>drones smart enough to dodge bullets
well, there will be similarly smart "predator"/defense drones. The humans will have no chances on such a battlefield populated by thousands drones per square kilometer fighting each other.
>The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
>or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing
just a bit of arithmetic comparing new weapons - drones vs. classic guns. Say a radar guided gun takes 1 sec. to train onto a drone and shoot several bullets. The range is max 3 km (an expensive 20mm-30mm autocannon like Pantsir) - 35 seconds for a 200 miles/hour drone. Thus all it takes is maximum 36 such drones coming simultaneously from all the directions to take out that gun. At less than $1000/drone it is many times cheaper than that radar guided gun. (and that without accounting for the drones coming in very low and hiding behind trees, hills, etc and without the first drones interfering with the radar say by dropping a foil chaff clouds, etc.) It is basically a very typical paradigm shift from vertical scaling to horizontal scaling by way of software orchestrated cheap components.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
Drones don't remove people from the battlefield, they further the trend of there being no boundary to "the battlefield", putting everyone on it.
They can, depending on how they are employed, reduce the casualties (total and particularly civilian) on both sides of a conflict for any degree of military impact (Ukraine's recent strike against Russian bombers is an example), or they can increase the civilian death toll for marginal military impact (the accounts of Israeli gun- and missile-armed drones directly targeting civilians in Gaza being an example of what that could look like.)
Note for example, that Ukraine attack, although it caused no civilian casualties... it relied heavily on civilian infrastructure. Ukraine rented warehouses, common trucks, and hid the drones in normal shipping containers.
Thus indeed, this made the battlefield larger instead, now common trucks, warehouses and shipping containers are legitimate targets.
What Ukraine destroyed doesn't help either, for example they destroyed early warning airplanes intended to warn Russia if incoming missiles are nuclear or not. How Russia have to assume incoming missiles are nuclear, specially if they are flying in the regions where their land nuke detectors were destroyed too (I think 1 or 2 years ago Ukraine did that).
Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence. Now common trucks and containers are a threat as big as many advanced military hardware out there. A truck with a bunch of drones can open a hole in your nuclear defense as much as stealth planes were needed for this before.
>Thus Ukraine proved, that civilian equipment can destroy nuclear deterrence.
yes, that is the point i've been making for a while - those cheap automated systems, the drones being the first examples of it, is the new MAD/equalizer weapons now available to all countries, not only to the large nuclear ones (and that becomes very important for avoiding future wars giving for example growing doubt that NATO, and USA in particular, would come to the defense of Baltic countries, whereis several millions of drones (including larger long range ones) which Baltic countries can get relatively easy for several billions of dollars may pose an unacceptable high cost to Russia of any potential aggression against those countries).
In this particular case a much smaller Ukraine can use that MAD/equalizer potential to win the war, or at least to get a great negotiating position by systematically severely degrading Russia's strategic capabilities toward making Russia potentially defenseless against US or China, or even say Turkey.
That is how i think they can degrade strategic air/missile defense systems https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529638
And imagine if similarly to the plane attack Ukraine would attack Russian nuclear submarines parked openly at the bases (say using ships for drone launching instead of trucks) - there is no risk of destruction of those submarines, yet 10-50kg drone can damage the skin and outer hull forcing the submarine out of service for prolonged time.
>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing.
So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on.
That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards.
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And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
Well, kinda. Paraguay managed to almost wipe itself out. The war only stopped after virtually all Paraguayan men were dead.
Many factors contributed to Germany losing WWII, but one of them was because they ran out of soldiers. They were down to using boys and old men.
They 'ran out of soldiers' because they were surrendering en masse. It's difficult to know the exact numbers on anything from that era because there are ambiguities and poor record keeping abounds, but it's estimated that some 11 million Germans ended up surrendering. [1]
So yeah as morale collapses you're left expanding the age of conscription, which further collapses morale. There were plenty of sardonic jokes about the Volkssturm, 'the people's brigade.' Why is the Volkssturm the state's most valuable resource? Because they have silver in their hair, gold in their teeth, and lead in their bones.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befehlsnotstand#Nazi_Germany
> This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale.
The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace.
In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty.
In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more.
We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.
A war doesn't end when a government is deposed, it ends when resistance ceases (which is generally because morale breaks). Up until, and including, the final day of US withdrawal in Afghanistan the Taliban were fiercely resisting. US troops rarely left their little green zones because they would have been killed, same as in Iraq. The media stopped meaningful coverage of the war relatively quickly, which I think led people to believe that meaningful resistance wrapped up relatively quickly, but that's not the case at all. The Taliban ended up killing at least 75,000 soldiers/security forces and wounding what was likely some large multiple of that.
All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so. Americans would never tolerate US soldiers dying by the tens to hundreds of thousands as would have happened if we actually tried to enforce order on foot. So we were left with proxy soldiers, contractors, and a money printing machine. But that simply wasn't enough to defeat the Taliban, let alone carry out the grand changes you mention.
> All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so.
I disagree with this assessment.
Had the Western forces provided actual, proven economic opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance" fighters would have dwindled. People don't become terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that path because they do not see a gainful alternative to this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply of recruits from the desperate)
Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made, not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources. IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the workers and the profits going to the national government as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide population that something good came around from all the suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in the afterlife for killing infidels.
But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any talking points available to counter the Taliban propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost, and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.
[1] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/why-is-afghanistan-par...
There is no Afghanistan . There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords. "Afghanistan" hallucinated by the us, as a state does not exist and never has.
> There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords.
Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1] very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before then [2].
It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the population that the new government is actually better for their individual lives than what was before.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/c18q0r/das_heilige_tari...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Heiliges_R%C3%B6misches_...
Well congrats they got that story, they repelled in order: the mongols, the greek, the chinese, the russians, the british, the russians, the americans and soon the chinese. Are they the swiss yet ? Some ingredient is missing , the story aint it.
Up until the Soviet era, a lot of the natural resources Afghanistan has simply were not relevant, or maybe that fits it better, there were easier ways to acquire them than a country thousands of road (!) miles away from the powers that were.
The Soviets wanted Afghanistan for imperialist reasons, during the first Taliban era there were enough other sources that were more convenient, the Americans lacked the conviction and coherence to follow through... and now the Chinese are swooping in with money.
> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant.
Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way.
Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places.
That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world.
And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
> Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics).
The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.
No.
Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it.
In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service.
This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
> This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)
There are no silver bullets. It's just that having (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.
Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry.
And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.
No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They also load and prepare combat aircraft.
Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.
Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.
This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns.
In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances.
I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react.
Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
An insurgency doesn’t report to a battlefield to be slaughtered by the professional army. To see what a large-scale American resistance would look like, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan are instructive.
The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army.
They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces.
Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription.
They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
> not to deny the state the ability to do so
> were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted
If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds. That said I think there's plenty of evidence that your first claim is false depending on how you define the particulars of "deny the state".
> If you follow the reasoning through those two claims appear to be at odds.
No, the claim that the purpose of the second amendment was to assure that the state could rely on a citizen militia for internal and external security instead of denying them that ability and forcing them to rely on professional forces is not at all at odds with the claim that large professional internal and external security forces were not something that the framers trusted.
Your excerpting a verb phrases from each of the two claims to claim a conflict while ignoring the rest of the claims may suggest the source of your misreading -- because you seen to think that the thing that I said that the 2A was not meant to deny the states was the same thing the framers didn't trust, rather than something that was an alternative to it.
The excerpting was to minimize comment length, nothing more. That said I do see now where I rather catastrophically misread your earlier comment. I agree with what you wrote.
However in context it seems wrong because regardless of intent one of the effects of an armed populace is that a sufficiently unpopular conscription is going to carry serious physical risks for those in power. With regards to the framers I'd expect such a scenario to be classified as government tyranny and marked NOTABUG.
I'd suggest that the answer to the person you responded to is that the conscriptions that happened in the US weren't sufficiently unpopular to motivate such drastic measures.
> the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript
Generally such conscripts realize they're dooming their family to at best prison and at worst dying in the raid on their home.
Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)?
In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.
The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.
I did my conscription service in 2005-2006(iirc), plus one tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan.
This is the first I hear that this would be the motivation.
The main motivation is that for a small country like Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself adequately, conscription is necessary.
Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own [very high] class.
> And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing.
I agree with your other points, but this only helps with (physically) extending the battlefield, at least going by the current war in Ukraine. It's not only the line of contact that is now part of the battlefield, there's also a band of 10-15 kilometres (if not more) on each side which is now part of the active battlefield because of the use of drones.
Even though I have to admit that it looks like the very big power asymmetry in favour of cheap drones over almost everything that moves down bellow (from mere soldiers on foot to armoured vehicles) has helped with actually decreasing the number of total casualties (just one of the many paradoxes of war), as it is now way too risky to get out in the open so soldiers do it way less compared with the pre-drone era.
About your last paragraph: High level, I generally agree, but when you dive deeper to look at the numbers, I doubt that you can have 1000 USD drones that can fly at 200 mph/320 km/h. One quarter of that speed, I could believe.
Off the shelf parts are available for 200mph quads (that’s without payload though)
"And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing."
You're mistaking the removal of certain soldiers for "removing people". There will absolutely be people in future battle fields, mainly civilians, or as we call them now, terrorists.
I agree, but I'm a bit disappointed it will probably come to this, instead of having a mano a mano like in the movie "Robot Jox".
+1 for mentioning that movie; I watched it a month ago and it's hilarious. Nearest I've seen to live action with giant robot anime sensibilities.
