Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you agree with me — stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups.
>stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups The implication here I'm disagreeing with is that the war was the unintended consequence of mistakes. Instead of mistakes leading the continent down a dark path it was intentional, just waiting for an excuse to start fighting.
The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
571–580 of 701 posts
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand. Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted t…
> Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country That was true among some of the players in various governments — Kaiser Wilhelm being a prime example. Can you cite any (reputable) historians who think that was a general attitude?
(one of many sources of this kind of information)
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starship is also in theory targetting to reach Mars in 2022.
There's an unavoidable physical cap here. It's fueled with methane and oxygen, and its size is known. It can't be, say, $50m/flight in fuel for the same reason a 747's flight can't be; there's not enough space for that much fuel.
Also, fuel is just part of the cost of a rocket.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs". Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light…
Russia could end the war instantly with a few nukes if it wanted to. I don't get it why it hasn't done that yet. Pride?
- they would not change much on battlefield - there is no large concentrations that you can nuke - everything is dispersed
- nuking urban centers again won't change much on battlefield but would alienate China
- Russia's equipment is known to be not most reliable/maintained and worst that can happen to Russia is them trying to nuke and nukes not working
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point was just that gameification is just a modern word that doesn't reflect any change in behaviors. Presumably you were familiar with these practices under previous descriptors. And your moral objections would have been shared by many millions before you, long before gameification was coined. On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they…
I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall. Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the othe…
Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence. In that sense having a professional rather than conscripted army should be much more morally repugnant than e-points. Again, no one in Ukraine is isolated from consequences in any meaningful way.
The Ukraine War is the most televised war in history. Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed. Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality, a reality which is only hidden from one's view by choice. (After a few videos that left me crying, I figured I saw enough to ensure I was dutifully more engaged with the reality than the typical non-veteran at a comfortable remove.)
If anything drones and the necessity of having to record a kill for "points" is arguably an improvement over traditional aerially bombardment. Being forced to watch people injured and killed comes with a greater cost, even for veteran soldiers. On HN we take for granted that, e.g., Facebook employees forced to sift through child porn continually pay a price no matter how long they've been at the job, yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game. That perspective betrays a certain callousness that is in some respect even more worrisome than these technological advancements on the battlefield.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - All countries have equal rights. It’s even more simple. All countries don’t have equal rights. The strong make the rules and the weak suffer what they must. That’s how the world actually functions. But if you want to argue that countries have equal rights, well, in order to have equal rights one must have some rule, or law, or some other mechanism in which to receive and agree upon such rights or a forum to argue…
> All countries don’t have equal rights It's even simpler than that: all countries do have equal rights. The fact that russia or israel or the USA feel differently, and violate those rights, is immaterial. But if you want to argue that it's legally and morally okay for any country to attack and invade whomever they want, for whatever reason they want, go for it. It kind of cuts against your point though. > The closes…
You forgot some countries (Venezuela, Iran, &c.) but this very fact proves my point. Those rights are just fictions which are mostly backed by American military power.
> What does the United Nations say about israel's actions in Lebanon and Palestine? I'll give you a hint: it matches what they say about russia's actions in Ukraine, because they're the same thing
What does that have to do with Iran? And why would the bad actions of one country excuse the bad actions of another?
> The United Nations agrees that countries have equal rights. Beyond that, are you talking about israel's nuclear weapon proliferation here, or iran's civilian nuclear program?
I’m talking about Iran’s nuclear weapon proliferation. There are rules, you think all countries should be beholden to those rules. Why are you excusing Iran breaking the rules?
If you want to excuse them, then fine, but then I excuse any rules a country I agree with breaks and we just go back to my original point which is at the international stage might makes right.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.
I would bet Japan, Korea, Taiwan all produce some of the needed things in an emergency scenario (obv Taiwan may be under artillery attack, but then again, does China want a destroyed Taiwan or do they want to own it, with its priceless industries intact, as a crown jewel? They may avoid such destruction). But honestly, I don't think China wants Taiwan "reunification" quite as much as they want to have their economy b…
You think NATO would stand there with open arms in such a case? NATO membership requires agreement from all member states, and I don't sense a great appetite among the European countries for a war with China.
I agree with the overall point of your post though.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can't be, because if that was the goal they'd just stop attacking. The strait was open until they sneak attacked Iran. Everyone seems to be in agreement that as part of a ceasefire the strait will open. Iran has shown no particular interest in closing the strait except as a war tactic. The US clearly does not have the power to control or open the strait militarily, its been months now. They appear to be outclassed…
Iran charging tolls is not an acceptable definition of an "open" strait. All the stuff about China's energy supply... it's not that deep. Y'all are trying to believe Trump is playing 5D chess when he's demonstrably shit at checkers.
The toll seems pretty reasonable. Trump doesn't look like he's actually going to compensate them for the sneak attack and all the bombing runs; they have to make the money up somehow as all that destruction looks expensive. And they need a source of funds ASAP to arm up before the US comes back.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
>“When you talk about conventional technologies on a booster like you see other people doing, and being able to recover and reuse that booster 15 times with relatively minimial refurbishmoent costs, that’s pretty darn challenging, and maybe not the right place, in our view, to start on that problem,” Bruno said. This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching…
ULA was openly skeptical about the viability of landing at all. Then reuse. Then the goalposts moved to this, repeated reuse.
The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rapid turn-around/reuse. It never made it to the full orbital regime because it was scrapped early, but it was considered successful in proving the proof-of-concept. It was also managed by the predecessors of ULA (McDonnel Douglas, which later merged with Boeing).
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of differences. One of the chief differences was that during World War II the United States continental homeland was pretty much untouchable, which allowed the United States and the allies access to a secure and resource rich supply chain that helped lead to victory over the Axis powers. In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial ba…
> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs". Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light…