Am I the only one that thinks this is very sad? Mass killing on a budget?
War is still the ultimate leverage. A hostile nation deciding to take you out forces you to defend yourself. Russia has shown that quantity largely outweighs quality. I see two reasons for this:
1. Quantity can exhaust supplies. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re out of ammo or people.
2. Quality is concentrated. It’s easier to destroy and be done with.
This type of tech is the future of defense and deterrence. Being able to send hundreds or thousands of smaller drones ensures at least some make it through.
Forgot the camera. Basically push a cellphone into standardized brick, not to unsimilar too industrial plc bus cards.
ps:in picture a bigdog like system built by lego of death:
https://github.com/PicassoCT/MOSAIC/blob/master/luaui/images...
pss no reason to not build cruise missile like systems from the same lego.
Russia has a big hammer. It can unquestionably kill a target it decides to kill and Ukraine is basically powerless to prevent that.
Ukraine has pinpricks. They have to wait for the best conditions to attack and have no certainty as to whether they can kill their target or not. But the Russian ships can't be wily all the time, they have to sometimes be sitting ducks. And the only weapons Russia has that can engage those sea drones is guns.
I believe that in reality you need some of each. Quality fights quality, quantity fights quantity. Quantity does very little against big quality, but big quality does very little against quantity. You want to knock down that LORASM that your radar just picked out of terrain? You need something that can get there fast, drones won't do it.
Problem is, no matter how deep are your philosophical thoughts on arms and peace, there are countries that just want to kill you, plain and simple.
In order to have the ability to continue being concerned on the spending on mass killing, you have to be ready to physically defend your favorite Starbucks.
Well ... they have a new 'super commuting" CEO if that helps
If both sides are sure of what would happen with conflict there will always be peace. Nobody's going to pick a fight they know they will lose unless losing is just as bad as not fighting in the first place (say, your opponent wishes to kill you.) However, in the real world knowledge is far from perfect and circumstances can change. War happens when the two sides have different evaluations of the expected outcome.
(And you also have cases where losing is the objective--at least a double digit percentage of police shootings are suicide by cop and plenty more are people who evaluate dying as preferable to jail. Not outright suicide but pretty close to it. De-escalation is completely useless against both of these groups.)
An awful lot of gunning for war. The words inclusion are very much talked about in context of human beings but it disappears out of the window when talking about foreign policy. Perhaps inclusive foreign policy could have resulted in the avoidance of the Ukraine war? Instead everything is focused on escalation and exclusion.
Ukrainians had chosen a turn to Europe and the West before 2013. Should they have abandoned a national aspiration because it would annoy their neighbour?
Maybe but negotiations are always bound by the alternatives of which war is one and as a country it is better if the calculation looks grim when it is considered.
What is certain is that Russia didn’t hesitate to start an invasion when they felt threatened and thought they could get something from it.
I think it’s a fallacy to view it as an either/or situation. We should strive for both an efficient diplomatic service, enlightened leaders who strive for peace and are intellectually able to navigate a complex international situation, and a strong army.
Obviously it's the woman's fault her husband beat her. She clearly wasn't inclusive enough in her actions. She deserved to be rape when she wouldn't put out when her husband came home drunk.
The Ukraine war is not due to peaceniks. Had the hawks been in charge we would be in pretty much the same situation as we are now.
Up until 2014 there is nothing any reasonable hawk would have done differently with Ukraine. Even after they had their come-to-Jesus moment and cleaned up their act there's still little more we could have done. We were helping them get their military in order, what else was there to do?
I do think the peaceniks are very wrong in saying it could have been avoided by diplomacy, but that doesn't mean they caused the war.
The obvious example is WW2, where appeasement backfired. The recent example is Ukraine, where the West appeased Putin in 2008 around Georgia, in 2014 around Eastern Ukraine, and again after he invaded in 2022 by slowrolling arms and placing restrictions on Ukraine.
This appeasement mindset is a failure of cognitive empathy. You as an individual can be reasoned with. The people around you can be reasoned with. So you can't imagine someone who is a ruthless empire builder. You extend the benefit of the doubt in places it shouldn't be extended. And in turn develop this naive worldview where war is always unnecessary. But this worldview can lead to more people getting killed.
I see your point.
The way I see it there's a great advantage to having big very expensive weapons, such as only a few countries can afford them and they are so expensive and destructive that leaders aren't so quick to use them.
As the entire post WWII Cold War era and recent post 9/11 decades have shown, however, is that big expensive weapons that destroy entire cities in a single package have done little to stop endless low level warring. Small conflicts continue none the less, the US invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Russian actions in Syria, the Crimean and Ukraine invasions, etc. (many many other "et cetera's").
A Chinese expansion to take Tawain would be of a similar "small" scale from the PoV of "does this warrent a nuclear response".
It would be a naval battle in many ways and the best deterrance, perhaps, is an over supply of "cheap" semi autonomous self guiding over the horizon evasive ship killer missiles.
The knowledge that any ships that engage could be rapidly removed from the board is the very thing that might see such usage not come to pass.
What do we do when the Sinaloa cartel gets the capability to attack LA? They're already heavily involved in preventing the election of officials opposed to them.[1]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/mexico-drug-cartels-violence-elec...
I wouldn't expect them to do this, though, because anyone contemplating such a thing would realize the response would be immediate and decisive. Cartels are after all business organizations, and you can't do business if you're spending all your time dodging hellfire missiles.
I have an even hazier understanding of the hazmat rules on possession and transport of explosives. When they blow down a building around here bringing in the explosives is something of an event and not done until the last minute because they're not allowed to store them on site.
Not to mention that explosives + motor falls deep into NFA stuff if it's legal at all. Or look at Mythbusters. All the explosions on the show? Nope, permits to do most of that simply do not exist. Behind the scenes it was actually being done by the local bomb squad.
Now, Iron *Beam* is another matter. I'm not aware of any applicable rules.
Be right back, quickly buying up some realestate...
In a complex world that continues to have ideological challenges, economic constraints and susceptibility to coercion by violent thugs (Putin), forgiving weapons supremacy is betrayal of our peaceful ideals, families, neighbours.
Anti-weapons as a policy to achieve peace is quite an incomplete train of thought.
In this world, we do. The sad thing for me is whom it is used on and whom it is not.
1. We stick with the current wasteful and expensive models and have less money for everything else the government does.
2. We don't buy cruise missiles at all and Putin and friends gleefully march across eastern Europe/whatever land they believe is theirs.