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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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What I find most interesting about the current Israel - Iran conflict isn't necessarily a lot of the geopolitical implications / consequences (although of course they are important), but instead the way the war is being waged. It seems, so far as I can tell, that they are almost entirely "trading missile strikes" and that no boots are on the ground, there isn't even really much of a naval component. Just missile centers in cities or in the desert shooting at one another, causing damage that, from a citizen's POV, is essentially random.

I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?

On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.

Then again, the whole war in the Ukraine is very much boots on the ground, even if drones are heavily involved. I'm not sure (obviously) exactly how the future of war will develop, but we are certainly seeing interesting new innovations as of late. And we have barely even scratched the surface of using AI in warfare!

What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?

Something I think hasn't been addressed thus far: the degradation of international law over the GWOT period, leading to the current Iran-Israel conflict. War used to be declared publicly, fought to a conclusion, ended with finality. Now there isn't really a declaration of war, states of conflict exist in nebulous ways between strong-state, non-state, and weak-state actors. Obviously this goes back a long way, but the US pioneered this process during the GWOT, asserting its right to bomb within certain countries at any time, with no declaration of war, and no peace made afterward. The USA was never at war with Pakistan, and Pakistan never formally publicly approved the use of force by the USA within Pakistan's borders in either a narrow operation or broader war. Yet the USA continuously bombed targets in Pakistan, and even launched a commando raid within Pakistan's borders killing residents of Pakistan with no formal notice to or approval by Pakistani authorities. The USA continuously asserted its right to bomb targets in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, without a formal declaration of hostilities commencing or ceasing.

What was initially the prerogative of the hegemon leaked. Israel and Iran started to assert their right to do the same after terrorist attacks, first within weak states and targeting non-state actors. Israel periodically bombs targets in Lebanon, Syria. Iran responded to attacks by bombing non-state targets in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Now they're trying to assert that right to bomb each other. Now we're in a situation where the belligerents escalated from proxies, to hurling drones and missiles at each other, with no particular realistic end point in sight.

What we're seeing is a kind of low-grade warfare, that will drag on, because it forms political positive feedback loops. The leaders who send the bombs are strengthened by the bombs that come in reply. Peace is an unclear process from here.

Good points. It's repeated a lot around here, but the post-WW2 global order does seem to have almost fully broken down at this point.

I think it goes way deeper than that. The concept of declaring war and making peace within European (and hence today, global) diplomatic systems goes back to Rome at least. The Romans had huge amounts of superstitions and traditions related to declaring war, and making peace. Numa Pompilius, who first held the title Pontifex Maximus which has gone in unbroken succession to our current Pope Leo, introduced the tradition of the Temple of Janus to the Roman populace in order to tame their warlike urges. The temple's gates were open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. The formal declaration of war and peace was a superstitious, religious matter for the Romans.

When we abandon that kind of simple logic, we chip away at an organized international legal system, and we wind up with a permanent murky state of conflict. If you never have declared war, you can never have peace.

The temple's gates were open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. The formal declaration of war and peace was a superstitious, religious matter for the Romans.

Weren't the gates open for something like a 400 year stretch at one point? AKA longer than the USA has been in existence?

The Romans had huge amounts of superstitions and traditions related to declaring war, and making peace. Numa Pompilius, who first held the title Pontifex Maximus which has gone in unbroken succession to our current Pope Leo, introduced the tradition of the Temple of Janus to the Roman populace in order to tame their warlike urges.

Hasn't the succession been broken a few times? Like with the antipopes and such?

But yes agree with the broader point. It speaks to the entire idea of chaos growing and the flood coming to consume us as we chip away at meaning and reality. Truth becomes impossible to pin down - are we at war? or are we in peace?

If war becomes increasingly technological, as seems the trend, we can expect a re-feudalization of our politics produced by this basic military necessity. Not in our lifetime, of course, but soon. Mass politics is necessary to get masses of men into the field in an age when how many men you can put in the field determines who wins. This five hundred year cycle of "democracy" has really been the political concessions necessary to get large numbers of men into the army.

When the question is "who has the ability to call a drone strike?" The answer does include a few dozen corporations, major police forces, criminal organizations, terrorists and a cracked-out teenager from Burbank, but does not include a majority of nations. A new sort of feudal system must necessarily form as military capacity is disengaged from political organization.

If war becomes increasingly technological, as seems the trend, we can expect a re-feudalization of our politics produced by this basic military necessity. Not in our lifetime, of course, but soon. Mass politics is necessary to get masses of men into the field in an age when how many men you can put in the field determines who wins. This five hundred year cycle of "democracy" has really been the political concessions necessary to get large numbers of men into the army.

Wait so you're saying that we'll see less democracy as technology increases, and the need for manpower decreases?

And yeah I do agree corporate power is highly concerning. Especially that of AI companies. We'll see where things shake out I suppose.

Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.

Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.

With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.

At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.

More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.

But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.

This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.

The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be militarily irrelevant.

As so often, attack precedes defense.

I actually think drones have been a bigger win for Ukraine than Russia.

The longer a Russian attack takes and the further into Ukrainian lines they get, more and more drones get vectored onto their attacking troops. And it's hard to suppress them, so every Russian attack inevitably gets bogged down. They cannot for the life of them generate a breakthrough.

Otherwise, spot on analysis.

Fair point, good input.

Could be a blessing. If you think about it, the superiority of drones means every human becomes a non-combatant. You send your drone army against their drone army and the loser just surrenders: there’s no strategic point to slaughtering useless biomass. These near-instantaneous drone battles, foreshadowed by israel’s swift degrading of iranian capabilities, will relegate to the dark ages that terrible word: Attrition. War is going to be as quick and painless as running an algorithm.

The dream of Richard Gatling, realized at last? Maybe to some extent.

Autonomous drones will still be tasked with killing people, will have false positives in identifying targets, will sometimes attack large areas with a high probability of collateral damage. And as @BreakerofHorsesandMen said, they may be used just as well to effectively carry out variably-discriminate mass killings.

OTOH, like precision-guided munitions reduced the usage of carpet bombing campaigns, the ability to use drone strikes precisely tailored to a given target may also work to reduce collateral damage like you say.

We'll see.

useless biomass

No strategic point in keeping it around, either.

A drone will never say “No,” or get PTSD from its memories of mass graves and executing mothers and children.

Might as well just slaughter everybody and let your people move into the freshly empty land. No risk of terrorism, no sullen populace yearning to break free of their chains.

Rather, I think, we will relegate to the dark ages that most foolish of words: Genocide.

War is going to be as quick and painless as running an algorithm.

There's a Star Trek episode about that ("A Taste of Armageddon"). It didn't turn out well.

That's not the same thing. In Star Trek, they were simulating battles without actually destroying their opponent's means of fighting. If you have two drone armies fight each other, the loser still gets destroyed. In Star Trek, if one side defected, the other side would have to send their ships in, and possibly sustain the losses they avoided by only stimulating the flight. In drone warfare, you've already sent your drones in and fought their drone army, so if they defect you can slaughter them. If drones are that much better than humans at fighting, they won't be able to defend themselves, because you didn't just simulate it, you actually destroyed their drones.

Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.

Wow, this paragraph was extremely chilling. Good job.

we're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones.

Didn't think about the different type/level of drone but it makes a lot of sense. Again, chilling!!! But kind of cool.

More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare.

What about EMPs? Or strikes at drone control centers?

Thanks.

What about EMPs?

As mentioned, this might be possible. AFAIK - which isn't very far, I'm just an armchair theorist with a very cursory knowledge of physics and engineering - meaningful EMP requires some pretty big explosions to generate, so you can't just sustainably deny a large area. Even assuming that someone will invent a sustainable, powerful large-area EMP, then it will only delay the development towards ubiquitous, scalable, autonomous drone swarms. EMP hardening through metallic shielding will make drones heavier, slower, more expensive and easier to spot and target, but they will still be exceedingly useful and powerful and nobody will be able to afford not using them.

I'd expect hardened and unhardened drones to be used simultaneously. You deploy both, assuming that enemy will probably not use EMP, but just in case they do you have the hardened drones to continue the mission if the unhardened one should get fried. If they do not, then the cheaper and more agile unhardened ones can complete the mission while the more expensive and cumbersome hardened ones hang back and don't risk themselves.

EMP also comes with the caveat that, well, EMP doesn't discriminate. You will shut down your own unhardened electronics as well as the enemy's if you use it. So it becomes necessary either to employ a lot of hardening, which is expensive and heavy, or to accept that EMP is a weapon of last resort that will harm yourself, or somehow synchronize the EMP with a sort of hunker-down protocol of your own drones in which they retreat into prepared shelters before the pulse and reemerge after. The latter obviously doesn't work for stationary electronics.

And in the very long run, who knows, someone might just develop hardware that doesn't rely on classical electronics at all. I absolutely expect someone to grow organic CPUs at some point.

Or strikes at drone control centers?

Drone Control Centers are a relic of our transitional age, in which you need a horde of humans to babysit a small number of drones that they manually control in real-time. The drone "control center" of the future will be a command-and-control drone flying slightly behind the frontline drones. At most you will have, let's call them "drone doctrine programming centers" sitting safely at home, in which the missions and rules of engagement are defined before being handed off to the drones themselves. EMP may not be viable as a general countermeasure to drones, but jamming is already used to great effect - but radio jamming can at most prevent drones from communicating, not from operating autonomously. This massively reduces the value of real-time manual drone control (as done today), while the autonomous drones of the near future are only affected in their ability to share information with each other (via radio; other means still work) while retaining the ability to operate individually.

The gist of all this is that there will be no sufficently good reason to have big control centers in one place in striking distance of the enemy. Maybe some operations will require a human operator to observe through the drones' eyes as far as possible to make judgement calls, but I'd guess that those will be increasingly rare as more and more authority is transferred to the drones themselves for reasons of practicality and scalability.

This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.

Hence drones being a revolution in military affairs, and not just a military revolution in technology. Society itself is going to change / is already changing on the increasing ubiquity of drones, and with that the relationship between societies and war.

I look forward to cheeky American 1st Amendment debates in the future about whether the right to bear arms entails the right to a personal air force derived from the protections of your papers and property (3D printer fabs and raw materials).

I broadly agree with your linked post. But I think the damper that drone warfare puts on power projection (conflating this with interventionism for now) is only temporary. Big miltiary bases won't be necessary for gunboat diplomacy when the drones are smart enough to deploy themselves from shipping containers, or fired to the target location via cruise missile, or just creeping from home to there on solar power. And if boots on the ground are strictly required, then it's still our drones versus their drones. Drone-on-drone warfare will be a thing, and I find it entirely conceivable that you will have military bases surrounded by dozens of miles of drone-patrolled perimeter, or entire towns kept free of enemy drones by flooding them with your own technologically superior drones, which can then be occupied by your human troops.

Please disagree with me on this. The topic is fascinating, IMO. I've been waiting for decades to see this stuff happen and it seems to finally be just around the corner.

If you're speaking metaphorically, you are directionally correct, though so time abstract I can't take any real position. If you're speaking literally, the reason your concept is an exaggeration is because drones are no more immune to the concept of cost-efficiency and opportunity costs and geopolitical balancing than anything else.

But, again, the context is so abstract there's not really much to disagree with.

What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?

Cheap missile spam backed by cheap drone spam that may be followed with armor and infantry on the ground with active air support if needed.

At least, that's what Anduril is clearly banking on. They're making missiles that are also drones.

The technical issue of holding territory if you manage to capture it is still hard to solve.

But I imagine the opening stages of a non-nuclear war between peer powers looks like a scaled up version of what happened to Iran. Missile swarm exchanges targeting enemy Command and Control and defensive systems, coupled with cyberattacks and other sabotage to maximize penetration.

And of course, if you can smuggle a ton of drones into the target country in advance and set them up near vulnerable targets you're able to leverage the carnage even further.

Knock out the defenses in the first wave, then successive waves will be all the more destructive and you can diversify targets. Seems like it soon becomes an all-or-nothing exchange b/c if you can kill off their ability to launch retaliating strikes, you can just keep on striking without fear.

Then drones of various sizes to reconnoiter and identify pockets of potential resistance, and start softening up the troops who actually stay at their posts. I don't know how you maintain morale for human infantry when the chain of command is tossed into chaos and they can see the writing on the wall when the FPV drones start buzzing in for the kill.

Add on the extra consideration that you can fit missile launchers and drone swarms on shipping containers and suddenly the task of predicting where the strikes will originate from is more difficult.

Civilian ships are potential launching points for missiles and drones, so it might legitimately become doctrine to attack any cargo ships inside your air defense's envelope just in case they could be used to retaliate.

Hell, the scariest thing I can imagine is using missiles coordinated with drone swarms to penetrate armored facilities so the drones can sweep through and murder everyone inside.

And yeah, I would not want to be a head of state or military leader of one of the belligerent countries, when poking my head out of my deep mountain bunker could be instantly fatal. Traveling by air would be right the fuck out, and any attempt to move over land is inherently exposing me to missiles or drone salvos.

I see comments mentioning that decapitation strikes have been a feature of warfare for eons, but we're seeing the ability to reach out and touch someone from absurd distances, and DEFINITELY the ability to coordinate the simultaneous strike much more effectively. And redundancy. Want to be SURE a guy is dead? Fire more missiles, then have drones on cleanup duty.

Safest place for a leader to be would probably be on a silent nuclear-powered submarine deep enough underwater to avoid depth charges.

Except... oh shit.

I take it back, the safest place for the leader to be will be on the fucking MOON while the conflict is active.

The technical issue of holding territory if you manage to capture it is still hard to solve.

I dont think either of them want to hold enemy territory. Iran maybe as a long-term goal, but theyre on the defensive here so its probably not in play. Israel is fine with distance-policing their capabilities.

Agreed.

Which also changes the dynamics of what a war looks like. How can an inferior power ever hope to gain enough edge to deter an opponent from attacking when said opponent can just attack unilaterally with impunity to bring down any attempt at a functional deterrence.

The Taliban showed that its possible to outlast an opponent who seeks to occupy your lands. But if we don't care about occupying but are happy to just kneecap them if they try to build a nuke, or a missile stockpile, or bioweapons, there ain't much they can do but sponsor low level terrorism against our civilians.

It would, I'd argue, make it so that you HAVE to make friends with the biggest kid on your block and hope there's enough deterrent effect there. Which is looking like the only kids big enough to matter are the U.S. and China.

But if we don't care about occupying but are happy to just kneecap them if they try to build a nuke, or a missile stockpile, or bioweapons, there ain't much they can do but sponsor low level terrorism against our civilians.

It is not clear to me at all that Israeli conventional airstrikes will be able to permanently keep either the conventional or nuclear weapons program of Iran in check. For example, Russia likes to use Iranian military drones in Ukraine, so that is already one big power which might support them in their capabilities to produce conventional weapons despite your efforts to kneecap them. China probably sees Iran as an important counterweight to US-leaning regional powers like Israel or Saudi Arabia.

So far, Iran has for the very most part only sponsored deadly terror against Israel, not the West in general (Bin Laden was Saudi, after all). As someone who was around in the early 2000s, let me assure you that what was ultimately an act of "low level terrorism against our civilians" managed to shape US politics for the better part of a decade and let to the West going on a wild goose chase.

Now, if your model of the Ayatollah regime is that the probability of them nuking Israel within hours of gaining the ability to do so is close to one, and that they are willing to sacrifice most of their population centers to the inevitable Israeli retaliation, then yes, trying anything to keep them from getting nukes might be worth the costs.

Or your model of the Ayatollah regime might be that while they are rabid antisemites who are serious about destroying Israel, they are also hypocrites in that despite their public statements, they would not like their children to become martyrs. Then bombing the shit out of them to delay them from acquiring nukes might be actively counterproductive in that once they have nukes, they are much more likely to use them.

This was the same method used to destroy Libya. The US sanctioned them, bombed them to pieces and financed various jihadist groups and slowly destroyed the country. The US failed at nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan and moved on to nation destruction. There was no attempt to build a liberal Syria, there was instead a project to simply destroy Syria. There has been no attempt to fix Yemen, the goal is simply to turn Yemen into a shattered wreck with no capacity to do anything.

The US empire has gone from trying to control the world to simply trying to smash anything that challenges it with not much more justification than might is right.

Libya was already relatively internally divided, Gaddafi was just a great autocrat. Iran has far fewer internal divisions than Libya did in 2011.

It has far fewer ethnic divisions, but the political diversity in dissidents to the mullahs is so great that any successful decapitation would either need to be followed by an autocrat with US backing or civil war.

Given that Syria has normalized diplomatic relations with the U.S., bombing them to pieces seems to be the most effective nation-building strategy that has so far been tried. Don't invade, don't occupy, just bomb anti-American regimes. The bombings weaken the regime and allow a rival to take over, and the desire to not get bombed makes the new regime want to stay on America's good side. Simple as.

Are you being serious here?

Is there another nation-building strategy that has been proven more effective? I only said it was the most effective strategy that has been tried so far. I didn't say it was neighborly.

Of course. That of the British. You take some locals with legitimacy, give them just enough weapons to rule the place and enjoy the plunder.

The US has been down that road before in Iran specifically too. But their guy started to reneg on the plunder and they thought they could switch him out by breaking everything, and instead created an enemy for decades.

Next time just replace the guy with his son or something.

Problem was that they started actually believing all of the universal spread of liberal democracy stuff because the Cold War involved an ideological component that 19th century European colonialism didn’t (“spreading Christian civilization” was a post-hoc thing). That meant that which side was supported was often determined more ideologically than it had been under the British or French, who were regularly willing to screw over fellow Christians, liberal reformers, or other more ideologically aligned factions if their opponents had better will to power.

I didn't say it was neighborly.

If 'nation-building' is supposed to mean anything other than conquest, then it is deranged and incompetent.

It took 14 years, a massive refugee crisis to Europe, the destruction of the country and a decimation of the Christian population to get a jihadist dictator that somewhat controls the country. The ambition is not what it was in 2003.

Kind of clashes with the American rhetoric of unprovoked invasions and the horrors of Russian aggression in Ukriane.

The Christian population of the Middle East has been leaving since the late years of the Ottoman Empire, a process that has only accelerated since the rise of Islamism post-Qutb after the middle of the 20th century and especially since 1979.

The War on Terror was the death knell for ‘humanitarian’ US regime change opps because it was the moment it became clear that the State Dept, CIA and DoD no longer had the appetite for actual population transformation. There were people who pushed for it. Ann Coulter after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. But when it came to it, nobody had the guts to do it and it seemed like a lot of work when you could get some peace corps Yale grads at State to fund a few schools to teach women how to sew, fund girls sports teams, give the top ten high school students in the country scholarships to Georgetown and call it a day.

Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?

No, strategic bombing has a mediocre track record and in most of those cases it was accompanied by full scale land invasions. Strategic bombing alone just makes the bombee really really mad at you. Israel is knocking the Iranians a few years back along the nuclear "tech tree". Regime change is a stupid goal if that's their goal, but who knows (they'd need a strong rebel group to arm at the very least).

Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars

I actually wonder if I'd rather be in a WW1 trench or Ukranian one. It's insane it's even a question. I think you have to pick Ukranian ultimately because of the advances in medical technology. But the technology isn't worth shit if you get droned while evac-ing, which is all too common...

Fiber optic FPVs have high quality and don't have LOS signal issues which means skilled operators can fly them into buildings and around inside them. This means they can even navigate them around say, the tarp you hung up on the front of the dugout, which used to do a pretty good job of stopping FPVs.

Getting hunted by robots is a nightmare, and they're only getting better and more capable.

What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?

Each war is different. USA v China would be all air and sea assets. We will probably see almost no footage aside from explosions in or around cities very occasionally.

Iran/Israel can't invade each other so all they can do is lob things back and forth. Note that Israel has a ton of air assets all over Iran though, it's not just missile bases firing at each other. USA/China also cant invade each other, so it would be a similar situation of plinking at each other. Although unlike Iran/Israel, there is actually ownership of Pacific islands (incl but not limited to Taiwan) who would change ownership depending on outcome.

Ukraine/Russia is what not winning the air looks like for sure. Although caveat that with the fact they're post-soviet armies with absolutely awful generals (and politicians making bad military choices) at the strategic levels so this was is significantly more sloppy and gruesome than if France and Germany suddenly decided to run it back for old times' sake.

Land: Defence is so strong right now with drone-spam. The effectiveness/cost of Class 1/2 drones vs their countermeasures is really hard to predict (lasers, AI targeting, cost of everything, reusable interceptors) and shapes land battles heavily so hard to say.

Right now class 1 and 2 drones are cheaper to make than to stop, so defence is really strong at the moment. The longer your attack takes and the further into my lines you get, the more drones I can vector onto your attacking troops. And it's hard to suppress my drones (unless you have air superiority).

Sea: I assume drone boats are the future. Carriers always/forever useful, but their fragility depends on the missile vs countermeasure balance, which we can't predict.

I think the meta stays the same, survivability onion doesn't change. Find the enemy and blow them up from far away.

AI allows you to spread out more and extend the reach of your eyes and weapons. So more smaller drone ships. Stealth and Zumwalt shaped, maybe semi submersible. Don't know enough about submarines but presumably similar.

Air: similar to sea. 6th gen fighters are shaping up to be bigger, for longer range and bigger/more ordinance. Also bigger engine = more electricity = more compute, if your 6th gen isn't also a drone C&C it's already obsolete. It'll be handfuls of 6th gen fighters commanding swarms of class 2 and 3 drones (which in turn, may deploy class 1 drones? Yikes). They'll have radar, missiles so the 6th gen doesn't need to give itself away doing these things.

Closing thoughts on USA vs China: it's the USA's game to lose. They're still ahead but the trend lines SUCK, and nothing about the current state of US governance indicates that's going to change dramatically. They shouldn't bail on the first island chain yet, but as someone who enjoys Pax Americana, I'm not feeling optimistic for my team's odds in 10 years. China can project force in its backyard even if it's never the #1 big dog.

See acoup on strategic airpower.

In general, strategic bombing can mean different things:

  • bombing your enemies production centers
  • bombing your enemies population to demoralize them
  • (nowadays) bombing the enemies leadership to destabilize the country

The first one works somewhat, but historically not very well. It is debatable if better intelligence today might mean that it is more effective today.

Terror bombing, besides being a crime against humanity, is actively counterproductive. It actively strengthens the bond between the government and the civilians who feel that they are all in it together. It worked like that for the Brits and the Nazis. Arguably, a very similar effect could be observed after 9/11 in the US. Ordinary Americans who were leaning Democrat or dovish found themselves supporting Bush's hawkish adventures. (Coming to think of it, rocket attacks might also explain why the Israeli population is voting for right wing parties supporting goals far beyond what is considered normal in other Western countries.)

Targeting the leadership seems like a less bad option. But here the strategic effect is obviously quite limited. The US blew up a lot of weddings in drone strikes in an effort to curb the Taliban. It did little to prevent their rapid rise back to power the minute they left. And the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas, accepting high civilian casualties to take out their commanders. So far, this has not caused Hamas to fall apart. In an environment where IDF bombs have deprived most Gazans of homes and extended family members, and where the families of Hamas members are the ones whose food supply is secure, Hamas does not have a recruiting problem.

I will say that targeting the leadership worked better against Hezbollah. The pager bombing allowed them to take out a lot of the mid level management without Gaza-level collateral damage.

The power of the Iranian regime ultimately comes from the military and revolutionary guards. Sure, murdering a general or politician here and there might make it harder for the regime to pursue their objectives, but at the end of the day it is not enough to force a regime change.

Yeah Isreal is doing an amazing job shitting all over their military and nuclear programs.

It's just very unlikely to cause a regime change or cause Iran significant long term harm. They'll be neutered for the next few years for sure though.

They're still ahead

I’m not even sure they’re ahead now. If you compare the US and Chinese Navies as a whole the US Navy looks better, but the US Navy is spread across at least four different oceans and seas, most of the Chinese navy is right there. And maneuverable re-entry vehicles and constant satellite surveillance make giant aircraft carriers a lot less practical. Recent war games have indicated that getting carrier groups further west than Hawaii would be extremely risky. And that’s just the large extremely long range ballistic missiles, most of the fight for Taiwan would have to be within 100 miles of the Chinese coast. And that’s not even getting into the string of pretty worrying incidents lately that show a dramatic loss of basic seamanship skills in the US Navy (like accidentally scuttling the John Paul Jones).

Also for some reason it seems like most people picture a Chinese invasion of Taiwan like it’s Omaha beach in 1944 with Higgins boats full of Chinese soldiers getting mowed down on the beach, it wouldn’t be like that at all. It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.

Also for some reason it seems like most people picture a Chinese invasion of Taiwan like it’s Omaha beach in 1944 with Higgins boats full of Chinese soldiers getting mowed down on the beach, it wouldn’t be like that at all. It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.

The reasons why are threefold (or more).

First, if the Chinese used their cruise missile potential like that, they'd have blown through most of their stocks in those three weeks, with relatively few left for the landing. (They'd have some, but proportionally). The nature of a missile that you can launch from long range is that throughput is high (you can fire them faster), and the diminishing returns of bombardment over time is low (you get less value per cruise missile on week three than on week one, and on week one than on day one, because everything easily killable either dies or becomes less-killable with time). It doesn't really matter what the specific number is, the nature of the munition is that you can shoot your stockpile far faster than you can sustain it, and your incentives are to do so early when it's most effective. If you're going to wait three weeks regardless, you'd might as well just hold fire, so those munitions could paralyze the Taiwanese ground force when you do move.

Second, the opening weeks of that sort uber-overt conquest scenario is a race against time, with the time being the ability of the US navy from the rest of the world's oceans to relocate to the Pacific. This is measured in weeks. Add however long you expect you ground force to take onto that. In a sustained offensive, the Chinese want their bridgehead established and expanding before American carrier airpower can bring, lest the reinforced carriers start cutting the sea lanes supporting the attack. That doesn't mean a day-0 landing attempt, but it does mean there's an optimal point before the island is bombarded into dust, but more importantly before the US carrier airpower in the pacific quadruples, to land.

Third, there is a non-trivial chance that Xi or whomever gives the go-ahead convinces themselves that the Taiwanese would collapse / surrender promptly once landed, whether because they convince themselves there won't be any resistance, that the resistance they will face will be brittle and easily crushed, or that once a landing is made the authorities will surrender, especially if if they believe their agents will defect. This is the sort of belief that leads to judgements that prioritize speed and audacity over preparation. Remember- in the 'don't screw up like this' invasion of Ukraine, the Russians did make the vast majority of their gains in those opening days and weeks, even when the ran into a wall, and a lot of that was because there was a bunch of actually-worked preparartions of corrupted government types who were bought off in advance. If that sort of optimism seems unreasonable, consider what level of default optimism you'd need to approve a landing in the first place, and then consider the system and identify who will tell Xi the optimist 'no.'

It also helps to remember that Omaha Beach 1944 was... not actually that well fortified, in the grand scheme of things. As much as it's been valorized / dramatized in the decades sense, even at the time it was attacked because it was a less fortified part of the coast, with the closest German reserve further away. It was not exactly held by the German best (or most). That D-Day remains (for now) the greatest amphibious invasion in history is a testament to how hard the logistics of amphibious warfare is, not the combat-intensity at the point.

Agree with everything you've said.

I'm slightly more optimistic on the USA. China might be as well drilled, which negates this, but the USA is so dialled. Their institutional culture in the military works damn well. It's full of infinite flaws I'm sure you can name, but they make everything they do look so easy, and then you see any other nation on earth (Israeli airforce is the rare exception) struggle to do what the US does on a regular Tuesday.

You are right though, even that is showing signs of rot.

Total war is "a factory fight" and I think it's going more that way thanks to the increasing sophistication of drones/missiles/interceptors. Also scary when we think about who has the most and the best factories. Yikes!

There is absolutely no reason to do a direct assault of a small hilly island. The only sensible way to take Taiwan is a siege which the Chinese could even conduct from their homeland with anti ship missiles launched from the shores. Taiwan isn't going to last that long without international trade.

It would be 2000 cruise missiles a day for three weeks before there was any kind of landing attempt.

And the presumed response looks like 2000 anti-ship missiles (or pre-placed torpedos) denying navigation to the entire strait, plus long-range anti-ship missiles used to declare a blockade of Chinese ports (see the Black Sea, but with potentially less regard for continued commercial traffic). Which isn't to say that would work out either, but the idea that Taiwan's defenses would crumble immediately like Iran's have isn't a guarantee either.

The bombardment Iran is getting isn’t even close to what Taiwan would get. It would look more like Iraq or Kosovo, but in a much smaller area.

OK, so China flattens the island (incidentally destroying any facilities of value they might want, or they're destroyed deliberately to deny them to the invaders), but hasn't at all harmed the ability of the US to deny landings or blockade China.

The main strategic value of taking Taiwan is removing the threat to China. Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland. The chip fabs and any other economic value are a distant second. Ideally China would like to get those, which is probably why they haven’t invaded yet in the first place. China has its own chip fabs, so everyone else would be in a much worse position than China if they got destroyed.

Regarding your second point, for the US to blockade China, the United States would need to:

  1. Decide it’s actually going to fight China.
  2. Decide it’s an acceptable loss that the entire US economy falls apart in a matter of hours.
  3. Decide it’s ok incurring tens of thousands of military casualties in a matter of days.
  4. Decide it’s fine with the risk of nuclear conflict.
  5. Actually get it’s ships somewhere near the vicinity of Taiwan without getting them all sunk.

Taiwan is in a position where they can easily bottle up Chinese naval traffic from getting into the South China Sea, and yeet missiles into strategic military and economic targets in the Chinese mainland.

Taiwan would have to be really suicidal to do that. At the end of the day, Mainland China can bring missiles into range a lot more easily than the US can transport them to Taiwan.

I think that the more serious long term threat for the CCP is that Taiwan is a state which has Chinese culture and is not under their control. A successful, capitalist, proof-of-concept minimal version of China could really be a thorn in their side during an economic downturn. If it was just some expats in the West, that would be much easier to downplay. If it was really a distinct nationality, like Koreans, that would also be easier to tolerate.

But a world in which the pinnacle of technological progress, the most advanced microchips in the world, are produced by Chinese but the Chinese who produce them are not actually from the PRC but the descendants of the side which lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan must be really painful for the CCP narrative.

The American economy is not dependent on imports from China, and neither does it rely on exports to it. All it needs to do to blockade China is block the straits of Malacca and Tiran.

Massive immediate shortage of consumer goods, industrial parts and equipment, some kinds of food (which isn’t grown in China but is often shipped there to be packed or processed or canned), and basic military equipment (boots, uniforms, etc).

Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?

Trying to decapitate the enemy leadership has been a thing for almost as long as total war has. There were hundreds of plots to assassinate Hitler, and dozens of Nazi plots to assassinate Churchill and Stalin. The only reason none of these worked is that all parties involved were surrounded by fearsome state security apparatuses, and because infiltrating a dozen commandos into a foreign country to kill a VIP under massive security is pretty hard. Later during the nuclear age, assassinating leaders of major powers became untenable along with all the other aspects of total war.

@erwgv3g34 And it’s pretty ironic that Scott mentions Lincoln, given that Lincoln died as the result of a botched and too-late massive decapition strike against the entire Union leadership structure. The plot was supposed to kill President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Secretary of State William Seward, and Commanding General of the US Army Ulysses Grant. The plot fell apart near the date of its execution for multiple reasons (partially because the plan came together too late to actually win the war) and only Lincoln and Seward needed up being attacked.

I know that the World Wars were considered horrible because death in combat felt so random due to bombings, machine guns, etc. Are we now entering a new stage of warfare where soldiers are barely even involved, and we just shoot missiles at each others population centers, trying to decapitate the enemy leadership?

On the one hand, it's certainly... cleaner, I suppose? Much better than the horrid conditions of trench warfare during the World Wars, at least based on what I've read about it. Still though, it feels extremely cold and random, disconnected from the perspective of the average person.

From "What if drone warfare had come first?" by Scott Alexander:

The scene is the Oval Office. Three of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GENERAL HAWKE, GENERAL STEELE, and GENERAL RIPPER, are meeting with THE PRESIDENT. The meeting has been a long and exhausting discussion of drone strikes, and they are reaching the end.

PRESIDENT: I think we only have one more matter left to discuss. As you know, I have recently been worried about the moral cost of our drone war. So many lives lost. So many civilian casualties. I tasked DARPA with coming up with a new type of warfare, one which will end some of the troubling moral quandaries with which we are forced to wrestle every day. I believe General Ripper has been briefed on the results?

HAWKE: Mr. President, once again, I object to this pie-in-the-sky project. Drone warfare was good enough for our ancestors and it is good enough for us. The Romans used surgically precise ballista strikes to assassinate Hannibal without harming the Carthaginian populace. Abraham Lincoln used guided hot-air balloons to knock out top Confederate officials and keep this country united. Literally hundreds of people died in World War I before the British were finally able to kill Kaiser Wilhelm with a carefully-aimed zeppelin. To abandon drone warfare now for some untested new project would be an insult to their memory!

PRESIDENT: General Hawke, I appreciate your concerns, and I promise I will not be overly hasty to embrace these new ideas. But I'd like to hear what General Ripper has to say.

RIPPER: (interjecting) Guys!...Guys! Guys, listen! This is going to be so awesome. Listen to this! We take hundreds of thousands of people...guys, listen!...we take hundreds of thousands of people, give them really really really powerful automatic weapons...this is going to be so awesome...we take hundreds of thousands of people and give them really powerful automatic weapons and put them on planes and give them parachutes and drop them into our enemies' cities and then they just start shooting everything BLAM BLAM BLAM until our enemies run away and we're like HA HA HA HA HA THIS IS OUR CITY NOW and then we win!

STEELE: What the hell, Ripper?

RIPPER: No, listen, this will totally work! We take hundreds of thousands of people. We can use young kids and poor people and minorities, because we don't have to pay them as much. And then we give them really really big weapons. Like, not just the kinds of guns hunters use. Not even the kind of guns we give police. Guns that just NEVER STOP SHOOTING BULLETS! You can just swing them in a big arc and it will leave an arc of bullets everywhere and anyone anywhere in that arc will be dead! It will be SO AWESOME!

HAWKE: Ripper, are you mad?

RIPPER: Guys, think about it! You're Ayatollah Sistani, or Mullah Omar, or one of those motherf@*kers. You're having breakfast in your house one day when WHAM! A hundred thousand American teenagers and minorities RIGHT IN YOUR CITY with guns that never stop shooting bullets! There are bullet holes in your walls and in your gardens and now they're shooting your water supply and your power plant and everything. Do you think you're going to keep having your f@*king breakfast? Or do you think you're going to start waving an American flag and get on board with American policies like, right away?

PRESIDENT: General Ripper, frankly your idea seems at best ill-advised! Just to take one of many objections, we'll never be able to gather a hundred thousand Americans in secret. Ayatollah Sistani will hear about our plan long before we can surprise him.

RIPPER: And what could that motherf@*ker do about it?

STEELE: Well, he could get some Iranian teenagers and minorities, give them these super-guns of yours, and have them lie in wait for our teenagers and minorities outside his house.

RIPPER: Oh my god that would be so awesome! Because we have more technology, so we could have better guns than they do! And we're richer than they are, so we could hire more teenagers and minorities! Right? RIGHT? So everyone would be like BLAM BLAM BLAM with their super-guns and there would be this huge fight and in the end we would win and get that sunavab*tch anyway!

PRESIDENT: (horrified) You realize what you're suggesting is the deaths of dozens of Americans and Iranians, right? Maybe even hundreds!

RIPPER: No, look. It would be okay. Listen to this. We would come up...we would come up with this new philosophy where once a teenager or minority got a super-powerful gun from our enemies, it would be okay if we killed them. Because if we didn't kill them, they might use that gun to shoot us.

HAWKE: But they're only doing that because otherwise we would...I can't believe I have to say this...otherwise we would parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah.

RIPPER: I KNOW RIGHT? We're going to parachute teenagers with giant guns into their city to shoot the ayatollah! THEN EVERYTHING'S GOING TO GET BLOWN UP AND IT'S GOING TO BE SO COOL.

STEELE Everything...blown up?

RIPPER: Oh man I totally forgot this part! If we just have the super guns, people might hide inside buildings, right? And then we couldn't shoot them and then the ayatollah wouldn't have to agree to do everything we say. So...ohmigod you guys are going to love this...we take cars, right? And we cover them in armor and put giant caterpillar tracks on the bottom so they can drive over walls and sh*t. And then we put HUMONGOUS GUNS on top of the cars. Guns so big they can BLOW UP WHOLE BUILDINGS. And then we just KEEP BLOWING UP THE CITY until the Ayatollah agrees to do everything we want.

PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Uh, Secret Service? One of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has started acting really weird. Maybe you could stand outside the door and, uh, monitor the situation?

RIPPER: And then! And then we have these planes, right? And we arm them with lots of bombs, and we fly them over enemy cities, and...

HAWKE: Oh, thank goodness. You're starting to see sense and admit that the old ways of drone warfare are right after all.

RIPPER: No, it would be totally different! Because, get this! There would be people in these planes! We'd train them at special schools and whirl them around in centrifuge until they were able to work at 5 g-forces without passing out. Whirl! Whirl! Whirl! And sometimes they'd bomb our enemies, and sometimes our enemies would shoot them down and they'd get captured and we'd have to send in special teams of super-spies to rescue them before they got tortured and told our enemies everything they know!

STEELE That's...horrible!

RIPPER: And instead of trying to only target high-profile enemy leaders? We'd have a special rule that they couldn't target high-profile enemy leaders! They would have to hit power plants and dams and weapons factories and...

PRESIDENT: Weapons factories? Wouldn't those explode if bombed?

RIPPER: OH yeah. HUGE explosion! BOOM! And then when everything had been destroyed from the air, we could send in our hundred thousand teenagers with super guns and they could send in their hundred thousand teenagers with super guns, and we could send in our cars covered in metal with caterpillar treads and they could send in their cars covered in metal in caterpillar treads and then it would be all BLAM BLAM BLAM for WEEKS AND WEEKS and we win would because we would both kill each other and destroy each other's cars but we're bigger so we would have more of them and the Ayatollah would have to agree to do everything we say.

STEELE What if he doesn't?

RIPPER: We could kick him out, and say okay, city, you're part of America now! You're following American laws! You fly the American flag! And then America would be even bigger! And we could take their stuff too, like if there was any oil in the city, then it would be our oil!

PRESIDENT: General Ripper, this is highly unorthodox but I am going to have to relieve you of command effective immediately. This so-called "plan" of DARPA and yourself appears to be no more than the rantings of a deranged and homicidal lunatic. Your request to further develop this new type of warfare is completely denied, and honestly you seem to have so little regard for human life or the rules of warfare that I do not want you anywhere near our nation's drone fleet.

STEELE: Wait, I just realized something. Maybe this isn't about having little regard for human life. Maybe it could even help preserve human life?

PRESIDENT: (skeptically) What do you mean?

STEELE: Think about it. Nowadays, our drone controllers plan strikes from the safety of the Pentagon, never knowing the horrors of warfare, never seeing their victims as real people. But imagine what would happen if we did war Ripper's way?

HAWKE: What would happen?

STEELE: All our teenagers and minorities would see the looks on the faces of their victims as they got shot. Reporters would go into the cities and televise the devastation that our cars with armor and humongous guns had caused. People would come back traumatized, and we'd see them and understand their trauma and with it the trauma of warfare.

PRESIDENT: And?

STEELE: And we'd only need to do it once. Think of the hundreds of people who died in World War I, Mr. President. Think about the waste. If we had done things Ripper's way, the Allies would have encountered the Germans. They would have realized they were human beings just like them. The people in the capitals would have had to think twice about sending their young men off to die just because they wanted to play stupid games with the balance of power. And they would have thought twice. They would have said "No, this is horrible". Instead of those hundreds of zeppelin-related casualties, we would have had both sides pull back from the brink of war, and join together in their common humanity. It would have been a War to End Wars.

HAWKE: It would never have happened that way.

STEELE: No, perhaps not. Perhaps we should go on with our drone strikes as usual. Keep killing hundreds of people. But perhaps one day we will regret not taking hundreds of thousands of teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, arming them with guns, parachuting them into our enemies' cities, and having them shoot things until our enemies agree to do whatever we say. Maybe it will end up being the only truly virtuous mode of warfare, the only one that preserves our inherent humanity.

PRESIDENT: (to buzzer under desk, in a whisper) Yes, I'm sorry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff seem to have gone insane. Would you mind terribly coming in and escorting them out?

The Secret Service comes in and escorts the Joint Chiefs of Staff out. The President sighs and starts taking care of some paperwork. A few minutes later, MS. WELLS, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, comes in.

WELLS: Mr. President? I'm sorry to disturb you, but a question has come up. I know you authorized free health care for everyone in the nation, but the doctors are wondering whether it's okay if they buy examination tables made of solid gold. Something about it 'adding a touch of class to the clinic'.

PRESIDENT: Sure. Tell them to go ahead. We have more tax money than we know what to do with these days anyway.

I think this has been overtaken by events in Ukraine - also by the news about what the US was actually doing in Afghanistan. Actual drone warfare fought by people who know they are at war, hate the enemy, and want to win, is about as gentlemanly as WW1 era trench warfare.

What are your best predictions for how future warfare will develop?

Anyone who's been paying attention to defense issues in the past few years will point you in one direction: drones, drones, drones. They're going to be omnipresent in basically every serious conflict going forward. From what I've read about troops in Ukraine, they make things absolutely miserable. They're nearly silent killers with the panopticon effect -- it feels like they're always watching, even when they aren't. You get out of your trench for 5 minutes to take a leak, and bam, now your leg is blown off. You're bleeding out on the dirt hoping for medical evac, but the medics don't want to come because who knows if another drone could be on the way. So you lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness while in a puddle of your own piss. Maybe you live, maybe you don't.

It's so much worse than that.

I was just reading an interview with a Ukrainian medic and they air drop anti-personnel mines with drones. Not only do you need to watch the sky, you need to watch your step because there might be a butterfly mine there today that wasn't there yesterday.

It goes on and on

Its a terrible shame that wearable exo-suit tech is so far behind the curve compared to quadcopters.

What I found more interesting was Trump tweeted ‘get out of Tehran now’ and there were immediately massive traffic jams leaving Tehran.

That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.

That’s one example. This is a war that the U.S. is far less clearly involved in than Ukraine and which is clearly about US policy. Global hegemony isn’t waning.

Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine (which if it is a client state is a shared project of the EU and US). I am not sure if public opinion on this point is correct, but I am pretty certain the people fleeing Tehran see it that way, and would do even if it wasn't for pro-regime propaganda in Iran.

Israel is generally considered to be a US client state even more than Ukraine

Except by the US dissident right who sees the US-Israel relationship the other way around.

But there's obviously a close relationship between the US and Israel and if it doesn't extend to being an actual bellicose ally against Iran, it's the next best thing. Public opinion isn't wrong on that.

Trump tweeted ‘get out of Tehran now’ and there were immediately massive traffic jams leaving Tehran

What a claim. There were traffic jams leaving the city from day one. And still, the traffic probably did pick up after he made the threat, US & Trump is understood to be slavishly devoted to Israelis, likely to sign off on and aid a nuclear strike on the city.

far less clearly involved in than Ukraine

Direct involvement in air defence, active support in the bombing campaign. This is less than in the first weeks in Ukraine?

My point was about what I think Iranians believe to be plausible. I'm not predicting a strike in the current circumstances, though I do think US would sign off on it if Israelis made such a decision.

I’m reminded of the young men marching off to the Great War, excited at the prospect of winning glory, and finding a meat grinder.

There’s little glory in pushing the button. Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button, but it’s still of a different kind than a hoplite would have experienced.

There’s little glory in pushing the button.

"Whatever happens, we have got

The Maxim gun, and they have not."

It must have still felt glorious enough to the people behind the machine guns, or they and their immediate successors wouldn't have been so eager to fight in a war where both sides had heavily mechanized.

Maybe there is in creating the winning system behind the button

From a pragmatic point of view there clearly should be, but in practice Rosie The Riveter etc. don't get glorified until the battles have already begun, at which point it's too late to do more than merely expand a winning system that's hopefully already been created unheralded. Even this year, when we're all arguing about tariffs and protectionism and such left and right, the arguments from the left are mostly of the form "why wouldn't we want to make Pareto trades?" with no hint of awareness of the systemic military implications, and the arguments from the right are mostly of the form "why are we letting them take all our super-valuable green pieces of paper?", focusing on competing long-term allies and on non-dual-use production even when the effects of that undermine industries with security applications.

Iran and Israel is a special case because they can't reach each other to invade (and if Israel could, they don't have the manpower). And Israel probably isn't trying to decapitate; they're probably not trying to topple the regime (which would lead at best to chaos), but incapacitate it technically. Israel and Gaza is probably a better view of what it looks like when one side is totally outclassed. And Ukraine/Russia for near-peer fights. Total war, WWII style, is still off the table because of the nuclear spectre; a fight between China and the US seems like the only way to get that in the near term, but it will look different than any of the current conflicts because it will be far more about naval forces at least at first.

Where does Jung say that Satan needs to be raised into the trinity? I remember reading something about how we need to embrace the divine feminine, but don't remember the Satan part.

In the Red Book, where he says all sorts of weird stuff. It was only released a few years ago so this wasn't common knowledge for most of the period of Jung scholarship. He also basically tried to start a cult, among other things.

I expect this reply belongs elsewhere.

Most esoteric war analysis I've ever seen...

Ahh yes not sure how it got here.

I can't remember where, but some (reputable) news org said Israel wanted to kill the Ayatollah, but Trump told them no. Iran is at a weak point now, but their most important nuclear research facility is underground and Israel doesn't have bunker-buster bombs. Regime change through internal uprisings is all the Israelis can really hope for if the US doesn't get involved, and hostile action doesn't have a great track record of getting that to happen (rally round the flag effect usually dominates). If the US does get involved, they'll want the US to blow up the facilities they can't reach.

And Israel probably isn't trying to decapitate; they're probably not trying to topple the regime (which would lead at best to chaos), but incapacitate it technically.

Israel is absolutely trying to topple the regime, Netenyahu has made this very clear. Reporting is that Israel had a window to assassinate the Ayatollah but was vetoed by Trump, with Israelis claiming it would end the conflict. Trading missile blows was never going to achieve either of Israel's war objectives directly, but escalating to this point forces the hand of the United States to achieve those objectives on behalf of Israel including toppling the regime.

It's going to follow the model of Libya and Syria, with bombing campaigns coincided with arming and fomenting a civil war in Iran. Toppling the regime is without question the goal of Israel, but it remains to be seen if the US is on board with that.

It's going to follow the model of Libya and Syria, with bombing campaigns coincided with arming and fomenting a civil war in Iran

I am all on board if this can lead to united Kurdistan. Erbil is probably the only good place to live in the region.

That is a very strange assertion to me. Why is Erbil a nice place to live? What does "uniting" Kurdistan achieve for you?

Fixes one of the greatest injustices in the post ottoman collapse. Erbil is absolutely great. It is the safest place with kindest people in all of the arab peninsula and Iran. It is pro western, really peaceful and have the best kebabs. United Kurdistan will create a strong center in the region that will be pro west and will weaken simultaneously Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey. And until Erdogan and his faction are in power everything that weakens Turkey is unadulterated good. If the secular people come in power it will be different, but so far it is long shot.

There are many (much much greater) injustices in the Ottoman collapse and many people who constantly try to “fix” them. You see them often standing trial in The Hague or topping CIA most-wanted lists for crimes against humanity. Kurds didn’t get a state because they are a loose combination of mountain tribes who speak a somewhat similar language to each other with zero history of having a state or associating with each other politically. It’s not a coincidence any Kurdish political group immediately becomes a proxy servant for a larger state.

Speaking of proxy politics, did you ever actually wonder why Iraqi Kurdistan is a relatively stable safe and prospering place? Would you mind googling a bit about the Turkish military bases (136 of them according to BBC) in the country providing this security or how much of their economy is based on trade and investment from Turkey or how Iraqi Kurdish politics actually manage to stay stable? (Hint: it’s totally controlled by two clans which are both Turkish state proxies and compete/rotate for offices peacefully via negotiations with Turkish foreign ministry)

I understand you have some personal grudges against Turkey and Iran but how much more do Syria and Iraq need to be weakened for this great pro-western Middle East to emerge in your imagination? Have you by chance checked any news since year 1999?

What are these “secular people” in Turkey going to do once in power to please you? Can you give me some examples of how Turkey is a more Islamic country today than in 2001? Also I am looking forward to some examples of any Islamitising influence out of Turkey that caused anyone ever any trouble. Somehow Sunni jihadi movement is entirely funded and armed and manned by the Saudi and Qatar, both hardcore American allies/clients, but the grand strategies for fighting it never involve fixing any great injustices in those countries

Edit: yeah kebabs are good but they are good literally everywhere. Is Erbil the only place you ever visited in the Middle East or something?

Can you give me some examples of how Turkey is a more Islamic country today than in 2001?

Hagia Sophia. Erdogan keeping interest rates low during could also fall under this but I have a suspicion that he used it so his allies can inflate their debts and buy bankrupts business for cents on the dollar.

What are these “secular people” in Turkey going to do once in power to please you?

Committing to hardline Kemalism. Again. So we can finally accept Turkey in the EU. Before saying something - I don't believe in freedom of religion, but in freedom from religion.

Edit: yeah kebabs are good but they are good literally everywhere. Is Erbil the only place you ever visited in the Middle East or something?

Hmm... here is quick shawarma/kebab comparison from the places I have been. We don't discuss in europe because it is mediocre at best. And in north africa I don't have much impressions. Aside from Erbil - in Istanbul they are meh, in Ankara are really good, ditto in Ismir, bland un Dubai, forgettable in Oman, let's not talk about pakistan, surprisingly decent are the afghani ones, but probably the best are in Uzbekistan. The kazah one i ate them from the other side of the border with china - so can't comment. Lahmacuns, kunefe, gozleme and pide are other beer - the only place in the world they make them right is in Turkey (everywhere).

Turkey is too powerful and Erdogan is eyeing parts of the Balkans and probably Cyprus. So I either want the country to be weaken or to self secularize. I also don't want pro western middle east - weak and busy with infighting also gets the job done. Greece is too weak to be counter balance, so is Bulgaria. And I doubt that NATO will do shit if he attacks any one of those two countries.

So yes. I want Turkey to have problems east and south, as to not look north and east

Israel is absolutely trying to topple the regime, Netenyahu has made this very clear.

He's said it, but he hasn't done it. I don't believe that Trump would be scrupulous of them doing so... or that the Israelis would actually ask if they thought it would work.

Netenyahu has made this very clear. Reporting is that Israel had a window to assassinate the Ayatollah but was vetoed by Trump, with Israelis claiming it would end the conflict.

"Reporting". Anyway, it wouldn't end the conflict, there's plenty of Ayatollahs to take his place.

BBC reporting cited three US officials.

Is that more or less than played up the Steele dossier, or reported that Trump commandeered the Beast, or denied the validity of the Biden laptop?

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