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Nowhere is safe

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Re: Nowhere is safe

#131

Post by luxuryballs »

intended wrote: post #46

Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance. I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns. The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with…

it’s basically smart grenades that “throw” themselves, high tech shit, there’s def going to be some kind of automatic helmet-mounted counter devices coming

Re: Nowhere is safe

#132

Post by tmnvix »

XorNot wrote: post #119
tmnvix wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory is that control over Venezuelan and Iranian oil is a means of constricting Chinese economic competition.

Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.

Trump may be a violent moron, but this goes back further. US sanctions and intimidation of Iran and Venezuela has been supported by both parties when in power. It's a US regime thing, not a party/administration thing (that stuff is for the mugs who believe they have a democracy).

Re: Nowhere is safe

#133

Post by XorNot »

SkyeCA wrote: post #89
carlosjobim wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And making drones and drone parts for massive assaults on stationary targets in the US is not an insane course of action? For proxy wars, super powers won't bomb each other. But if one of them is attacked by weapons from another, then they will. > You don't need very specialized parts to do this. So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes? Then why weren'…

> So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes? I'll understand if you aren't a hardware person, but I think you severely overestimate how complex a drone needs to be if you only intend for it to be single use (which is apparently all the rage in modern war). You don't even need drone specific parts, the parts you need are used in all kinds of other applica…

No they're exactly right: drones need cheap, powerful parts which have only become possible due to highly concentrated mass production in places like China. You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs in a shed in Ukraine, and the cheapness of the parts depends on large unfettered supply chains. They're not "with some skill, you can build a lathe and then machine a pipe gun" simple.

In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.

In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.

But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#134

Post by [deleted] »

throw310822 wrote: post #111
some_random wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, he also justified it by citing the US's acceptance of homosexuality so maybe it's more complicated than that.

No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question: "As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us." And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list. Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he c…

[deleted]

Re: Nowhere is safe

#135

Post by krisoft »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #122
krisoft wrote: post #83

> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide? Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day? Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled b…

That cover dirt materially adds to the resistance of the structure. This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of pra…

> Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.

I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)

I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#136

Post by coldtea »

ctippett wrote: post #125
cladopa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world. Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world. Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immen…

Except America went to war with Saddam Hussein a full decade before the move to the Euro and was largely a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.

Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).

Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.

Re: Nowhere is safe

#137

Post by ms_menardi »

I had this idea for a "drill" that I'd like to make someday.

Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.

After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.

I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.

"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this

Re: Nowhere is safe

#138

Post by YZF »

throw310822 wrote: post #74
YZF wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You asked "who did the US bomb before 9/11" and you got the answer. Now you're arguing that they shouldn't have reacted even if the US bombed them before (calling it "an excuse")? As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonis…

[flagged]

Re: Nowhere is safe

#140

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #130
throw310822 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why in 2006?

Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut and killed a kid from a message board I posted on at the time. Haven't liked Israel since. I was young and didn't really have an opinion on Israel until then.

Killed isn't a strong enough word. I should have said, "2006 was when I learned that IDF indiscriminately murders humans who are just trying to live their lives, and many of those humans are children."
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