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The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

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Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#581

Post by ExoticPearTree »

n4r9 wrote: post #534
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA. It actually depends on what the you the outcome of the war to be: total conquest or regime change. The US can probably achieve total conquest, but not regime change. They spent 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan and left there without winning anything, especially in Afghanistan. If they wanted to erase Iraq and Afghanistan, that would have a been a totally diffe…

As with many modern wars, it's hard to say whether the Iraq war was won or lost, because the goals are difficult to discern.

The internet never forgets: you go and find the first speech about why the war was started and look at the outcome. You can then judge for yourself if the war was won or lost. Obviously with all its nuances.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#582

Post by ExoticPearTree »

skolos wrote: post #574
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was lots of discussion within Russian and Ukrainian war analytics that nukes (at least tactical) are useless in this war for the following reasons: - 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/ma…

Nuking all the major population centers would pretty much destroy the ability of Ukraine to manufacture weapons in any meaningful number and it would also deprive its army of any new soldiers, no reinforcements, no food supplies and so on. I think it will change the course of the war pretty fast and pretty drastically.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#583

Post by briandw »

recitedropper wrote: post #392
briandw wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean that when you have a system like this and you don’t stress it, it becomes more likely to fail catastrophically. It’s like the Dodo bird. It evolved in the absence of predators, so was easily made extinct. Had the island had dogs the entire time, the Dodo would have evolved to survive.

I agree with you--but just fyi I think "antifragile" is generally used in the opposite to what you mean. If I'm remember correctly Taleb has tried to coin it as a precise word to describe the inverse of your phenomena: Systems that prioritize robustness over optimizations, and therefore can handle stress effectively.

The point is that stress makes some things stronger. Stress doesn’t make a tea cup stronger because a tea cup is fragile. Stress makes a body or organization stronger if its not too much and the system can adapt. A body in zero g gets sick, but is healthy in 1 g.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#584

Post by andrewflnr »

roenxi wrote: post #578
andrewflnr wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the alternative here other than acceptance exactly? It seems the options are either accept a toll or accept that the strait is closed. 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…

I'm just talking about the goals. That obviously doesn't imply anything about the existence of feasible ways to achieve them.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#585

Post by CamperBob2 »

bluGill wrote: post #510
RealityVoid wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can do this relatively simply with infrared led lights. Imagine "Please don't kill me" remote controls. You are a bit more visible when broadcasting, but presumably you can be selective when turning it on.

You need some thing that the enemy cannot spoof. That means two way communication and a shared secret (public private key may count). Then we need to ask what happens if communication itself fails? An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications. Either you do nothing in that case because there might be something you can't communicate with, or you kill your own people

An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications.

The idea being that there is no communication to jam because the drone is fully autonomous. Given that, one needs a foolproof way for it to identify the enemy.

In this case the absence of communication would be what gives it permission to engage. Jamming the drone would not save you, but you could potentially make it attack its own forces if there happened to be any around at the time it comes for you. An IR beacon would make that very hard to accomplish.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#586

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

user_7832 wrote: post #551
wahern wrote: post #525

Earlier 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…

This post is so insanely out of touch with reality. What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country. Trying to project criticisms of the American drone program onto Ukraine in such an openly transparent and uncritical manner is the only thing sickening here. For your platitudes about humanity you clearly care so little about such a deadly conflict to have clearly done no research into the basic facts. The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious. But really it's the arrogance of this post paired with the professed humanity that is so unnerving. It's like you took an essay about America's drone program and just copied it into the Ukranian context with no critical thought or self reflection. That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#587

Post by harimau777 »

weard_beard wrote: post #532
pheaded_while9 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing new under the sun. You fail to address my clear moral objection with these irrelevant historical instances. It has no rhetorical value in this context.

War is inherently amoral and in an argument about its efficacy I don’t understand what your argument is?

Can you expand on that? There is a long history of warrior codes, just war theory, war crimes, etc. Certainly they have virtually always been followed imperfectly, but I'm not sure that means that they don't exist.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#588

Post by Fizz43 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #521
Fizz43 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public loves that narrative but it collapses under scrutiny.

The military industrial complex is a "narrative"? If anything the public does not understand it enough. But please, do scrutinize it. What is the goal of all of the USAs wars in the middle east, if not to funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of shareholders of weapons companies? The latest one for example, in Iran, is clearly just because Trump can profit off of it, and because Israel wants to destroy all of their…

Just to be clear what your position is. You believe that US is getting involved in wars particularly the middle east because US government wants to give money directly to military contractors or it wants to boost the value of these weapons companies to benefit the people who invested.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#589

Post by ceejayoz »

bumby wrote: post #579
ceejayoz wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ULA was openly skeptical about the viability of landing at all. Then reuse. Then the goalposts moved to this, repeated reuse.

I think that misremembers or misrepresents history. 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…

https://x.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1251155738421899273

Tory Bruno saying "no one has come anywhere near close to demonstrating these economic sustainability goals".

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-critic-ula-ceo-reusable-roc...

> “We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis. It’s pretty darn hard to make that actually save money… We’ve seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that,” the ULA CEO said.

> The ULA CEO’s points about the possible lack of savings on reusable rockets put him in stark contrast with other noteworthy leaders in the space industry. Apart from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin is also intently focused on using reusable rockets. Even Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, whose company designs and launches small rockets, has embraced the idea of reusing previously-flown boosters.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#590

Post by sometimes_all »

What I am really impressed by is that experts and the army itself is open to criticism and commentary (I am sure there are limits, and censoring will be happening on the more important parts), but coming from a country where the government seems to think that any critique is "anti-national", such articles seem like a breath of fresh air.

A more open space means better ideas with potential edge get shared, which is better for everyone.

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