Shrike
1d 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
1d 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.
Shrike
1d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's the US that makes the first move against satellites in a Pacific war: aircraft carrier battlegroups are actually pretty hard to locate if you don't have any imaging or radar satellites in orbit.
I agree that taking out the huge US satellite constellations will degrade US war fighting capabilities, but in a Pacific war over Taiwan I suspect a Kessler syndrome asymmetrically helps the United States: China is surrounded by Taiwan, South Korea and Japan in a ring, and their naval and shore-based assets will be able to track Chinese naval activity, identify it for targeting, and communicate that to US bomber strike packages originating from well outside China's effective reach. Meanwhile, the US carrier fleet will be free to steam in circles in the middle of nowhere, Pacific, and China will have to resort to trying to locate them with submarines, recon aircraft, and possibly ELINT (very fun and fancy until the carrier turns off its radios). It's possible there's some other options I haven't thought of, but the long and short of things is that targeting a ship at sea is much easier with orbital assets and much harder otherwise.
I also think it's worth considering that the US has a lot of nuclear-strike-warning orbital assets, so hitting US satellites indiscriminately may send the signal that you're planning to go ballistic in the nuclear way – but those same assets are helpful for all sorts of stuff, with resolutions sensitive enough to pinpoint the release of small weapons. I assume if you're China you just shoot them down anyway.
I should note that there are a lot of soft-kill ways to deal with satellites and (additionally) plenty of hard-kill ways that don't result in massive debris clouds. That doesn't mean people won't create said debris clouds – either because they're just using basic ASAT missiles or to make it harder for the US to simply putting more assets in orbit with its massive edge in earth-to-orbit transport.
Shrike
2d ago
I dunno about "12 months" but a couple things that I think point towards China's window closing, not opening:
- The US has started developing a lot of new anti-ship capabilities. But we're having embarrassing teething pains on the hypersonic weapons, and while we've got the stopgap LRASM in production it's unclear (at least to me) how many we've actually got ready to go into combat. A number of new programs, like the B-21 and the Australian acquisition of nuclear submarines, could potentially be very potent – but in 5 - 10 years, not months. If you're China, do you want to go to war today, or in 2035 when the US has 100 B-21s armed with hypersonic anti-ship missiles and Australia has its own set of nuclear submarines? (Obviously China won't be sitting still for the next decade, but if they think they have enough to go now, why wait for your enemy to get stronger?)
- Younger generations of Taiwanese are identifying more and more as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.
Since I suggested to @quiet_NaN that I would, here's my thoughts on the "surround Taiwan with the Coast Guard and start conducting customs inspections" option:
The good:
- Since almost everyone recognizes PRC as the legitimate government of China, it puts China in a favorable position vs. USA + Japan in matters of international law and international reputation in a way that bombarding Taipei would not.
- It also shifts the onus to act on Taiwan and/or Japan + USA, and puts them in the awkward position of potentially using military force against the Chinese Coast Guard.
- It is easier to reverse than a war, and less embarrassing to cease operations than losing an invasion, but (importantly) it doesn't take an invasion off the table and might assist in preparing for one. It's a great trial balloon!
- It lets the PRC cut off the Taiwanese supply of microprocessors and arms shipments destined for Taiwan, making their potential enemies weaker in one stroke.
- A very soft version of it, such as simply enforcing existing Chinese customs law against traffic to and from Taiwan makes it something less than a blockade, but is still financially difficult for Taiwan (since it amounts to a double tax) and lets the Chinese restrict the flow of sensitive materials.
- If Taiwan decides to comply, it acculturates Taiwan to Chinese rule.
- The Taiwanese navy is defensively oriented and will be more vulnerable than it already is attempting to break a far blockade. If it does attempt to do so, China might be able to retaliate precisely by destroying those naval assets (or Taiwanese naval assets writ large) in "self-defense" without escalating the situation further. This gives puts China in a win-win scenario: Taiwan can acquiesce or it can risk losing its naval assets, rendering it more vulnerable to an invasion. Of course Taiwan could attempt to climb the escalation ladder, but doing so unilaterally would be risky.
- International shipping is very risk-averse and would probably comply as a default.
The bad:
- It is likely to precipitate dramatic Taiwanese reactions and harden the Taiwanese stance against China.
- Parties attempting to break the blockade might be able to generate local force advantage and would probably get to pick their battles.
- Although I think this risk would be mitigated somewhat if China mostly relied on its Coast Guard, it would invite a sort of reverse-Pearl Harbor wherein the US, Japan and Taiwan decided to secretly attack, and launched a coordinated strike on their own time against exposed Chinese naval assets. Being further from the mainland means being further from air cover and the mainland air defense umbrella, and in deeper water that is better for nuclear submarine operations. You can see a scenario where Team Taiwan lets the blockade go along for four or five months while getting every available nuclear submarine in position and then sinks a big chunk of the Chinese navy in half an hour.
Overall I wouldn't be surprised if China decided to do this in response to a US arms shipment, a la the Cuban missile crisis.
Shrike
2d ago
Is this true?
- My understanding is that Taiwan is not a nation independent from China; rather, they both claim to be be the legitimate government of China. As far as I know, nobody recognized Taiwan as a separate independent nation de jure. But to the extent that it is an act of war, it seems that (under the current legal theory) it would be an act of civil war. I'm not very familiar with international law, but I'm not aware of any legal principles banning a self-blockade.
- China is on the UN Security Council, so they presumably would veto any condemnation.
I support, broadly, Taiwanese independence and am not pro-PRC, but the legal situation here is novel and might be more conducive to China than people realize.
I think the blockade actually does a lot for China, and is arguably a good option. If I have some time maybe I'll write about that a more length.
Shrike
5d ago
An unfriendly nation on your borders is generally presumed to a clear threat to the safety of your citizens – this is the logic of NATO (and most other defensive alliances). Ukraine has also demonstrated its capability to harm Russian citizens inside Russia, so, yes – an unfriendly Ukraine constitutes a security threat to Russia.
Whether or not it's legitimate to INVADE a sovereign nation on your borders simply because it's unfriendly/a security threat is another question – but historically it's not unusual for nations to do it, regardless of the legitimacy. (Cuba and the United States comes to mind; see also the war between China and Vietnam.)
Shrike
6d ago
It seems to me like SpaceX is the stand-out success (reusable rockets are a big deal!) so there's a sort of natural gravitation towards it, perhaps particularly on here. But I think you raise a good point! In the spirit of answering your questions, here's my somewhat reflexive thoughts on the other stuff:
- Tesla: OP criticizes them for hype (which seems fair) but from what I can tell on a two-second Google they do seem to make money, billions of dollars worth. And my recollection is that they beat the rest of the US automakers in electric cars and still outperform them in other areas. I'd consider leading a company to that sort of success (or really any success!) a W under about any circumstances (even though I think it's perfectly fair to point out how it is rewarded by subsidies.) However, I'm...skeptical about some of the issues with the cars (which may not be unique to Teslas) and I am not sure if the engineering is particularly good – China's got a huge EV market, perhaps in the future they eat his lunch. I'm not especially optimistic about self-driving, at least in the medium term, but that's partially because I think there's strong inertial force against it, and fixing the engineering problems doesn't entail fixing the regulatory and repetitional problems.
- The Boring Company: seems really cool, but also like they missed their moment. Just doesn't seem to be enough demand. Maybe their time will come, but it doesn't seem like it has yet.
- Twitter: renaming it was a bad idea (imho). Firing most of the staff and generally decreasing the draconian attitude was a good idea. I'm very interested to see if he can make the finances work. (In his defense, my understanding was that "getting the finances to work" was something Twitter struggled with before Elon took over.) I actually think the basic plan (strip down the staffing costs, print money on the world's most high-velocity social media platform) was good – obviously some of the advertising income streams hit snafus. I will say that although I'm a fan of the ad-revenue-sharing deal in theory, in practice it does seem somewhat scammy to me. I'm not saying that rises to the level of an actual scam but I can definitely imagine a lot of people misunderstanding which end of the distribution they are on.
So, overall, based on my assessment, I'd say SpaceX is a huge W, Tesla a solid W so far, Boring company hasn't had it moment yet and may never, and Twitter probably a good thing on balance but the jury's still out on the end results for Musk.
Shrike
6d ago
I have a question - if Falcon Heavy is so much cheaper than Falcon 9, why are they relying so much on the latter for Starlink?
I dunno, but I can speculate – it might be that they have lots on hand. Also, it's good to stress-test reusable tech like Falcon 9 as much as possible to discover potential failures, and less costly to discover them with a smaller rocket.
Can we do some back of the envelope calculations here? How low does the price have to go, for people to start launching satellites en-masse? How many would they want to launch? How many clients would SpaceX have to get to make a decent profit at such a low price point? How much can they launch before triggering Kessler Syndrome?
I'd say we are already launching satellites en-masse. You'll note that Falcon Nine started launching in 2010 and started reusing its boosters regularly around 2018; the steep US vertical ascent starts in 2020. You can also compare to CubeSat launches by year (which is not omnidirectional, but broke 100/200/300 in 2014/2017/2021. Since (AFAIK) the low price point has a profit baked-in, I assume as long as they have demand they are profiting at that rate.
Kessler Syndrome happens on accident, of course. Orbit, especially outside of LEO, is really big, and satellites are teensy-tinsy and decay in orbit. So the answer is "tens of thousands" but also that you do have more risk of Kessler Syndrome as you get more up there. However, even if we reach a point where we say "no more satellites" we'll still need to put more up as the old ones decay. Presumably we'll need lots of rocket launches for whatever space exploration we're doing, and possibly (as discussed) for tasks like asteroid mining or even decommissioning old satellites so that Kessler Syndrome is less of a worry.
Obviously, Musk and his sort want to go to Mars and the rest of the solar system. If you're doing that the demand for mass is much more than could be accommodated by satellites (I would imagine), at least until you get onsite resource production up and running.
I don't particularly think Starship development is going poorly. Falcon 9 had a number of failures on early launch tests. Both of its first two launches failed in the recovery phase, and of the first seven, four had some form of a failure. Yet, as I think we've shown, it's matured into a tremendously successful launch vehicle. Musk's whole "move fast and break things" shtick, as I understand it, is built around accepting more risk up front in exchange for faster results. Starship has had three launches so far, with what appears to my untrained eye to be progressive improvement. Unless the costs of these failures are high enough to cause SpaceX to run out of funding (which I doubt – they're made out of stainless steel!) my presumption is that they will simply move past the failures, as they did with Falcon 9. Now, I wouldn't say it's impossible that Starship is found to be unworkable, or retired for other reasons. I just know that accepting and moving past failure is something SpaceX has historically done (and is normal in aerospace development) so without specific reasons to think otherwise I sort of assume that that will be the case here – although I can certainly imagine a number of reasons it might not be.
Shrike
6d ago
orbital delivery would already be absolutely revolutionized
There aren't that many people who want to launch satellites, or do that many things in space.
I think quite the opposite – if you get the cost low enough, sending stuff to space becomes a high school science project and everyone wants to do it. Lots of amateur CubeSats in this vein.
I think he'll run out of hype before he manages to get it to work.
Maybe you're right. To clarify, your position is that Starship will never make a successful orbital payload delivery? Or that it will never land successfully?
Sure... but the glowies can pay Bezos instead.
Right now they can't, can they? New Glenn is having its own developmental issues, leaving the only functional Blue Origin delivery vehicle New Shepard, which is designed for orbital tourism, not payload delivery.
Shrike
6d ago
Can he please deliver on any of the other wild insanely valuable things he promised
Am I missing something here, or wasn't SpaceX the company that provided, under (substantially although IIRC not entirely) Musk's leadership, reusable rockets? That's a huge deal in terms of proven track record – basically SpaceX did something that the massive defense corporations failed to do for decades.
If Starship works (and it seems likely to) it will absolutely revolutionize orbital delivery. Going back to the idea of using Starlink to create demand, Starship is likely to drop cost-to-orbit enough to create more demand. (I don't think "Starship will work eventually" should be considered an Elon Fanboy Position, it's fundamentally a bigger rocket of the type we already know works! But this is rocket science, and I'm not a rocket scientist, so take that with a grain of terrestrial salt.)
Now, I wouldn't be surprised to see space mining in my lifetime (we know it is technically feasible) but I think the true reason SpaceX will do fine for the short-to-medium future is because space is a key national security concern, and getting moreso. There is a ton of money in national security, and SpaceX is uniquely suited to tap it.
Shrike
13d ago
I like the comparison of the spotting plane to the drone. One thing that exists in this war that didn't in World War One is the possibility of deep strike (cruise missiles, ballistic missiles) which means that massed assaults (cut down in WW1 by machine-guns and tube artillery) can be defeated before even reaching the lines.
On the topic of good sources, in my very limited experience, I'd recommend the Royal United Services Institute, they actually sent some guys over to Ukraine to talk to the Ukrainians. RAND probably remains one of the best places to read the rough draft of history before it happens.
I don't read this stuff religiously, but I've found what I have read on the Russo-Ukraine War (something like one paper from each source!) to be interesting.
Shrike
14d ago
Not "swimming in space" – that just requires changing your shape.
There are "warp drives" that use exotic matter for superluminal travel, but there is also at least one proposal that uses no exotic matter, albeit only for slower-than-light travel.
Shrike
17d ago
My understanding is that propellantless drives ("swimming in space") are permitted by the current Laws Of Physics. This approach is very different from the one taken by the propellantless propulsion efforts, though.
Shrike
19d ago
By "war of annihilation" I (perhaps unclearly) meant "destroying all their hardware and killing all their personnel to reduce their ability to fight" not "killing all their civilians."
Shrike
19d ago
I'm not an Atlanticist or a Putinist BUT I have played Paradox games, which gives me an intimate understanding of Putin's motivations and goals.
The endgame is to peel off those sections of Ukraine that Russia thinks are valuable/pro-Russian, and to neutralize what's left of Ukraine, rendering them a permanent non-threat and pliable diplomatically and economically. Russia appears to be (currently) attempting to reach this goal by conducting a war of annihilation, attriting Ukraine's combat personnel and equipment until it either accepts Russia's terms or is unable to resist Russia's de facto imposition of them.
Russia's war against Finland is a good historical example to look towards.
Shrike
21d ago
I believe there are back-breeding projects, or you can compare cows from more "primitive" (wild) conditions, such as longhorns, with other cattle. In my experience longhorns come across as considerably more intelligent and resilient than shorthorn cattle, although I have little experience with the latter.
Shrike
1mo ago
The Obama administration's decision to let the states do an end-run around federal drug laws that marked one of the biggest swings in favor of state power away from federal power seems like a very important but under-examined swing from state power to federal power, a huge erosion of the federal power norm.
Shrike
1mo ago
Louisiana controls the Mississippi river chokepoint, which is pretty strategic. Just as an exercise in good geopolitics it would be smart to secure it if you could, I think.
Similar deal with Florida (gives you much more control over the Gulf). I think you'd also (with TX + FL) scoop most of the US' space launch infrastructure (although Vandenberg is in California) and that could pay off considerably down the road.
Security benefits can be a bit hard to quantify at times, so whether or not that would "pay off" or not, I don't know. Given some sort of national breakup, from Texas' POV it seems like the smart thing to do might be to pursue a security/diplomatic alliance with other states that secede without committing to financial support, which would increase mutual safety without dragging Texas down in a negative financial spiral.
I have a theory that if some states broke off from the US of A without a wholesale US collapse, it might cause some very interesting fiscal effects that would bolster the long-run standing of the breakaway states, but I think in the short term even with a mutually amicable separation it would cause a considerable financial shakeup in the best-case scenario.
Shrike
1mo ago
I think a (the?) big elephant in the room with secession is that whichever side successfully cons the other side into jumping first keeps the Presidency for the next 50 years.* Get one of the Big Four states to bail, and suddenly there are 30 - 50 EC votes that your side never needs to worry about again. Now all of a sudden you get a massive leg up in domestic politics and implementing whatever pet domestic agenda you had in mind.
Right now, the echo of Lincoln still rings loudly in our years (the last American Civil War vet died in '56 and the last veteran bride just passed away in 2020). Every single President has been a combination of too much of a true believer in the American project and too much of a realpolitik pragmatist to give away a US state, even if there was internal support for it (there hasn't been.)
Ideologically, I think younger Americans (left and right) are less inclined to have a patriotism or nationalism towards their country as a motherland/fatherland. Some of them might see it merely as a tool to achieve their preferred policy ends (and indeed that's a common attitude towards government these days!) Combine that with an intense focus on maintaining domestic political power, a lack of pragmatic understanding** and a world where there is some native demand for a national divorce and I could see a future where a sitting President goes "besides millions of taxpayers, tens of thousands of servicemen, dozens of vital military installations, four or five different priceless natural resources, and one really nice vacation spot, what have those 40ish Electoral College votes ever done for us?" (Technically this even sort-of happened the first time; the feds did ~zip to stop secession until Lincoln took office.)
I'm not sure such a situation is likely per se, but I think it will be something that will be on the radar in the minds of future politicians in a way that it isn't of most currently serving ones.
An interesting barometer here is Brexit and the Scottish independence question. Obviously Brexit went through, and from what I can tell there's zero English interest in even something relatively mild (like sanctions) if Scotland actually votes to secede. I don't think that this rules out punitive actions or even military action against seceding states, but after a clear referenda I think it is politically trickier.
*In reality I suspect this is a mirage, actually, but a tempting one.
**I'm not actually sure if future governing generations will be worse at pragmatic understanding, to be clear. Certainly many younger people seem less pragmatically-minded, but I'm not sure that's ever been otherwise!
Shrike
1mo ago
Well, the vast majority of people aren't influential, though – I don't think measuring the impact on influential people is the best way to evaluate the extent of repression! To pull out the C.S. Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I think Putin is pretty clearly the robber baron here, and from what I can tell at least some of the European states (England specifically springs to mind) strike me as aspiring to be omnipotent moral busybodies. But on the other hand, the omnipotent moral busybody-ness is still aspirational, and on the other I think it's important not to underestimate how chilling pushing a few politically influential people off of buildings is on ordinary, non-influential people. So I think it is best to characterize the European state's oppression as different and bad moreso than worse or something like that (and certainly, all else being equal, literally murdering someone seems worse to me than hassling them over their bank account.)
But it doesn't seem to me that it then follows that everyone will prefer bad Western policies to bad Russian policies. I can imagine some people who would be more impeded by German's restrictive speech code than Russia's. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that some people who aren't me have a preference for the latter because of what they value – and surely a nonzero and in fact substantial amount of such people must exist in real life, choosing to side with Russia instead of fleeing Ukraine for a variety of reasons.
Real opposition parties don't exist and elections are faked anyways.
This may be the case, but I've always been a little puzzled at the allegations that Putin systematically fakes elections (versus pushing people off of buildings, which makes a lot of sense to me). By all accounts (including independent Western polling, from what I recall) Putin is quite popular, and should be expected to win elections. It makes me wonder if these allegations are cope from Western elites that can't understand why people would willingly vote for Putin. (The reasons for voting for Putin should be pretty obvious from looking at how Russia has rebounded since the fall of the USSR, although it is possible that he will end up undoing that progress on his Ukraine adventure.)
On the other hand, possibly there's some quirk of the Russian political system (which I am not particularly familiar with) that makes the extra bit gained fraudulently worth it, or some other risk assessment that is opaque to me.
The other option, of course, is that when people say there aren't "real elections" what they mean is that there's enough voter fraud to swing the vote considerably. This seems pretty bad, and much more plausible to me. But I think it's more precise to describe that as fraudulent than faked – maybe it seems like a weird difference, but e.g. I wouldn't argue the 1960 Presidential election in the United States was fake (which, to me, connotes a complete disconnect between the input and output of the votes) even though it was substantially fraudulent (possibly by enough to swing the election).
You may have considerably more insight into this than I do – when you say they don't have real elections, what precisely do you mean?
Shrike
1mo ago
The researchers found that moods were contagious. The people who saw more positive posts responded by writing more positive posts. Similarly, seeing more negative content prompted the viewers to be more negative in their own posts.
This seems very intuitive to me, and I'm not surprised that it's true, and I don't discount the power of the algorithm, but it's worth noting that aggregate results among nearly 700,000 users is VERY different from being able to target a specific individual for divorce. Especially over 700,000 users, small effects that a single user wouldn't notice (or even be affected by) show up, even without any sort of p-hacking.
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.
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