Shrike
1yr ago
When was the last time the United States did that in a ground war on the enemy's own territory?
Shrike
1yr ago
The single biggest supplier, yes, the single most important yes, but EU institutions have given more financial aid to Ukraine than the US has given in value of all combined military / financial / humanitarian, and this is without addressing European national contributions.
It is worth noting that the United States applied a lot of pressure to make this happen.
Realism would note that Russia's military edge is ebbing
It is not. As per Ukraine's commander-in-chief:
Syrskyi is Ukraine’s new commander-in-chief. His unenviable task is to defeat a bigger Russian army. Two and half years into Vladimir Putin’s full-scale onslaught, he acknowledges the Russians are much better resourced. They have more of everything: tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, soldiers. Their original 100,000-strong invasion force has grown to 520,000, he said, with a goal by the end of 2024 of 690,000 men. The figures for Ukraine have not been made public.
“When it comes to equipment, there is a ratio of 1:2 or 1:3 in their favour,” he said. Since 2022 the number of Russian tanks has “doubled” – from 1,700 to 3,500. Artillery systems have tripled, and armoured personnel carriers gone up from 4,500 to 8,900. “The enemy has a significant advantage in force and resources,” Syrskyi said. “Therefore, for us, the issue of supply, the issue of quality, is really at the forefront.”
NATO officials are now saying that a Ukrainian victory would not end the Russian threat:
“But we can't be under any illusions,” Cavoli said. “At the end of a conflict in Ukraine, however it concludes, we are going to have a very, very big Russia problem. ...
“We are going to have a situation where Russia is reconstituting its force, is located on the borders of NATO, is led by largely the same people as it is right now, is convinced that we're the adversary, and is very, very angry."
I agree broadly with you on the problems with a ceasefire tomorrow (in part because of the above): if Russia isn't very satisfied with the conclusion, is has every incentive to come back for more.
Minor addendum:
clearly delivered it's intended goals of limiting Russian economic capabilities
I agree that it probably hampered Russian access to certain high-end stuff (microchips) that it needs for war production. But the World Bank upgraded its economic status this year. So it seems like the Russian economy is "fine" (although perhaps they're running an internal house of cards to keep that up somehow and it can't last forever - I don't have any particular reason to believe this, though.)
Shrike
1yr ago
(better weapons compared to what they have today)
We could give them 5th generation aircraft or nukes, but we won't. We gave them top of the line artillery, air-to-surface and surface-to-air weapons, and modern tanks. "There's nothing better to give them" isn't technically true, but it's directionally accurate.
Shrike
1yr ago
Trump threatens to bomb Moscow, simple as!
Nah, probably not this time – this time the call just says "cease-fire?"
Obviously the war would actually stop after a lot of wrangling and haggling and might even start up again but if Trump threatened to cut Ukraine's aid off unless they negotiated they almost certainly would show up, and Russia showed up last time.
Shrike
1yr ago
I think all of this is more or less correct. (I don't think I saw you, specifically, as being particularly distressed about this, I was just reacting to a vibe.) I suppose to me AI is already in the military and there's no closing the barn door now. And I don't think it's dumb to bring AI into the fix.
I do think that an underrated danger is that AI is so good at seeing patterns that it could loop over to being easier to spoof than humans. There is of course the joke about spoofing Terminator with the grocery barcode, but if I wanted to mess up hostile AI image detection software, I would use very specific, distinctive (to AI, not necessarily to humans) camouflage patterns patterns on all of my vehicles for years, ensuring that hostile imagery models were trained to inseparably associate that with my forces - and then repaint every vehicle in wartime. That trick would never work on a human (although there are lots of tricks that do) but it might fool an AI.
My point here isn't that AI is dumb, but merely that it's just as easy to imagine ways they introduce more friction into warfare as remove friction. Moreoever, if intelligence apparatuses are defaulting to filtering all intelligence and data through a few AI models instead of many human minds, it means that a single blindspot or failing is likely to be systemwide, instead of many, many small blindspots scattered across different commands. And if there are hostile AI (or even just smart people) on both sides, they will figure out the patterns in hostile artificial intelligence programs and figure out how to exploit them. (I think the conclusion here is that intel agencies should take a belt-and-suspenders humans-and-AI approach, and developing multiple AI programs to assess intelligence and data might be a good idea.)
One of the things we've seen in Ukraine is that when countermeasures for a high-tech weapons system are developed, the weapons system loses a lot of value very quickly. (This isn't new - World War Two saw a rapid proliferation of new technologies that edged out older warfighting gear - but our development cycles seem longer than they were in the 1940s, which does pose a problem.) I suspect that in a future AI reliant war, we will see similar patterns: when a model becomes obsolete, it will fail catastrophically and operate at a dramatically reduced capacity until it is patched. (Since a lot of the relevant stuff in Ukraine revolves around signal processing and electronic warfare, this future is more or less now.)
In conclusion, I am cautiously optimistic that "AI" can reduce friction and increase strength, but I think the "AI" that is most certain to do that as, really, "targeting computers," and "signal processing software," not necessarily the stuff OpenAI is working on (although I don't count that out). Since I think that multiple powers will be using AI, I think that hostile AI will be adding friction about as fast as friendly AI can reduce is (depending on their parity.) What concerns me about AI use in warfare is the dangers of over-relying on it, both in terms of outsourcing too much brainpower to it, but also in terms of believing that "reducing friction" will save us the need to sharpen the pointy meatspace end of things. At the end of the day, being able to predict what someone is going to do next doesn't matter if you've got an empty gat.
Shrike
1yr ago
Not a call to pick a side particularly, more an attempt to think about cultural dynamics (if possible) before they occur. My model of cultural norms is a sort of "cultural peace" model, where people agree to lay down their metaphorical arms and stop fighting the culture war because it's become troublesome for both sides. (The alternative model of cultural peace seems to be that one side triumphs decisively.)
If the optimal goal is strong cultural free-speech norms, and we take for granted that the prior norm was that "cancellation" was primarily an attack wielded by the left against the right (debatable!) and that the left was not culturally successful at keeping their "own side" from launching cancellation attacks, then it seems like game theory suggests that to achieve the optimal goal one would want
- Right wingers successfully canceling left wingers
- Other right wingers making a principled stand against cancelations in general
Group #1 is needed to make "the left" realize there is a good pragmatic reason to have a principled pro-free-speech stance (presumably since right-wingers have been canceled by left-wingers, they already have good pragmatic incentives for such a norm).
Group #2 is needed to team up with those on "the left" persuaded by Group #1 to write a new cultural peace treaty and cement the pro-free-speech norms across partisan lines.
The fail mode of this on the one side is that one side is very principled and the other side never has to learn principles because they never have any motivation to do so. However, I think the fail mode on the other side (in the theory that I postulate above) is that there will be a failure to coordinate a new peace and instead of reducing cancellations culturally we double them and the culture war heat ticks up a notch.
(This is all a brutal oversimplification and I sort of hate typing something as broadly sweeping as "right/left wingers.")
It also might be worth pointing out that I suppose one could make a principled difference between speech that calls for political violence and speech that...doesn't. There's definitely a slippery slope here (should Marxists be canceled because of their beliefs? what about libertarians?) but it seems like a culture could agree to draw the line at public calls for violence aimed at specific people.
Shrike
1yr ago
Yes, as you can see from my next paragraph, I am deeply skeptical that Lavender (even if it works well, and I suspect it doesn't!) is winning Israel the war.
Shrike
1yr ago
I am a little surprised by the distress over this. The military has been using artificial intelligence for decades. Any self-guiding missile or CIWS is using an artificial intelligence. Not a very bright one, but one programmed to a specific task.
People are talking about weaponizing AI because it's sexy and it sells, but fundamentally it's stuff the military was going to do any way. Let's talk a bit about what people mean when they say they're going to use AI for the military, starting with the Navy's latest stopgap anti-ship missile.
...the LRASM is equipped with a BAE Systems-designed seeker and guidance system, integrating jam-resistant GPS/INS, an imaging infrared (IIR infrared homing) seeker with automatic scene/target matching recognition, a data-link, and passive electronic support measures (ESM) and radar warning receiver sensors. Artificial intelligence software combines these features to locate enemy ships and avoid neutral shipping in crowded areas...Unlike previous radar-only seeker-equipped missiles that went on to hit other vessels if diverted or decoyed, the multi-mode seeker ensures the correct target is hit in a specific area of the ship. An LRASM can find its own target autonomously by using its passive radar homing to locate ships in an area, then using passive measures once on terminal approach. (Wiki source.)
In other words, "artificial intelligence" roughly means "we are using software to feed a lot of data from a lot of different sensors into a microprocessor with some very elaborate decision trees/weighting." This is not different in kind from the software in any modern radar-homing self-guiding missile, it's just more sophisticated. It also isn't doing any independent reasoning! It's a very "smart" guidance system, and that's it. That's the first thing that you should note, which is that when you hear "artificial intelligence" you might be thinking C3PO, but arms manufacturers are happy to slap it onto something with the very limited reasoning of a missile guidance system.
What else would we use AI for? Drones are the big one on everyone's mind, but drones will be using the same sort of guidance software above, except coupled with mission programming. One concern people have, of course, is that the AI IFF software will goof and give it bad ideas, leading to friendly fire - a valid concern, but it likely will be using the same IFF software as the humans. Traditionally IFF failures on the part of humans are pretty common and catastrophic. There are cases where humans performed better than AI - but there are almost certainly cases where the AI would have performed better than the humans, too.
Neither drones nor terminal guidance systems are likely to use anything like GPT-style LLMs/general artificial intelligence, in my mind, because that would be a waste of space and power. Particularly on a missile, the name of the game will be getting the guidance system as small as reasonably possible, not stuffing terabytes of world literature into its shell for no reason.
The final use of AI that comes to mind (and I think the one that comes closest to Skynet etc.) is using it to sift through mountains of data and generate target sets. I think that's where LLMs/GAI might be used, and I think it's the "scariest" in the sense that it's the closest to allowing a real-life panopticon. I think what people are worried about is this targeting center being hooked up to the kill-chain: essentially being allowed to choose targets and carry out the attack. And I agree that this is a concern, although I've never been super worried about the AI going rogue - humans are unaligned enough as it is. But I think part of the problem is that it lure people into a false sense of security, because AI cannot replace the supremacy of politics in war.
And as it turns out, we've seen exactly that in Gaza. The Israelis used an AI to work up a very, very long target list, probably saving them thousands of man-hours. (It turns out that you don't need to worry about giving AI the trigger; if you just give it the data input humans will rubber-stamp its conclusions and carry out the strikes themselves.) And the result, of course, has been that Israel has completely achieved all of its goals in Gaza through overwhelming military force.
Or no, it hasn't, despite Gaza being thousands of times more data-transparent to Israel than (say) the Pacific will be to the United States in a war with China. AI simply won't take the friction out of warfare.
I think this is instructive as to the risks of AI in warfare, which I do think are real - but also not new, because if there is one thing almost as old as war, it is people deluding themselves into mistaking military strength for the capability to achieve political ends.
TLDR; 1) AI isn't new to warfare, and 2) you don't need to give Skynet the launch codes to have AI running your war.
And that's my .02 cents. I'm sure I missed something.
Shrike
1yr ago
Well, this time there's actually some evidence (for example, the notable drop in support among the younger generation for gay marriage since 2018) but I'm not sure that translates over to "incredibly red." However doglatine's point re: the gender divide is well taken.
Shrike
1yr ago
Is this actually true? Seems like there are some small indica that the next generation might be a bit redder than the younguns but by and large the young adult population doesn't seem to be trending incredibly red. I'd be fascinated to read a take otherwise.
(I've 100% seen the "only the reds are having kids" take but it doesn't seem clear that that actually results in red kids.)
Shrike
1yr ago
I think they could: everyone would know that it was about winning the election in 2020, so their base would think it was hilarious. "You ordered it, you eat it" etc.
But who knows. The next-level play on their part in this situation would probably be to try to stall the entire thing until POTUS is irreversibly on the ballot and then go for removal. Right now I don't think they could stall that long on the 25th but give it another 30 days and it looks like they would be able to do some damage that way.
Shrike
1yr ago
Ironically, he could in theory:
- assuming the VP and executive branch heads declare POTUS incompetent,
- POTUS can simply transmit to Congress that he is in fact competent
- VP and executive branch heads now have to reassure Congress that POTUS is in fact incompetent
- Congress now gets to decide the issue. They have to declare by a majority that POTUS is in fact incompetent
- Hilariously they might not (Republicans have majority in the house and might prefer Biden running)
- if POTUS retains seat, all the cabinet heads might roll at this point (which does create some liability for cabinet members at steps 1 and 3).
At least, this is my read of the 25th, but it's past my kid's bedtime, so I might be missing something.
Shrike
1yr ago
I don't think it was a cognitive test, as per your link anyway:
Biden’s remark, according to a person familiar with the president’s schedule, was in reference to a short checkup by a White House physician in the days following the debate due to lingering symptoms from his cold. The exam, that person added, was brief and did not include any major tests.
I also don't think your framing that the governors pressured Biden into it is correct:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday evening told more than 20 Democratic governors in a private meeting that he underwent a medical checkup after last week’s debate and is fine, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.
The general optics of the meeting, at least as per the Politico article, read much less like governors getting together to influence Biden and much more like Biden summoning a group of governors to influence them and assess/reinforce their loyalty.
Shrike
1yr ago
It would be like a Democrat/Republican voting to remove a Democrat/Republican president, which AFAIK basically never happens in US politics.
I wouldn't say it's that uncommon – both Clinton and Trump (both times) got votes across party lines in their impeachments; Johnson didn't. So 3/4 impeachment attempts in US history were bipartisan.
Shrike
1yr ago
Hmm! Here's the full URL as it's supposed to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra#Revelation
Shrike
1yr ago
If it helps: MKUltra was discovered via FOIA because the CIA missed a spot when cleaning up the crown jewels. Fairly easy IMHO to imagine a world in which it existed only in urban legend and conspiracy myth.
Shrike
1yr ago
I think a couple hundred hardcore guys with combat experience and a clear vision are plenty enough people to topple a government under the right circumstances.
Shrike
1yr ago
You can't be a Nazi and fight for a country run by a Jew.
I think that Real Life is often much more nuanced than this – people are often happy to team up with someone they hate to fight someone else they hate more, and military exigencies in particular makes for strange bedfellows. Random examples: the Free Arabian Legion, qualified Nazi "support" for (or at least limited facilitation of) early Zionism, support during the Civil War on the Confederate side for mass freeings of slaves to serve as soldiers.
I get the vague impression that a feature among far-right Ukrainian ethnonationalists is that the RUSSIANS are the inferior racial types, but that doesn't prevent them from thinking the same thing is true of Jews. Possibly e.g. Andriy Biletsky has moderated his views over time, but it seems quite possible to me he thinks fighting for a country run by a Jew is politically expedient for an anti-Jewish agenda over the long run. Of course I think one could, ah, question whether Ukrainian ethnonationalists are really "Nazis" even if they self-identify as Nazis for much the same reason and in the same sense that one could question if Lenin was really a Marxist/Communist.
I tend to agree with the commenters on here that corruption resulting in weapons getting trafficked is probably more likely than "a few hundred neo-Nazis topple the Ukrainian government" (although I doubt that's a problem unique to Azov) but in potentially unstable countries like, possibly, a future Ukraine I think there's a lot of potential for a few hundred guys with military experience and hardline political views to do Stuff up to and including Regime change. I'm not really sure that they need US weapons to do that, but of course it will look awkward if they end up using them.
Shrike
1yr ago
the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female
Is this true specifically because of the age-old practice of "killing all the men and keeping all the women," though? My understanding is that that is at least one of the explanations for the genetic footprint we currently have today. Possibly the "80% of women reproduced but only 40% of men" says more about war than about love.
Shrike
1yr ago
Sorry for the delay; I was out.
I have seen one video of Russia doing a bombing run with gravity bombs and zero videos of Ukraine doing so.
Both Ukraine and Russia are using glide bombs. If you poke around a bit, you can see videos of them both using unguided rockets in the CAS role.
I haven't even seen any complaints from Russia about anything but Storm Shadow.
Yes, and if Storm Shadow can penetrate layered Russian air defenses we ought to imagine LRASM can do the same. (Recall that a B-1 can carry 2-3 dozen LRASMs, so a squadron of them might literally be able to overwhelm a Chinese carrier battle group even if they launch and hit with every air-defense missile; the B-21 seems fairly small, maybe it carries 6ish?)
Single missile?
Perhaps I was too ambiguous; what I meant was it only takes a single missile to hit to render a ship non-combat effective. I agree that it will likely take salvos to hit reliably, although it is worth noting that it did not take large ones in the Falklands War, and that Ukraine appears to have sunk a Soviet cruiser (the Moskva) with a very small salvo of two subsonic missiles (if you trust the Ukrainian claims.) The Moskva had the S-300 – not exactly a slouch of an air-defense system – plus shorter-ranged anti-air missiles and CIWS. I can think of a lot of reasons why the Chinese ships might perform better than the Moskva but I think our priors ought to be that missile salvos will be effective, because they have been in the past and are now.
Anyway, if the LRASM (stealthy) or future hypersonic weapons give Chinese ships the same trouble that the Storm Shadow gave the Russian air-defense crews using similar missiles, I think the B-21 will be plenty scary.
Shrike
1yr ago
(no heavy lift helicopter capability at all, extremely limited if nonexistent heliborne support capability) and helicopters don't have the range to reach Taiwan anyways.
Taiwan Strait is 100 miles. Combat radius of a Blackhawk is 370 miles. The Chinese medium-lift fleet (which includes the Super Frelon and Mi-8/Mi-17s) is should be adequate to get troops there.
Shrike
1yr ago
IR sensors are absolutely fantastic, until, say, it rains. Very good to have, not reliable in the way radar is (radar has its own problems, of course).
Yes, the B-21 probably won't be able to do missions into actually contested airspace. The question is if it can get to within a couple hundred miles (LRASM; longer with in-development hypersonics) of the contested airspace and release its weapons. Stealth has never been absolute; the Russians and whoever have always been able to detect our B-2s and F-117s and F-22s, the question has always been about whether the stealth gives strike packages the extra edge they need to get within weapons-release range and get out.
The Russians have arguably the best integrated air-defense systems in the world (in Ukraine they scored a 90+ mile kill against a target flying <50 feet off the ground) and very impressive long-range air-to-air missiles fired from the world's fastest acknowledged aircraft with a radar antenna the size of a dinner table (100+ mile kill recorded) and the Ukrainians are still successfully running airstrikes against them using non-stealthy aircraft designed by the Soviets in the 1970s. I think the bomber will get through, the question is just if it's going to be effective. And unlike, say, a tank battalion, it only takes a single missile to render a ship combat ineffective. So I think the B-21 will probably be an effective weapon in the sense of being able to reach weapons release point (at least vs. China in a Taiwan scenario – albeit with some limitations) the real question in my mind is the relative effectiveness of US anti-ship missiles and Chinese anti-missile defenses.
(Source for Russian SAM/interceptor performance, see pages 20 - 21.)
Shrike
1yr ago
The F-35 has a 750ish mile combat range, which can be extended by in-air refueling. You can tack another, say, 100 - 200 miles onto that with an anti-ship missile, so a carrier strike group could hang out midway between Guam and Taiwan and launch effective strike packages against targets in the Taiwan strait. And one thing that the war in Ukraine has proven is that stealthy cruise missiles launched by low-flying aircraft can evade layered air defense, so our assumption should be that this strategy is at least somewhat effective. Of course, the US can also sortie effective strike packages from CONUS, but they will take a lot longer to get to the target.
The "cheap drones" you mention the Chinese using will be Predator-style drones – quadcopter types won't have the range, you'll need large, long endurance surveillance assets – basically unmanned U-2s. Which means they show up very nicely on every radar within a couple hundred miles and a fighter will likely show up and dispatch you before you get within range of the carrier. Optics aren't necessarily particularly effective maritime search assets anyway, as you mention you really want long-range radar, but that's 1) expensive, 2) prone to being spoofed, and 3) lets everyone know you are out looking for a carrier well before you can actually find the carrier, if their electronics are working correctly. You can try to build a stealthy drone to mitigate these problems but at this point you're no longer a cheap drone, and probably not a cloud. And, well, see how well WWII-style search patterns worked out for the participants in WWII.
Now, I'm not saying that a carrier battle group couldn't be spotted in such a manner. I'm just saying it's not an easy win.
Something that might be is over-the-horizon radar. I'm not sure how effective that would be, or what limitations it might have.
The big advantage the US has re: space is that it can just put more space-based recon in space pretty quickly. At least, I assume that's what the X-37 is for. So quite possibly you could see a situation where China knocks down all our satellites and we just put up a maneuvering recon asset that they can't touch the next day.
I think the F-16s will be better against Russian aircraft than the MiG-29s and maybe the Su-27s (if Ukraine has any left) because AMRAAMs but I don't expect that to make a difference in the overall posture of the war. I'm not even sure if Ukraine intends to use them in the counter-air role instead of just replacing the Su-24s in the "Storm Shadow launch platform" role.
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