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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35555 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?

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.

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