401–410 of 490 posts
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Why you need a tank in 21st century: 1. When enemy has tons of artillery, and any light armour is doomed in open field 2. The only military unit capable of offensive operation during nuclear warfare For as long as nuclear weapons are there, there will be a need for an all-terrain nuclear bunker with gun.
How long does the crew survive in a nuclear environment? They still have to refuel the tank and find food.
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Again. I'm not contesting that these arguments exist and were in the report from back in 1968 . (I'm going to ignore for a second that we don't actually do anything to rehearse a draft, standby or not, so yes we actually would have to build everything from scratch again.) I'm stating that there is no way the political direction from the White House to end the draft didn't influence what ended up happening, who got to…
The usual approach is to delegate the most complex technical work to defense contractors who can pay market rates (or close enough) to civilian employees. The military doesn't even want conscripts anymore. They have discipline problems, take too long to train, and don't stay long enough. Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
I am not, necessarily, concerned about questions of if the military wants conscripts. I'm concerned about the ability of the nation-state to properly respond to a crisis that precipitates major war. If you just consider the military's wants in a static context and extrapolate forward, just giving them what they want, the entire procurement roadmap for the next 10 years would probably still look like IED defeat devices and other garbage "future" tech that didn't and doesn't work, with the actually useful stuff arriving in 2040. We've thankfully had, on rare occasions, some smart civilians and DoD contrarians who have edged things in a different direction in some cases.
>Conscription stopped being relevant when technology became more important than numbers.
Hard, hard disagree. It is not at all decided that technology is more important than "numbers" (I'm assuming you are referring to raw numbers of troops in a particular combat zone). "Technology" has a lead time, and while humans have an approximate lead time of ~18 years, whatever technology that would beat them on the battlefield isn't stockpiled like humans are.
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I think the claim is that SPG can also fire in direct mode and they have MUCH bigger guns. Imagine an SPG with trophy system bolted on it. Question is, is passive armour beyond stopping bullets and shrapnel worth it? I wonder if the new "tank" will be a wheeled SPG that can fire hull down and has an APS system. Or it could be something like BTR 4 with its auto cannon, being able to carry some infantry, add APS to tha…
> Stugna or Javelin can kill T80 from 4km away, what use is dismounted infantryman there? Well they can carry their own Stugna or Javelin. Isn't that an argument for more dismounted infantry, not less?
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This made me chuckle. Not that it's impossible but that is quite hand wavey for a very tough technical challenge nobody is close to accomplishing yet. Sure. And carriers can simply launch their reusable hypersonic smart drone swarm shields and submerge underwater.
A carrier costs $10 billion. Without considering the crew and stuff in it. You can fire 50 $100 mil missiles simultaneously at it would still make a lot of sense, especially considering the morale aspect.
It would make sense for equal economies fighting.
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You can't occupy an objective with a drone or a missile. You can't control a city with a drone. Infantry and AFVs that support them will never go away. They may change but war isn't just about destruction.
Oh yes you can. Just not a flying drone and not just one.
Half-life 2 confirmed.
It's clear that this is an exciting topic for techies. But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often. If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place. T…
The "United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs" [prevention] had an income of $81m in 2020 whereas the "United Nations Department of Peace Operations" [mitigation] has a budget of $6.5b. And the UN has a budget of $3t!
To over-simplify a bit:
Cost(prevention) ~ 1% * cost(mitigation)
Cost(prevention) ~ 0.0003% * UN Budget
So essentially the global institution tasked with preventing conflict spends a rounding error of its budget doing so.
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You seem to have missed the "investment into peace research and conflict prevention" part of my post. Ironically, that's the part that you quoted.
> investment into peace research and conflict prevention What would this even mean?
You can see what the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs spends their budget on here: https://dppa.un.org/en/funding-documents
It's clear that this is an exciting topic for techies. But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often. If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place. T…
I decided to look up the figures and it's not pretty... The "United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs" [prevention] had an income of $81m in 2020 whereas the "United Nations Department of Peace Operations" [mitigation] has a budget of $6.5b. And the UN has a budget of $3t! To over-simplify a bit: Cost(prevention) ~ 1% * cost(mitigation) Cost(prevention) ~ 0.0003% * UN Budget So essentially the…
The "best thing against bad guy with a gun is good guy with a gun" mentality runs deep.
It's clear that this is an exciting topic for techies. But keep in mind what this all is made for: Destroying and killing. We are talking about war machinery, and technical discussions about those tend to romanticize all that technology much too often. If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place. T…
> If we'd only pour 10% of the investments that today goes into war machinery into peace research and conflict prevention, then this world would be a much safer place. If you get everyone to decide this, yes. But if you do this and your aggressive neighbor doesn't, your decision to forgo military spending can make the world less safe. Some parts of Europe are remembering this now.
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I'm not a fan of our (US + NATO) current Ukraine policy, but that isn't because I'm an isolationist. I think it's just dumb policy, on several different dimensions. The version of the criticism you're leveling right now can be inverted very easily. That the people arguing for escalation in Ukraine, that it's "the exact same thing [that] happened in 1938" (it isn't), and that unless we do things like a NFZ it leads to…
It's never the "same exact thing", but parallels are obvious and numerous. What more, Russia is already openly talking about some of the things they want to "reintegrate", and if you are familiar with the finer details of Russian internal politics, you can easily name a few more that aren't necessarily floated often (such as North Kazakhstan, which is "South Siberia" in irredentists' parlance). So yes, even if you do…
>In that, again, this is very much like 1938.
I'm looking for some actual evidence that the global geopolitical situation is comparable to 1938. Merely pointing out that a country in Europe has been invaded is not sufficient.
At this point, I think I should probably note that I consider Putin's invasion of Ukraine to be an enormous blunder. The humanitarian cost is already well documented, but from a strategic perspective, which is the theme of this thread, he's going to deplete his forces to such a degree that any follow-on invasion of other countries is going to be even more of a disaster. I don't know why or how he was convinced this was a good idea. He was always going to pay a significant cost, even if he, eventually, gets a land bridge to Crimea.