131–140 of 701 posts
The entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states. All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based sy…
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Things that are worse than war, a wildly incomplete list, in no particular order: Pogroms; slavery; totalitarian dictatorship; theocracy; intentional mass starvation; mass organ harvesting; mass forced relocation; anarchy; failing to respond to unprovoked violence; restricting freedom instead of defeating the adversary.
What do you think happens in war? Clean fighting from side to side? You really think the massive amounts of death and destruction aren’t top ten? What do you think happens to the local population when an invading force arrives? You should go and read about the rape of Nanking. And just read about what happened in wars before the modern era.
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They might be referring to the e-Points system, where hitting targets awards points and you can trade the points in for drones, etc
They literally gamified it? Amazing.
Equipment was worth more than a capture.
Capture was worth more than a kill (get Intel, trade for Ukranian captives).
Kill was xyz points.
The more points, the more weapons, equipment, and support you got.
This was several years ago, I'm not sure its still in play.
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> What's the goal of the US/Iran war? Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you: 1 - Haven't been paying attention since 2008. 2 - Are giving the administration way too much undeserved credit.
I'm not sure anything is a distraction from the Epstein files. I don't think the administration cares about the Epstein files. What would be the fallout if they were all released? We already know that a lot of wealthy people were raping children. It's not like the US is going to prosecute.
A very insightful, and correct, piece. I'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point. > The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated conc…
> A very insightful, and correct, piece. I agree, or at least it feels insightful and right, though I can’t personally validate if it’s correct. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, stop using contractors & no-bid contracts, or simply ask for more? Looks like militar…
Deeply entrenched corruption, obviously.
Change is not going to happen until it's forced. The US military was born as a force required to rebuff existential threats. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the gravitational center of the US military has been the profit margins of defense contractors. What creates the greatest profit? Centralization. Why have a dozen logistics centers when you can have one big one? A trillion dollar fighter program more efficien…
Isn’t the American military logistics the most decentralized supply chain in the world? Famously (perhaps apocryphal) _every congressional district_ has jobs in the military logistics supply chain.
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> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state. What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
There hasn't been a clear goal for an American war since the first Gulf War.
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> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state. What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
This is not a very charitable explanation, it takes politicians at their word during a war. (One should not do that, and you can refer to Putin’s language at 2022 as a parallel example to Trump’s) The initial US goals clearly were: 1. Regime change 2. Denial is of nuclear weapons It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it se…
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa...
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One of the most interesting innovations in the Ukraine war is their internal market place for drones, letting each drone group decide which drones they want to procure and use in battle. It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card. Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex. That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
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I'll admit it cannot be proven to the standard of criminal conviction, but I don't think it's beyond a person's or technology's ability to identify enough "tells" to make a solid conclusion. I can share the things that stick out to me if desired, not that it ultimately constitutes any "proof". > Still there is nothing to be gained from distrusting and calling out authors Is there nothing ? Nothing at all to be gained…
I don't think you gain anything. The article is written, it will not be rewritten or unwritten because you said it's written by an LLM. I don't see the author not using LLMs in the future if they did use them. I don't see how you changed anything by pointing out that you assume that this is written by an LLM. What was gained? I don't really see anything. Do you think anyone is dissuaded from reading the article or fr…
From an outcome-orientation, no, nothing has changed. But then why write a letter to my representatives or leave public comments on legislation? That seems to do nothing. Why volunteer to remove amur honeysuckle from an American forest? It will just come back in a few years.
You are being outcome-oriented, I'm being value-oriented. I think the effort is worth it for the act alone. I believe I retained some dignity by still caring about the distinction between human-created content and machine created content, and for caring enough to still be able to tell the difference. To you it's worth nothing, fine, to me it's worth something. It's not like I'm blanketing comment sections across this or any other site.
> Unless you know for certain that there was not a real human behind it don't point fingers
I am telling you, definitively, this article is "penned" primarily if not exclusively by an LLM. You want to hang on to possibility that isn't true? That is your decisions to make!
I find it interesting that your reaction to my observation seems to make the observation more of a pejorative than my own comments have. You act like I'm accusing someone of a deplorable or shameful act. I don't feel that strongly, but I am nevertheless sad to see the loss of humanity in our writing.