This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
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.
Wow, this paragraph was extremely chilling. Good job.
Didn't think about the different type/level of drone but it makes a lot of sense. Again, chilling!!! But kind of cool.
What about EMPs? Or strikes at drone control centers?
Thanks.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link