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expedition32

I hope in the future all wars are fought by drones. Just don't make them unstoppable like in that Horizon videogame.

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I hope not. This looks like a nightmare world constrained only by basic manufacturing.

World War I called. It wants its "horror at the concept of industrialized warfare" back.

In World War 1, countries had to contend with the political unsavoriness of sending their youth to go die in droves.

In asymmetric drone warfare stronger economies can nearly “costlessly” conquer less wealthy economies.

From the point of view of "the market" I imagine that it's profitable rather than merely costless.

sigh

> In asymmetric drone warfare stronger economies can nearly “costlessly” conquer less wealthy economies.

Iran vs US shows the opposite. Stronger economy is a huge vulnerability, low human life cost is a big advantage. Economy matters a lot, but if one country can allow itself to lose 80% of it's resources in the war, and another will capitulates long before 5% loss, the first will win no matter the size of the economy.

And I think this generalizes. War is basically a game of morale. Whoever's morale breaks first, loses - in both battles and wars. This is precisely why Afghanistan managed to defeat both the USSR and the USA. They will fight you to the very last man without even having a hint of morale issues. And then after they're all dead their children will do the exact same. And then their children's children. They simply will never surrender, and that makes them practically impossible to defeat. Iran is showing themselves capable of the exact same.

It's interesting to imagine a parallel WW2 where the Japanese emperor did not tell the war council to end the war, and they just continued to fight, as the council wanted. It seems that surely Japan would have lost, but the shape this would take when you have a people, and not just a leadership, unwilling to surrender is not at all clear.

Materiel isn't free! Had everyone forgotten the "cross of iron" speech from Eisenhower?

It also doesn't seem to be working all that well in the Middle East, which looks more like a standstill. Even in Ukraine the actual holding of ground is mostly manned.

Hold is, but attacking often isn't

The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In any case, most actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you go forth today remember your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.

I hope there are no future wars.

The point of war is to kill people.

The point of war is enforcing your will through violence. You can skip the violence, but then bullies would essentially be unrestricted.

Do you think there is a difference between killing people and violence ?

You can have violence without killing people, for example in torture the goal is generally not to kill the recipient.

And if a doctor has a surgery that goes bad and the patient died, they may have killed someone, but there was no violence.

But you can't have killing without violence.

I guess if you get extremely broad with the term but starvation isn't often classified as violence.

If the starvation is intentional it's a kind of violence ?

Smallpox, radiation leaks, freezing to death etc are all causes of death that can be engineered but not generally labeled as violence. What definition are you using?

"War" for the sake of "war" is pointless. It should be tied to a political objective for some kind of gain.

Ideally, it would be the last resort in limited capacity when diplomacy fails.

Otherwise you're unleashing horrors on humanity.

There's no single point to war. It can be anything from enjoying the destruction and killing and torture and lack of rules, to "retribution" (for people who are into thinking of other people in terms of arbitrarily and vaguely defined groups), though creating chaos to get political advantage, to distraction from political issues, or really whatever...

That's not necessarily true. The point of war is to force control. You can force control without killing people. Economically, psychologically, digitally, etc. Killing people is one of the ways but not the only way to wage war.

Indeed - anti-personnnel mines are intended to maim, not kill, because severely wounded soldiers or civilians are a greater drain on enemy resources and morale than a quick death.

> The point of war is to kill people.

You could have a war that's entirely based around infrastructure damage, and you could warn people away from incoming attacks.

ah right, good point. Let's have more wars then.

Do you think that's what I was arguing?

Well I'll quote the sentence to make it clearer, I guess.

Never happened.

Even if it hasn't happened, it would still be a relatively normal war if it happened.

The point of wars usually isn't death.

Logic would indicate that if it didn't happen, it would not be normal if it did now.

Logic would not dictate that. It would be notable but still a pretty normal war. There have been major attacks that are only strikes on infrastructure, and some of them do warn ahead of time so people can evacuate. Deciding to only use that kind of attack is a valid option that makes sense as a "taking the high road" PR tactic.

the point of war is to get past bargaining frictions and make it clear what a mutually acceptable settlement looks like

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