won't be effective either. One possibility is using long wave radar to detect surface ships at long distances and use that to cue, but I don't know how effective that would be, so I am agnostic on this front. Obviously, ballistic missiles are also vulnerable to interception, and while China has a lot of them they probably also have a lot of places they will want to put them.
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Submarines – in many ways I find these scarier than ASBMS. I am inclined to believe that flooding the zone for them would be dangerous, and China could plausibly surge 40ish of their 66 submarines in the field. (I'm assuming they won't send their boomers and won't be able to field every single ship for maintenance reasons). And once subs get to Taiwan's eastern side, they will be in deeper water and be able to lie in wait around Taiwan's ports.
However, if China's plan is to keep its surface fleet back in coastal waters, it deprives the submarines of air cover, which gives Japanese, Taiwanese and American helicopter and air anti-submarine assets a lot of leeway to operate. China only has about nine nuclear attack submarines, and the rest might be fairly vulnerable while snorkeling (I haven't done a deep-dive on the specifics of their diesel fleet). Submarines are also slower than ships, torpedoes have relatively short ranges, and submarine-launched anti-ship missiles (which China also has) suffer the same guidance problems ASBMs do.
This raises the possibility that simply running the blockade at high speeds escorted by anti-submarine aircraft could pose a serious complication to Chinese submarines, as if they weren't lucky enough to be in the correct position, they'd have to travel at high speeds underwater to reach an intercept, dramatically raising the chances they are identified by anti-submarine aircraft. But on the other hand if they do get a torpedo off, they will immediately be targeted and possibly sunk by escorts.
Now – subs are sneaky, and I think that a sub blockade of Taiwan might be extremely painful for Taiwan. While past submarine blockades haven't worked, there are a variety of reasons to think that Taiwan might be different. (It seems quite possible that a lack of Western manufacturing of transport ships is a huge Achilles heel, here!) But you can see how a blockade of Taiwan is (to use my word) complicated if you don't put large surface combatants with surface-search radars east of Taiwan.
To be clear – I am not saying a war against China would be an easy win for the United States. The United States might even lose! I am saying that mass manufacturing of cheap weapons systems of the sort that have been effective in Ukraine is unlikely to be as helpful in a naval war.
And this is not a new problem for the United States – the Soviet army significantly out-massed and out-gunned NATO forces during the Cold War. The US solution to this problem was to develop high-end capabilities that increased combat effectiveness so that brute manufacturing capability was not the determinative factor on the battlefield.
Now, looking at how that's turned out in Ukraine, I think it's clear that the US definitely underestimated the importance of manufacturing. But on the other hand, I think that air war and ocean war are much less vulnerable to the simple expedient of raising larger armies and manufacturing more artillery shells, and I do think high end technological edges matter more at sea in combat.
I do agree that abysmal rates of US manufacturing of ships and weapons systems are a legitimate issue here. I just think the story is not quite as simple as one might be tempted to conclude.
Shrike
8mo ago
Taiwan's largest trading partner is China – which presumably would no longer be the case in the event of a blockade – so of course most of the trade is from western ports. Taiwan has multiple ports on the eastern side of the island, which is presumably where it would accept incoming traffic from the United States and Australia in the event of a blockade.
Obviously, being blockaded is far from ideal for Taiwan. But I haven't seen convincing evidence that the ports on the eastern side of the island are physically incapable of handling the necessary sealift.
Now, I grant that China has options besides sending a fleet to the eastern side of the islands:
- Ballistic missiles
- Airstrikes
- Submarine-only blockade
But at the end of the day, I suspect that failing to place surface ships east of Taiwan will complicate any attempt to blockade it. (Keep in mind, too, that in at least some versions of the China blockade scenario doglatine proposed it is framed as a police action rather than a military one, which makes it likely that China would try to enforce the blockade with Coast Guard vessels.)
Shrike
8mo ago
Yes – the distance would impede sortie tempo but I don't think it would stop the US from putting together extremely large strike packages. I particularly doubt that China can actually take out all the airstrips in Japan and keep them taken out.
If we were staging out of Hawaii the size of the package would probably be regulated by the ability to put aircraft and tankers in the air – it'd be a Rube Goldberg machine to stage bombers out of Hawaii or CONUS but I don't think it's impossible. Hawaii's got a couple of military bases and it looks like seven major commercial airports to boot, so I think a large sortie from there would be possible.
On doing a little poking around – Hawaii is probably too far to do a massed Rapid Dragon raid with C-17s, but you could probably send 50 B-52s with 20 LRASMS each for a 1,000 missile strike.
I'm not sure that's actually worth it – it looks like you'd need a decent fraction of the tanker fleet to support it. But I think it's doable considering that the US has hundreds of tanker aircraft.
If people want I could actually sit down and do some napkin math and write this up, but it would take a bit!
Shrike
8mo ago
China doesn't have to cruise in open water to win, it just has to defend its coastline. The US and its allies have the much more difficult job.
Well, this assumes a far blockade doesn't cause them problems – the best use of US submarines might not be near the Chinese coastline, but in interdicting shipping escorts thousands of miles away. I think cooperation with Russia would help alleviate a lot of the concerns China has to have with a far blockade, but that doesn't mean it is a non-issue.
It also assumes a purely defensive war. But pure coastal defense probably won't be sufficient to conduct a blockade of Taiwan, which is what doglatine suggests. A blockade will require, almost certainly, getting ships onto the far side of Taiwan, where submarines will be considerably more lethal and Chinese ships will be outside of their ground-based air-defense net. There's a reason China is building aircraft carriers!
China doesn't have unlimited time and money to do any of these things, any more than we do. I don't think they will be incapable of defending against stealth bombers or cruise missiles. In fact, if you look at Russia's track record against stealthy cruise missiles (and Russia has very good air defense) it appears they can shoot them down! We should presume the Chinese can too. But they don't have a 100% track record, and that's very concerning when the target is a ship that might go to the bottom or be combat-incapable for months based on a single hit instead of a bridge (which can be repaired in a matter of days).
My point is that China's problem isn't a problem you can solve with mass-produced FPV drones.
Well, I'm not sure exactly how easy DFing a drone transmitter is just as a general rule, especially in a populated area, but if you're trying to evade detection - which these drones reportedly are - you could probably do it successfully. The actual drones spotted in New Jersey are assessed as being about six feet in diameter, which would be large enough to house a satellite communications suite, I think, which would make the operator pretty much impossible to find. (You can also run drones off of fiber-optics but that seems much riskier.) This might be why at least one NJ officials is reporting that their drone "detection equipment" is not working but that they are detecting the drones on radar.
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