501–510 of 629 posts
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452376 .
It IS deliberately provocative for a reason.
The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare t…
It's been possible for a long time. For antipersonnel use, guns are perfectly adequate and guns on tracking turrets have been widely deployed (for example, CIWS). The underlying technology is a ballistic calculator and a fast panning turret. Modern ballistic calculators, weather stations (a small device about the size of a cellphone), and good quality ammunition allows for incredible precision with small arms -- hitt…
The thing that worries me isn't the drone/anti-drone escalation. It is the fact that these weapons aren't actually limited to anti-drone use. Recently we have seen clear examples of countries, including Israel, that will use automatic id technology to mass tag a population. If you then have tools that can automatically track and mass kill, which this type of weapon represents, then we have reached a type of warfare t…
Truth is it's already happening, this is how "Lavender" and "Where's Daddy" were used to collectively punish entire families of what a poorly trained AI model thought may or may not be a Hamas fighter
And the Lavender system was only deployed once it was doing as good as the humans. It isn't 100%, war never is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To say that israel invests in defense is at least 1/4 untrue, since the US sends billions every year. This is factually incorrect. The amount of money that the US gives Israel is completely and totally irrelevant to whether or not Israel also invests their own money in defense. The fact that the US has a problem with foreign influence literally does not matter for the statement above. To be clear, I don't agree wit…
Can i rephrase to help you understand my point? The defensive and offensive capabilities of Israel is about 1/4 larger because of american tax dollars not their own spending.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The power delivery was doable even 15 years ago. Not really. It took a long time for solid state lasers to make it to 100KW. That's the power level military people have wanted for two decades. Megawatt chemical lasers are possible, and have been built. But the ground based one was three semitrailers, and the airborne one needed a 747. Plus you ran out of chemicals fairly fast.
I took 'power delivery' to mean the systems that facilitate driving the energy into the weapon, not the beam itself -- although now under consideration of the technology I think we should probably avoid the use of the phrase 'power delivery', without a projectile being involved that's essentially the entire concept.
A 100KW generator is no big deal. It's a truck Diesel engine coupled to a generator. Trailer-mounted, it can be towed with a pickup truck. It's a standard rental item for larger construction projects.
A 100KW laser is a big deal.
The big problem with this as an anti-drone weapon is that, unlike artillery shells or unguided missiles, drones can operate close to the ground, and the laser needs line of sight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does a reference to "...the judge, jury and executioner..." really make sense in armed conflict? Is there really a judge or a jury? There isn't really even an executioner, in the sense of a lawful delegate tasked with carrying out the result of adjudication. One of the reasons armed conflict is bad is there is really no justice in it and no time for justice. Justice starts to be possible when security is established,…
Back when decent civilization was a thing, there were rules of engagement, conduct, the pursuit of security, and strategic goals which didn't include active genocide of civilians. Now, granted, we've witnessed horrible things in wars that don't match up to order and clarity of my previous sentence. But there were end goals that made sense. Sorry, genocide, apartheid and the establishment of a religious-fascist state…
Consider an attack for which Israel was blamed for a large number of civilian casualties. Israel had given warning they were going to hit the building, get out. Reality: Hamas ordered all the neighbors to rush to the roof of the building to keep Israel from hitting it. Too slow, they were still inside when the bomb landed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gaza (Hamas), the West Bank (Fatah), and Lebanon (Hezbollah) are the reason this technology is needed in the first place: violent religious fundamentalists firing cheap rockets at Jewish cities because of religious hatred. Over 16,000 rocket attacks on Israel last year alone. Thanks to the Iron Dome technology, nearly 90% of such attacks were intercepted, saving thousands of lives. This new Iron Beam technology is mo…
you could alternatively pount towards israeli expansionism, which is a bit more likely than religious extremism. demolish peoples homes and kidnap their families, and theyre gonna respond in whatever way they can. i expect the iron beam is going to make a lot more deaths, just of people israelis dont consider human. wooo
Just in time for Iran 2.0
In the war in June, Iran fired 500kg warhead ballistic missiles. These were the only lethal munition they used, killing a couple dozen civilians. The Iron Beam is not relevant against ballistic missiles.
And Iron Dome scored on the ballistic missiles, I would assume Iron Beam also could. When it's coming down on it's target it's slowed by the atmosphere and it has no defense other than being fast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are 2 million muslims living in Israel. There are zero Jews in Gaza -- not even just living ones, they had to remove the long-buried dead ones too.
The millions being starved purposely are for all practical purposes (and by the territorial recognition of several countries if that means anything...) also living in Israel. More to the point, I am not sure what that means for the discussion: I am sure I'd have evacuated my own citizens too before doing this. The least important point is technical, which is that I said Palestine lost many homes to Israel over the ye…
Someone's never heard of jizya, or the repeated slaughters of Jewish civilians in the century prior to Israel's creation: https://www.fondapol.org/en/study/pogroms-in-palestine-befor...
Not to mention what some backward, cruel warlord did to much of the Middle Eastern population starting in 622:
"Alongside his campaign against the Quraysh, Muhammad led campaigns against several other tribes of Arabia, most notably the three Arabian Jewish tribes of Medina and the Jewish fortress at Khaybar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_career_of_Muhammad
And it never ended. It's continuing to this day.