Laser weapons are the answer to this, and they’ve been around for a long time. The first drone shot down by a laser weapon happened in 1973! We have the technology. There just hasn’t really been a need to scale them until now, but they are being deployed to many ships in recent years.
Nowhere is safe
271–280 of 329 posts
Re: Nowhere is safe
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for…
I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the comment. How can you read that comment and not conclude that this is the way of thinking from before "Pax Americana"? They are talking about "wealth extraction" ... in other words, free labor (not money), without paying. In other words, slavery. Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and…
> In fact WW2 is the last such war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27état
(Many other examples)
Re: Nowhere is safe
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Reddit hand wringing land where your 3-gal homeowner air compressor gets called a bomb, yeah sure it's a major undertaking. 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.
Spoken with the confidence of someone who never dug a full height trench. No the military doesn't do 30ft deep tunnels on the frontline, and it has no equipment to do it.
[flagged]
Re: Nowhere is safe
#274I was also thinking about this and I think it has to go a step further: Assets don't just need to be underground, they need to be on mobile rails underground. They need to constantly be moveable and pop out of one of thousands of holes to attack or if it comes to defensive e.g SAM sites they need to be moveable so that when an incoming missile is not interceptable that it can simply move away to a different undergrou…
This was the concept of the mx missile program (peacekeeper icbm) - the shell game concept was to have miles and miles of tracks with multiple launch sites, and to consistently move live and dummy missiles between them - that way there was a large number of potential targets and uncertainty as to which targets contained live missiles - I think the Chinese are now building a similar concept to this in the Gobi desert (if memory serves).
Re: Nowhere is safe
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your analysis presumes air power alone. Assets are seized by cavalry (in modernity, APCs and tanks) and held by infantry. Nothing new under the sun. The only reason anybody is thinking of destroying civilian infrastructure (wealth) is because everybody took off the table the prospect of sending in cavalry and infantry to seize and hold it.
USA rightly hesitates to send in the cavalry & infantry, because there, against much more numerous opponents, it no longer has the crushing advantage that it has in air power. The chances of success of such an action are very low, unlike for air strikes, as it has already been demonstrated by the failure of the incursion attempted by USA one week ago, which resulted in significant US material loss, e.g. the 2 scuttle…
> here, against much more numerous opponents, it no longer has the crushing advantage that it has in air power
Be careful not to compare absolute sizes of militaries (which matter in a long term, strategic sense) to the number of soldiers deployed to a specific battlefield (which matter in a short term, tactical sense, for that particular battle). Adversaries who deploy large numbers of troops into a small area make them vulnerable (to foreign air power, yes, but mainly artillery). Adversaries like Iran may have staggering military sizes on paper but their ability to deliver significant numbers of troops to a battleground, particularly when roads, airstrips, and paratrooper transports are destroyed first (by air power), is far more limited.
But you're alluding to a separate concern, which is whether the US military has enough manpower for long-term strategic purposes, particularly since we can't do much about the size of adversary militaries before wartime, but can do something about the size of our own.
> significant US military loss, e g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes
If the loss of two measly planes is ever enough to be a "significant" military loss, then God help us. The military wastes far more, even in peacetime. We should be so lucky that the enemy continues to hurt us less than we hurt ourselves.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> US when it was the uncontested superpower. 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…
Russia has its own war, they can not afford to militarily support Iran or other countries. They do not have the troops, weapons or money. And they would totally not enter a nuclear war with US for Iran.
Totally agreed on the last line, but my point was that just because Russia wouldn't do that doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested" at this point.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is little evidence for your theories. We do not know exactly how much Iran can really destroy, because regardless if they can or they cannot destroy more, their current strategy of threatening to destroy much more than they have destroyed is the correct strategy. If they had destroyed everything they can, then the adversaries would have no reason of further restraint. As it is, the adversaries are still fearful…
The only trick is Hormuz strait blocking by Iran... and it's very hard to tackle without a land invasion which Trump is reluctant to execute. Nothing else Iran could possibly do, matters at all.
> Nothing else Iran could possibly do, matters at all.
This is a naive belief and contains the same hubris as Trump held when entering this war.
They have also destroyed billing of US military planes and radars on the ground, taken US company data centers in the region offline, and damaged refineries for oil, aluminum, and water (desalination).
They can still get missiles and drones through air defenses in the region. 80% of their strikes are against not Israel.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point. That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to tak…
>I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible. There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
The combination of globalization and nuclear weapons led plenty of countries and leaders post-WWII to claim we would have permanent peace.
Re: Nowhere is safe
#279Re: Nowhere is safe
#280I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.
Pacifism at such a large scale is a self-defesting strategy though. If its well understood that a country will never respond, eventually someone will take them over or wipe them out.
Responding to a threat and meddling proactively half the world away are quite different things, are they not?