Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
This was because the US didn't want a communist nation to have a good economy.
That's the story of a bunch of the CIAs operations.
Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.
As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.
Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...
The American and the British supported the Shah and ousted the popular prime minister in 1953: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
But why start/stop there? We can go farther back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Soviet_invasion_of_Iran
Anyways, it's true the US meddled in Iran. The most recent meddling pre the Islamic Revolution pressuring the Shah to improve the human rights situation which enabled the (mostly secular) anti-regime forces to organize.
"In 1977 the Shah responded to the "polite reminder" of the importance of political rights by the new American president, Jimmy Carter, by granting amnesty to some prisoners and allowing the Red Cross to visit prisons. Through 1977 liberal opposition formed organizations and issued open letters denouncing the government." from the above. These social process culminated in the Shah leaving Iran.
Kind of funny: "Worse for the Shah was that the Western media, especially the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), immediately put Khomeini into the spotlight.[18][151] Khomeini rapidly became a household name in the West, portraying himself as an "Eastern mystic" who did not seek power, but instead sought to "free" his people from "oppression." Western media outlets, usually critical of such claims, became one of Khomeini's most powerful tools.[18][117]"
There are a lot of good books about Iran. Another interesting aspect is that a lot of the idealistic left wing revolutionaries that tried to remove the Shah were IIRC amongst the first to be lined up against a wall and executed by the Islamists that took over. AI summary: "The aftermath of the 1979 Iranian Revolution was a brutal and tragic period for the secular, left-wing, and Marxist groups that had played a crucial role in overthrowing Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
While the revolution is often remembered strictly as an Islamic uprising, it was actually a broad coalition of secular liberals, student movements, labor unions, communists (like the Tudeh Party), Marxist guerrillas (like the Fedayeen-e Khalq), and Islamists who united against the Shah's autocracy. However, once the Shah went into exile in January 1979 and the monarchy collapsed, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist supporters moved swiftly to monopolize power and systematically eliminate their former revolutionary partners."
EDIT: Another interesting detail in there is that some internal massacre ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_(1978) ) is blamed on the Zionists. This claim is completely debunked - never happened. Everything old is new again.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
I don't think you can quite generalize that much.
Additionally cooperation is an evolutionary advantage and world war is a species level threat now that we have nuclear weapons.
I don't believe that everyone wants peace. I believe the people who have the ability to shape policy and invest capital would want peace.
Which I think is also complicated. Kind of harkens back to the cliche that WW1 was caused by old people romanticizing war. Most letters between the heads of states confirmed they were anticipating industrial destruction and death but they felt the pressure to initiate war anyway.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).
We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.
Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.
Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.
“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”
The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm
(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)
Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.
If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.
I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.
Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.
Because nature is filled with examples.
Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.
And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.
War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.
Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.
Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.
While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
significant parts of the current world order evolved when the US was very much a contested superpower, c/o the USSR. While many things have changed since the dissolution of the USSR, many things have remained the same.
Further, you can guarantee that if Russia had announced in the days of war rumors re: Iran that they would militarily (not just intelligence & logistics, if stories are to be believed) support Iran, the US would likely not have attacked in anything like this way. That they did not doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested", merely that Russia wasn't interested in that sort of positioning of its own (nuclear) military threat over US action in Iran.
The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.
Ignoring the one sided benefits of that even though you shouldn't it kind of reminds me maybe of the US and Britains relations?
Not a 1:1 but the continental separation, the "greed" of external companies trying to exploit the natural resources and work force.
And yet we're allies today.
If you're interested in the topic I'd highly advise checking out Sarah Paine and her lectures. An interesting view point of Mao and the rise of China.
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.
Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
When all you have is a hammer…
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
With fours times the population
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?
There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?
Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.
> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?
Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.
I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?
> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it
As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".
"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."
And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.
Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).
This is already an incredibly regressive thing to say as a polite request, but in case you weren't aware the "or else" was that his global terror organization would continue to murder innocent civilians.
As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".
"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?
Area A in the west bank has generally been under full Palestinian control and not under blockade or meddling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_A
Gaza wasn't under occupation or blockade when Israel withdrew in 2005. Only after Hamas won the elections and after Gilad Shalit was abducted from Israel in 2006 into Gaza did Israel start imposing more restrictions. I know this is a recurring claim from anti-Israeli but the fact remains that Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and so there was no occupation in any meaningful sense of that word. Gaza also has a border with Egypt.
Here from an age were the BBC still had some decency: "Disengagement did remove one obstacle to peace - the settlers' presence on occupied Palestinian land in Gaza.
But the optimism of 2005, such as it was, has evaporated and Gaza today is completely outside the peace process.
That is a result of the rise to power of Hamas and the boycott of it by Israel and the international community.
But even in 2005, critics of disengagement said it was being used by the Israeli government as a substitute for a peace agreement with the Palestinians."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-11002744
"After the settlements have been evacuated and knocked down, Israel will turn Gaza over to Palestinian control for the first time."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/22/israel1
The withdrawal was without agreement and unilateral but it was a full withdrawal.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-192849/ is from the UN which has bias but here are some nuggets: "Infighting between Palestinian families and between factions increased in the weeks leading up to the disengagement and after the IDF withdrawal on 12 September. More than 97 violent incidents involving families, militant factions and PA police forces have occurred between 12 September and 31 December. These incidents include gunfights, kidnappings, beatings, house burnings, threats and theft. Forty-seven Palestinians have been killed in the clashes and at least 298 were injured"
"Discussions were suspended following a Palestinian suicide bombing in Netanya (Israel) on 5 December"
"However, since 16 December, Erez Crossing has remained closed in response to Palestinian militants’ firing of rockets from the northern Gaza Strip into Israel."
"Following the IDF withdrawal on 12 September, Palestinian militants have fired at least 283 homemade rockets towards Israel from the Gaza Strip."
Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.
/s
Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East for decades now, and not at all shy about it. They support armed proxies and radical insurrections in the entire region - many of them internationally acknowledged as terrorist organizations.
I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime. Long overdue, the moment was picked reasonably well, the military has performed well. The broad scope planning, however, simply wasn't there. What transpired reeks of Russia style "we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/sunday-shows-pre...
"Even a stopped clock..."
I'm honestly not sure what the goals were/are on the current Iran campaign. I'm not sure the White House knows exactly, which is a very concerning thing.
If it was a campaign to inflict lasting economic damage on Iran by choking its income streams, or perform a boots on the ground regime change, or to cover for a land operation to extract nuclear materials, we would see different events.
But what we saw instead was a very successful strike campaign and no follow-up. No strait seizure, no land operation. I have a lingering suspicion that the assumption was "Iran will want to negotiate after the first strike exchange" and that assumption was proven wrong fast. And I already made my distaste for "only plan for the absolute best case scenario" clear.
You think the problems inside North Korea are ok? Koreans are human too.
That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).
A great many of us feel that way, however historically GreatPowers do not - it's control of resources that move the needle for them.
Currently the US makes much of 30K protesters killed in Iran (number in dispute) but it is very much an action rooted in petro dollar geopolitics, oil, and Israel.
Starving people globally no longer get USAID .. a fractional cost compared to the Iran excursion.
The US didn't feel the need to get involved in regime change following any part of the Rwanda Genocide, and the US took the side of Indonesia (who were going for the resource control) against the West Papuans .. the US and UN turned a blind eye to exactly who and how people were tortured to get a favourable vote.
There's a long long list of starving and essentially enslaved people globally that have been ignored in favour of others by the French, the Dutch, the British, Belgium, USofA, etc.
> That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate
In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.
Sure... I think minimizing the number of entities who have this sort of impunity is a good thing even if we can't eliminate all of them.
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
Is this a complaint? What else can you expect, given that it was unilaterally agreed to by his predecessor?
If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.
Not Just Obama.
Can the world be saved from central north American partisan squabbling please.
I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.
IRGC sympathizers across the world that would rather have the current government than the more progressive predecessor.
Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.
Therefore the only solution is drones.
You could try an idealistic approach like making drones illegal and attempting to control proliferation, but as we've seen with other weapons that's really not an effective strategy.
Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.
The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.
Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.
Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.
Si vis pacem ...
[edit, found the real version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum ]
adapted from a statement found in Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract De Re Militari (fourth or fifth century AD), in which the actual phrasing is Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").
It was obvious ten years ago that this was coming, but saying so just made you sound crazy.
I said a similar thing when the Nordstream pipeline was popped. Basically anyone with, say, $400k to rent a boat and a work class underwater ROV could have done it. Sure, pricey, but that's low enough that a single individual could have financed it.
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of practicality.
There are entire civil engineering textbooks that focus exclusively on the types of scenario you are alluding to. It is a very mature discipline and almost all of it has been tested empirically.
I used to have a civil engineering textbook that was solely about the design of structures to resist the myriad effects of nuclear weapons. It was actually pretty damn interesting. Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)
I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.
I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.
TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".
Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
> visibility
There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.
Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.
> susceptibility to attack
Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.
> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce
I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.
Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.
I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.
"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this
Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
The simple fact is that rules matter if and only if they are enforced effectively by a community. And power is the ability to direct and control that enforcement.
The international order has declined in the past one or two decades because the UN security council was hamstrung by the enormously powerful veto rights held by Russia, China and the U.S. This has slowly emboldened those countries to de-value the UN and pursue their own interests.
Because who exactly, outside of those major powers, is going to enforce anything?
You can defend yourself with letters of strong condemnation only as long as someone stronger doesn't want what you have.
I think it's sort of laughable when people try to invoke international law about the strait being closed when the country closing it was being bombed in the first place. Once your civilian infrastructure is being attacked all gloves are off.
What people fail to understand is that international order being respected favors the stronger and more developed countries first. Those are the countries that depend more on complex supply chains, on more expensive infrastructure, etc.
That the US of all countries would be the one dismantling an order that favored it first and foremost is sort of fascinating to watch, especially when it is replacing it with nothing. Definitely not something I would have guessed even a few years ago.
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
Admittedly that's "soft" rock, but 30 foot is shallow underground mining compared to major league underground mines and open cut super pits.
15-30ft holes in the ground can be constructed with bog standard earthmoving machinery that isn't even "wide load" so it's "within normal capabilities" by professional or military standards.
This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.
You can do a tremendous amount of damage with off the shelf consumer drones, and a minimal budget. Ukraine did an billions of dollars of damage to Russia's airfleet with a couple million dollars of drones hidden in trucks. Well in the range of cartels and terrorist groups.
> The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy.
You are very much correct that the way to not get into this situation is to not start a war.
I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.
I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.
The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
What used to cost millions per unit now costs tens of thousands. That's significant.
It's like saying artillery isn't that big a deal in 1914. After all, it's been around since 1452.
Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"
I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.
... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.
It is a bad time to be an invading force.
NYC on the other hand has the biggest number of jerks per capita I ever seen. (No offence to all nice people from NYC, which there are still plenty.)
If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed, I have no doubt about that.
The author is quite misguided if he thinks wars can only be fought defensively and never offensively.
Bombing China would be an insane course of action to take for virtually any reason.
That aside consider this: You currently have the power to buy a handful of the shelf parts and assemble your own deadly drone at home. You don't need very specialized parts to do this. Bombing drone factories would do nothing to stop the use of drones.
For proxy wars, super powers won't bomb each other. But if one of them is attacked by weapons from another, then they will.
> You don't need very specialized parts to do this.
So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes? Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?
I'll understand if you aren't a hardware person, but I think you severely overestimate how complex a drone needs to be if you only intend for it to be single use (which is apparently all the rage in modern war).
You don't even need drone specific parts, the parts you need are used in all kinds of other applications...many are even in your home right now whether you know it or not.
To destroy the supply of these generic parts you would have to destroy...basically everything.
> Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?
This statement alone makes me not take your argument seriously. You aren't arguing in good faith.
In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.
In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.
But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.
All the basic sensors you need for flight exist in the literal billions of Android phones produced in the last 15 years.
I'm trying to be evasive about how you'd build such a thing because I don't want a visit over a comment online, but if you understand aerodynamics you can make almost anything fly.
I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thinking something super high tech and precise, whereas I'm thinking of the minimum thing viable thing to create chaos/fear for you enemy.
No? Flat out arming proxies is literally the point of overt proxy warfare. Sometimes one tries to to be deniable and source other weapons, but other times it's just, enjoy quagmire, cry about it. It's like suggesting PRC going to start blowing up Lockheed plants if they ever lose anything to US munitions.
None of the super power countries will ever accept defeat in their homeland and being conquered without using all means possible to hinder it. That's why the USA has strong opinions on how the Ukraine uses long range weapons in the war with Russia.
Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.
In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry. But this is easier said than done; they tend to be deep inside enemy territory. And drones are made out of commonplace consumer electronics parts, which could be made in thousands of factories around the world.
Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.
And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
The rest of the drone is all stuff that can be fabricated in small batches in a garage... of course bigs factories are more efficient at fabricating just about anything so to the extent that's possible it's done, but bombing all the big factories won't stop it.
The US will do none of that shit because they wont be able to do it. Given the US is struggling against Iran, couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield yet they want to force down China which is an order of magnitude bigger than Russia.
Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.
> couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield
??? What does this even mean?
It's not like the US is in a wartime economy.
I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.
You think so? Then why did the US make it the condition of cease fire? Why did the US even agree to a cease fire? It is not like Iran is hurting the US mainland kinetically.
> The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
Sometimes you have a thing and you don’t appreciate how important it is for you until you don’t have it anymore.
The comment was alluding to impotent tactical prowess, which is... silly, to say the least.
> Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.
This whole thing is extremely stupid, yes.
Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.