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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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It comes down to relative power. If you can make a weapon that lets any idiot (or, eventually, no idiot) destroy a main battle tank unassisted, then you don't need to worry very much about military training when facing tanks. Repeat mutatis mutandis for infantry, planes, drones, etc.

My take is that the West - including Turkey - is providing weapons to Ukraine that are decisively superior to what Russia is fielding.

Ok, let's take take the example of infantry, as you brought up. We already have a weapon that is so dead simple any idiot can use it, a literal "point and click" weapon that can kill a human out to hundreds of yards. It's called a rifle, they've existed for hundreds of years, and mysteriously every professional army in the world is still spending time training basic infantrymen, practicing everything from marksmanship to tactics. Any idiot can kill an enemy infantryman, but everyone really still seems to worry about training when facing infantry and keeps training their own. Mutatis mutandis...

I don't even think it's right to claim that the Javelin works for any idiot without training. The US Army specifies 80 hours of instruction for using the Javelin. Here is an article about the current conflict, with a few choice quotes: "The bottleneck for this influx of aid is training." "In Western militaries, soldiers who operate these weapons undergo weeks or months of training before firing their first live shot." All of this training for the Javelin alone is in addition to all of their other training, of course. Mutatis mutandis for every other weapon system.

Even the Javelin is not exactly an "unassisted" weapon. The thing weighs about 50 pounds, with one missile! That gets split up, so you need an ammunition bearer if you want to have any other gear... uh oh, looks like you're not "unassisted" anymore. Mutatis mutandis... Are you going to pack a Stinger with them? That's another 35 pounds, probably have to give that to someone else. Maybe you'll need something like a SAW, better bring someone else to haul that around and ammunition for it. Maybe bring a few more people to keep an eye out while you set up your launcher, maybe someone to direct all these people... oh look, we're back to an organized group, better train them all together so that they're more than a gaggle of schoolchildren.

Every step of the way, trained personnel, and plenty of them, are needed. Warfare has not been "fundamentally reshaped," these new high-tech weapons are not a replacement for trained fighting men, even if it alters how the fighting is done, or the side with the better weapons has an advantage, just like every piece of technology before them. It's the same old claims of the past repeated ad nauseum that this time it's different. I'm unimpressed this time too.