Shrike
1d ago
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms
Sure. I am against drone maximalism, not drone usage.
And that's assuming the tech remains static, which it wont.
Right, it will evolve in ways that harm drones as currently employed. You know what's cheaper than a single AI-targeted drone with a 20km range and a cheap armor-penetrating warhead? A tiny interceptor drone with no warhead, a .5 km range, and a mindless acoustic-homing sensor.
The drones were not one of them and they undeniably moved the battlefield in America's favor.
I don't think this is a settled question.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities.
If America is in a state of civil war, then the conditions of America have radically shifted enough that I don't really think this sort of postulating is particularly illuminating. Suffice to say that in civil wars both sides (particularly at the start) usually find many of the men with guts and ideological firmament the same place they did before the war: in the active duty military.
Shrike
1d ago
Medium term?
Forget guns, right now if you pit an untrained person with a big stick against an untrained person with an FPV drone, the smart money is on the guy with the stick.
From what I can tell, the reason that the warfare in Ukraine looks the way that it does is because of guns. If tomorrow Ukraine turned in all of its guns (I'm including here machine guns, howitzers, mortars, etc.) for an equal cash value of drones, Russia would simply jam the entire frontline and roll their mechanized formations all the way to the Carpathians.
Shrike
1d ago
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
Shrike
1d ago
Right. I guess that "school choice" doesn't brand as "Catholic literati initiative" (and indeed attracts all sorts) which is part of why people don't see the tremendous strides that it has made as "John Senior sequelae."
Shrike
2d ago
You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone.
Please watch the following footage of Ukrainians shooting down Shaheds Gerans with an assault rifle. Note that he's using an ACOG sight, and not, say, SMASH.
Shrike
2d ago
I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
I think this would be a good idea! Look at:
- Shall-issue handgun permitting and right-to-carry laws, and how they have changed since 1990
- The proliferation of school vouchers (I might not describe this as an "elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics" but I could see a less charitable take that amounted to that)
- Gay marriage - public and especially young opinion thereof, trends in the last five years
- Catholic acquisition of hospitals throughout the US, making vast swathes of the healthcare system off-limits to abortion and gender transition surgeries - pro-abortion groups have been waving the red flag about this for years, to no avail.
- "What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion?" - this is obviously an ongoing project; "make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business" has in fact been tried, but didn't stick, whereas Dobbs did. Medical abortions have been trending downwards for decades, although I think a lot of that is due to abortion drugs - and a legal effort to restrict mail distribution of abortion drugs is ongoing.
I would not chalk the developments you find entirely up to John Senior's efforts but you'll find the fingerprints of the Catholic literati on a great deal of them, I reckon.
Shrike
3d ago
It's very interesting to me that people never complain about evangelicals for interpreting Matthew 24:14 literally and always for supporting Israel. If the complaint was actually about "evangelicals trying to bring about the end of days" the complaint against evangelicals would be for evangelizing.
Shrike
3d ago
The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions.
You are missing some of the more interesting recent ones.
I recommend going to to https://www.scotusblog.com/ and look up the cases that seem to be big culture-war-y cases. Go to the amicus briefs. Find the briefs written by the parties that opposed the ultimate outcome of the case and read them, or go to their websites and read their press releases after the decision came down. (Perhaps avoid the more zealous activist groups, but you can generally expect the ACLU or someone with a similar track record and expertise to show up and opine). Note whether they [the legal experts] construe it as a limp-wristed defensive action or not.
If you want to get really into the weeds, note also the practical outcomes of the case. If the court says "states can do X," note how many states are trying or might want to do X. If the court says "states cannot do X [if they do Y]" note how many states that impacts as well. If you prefer thinking in strictly partisan terms, note whether they are blue/red/purple. Note which institutions they strengthen and which they weaken. Compare the current precedent with the old precedent. Ask yourself what behavior the decisions make easier and more difficult.
And then at this point you might as well write it all up and get an AAQC here!
Shrike
3d ago
Aha! I knew that Texas had the parental sign-off waiver, so I didn't realize that they latched on consumption rather than possession.
IIRC 20th
Yeah I do think that the age should be lowered to 18 (at least). Such a rule might make sense for minors, but it's a bit farcical for someone who may have graduated high school two or three years ago living halfway across the state with his own car and job to have to drink within arms-reach of his parents. With the trend of appellate courts killing under-21 handgun bans, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a future development.
Shrike
3d ago
That's the legal age to purchase, which is not the same as a ban on minors consuming alcohol - I am not familiar with any state with such a ban (although some states ban possession by minors), and many US states specifically permit minors to consume alcohol with parental sign-off.
Shrike
3d ago
Pure defence, no bite. Never has an elite done so little with so much!
It is a misunderstanding of how ideological movements advance their goals in the cultural and regulatory environment of the United States to suppose that the burden rests entirely on the Supreme Court.
I'm going to use a (mostly) fake example: supposing that conservatives decide to really go after weed. In some states, they have the political power to just straight up ban it. But they want to be able to hit it in Colorado and New York, too, so they go after insurance providers and banks on the institutional level, using public and private resources to establish a baseline of "best practices" that will apply nationwide. Suddenly your insurance premiums if you smoke week skyrocket, and weed dealers increasingly have trouble opening even personal bank accounts. Private schools and universities start screening out the children of weed-smokers under a best-practices risk paradigm and banning weed on campus. Rental car companies do the same. Palantir puts together a national list of weed-users and makes it available at trivial prices to accelerate this effort. This effort goes slowly, but after 25 years it becomes extremely pervasive.
The legal-weed movement on the libertarian left quickly realizes this is a potentially existential issue. Even if they have some ways to fight back (e.g. working with local banks that don't practice in red states and so are less concerned about the legal and reputational ramifications of banking weed providers) the pressure is quickly drying up demand for legal weed. Worse, it is making it uncool because strivers want to send their kids to private schools, and normies want affordable insurance. Weed is quickly returning to a product for losers reputationally, and financially it is rapidly returning underground.
They launch a legal battle aimed at overturning the web of private regulations that are locking weed enjoyers out of so many services. The Supreme Court rules that no, private entities have the freedom of association to do what they want, and even public entities are not required to not discriminate against drug users. This ruling only accelerates the right's momentum on the issue. Legal weed users are still a holdout, and it is still legal in many places, but the weight and momentum have shifted. Everyone in the legal-weed movement would understand that their cause had been set back tremendously and are concerned that in another 25 years, nobody will care enough about protecting weed to fight back against renewed attempts at legal bans.
But someone who wasn't aware of how these developments were all fitting together would look at the ruling in 2051 and say "so private companies can do what they want? big deal" and continue to believe that the legal weed movement had overwhelmingly won based on the fact that it was technically legal in many states.
I have not investigated the degree to which autonomous targeting has made its way down to FPV-sized drones, but that's an expensive solution and machine imaging is pretty brittle.
Fiber-optic drones are also very tricky (they can't circle a target, for instance, because that might break the cable!) - apparently to the degree that some Ukrainians prefer radio-controlled ones despite the ease of disabling them. Furthermore they are insanely expensive right now thanks to AI datacenter construction (no, really!)
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