201–210 of 701 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One design doesn't mean one factory. And it's not about one design anyway, just the thought of culling the less performing ones.
It’s more brutal than that. The Sherman tank wasn’t the best tank, but being able to make a lot of them was useful. As per Stalin, quantity has a quality all of its own.
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the goal of the war in iran is to produce a regime change that will prevent them from having nukes targeting israel islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
> the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine! Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have…
by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology
the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
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 The outdated conc…
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.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody (even the Ukranians) imagined that 5 years later they would have their own missiles hammering Russia 2500kms in the rear. Americans need to start accepting that a) the Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years and b) Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking.
People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen. Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine? Why not fire off a littany of missiles? Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest? Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there mus…
China has missed their window of opportunity, sadly. For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles. For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your…
Not sure if you've noticed, but none of that SpaceX stuff is going to happen
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ ̶
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶
̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶
̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶
Starfall will never happen!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine! Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have…
the prevalence of secular jews in the state department makes them completely unable to read islamic countries. it's the third time this happens in a decade by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
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…
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
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Russia has been able to target Kyiv and destroy arbitrary apartment buildings the entire war. I've just spent a few mins searching through news articles over the years, there's a story of a destroyed Kyiv apartment in 2022 and one from 3 days ago now in 2026 of course. So why the stayed hand? Clearly Russia then and now is capable of reaching out and destroying Kyiv arbitrarily. I still believe they could have turned…
You're missing the point. Russia simply lacks the conventional missile production capacity necessary to flatten Kyiv. They used up most of their missile reserves early in the war and are now firing them off about as fast as they can build new ones. And it's not clear that they're able to accurately target individual buildings; some of those strikes appear to be random collateral damage. Russia is simply no longer cap…
I’ve read that the local brain drain has been challenging too, eg https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1176769042/russia-economy-bra...
The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe.
But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends.
The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
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Reminds me of the Cambrian revolution: suddenly there were all kinds of weird animals. Many of these kinds rapidly disappeared, while a few more successful ones kept on. Or at least that's my reading.
For more reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).