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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.

If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).

https://missilethreat.csis.org/countermeasures-penetration-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome

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More DCs are than obviously required for the battery stores that these laser turrets will shoot.

Obelisks from Command and Conquer pinned to the roof of the DC would be amusing although personally I'm leaning towards prism towers.

The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.

If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.

(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)

Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.

Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.

Smart munitions for the early warning, signal intelligence, and radar, second wave is dumb, fast, cheap munitions for kinetic solving.

Modified cropduster AEW drones for detection and coordination, airburst howitzer rounds for initial sweeping, camera controlled Gatling guns for the ones escaped it, and conventional warhead SRBM for launch sites. Should be both budget and methods proportionate.

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