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kayo_20211030 22 hours ago [-]
A very insightful, and correct, piece.
I'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point.
> The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined. In modern warfare, the tail is the primary target. If the tail is severed, the teeth are rendered useless.
silvestrov 22 hours ago [-]
One of the most interesting innovations in the Ukraine war is their internal market place for drones, letting each drone group decide which drones they want to procure and use in battle.
It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
helsinkiandrew 2 hours ago [-]
Units can also collect e-points to purchase more equipment:
> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
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.
lopsotronic 19 hours ago [-]
You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card.
Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex.
That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.
Animats 18 hours ago [-]
Ukraine and Taiwan quietly cooperate in weapons development and production, especially drones.[1] They both have big, aggressive neighbors. Ukraine knows how to fight them, and Taiwan can make electronics in quantity. Ukraine is starting to get cooperation from Japan, too, but that's in an earlier stage.[2] With Taiwan, it's serious.
The paper doesn't mention Ukraine at all, yet it's all about the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting.
The paper has a lengthy section entitled "The Crucible of Ukraine: The Transparent Battlefield".
Animats 6 hours ago [-]
Right. Sorry.
dash2 13 hours ago [-]
The paper explicitly mentions Ukraine and that’s a key motivation for its conclusions.
ExoticPearTree 2 hours ago [-]
In Taiwan's case, the question is how does China see the reunification.
It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.
lo_zamoyski 16 hours ago [-]
And if we're talking Ukraine, we have to talk Poland as it has been facilitating 90% of all Western military equipment, humanitarian aid, and crucial trade deliveries into the country.
Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.
As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
Poland and the Baltics know they're next on Putin's list. So they're glad to help Ukraine. Better than fighting the Russians on home territory.
Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperation with Ukraine is because Ukraine figured out how to stop Russia. Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
caycep 12 hours ago [-]
I think they already have that, they want to make sure it stays that way
alternatively, there's a Dennis Ross piece out pointing out that China's procurement patterns over the years suggests they are not seriously thinking of invading Taiwan, they just want everyone to think that way...
wahern 2 hours ago [-]
To the extent Xi Jinping isn't seriously interested in invading Taiwan (and that seems dubious), he still needs to keep the PLA and other factions thinking he does. Reclaiming Taiwan is a pillar of PLA ideology and strategic doctrine. PLA culture is why China has never forced its will in North Korea despite continued disobedience to Beijing--the old guard in the PLA feels honor bound to defend North Korea's independence, rather than making it a client state, which it easily could do. It's similar to defense policy hawks in the US regarding Middle East intervention, who have nominally always been a minority faction. Perennial Middle East intervention never made much sense, and yet it keeps happening over and over, even when the military is woefully unprepared (e.g. Iran), because that faction is adept at manipulating defense policy, and has been playing the same long game since the 1990s. Which is precisely why the Taiwan threat is real. China isn't a political monolith, and the forces pushing to invade Taiwan, even if presently held at bay, could succeed in a blink of an eye, even without China being properly prepared for a successful invasion.
mschuster91 2 hours ago [-]
> they just want everyone to think that way
That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational.
With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. With Russia, it is Putin's dream of restoring "Greater Russia". With China, it's the dream of re-unification with Taiwan on one side, and reversing what is seen as a land grab by back-then Czarist Russia in Outer Manchuria. With Trump it is the desperate desire to be beloved (and the desire of his Project 2025 handlers to turn the US into an ethno-christo-nationalist state). With Ben Gvir and Smotrich in Israel, it is the desire to wipe out anything Palestinian.
And the result of these madmen was and is an untold amount of needless suffering. There is no reason at all to not believe what China is openly saying [1] and to prepare accordingly. Better be prepared than be sorry.
> Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
China could just bomb Taiwan into submission if it chooses to. I don't think it is a problem for China to build 20-30k ballistic missile and launch them at Taiwan. Or send a million drones over there just to be sure nothing survives them.
Taiwan is, unfortunately, in a very precarious situation should China decide enough is enough and reunification must happen no matter what.
brabel 15 hours ago [-]
Even the most optimistic Russian does not think Russia will ever get beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya which is not much more than Russia currently occupies. You really think they will eventually march over Ukraine on to Warsaw?? That’s as likely as the exiled Chinese government in Taiwan taking over China.
nostrademons 14 hours ago [-]
When the war started, it certainly looked like it. Russian soldiers were in Kyiv at one point:
It was the failure of Russian logistics and the triumph of Ukrainian logistics that beat them back.
ericmay 13 hours ago [-]
Credit certainly that Russian logistics failed, but was it Ukrainian logistics that beat them back or was it Ukrainian logistics and heroism alongside American and British support, intelligence, and 24/7 airlifts of critical weapons and equipment that beat them back?
yostrovs 9 hours ago [-]
There were no critical weapons supplied to Ukraine until after the Russians retreated from Kiyv.
troupo 1 hours ago [-]
> and 24/7 airlifts of critical weapons and equipment that beat them back?
There were no 24/7 airlifts of criticql weapons and equipment at any point in this war.
Ukraine was expected to fall quickly, and any help it needed started arriving very reluctantly, very slowly, in small batches stretched over months and years of deliveries much much later.
esseph 13 hours ago [-]
There have been rumblings of a Russian attack on Poland for awhile.
The head of Poland's Foreign Ministry noted that he cannot comment on intelligence data but stressed that Russia has long been waging a hybrid war against Poland and France.
He said this involves cyberattacks on state systems, attempts to gather information on critical infrastructure using shadow fleet vessels, arson, sabotage on railways and drone attacks.
Sikorski also recalled that before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia allegedly prepared false flag provocations to create a pretext for starting the war. At the time, American intelligence warnings helped thwart those plans.
"Today you must believe us – not just me, but other countries too – that we have credible information that the Russians are planning something again. The purpose of these warnings is to discourage them from carrying out these provocations," he said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, for his part, confirmed that Paris is also recording increased Russian hybrid activity.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
Poland is delivering 90% of NATO’s support to Ukraine. France is one of the staunchest enemies of Russia. In this situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do?? Sit and accept while those countries work hard to kill its soldiers and destroy its economy? I am surprised Russia hasn’t bombed transport depots in Poland that are known to be used for weapons delivery to Ukraine yet, but that seems very likely to happen in the next few months. However that is not the same as Russia invading Poland! Those reports are talking about attacks, no one in their right mind is expecting an invasion, which is what my comment was referring to.
wvh 1 minutes ago [-]
> In this situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do??
To stay within its borders. And that counts for the others on this planet, too.
troupo 59 minutes ago [-]
> situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do?? Sit and accept while those countries work hard to kill its soldiers and destroy its economy
Oh no, the poor innocent Russia that is currently in year 5 of its totally innocent blameless war it's waging. "Hitler did nothing wrong" vibes.
All Russia has to do to stop its soldiers from dying and its economy from being destroyed is to get the fuck out of Ukraine.
XorNot 15 hours ago [-]
Ukraine is keeping Russia where it is at a tremendous expenditure of people and treasure.
Their success in the conflict is not guaranteed.
brabel 2 hours ago [-]
Their success is already impossible: you cannot lose half of your population and suffer millions of casualties and still consider that a success in the end, even if Ukraine was to retake most of the territory it has lost, which seems less and less likely as the years pass.
Wars of this kind never have winners. Russia also lost too many soldiers to celebrate anything.
liamwire 2 hours ago [-]
I couldn't disagree more. In a fight for existential survival, repelling an invader at any cost constitutes a win. It may almost be pyrrhic in the end, but deterrence is invaluable.
Not to lose sight of the very real cost, down to every man and family destroyed. Many may even argue that life under subjugation is still at least life. But many more have walked the walk into the fire, in defiance of that notion. I see no way of arguing the opinions of the living outweigh those of the dead when it comes to opinions on what's worth fighting for.
I would add that this isn't advocating for blindly and endlessly throwing meat into the meat grinder. But to the extent that a country tells you, not from the top down but from the men on the very frontlines of war, that they're willing to die, to win... I'd say believe them when they say they understand the costs, and yet consider it a win not in spite of those costs, but in the face of them, defiantly.
14 hours ago [-]
D_Alex 10 hours ago [-]
>Poland and the Baltics know they're next on Putin's list.
"Putin's list" is a dishonest meme, just like the "rules-based international order" that the Western nations supposedly embrace.
There is no such list, and there are no such rules. There is only deceitful propaganda used to justify geopolitical ambitions. Don't spread it.
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
bix6 18 hours ago [-]
Thanks for linking this is interesting. It sounds like they are still unable to produce many of the base components though?
> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.
But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
It's not so much a matter of can, but willingness and (worse) economic viability. But recent worldwide instability - from leadership changes to supply disruptions to war - has given that a push.
dmsayer 12 hours ago [-]
Taiwan?
t-3 6 hours ago [-]
Taiwan is tiny, far from Ukraine, and the majority of the economy is TSMC. Just because they're also Chinese doesn't mean they have the ability to make everything China does.
kevin_thibedeau 18 hours ago [-]
The US strongly avoids foreign content for this reason. This policy is often the only thing keeping domestic commodity component manufacturing afloat. This is also the main reason Micron is getting a subsidized fab.
lopsotronic 14 hours ago [-]
The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch.
Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.
DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.
[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"
kevin_thibedeau 14 hours ago [-]
The point is that, when PRC cuts off the parts, there are backstops for alternate sourcing most of them even if it means reopening mines to get the materials and subsidizing production.
zemvpferreira 12 hours ago [-]
I don't mean to belittle the American war machine but as someone involved in overseas manufacturing for a while, I just don't see how it's possible to source 90% of items now made in China without a solid decade or two of investment. There are no factories, no supply chains, no skilled workers. It seems like fantasy.
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
I would bet Japan, Korea, Taiwan all produce some of the needed things in an emergency scenario (obv Taiwan may be under artillery attack, but then again, does China want a destroyed Taiwan or do they want to own it, with its priceless industries intact, as a crown jewel? They may avoid such destruction).
But honestly, I don't think China wants Taiwan "reunification" quite as much as they want to have their economy be prosperous and, just as importantly, not to have millions of people die on both sides. If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure. But I expect non-war outcomes somewhat more than I expect war.
I recognize this is a big bet on the ethics of perhaps a small group of important CPC decision makers, but I do bet on that. Xi Jinping is no Hitler, no Stalin.
nswango 13 minutes ago [-]
Offshoring into China was literally invented by Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese companies.
We see high quality tech products coming out of the countries and assume that they're very good at building things. In fact they are extremely good at managing complex supply chains going in and out of PRC, while keeping certain high value add parts of the business within their own countries.
7 hours ago [-]
kevin_thibedeau 11 hours ago [-]
The US defense industry keeps track of these things. Civilian production will suffer but the military will keep itself supplied.
lazide 9 hours ago [-]
The US has been running on fantasy for a long time.
klooney 14 hours ago [-]
Stuff like https://www.hadrian.co/ is pretty neat, but the whole "electric stack" is hopelessly Chinese from this perspective- batteries, motors, all kinds of small and crucial electrical things- and critical minerals, like Gallium for radar.
bix6 19 hours ago [-]
I am so curious about this. There are a lot of 3D printed drone startups now. But nobody really seems to be thinking about the electronics sourcing. Great you can print a drone shell wherever but what happens if China turns off exports?
galangalalgol 17 hours ago [-]
Ukraine seems pretty paranoid about this, having backup suppliers for parts. Looks like they take efficiency hits and build more complicated things out of multiple discrete chips that would normally be ontegrated commercially so that they can go to suppliers in Oceania, eurasia, or eastasia depending on who is being helpful.
cyberax 15 hours ago [-]
Which supplies? Batteries are produced everywhere. Power electronics are dime-a-dozen. IMUs, GPS chips, and CPUs are produced in Taiwan anyway.
klooney 14 hours ago [-]
If China/Taiwan kicks off, you're not getting new parts from Taiwan
cyberax 13 hours ago [-]
The US can produce these chips. South Korea can also do that.
nswango 11 minutes ago [-]
You know that when there were COVID related supply chain disruptions to microchips coming out of Taiwan, Europe and the US actually found it impossible to make the right number of cars?
ddtaylor 12 hours ago [-]
The US cannot produce most of what that TSMC can can. And those US factories aren't rolling yet either.
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
TSMC is absolutely critical for 'frontier' silicon but:
1. In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either
- Bear in mind that I doubt China would ever want to destroy TSMC though, so I'm talking about a naval blockade rather than artillery destroying the fabs.
2. Although SOTA chips are off the table, we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips. We had great missiles in 2015.
troupo 54 minutes ago [-]
> In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either
China has enough domestic electronics production to not care. Also, in the event of a war they would probably stockpile necessary parts.
> we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips.
If the factories producing those chips are still operational. Otherwise you end up in the exact same situation as Russia, for example. They have some barely functioning old factories producing extremely outdated chips on foreign equipment.
cyberax 10 hours ago [-]
Most drones don't use anything cutting-edge. Even 15-year-old chips are more than enough.
nswango 9 minutes ago [-]
You don't think neural networks are going to be a factor in drone wars? How far out do you think this prediction will hold?
giantg2 14 hours ago [-]
The US manufacturing capacity was a huge factor in winning WW2. I wonder who holds that advantage now...
ericmay 13 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of differences. One of the chief differences was that during World War II the United States continental homeland was pretty much untouchable, which allowed the United States and the allies access to a secure and resource rich supply chain that helped lead to victory over the Axis powers.
In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.
In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.
If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.
I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
marcus_holmes 10 hours ago [-]
> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet.
Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs".
Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light infantry to try and take ground because everything larger doesn't survive (and the light infantry apparently survive for only 20 minutes on average). Russia's Black Sea fleet cowers in port under its anti-air defences and even then takes losses. Their long-range bombers are not being used in the long-range bombing of Ukraine's civilians, that's all down to cruise missiles, because they're too valuable to lose (and a lot of them have been destroyed on the runway by drones).
The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
ExoticPearTree 1 hours ago [-]
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?
troupo 53 minutes ago [-]
Yup. As soon as Russia nukes someone, the war instantly ends. Because no one will ever think to retaliate.
ExoticPearTree 46 minutes ago [-]
I get the sarcasm, but besides the US that for whatever reason might retaliate with nukes, who else? And would they risk it just because?
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
> Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless
Depends on the application. The drones have to be manufactured somewhere. You need electricity. Running water. Industrial facilities. The big bomb still matters there.
> The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny. I think mechanized infantry will continue to have a place, they’ll just be augmented by drones. But who knows you could be right depending on how things develop.
marcus_holmes 5 hours ago [-]
> Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny.
Sure but neither side has a B-2 or F-35. Drones are great for blowing up a few conscripts or a parked plane but a stealth bomber carrying 80 JDAMs can level 5km^2.
marcus_holmes 5 hours ago [-]
Which is working so well against Iran, right?
Oh wait, no, the other thing.
budsniffer952 2 hours ago [-]
Hilarious. You realize the US could nuke and flatten Iran tomorrow, right? Do you imagine that Trump was trying to conquer Iran and just couldn't do it with all the American military power? There is no scenario that Iran wins a war with the USA.
They were trying to overthrow the regime, for the second time in a year, and failed.
ExoticPearTree 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 different thing.
budsniffer952 2 hours ago [-]
You realize Russia has drones too, right? And also artillery shell manufacturing capacity 2x the west? And they continue to bombard Ukraine?
Brybry 2 hours ago [-]
China does have nuclear-powered submarines and they are currently building a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier (type 004). [1]
Good analysis. I agree that China could consider targeting the US mainland, but in every scenario other than "crazed madman" I think they'll know that kind of thing inevitably ends up with symmetrical (or worse for them) destruction. It would be easy to get public support for massive retaliation if Americans see proof that China has no qualms about blowing up their home, workplace, etc. The fringe will say "Nuke China - it worked in 1945!" and the mainstream will say "Blow up every power plant and dam we can."
When the dust settles, China's killed a bunch of Americans, America has killed even more Chinese, and we're in the same place we were before. I don't think China's that dumb, and they're not that evil, either.
throw0101a 9 hours ago [-]
> The US manufacturing capacity was a huge factor in winning WW2.
Not wrong, but the British were outproducing the Germans in many things (e.g., aircraft[1]) even before lend-lease was a thing.
Maybe there should be a saying for national economies: Amateurs talk about finance and IT, and professionals talk about resources and manufacturing.
cyberax 15 hours ago [-]
There are no truly irreplaceable components there. It's going to only be a problem if China stops _all_ the exports.
Even then, a custom supply chain can be set up domestically. You'll probably have to limit the number of variations for these servos and motors, but you can produce them even manually if you absolutely have to.
tpurves 22 hours ago [-]
this strategy worked to keep Ukraine alive, by enabling them to throw literally anything and everything they could obtain into the fight. And the system enabled rapid experimentation and evolution of what works. Also they didn't have enough of anything to equip all units equally or fully, so a market-like system of was also a way to triage short supply.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
mcswell 21 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of the Cambrian revolution: suddenly there were all kinds of weird animals. Many of these kinds rapidly disappeared, while a few more successful ones kept on. Or at least that's my reading.
Animats 18 hours ago [-]
Look at 1950s aircraft. That was the decade of really weird aircraft, as people figured out how jets were supposed to work. Supersonics. VTOL aircraft. The X-planes. Rocket-assisted takeoff. After that, more was known about what worked, and designs became more similar.
There's something hilarious, in the truly cosmic sense of the word, about discussing an "explosion" that spanned between 10 to 25 millions of years of its duration.
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).
jerlam 21 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't a fragmented, decentralized system also help make their supply chains more resilient? If they had a single large drone factory, it would be a sizable target.
mikewarot 19 hours ago [-]
During WW2 in the United States, you had all sorts of consumer goods companies reorganized to output a prodigious amount of military supplies. There were multiple companies making the same model of things, with fairly rigorous QA to ensure quality and uniformity.
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
The key thing is to have second sources for everything. Something the US military seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore in their pursuit of gold-plated weapons systems that give the most kick-backs.
It's not a great comparison because Germany could not hit the US mainland. Even if there had been a single giant everything factory it wouldn't have mattered.
robotnikman 16 hours ago [-]
IIRC the US did plan in case either Japan or Germany somehow became capable of bombing the states. Some factories had their roofs painted to make them blend in with the surroundings, others were built out of reinforced concrete to make them bomb proof
Then take the Sten submachine gun, designed so that every little machine shop in Britain could produce one.
soco 21 hours ago [-]
One design doesn't mean one factory. And it's not about one design anyway, just the thought of culling the less performing ones.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
It’s more brutal than that.
The Sherman tank wasn’t the best tank, but being able to make a lot of them was useful.
As per Stalin, quantity has a quality all of its own.
throw-the-towel 17 hours ago [-]
I've heard exactly this argument about the Soviet T-34.
ExoticPearTree 2 hours ago [-]
As a "sitting on my couch" war expert, I think future combat should be country level semi-organized guerrilla combat style. When every structure, forest etc. tries to kill you, it might changed the adversary's opinion on how much they want your land.
On the other hand, if they just want to kill you for the sake of killing you, that's another story and the enemy will probably resort to "carpet bombing".
LPisGood 18 hours ago [-]
The system is useful for many reasons, not the least of which that it provides an easy way to avoid war crimes (which hurt the war effort via bad PR in partner countries). They award units 10x as many points (which can be redeemed for drones, HIMARS strikes, etc) for a capture than they do for a kill.
tencentshill 17 hours ago [-]
Because it's a defensive war for their own homeland, not just a job.
Zancarius 15 hours ago [-]
This is true. The outcome is also terrifying.
The asymmetric warfare that has been enabled by inexpensive drone tech has so many vast implications that I'm not even sure we've seen every possible avenue this could explore. If either side isn't willing to completely obliterate civilian manufacturing centers, it enables long-term protracted warfare without an obvious end.
On the other hand, even obliterating civilian areas might not be an "end game" in its own right if external interests were to keep flooding the front lines with drones. FPV capabilities make conventional guidance systems a little less important, and while fiber has its weaknesses and wireless systems can be jammed, the psychological aspect of never quite knowing when a drone could be waiting in the midst of one's unit is deeply unsettling.
pj_mukh 2 hours ago [-]
Woah cool! Any write up’s on this?
tim-tday 19 hours ago [-]
Procurement innovation wins the war.
homeonthemtn 22 hours ago [-]
I hadn't heard this before. Do you have a good article on it? I'd be curious to learn more
abejfehr 22 hours ago [-]
They might be referring to the e-Points system, where hitting targets awards points and you can trade the points in for drones, etc
zhengyi13 19 hours ago [-]
They literally gamified it? Amazing.
esseph 19 hours ago [-]
From what I remember:
Equipment was worth more than a capture.
Capture was worth more than a kill (get Intel, trade for Ukranian captives).
Kill was xyz points.
The more points, the more weapons, equipment, and support you got.
This was several years ago, I'm not sure its still in play.
That's fascinating, thank you for sharing. A market economy lets individual optimize from the bottom up.
holoduke 14 hours ago [-]
People talk like Ukraine is the first one doing this. Already in WW2 pilots had similar gamification where proof had to be filmed or with minimum witnesses. It probably goed back even further.
Ukraine / Russia war is not a real war yet. It's a gentleman's war. If parties want to go all in, even without nuclear weapons it would mean a lot of civilian casualties. Millions would die. It's waiting for when this is gonna happen. Only then we know what real war means.
s1artibartfast 13 hours ago [-]
It's a real war but not a total war, and the degree is different per side.
I would say it's closer for Ukraine, which has implemented forced conscription, which is pretty far down the path to a total war. There are of course tactics and strategies they have not enacted, that's not obvious which of those would be beneficial to the war effort in a non obvious way. All wars but specially modern Wars have to balance the possibility of publicity blowback or the population giving up the will to fight
larrik 22 hours ago [-]
They should probably rename it from "tail" to "neck" and watch the attitudes shift immediately.
cucumber3732842 19 hours ago [-]
Tooth to tail is crappy PC/corporate-approved rename. The concept used to have a bunch of arrow and spear related names and a bunch of informal phallic counterparts all of which are better suited to the fundamental workflow of mechanized offensive operations.
LPisGood 18 hours ago [-]
For curiosity’s sake, what were these things referred to historically and informally?
xvedejas 11 hours ago [-]
Reading between the lines, it sounds like it was probably one of "tip"/"point"/"head" and "shaft", or similar
mcswell 21 hours ago [-]
Or maybe "dentures"?
ykonstant 21 hours ago [-]
That will certainly resonate with the generals (≧▽≦)
danhodgins 6 hours ago [-]
If the tail is gone, the dentures become useless
masfuerte 18 hours ago [-]
That should call it coccyx. That sounds like something Trump would support.
pfortuny 18 hours ago [-]
The first thought when moving people must be "where/how will they shit?" Only once this is solved can you ask "what will they eat?".
Someone 19 hours ago [-]
Historically, that was phrased as “an army marches on its stomach”
It's always about logistics. The Three Kingdoms War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was largely enabled by the invention of the wheelbarrow.
The US military knows full well the importance of logistics. TFA is somehow arguing for distributed distribution networks that are harder to track and attack. Why not advocate for improved defenses along the supply lines? Or is it down to percentages where just one good hit has large effect?
Animats 18 hours ago [-]
The main point of this paper is that rear area bases are too vulnerable now.
This paper is from West Point, and is the view from the Army side.
It's a big problem for air forces, too.
The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more. Iran has been hitting US air bases. In the last day, they've hit US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. That's just this round. There were previous hits a few months back. It's not publicized much, but it's no secret. It's hard to protect an air base against drones. Air bases are big, everyone knows where they are, airplanes are hard to hide from drones, and are vulnerable to small explosive charges. As Russia keeps finding out as Ukraine hits their air bases. There have been hits well inside Russia. Blast-resistant hangars in Crimea have been attacked. Don't leave a door open.
China is going in for airbase hardening in a big way.[1] This is sometimes called a "concrete sky" program. The USAF is way behind in the Pacific. Too many planes parked out in the open, or in weak hangars.
Active defenses against drones and missiles do work, but they just thin them out. Some get through.
If the attacker has enough manufacturing capacity, the defenses can be overwhelmed. Ukraine is currently building about 7 million drones a year.
> The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more.
I guess we're all guerrilla fighters now.
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
"The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea" - Mao
Guerrilla forces have to be popular, or at minimum, have the local population cowed. They're useful for kicking an oppressor out of your own country, but not for conquest.
shimman 17 hours ago [-]
Maybe the US should focus more on diplomacy and open collaboration rather than letting a few dozen psychopaths convince the country we need to support a war machine that has benefited no one outside of the defense industry.
Noumenon72 16 hours ago [-]
If the problem was as simple as a few individuals and had no benefits it would not persist -- this is a Hollywood view of the world that won't help you understand your opposition.
watwut 1 hours ago [-]
Things that benefit only few can persist for a very long time. And US politics is full of those.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
No, it's quite simple. US imperialism only benefits the select elites of the country at the expense of the poor.
Why are you denying the absolutely destructive power of the US military and it's abject failure in not only making the world safer for Americans but explicitly more dangerous?
Are you personally benefiting from US imperialism?
shmeeed 1 hours ago [-]
This was not the point of GP's comment. The point was that your reductive take on the military-industrial complex as "a few dozen psychopaths" is simplistic and won't help you understand your opposition.
Also, please refrain from making personal allegations.
ericmay 13 hours ago [-]
What diplomatic means should the United States (why the US and not others) take to stop Russia in Ukraine, stop Iran in the Middle East, stop North Korea, and stop China and its support for Russia or insistence of attacking Taiwan?
Certainly there is some room for negotiation and diplomacy and frankly I think we've tried that and tried it until it was clearly insane and then we still tried it. We (the west) tried to invite Russia to NATO and we opened up Europe to Russian gas. We tried the JCPOA with Iran. We have no clue what to do with North Korea. And we pushed for Chinese entry into the WTO only for them to backstab the west.
oatmeal1 8 hours ago [-]
We pulled out of the JCPOA. It worked but we quit.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
Conflating China with Russia is absolutely bonkers. No need to comment when you're already engorged on propaganda.
Also don't understand what point you're trying to make outside of the US being explicitly poor actors that ignore treaties, allies, and are willing to start wars to run cover for unpopular domestic leadership while causing the unnecessary deaths of millions of people across the world.
Also WTF does backstab even mean in this context? That China didn't bend over and allow US corporations to rat fuck their country dry? Who exactly benefits from enriching US corporations here? It's assuredly not US citizens.
Good grief.
ImPostingOnHN 7 hours ago [-]
russia makes sense to the extent that they're attacking other countries unprovoked, but what are you talking about stopping China, North Korea, and Iran, from actually doing? Being successful? Improving their country? Existing?
strangegecko 1 minutes ago [-]
He literally said it for China: stopping an invasion. I would add limiting political influence from autocratic governments that don't respect individual rights, but I know that's opening another Pandora's box.
maxglute 21 hours ago [-]
Knowing logistics is important =/= able to adapt logistics to modern environment. Last 40-50 years US adversaries couldn't really contest/degrade US logistics at scale. Article is suggesting with new tech, they probably could, and hence may have to redo the entire system for distributed survivability / operate under chaos. Aka 60/70% of the force (the tail) is going to have to change the way they do things. It's hard to make 60/70% of org change, especially the boring bureaucratic/logistics part built around predictability, who are going to want to stay predictable and insist everything is fine with these minor changes, until its not.
zipy124 22 hours ago [-]
They argue for both no? Increased armour for logistics, but also the notion that yes, if one good hit destroys your whole stockpile then you would need a 100% success rate defense mechanism which is impossible when you can be overwhelmed by the number of drones/missiles seen in modern warfare.
rawgabbit 20 hours ago [-]
Ukraine is deploying AI enabled drones that require no fiber optic wires and no electronic tethering. They patrol autonomously and identify targets; a human authorizes the strike and they take out targets by themselves. This is the holy grail of modern warfare; destroy the enemy’s rear staging and logistics. If they don’t have fuel or ammo, they are a defenseless sitting target.
RealityVoid 14 hours ago [-]
These kinds of systems are rare or super rare.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
Not for long. Software copies easily. Hardware's more difficult.
RealityVoid 1 hours ago [-]
You need hardware for these things. High speed image processing and high precision control and global shutter cameras. You can't just slap a raspi on it with any run of the mill camera and call it a day.
_carbyau_ 9 hours ago [-]
With advances in drones but issues with communications I thought it was obvious that having a drone-area-of-denial would be a thing.
I mean, if minefields are okay with the intention to kill anything that walks in the area, why not drones?
huh? how does one keep a human in the loop for decision making it there is not an 'electronic tether'?
rawgabbit 18 hours ago [-]
A human is not piloting the drone. It patrols even if it lost communication due to jamming. It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.
chasd00 16 hours ago [-]
> It does need communication to ask the human for authorization to strike.
well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
You need human confirmation (for now) only when your side might be there. Tell your army not to go someplace and you can kill anything that is there.
CamperBob2 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder about the feasibility of an IFF-like mechanism at the level of individual soldiers. The drone could be designed not to attack when a nearby transmitter is broadcasting a prearranged encrypted code that's dependent on elapsed mission time or some other hard-to-spoof factor. Any humans caught out in the open without the IFF signal present are fair game.
RealityVoid 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bluGill 11 minutes ago [-]
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
zcw100 19 hours ago [-]
I guess you're just supposed to read Clausewitz not actually understand it.
cwillu 14 hours ago [-]
The drinking caused by the reading tends to interfere with the understanding.
shmeeed 1 hours ago [-]
A man of culture, I see.
alansaber 22 hours ago [-]
The driving force of peacetime military procurement and organisation is bureaucracy. Hence we see the real developments in military doctrine from Ukraine, Iran etc.
petesergeant 16 hours ago [-]
> which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined
Current SecDef thinks looking like a war movie hero is more important, however, so action on this front may be delayed.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
It is kind of interesting seeing the ukraine war tiptoe from actually striking the tail in earnest. We see some attacks on moscow refineries in recent days, yes, but why not full scale targeting of total industrial collapse of the russian state? Similarly, why doesn't Kyiv look like Gaza?
I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined.
I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
dgacmu 18 hours ago [-]
I think you're over-estimating the capability of both sides of the fight (absent nuclear weapons on the part of Russia). Both sides appear to be using drones and missiles as fast as they can manufacture them. One could argue Russia could be more selectively targeting industrial infrastructure - I don't know if their attacks on residential areas are an inability to target well or some kind of hope that demoralization will be effective - but Ukraine is, I believe, doing as much as they can to Russia's oil & defense sectors as they are able.
example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1]
Sanctions and limited parts availability are limiting Russia's ability to manufacture weapons [2]
Russia has been able to target Kyiv and destroy arbitrary apartment buildings the entire war. I've just spent a few mins searching through news articles over the years, there's a story of a destroyed Kyiv apartment in 2022 and one from 3 days ago now in 2026 of course. So why the stayed hand? Clearly Russia then and now is capable of reaching out and destroying Kyiv arbitrarily. I still believe they could have turned it into Gaza within mere days or weeks 4 years ago if they really wanted to. But clearly there are factors beyond their capabilities that prevent them from using their capabilities to the fullest extent. One might wonder what the US response would look like if Kyiv was actually destroyed and some 3 million were now refugees——american boots on the ground perhaps? Yugoslav war style joint coalition?
dgacmu 18 hours ago [-]
Russia's inability to have a decisive victory against Ukraine is at odds with the idea that it has sufficient stockpiles and launch capability to reduce kiev to rubble any time it wishes. If it had that capability, it would have the capability to destroy Ukraine's defense manufacturing sector - or simply its entire manufacturing sector - which it clearly does not. It's also at odds with the evidence that Russia is launching missles roughly as fast as they can build them.
orthoxerox 14 hours ago [-]
Russia has destroyed most of Ukraine's traditional defense manufacturing sector a long time ago. The problem is that Ukraine has decentralized and/or offshored a lot of its manufacturing.
There's no need for a massive assembly plant to produce a lot of drones from dual-purpose components. Most of these components arrive across the EU border and go to random warehouses that have been converted into assembly shops. There the drones are put together, flashed with the latest firmware and sent to the armed forces, where they are armed and launched.
The bigger problem Russia faces is the surprisingly sorry state of its AA. It's been designed to detect and intercept strategic bombers and multirole fighters, but it's been almost 40 years since Mathias Rust, and it still can't handle a cheap and slow flying target, relying only on point defense systems that can be and are overwhelmed. Ukraine has inherited the same Soviet tech but managed to build a better detection system that collects and processes the data from thousands of cheap listening stations across the country.
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
I guess the question becomes then why did putin start the war without sufficient buildup of missile reserves to flatten Kyiv in the first few days? And why not contract with israeli defense companies for precision missile technology? It doesn't seem like their relations are really that severed even with the whole Iran issue. One would also think China might also appreciate a client willing to battle test their precision military hardware.
Cthulhu_ 3 hours ago [-]
Flattening a city doesn't win a war. They started the war with the intent of driving tanks into the city and overthrow the government in three days, but (as the article mentions) that didn't work out.
But flattening cities is a WW2 strategy, and it didn't actually do much to win the war in the end, only cause unnecessary civilian suffering.
nradov 17 hours ago [-]
You'll have to ask Putin that question. But the usual intelligence analysis of that decision is based on several factors.
1. Putin thinks the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 was a historic disaster and wants to reassemble much of it as some sort of new "Russian Empire" in order to control more resources and establish defensive space to protect the motherland against a future foreign invasion. He sees Ukraine as a fake country.
2. Russian demographics are collapsing and Putin himself is aging so this was his last chance to take decisive action. Despite limited stockpiles of advanced weapons, waiting would have made an invasion even harder.
3. Putin has surrounded himself with loyal yes-men who curried favor by telling him what he wanted to hear instead of giving him accurate information about Ukrainian politics and military capabilities.
4. Putin perceived Joe Biden as being particularly weak and unlikely to take decisive action.
5. Russia's recent invasions of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) had gone fairly well so it wasn't irrational to expect a rapid victory.
To be clear I'm not trying to justify or excuse Putin's decision (I hope he loses) but rather to explain how he might have reached it.
Israel isn't going to sell advanced weapons to Russia in current circumstances. It would be impossible to hide. Intelligence analysts can pick apart little fragments from a missile explosion and determine where the components were made. It's not technology that Russia lacks but the capacity to manufacture that technology at scale with acceptable quality.
China is making a fortune selling weapons and dual-use equipment to both Russia and Ukraine. But they don't sell the good stuff because they don't want sensitive technology to fall into US hands, and because they want the option to bite off a chunk of Russian territory later.
eszed 11 hours ago [-]
Add to all of that: this started as a war of conquest. Putin seems to have believed that Russian forces would quickly take Kiev, depose the government, and install a client regime in its place. You don't want to destroy property you think you'll shortly own, so there would have been no point stocking up enough munitions to do so.
The airport raid by SF on the first day of the war arguably came close to success.
lazide 8 hours ago [-]
This whole thing was a war of ‘yes men’ telling the big bad what he wanted to hear, even though it was insane.
Also Iran.
orthoxerox 14 hours ago [-]
Because he thought he wouldn't need to use them. He expected Ukraine to accept the inevitable and not provide meaningful resistance. He almost got away with it, too. Had the Russian army launched its missile stockpiles at Ukrainian powerplants on day 1, it would've done enough damage to overwhelm the country. However, he declared that "Ukrainians were not our enemies, only the Ukrainian leadership and specific armed nationalist groups were", so he couldn't have attacked the country's civilian infrastructure until after the citizens of Ukraine decided that Russia was their enemy.
14 hours ago [-]
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
Because "Flatten a city" actually takes dramatically more scale than anyone has seen in decades.
40k Tons of bomb were dropped on Berlin in WW2. That's nearly all explosive payload too.
That's about equivalent to 80k modern cruise missile warheads.
The US has built less than 5000 Tomahawk missiles ever.
Russia has fired approximately 6000 missiles into Ukraine in the course of the war.
This is why the US still maintains a fleet of ancient "Bomb Truck" style bombers in the B52. Nothing compares to 100 B52s flying over a target for weeks. They allowed us to drop 20k tons of bombs on Vietnam and the surrounding countries. A horrific capability.
Gaza is a combination of Israel being utterly fucking insane and apparently desiring to terrorize people, and the fact that Gaza is super tiny.
skywhopper 17 hours ago [-]
Gaza is about 1/20 the size of Kyiv, has 1/5 the population, has far fewer resources to fight back, and is much closer to its adversary. Kyiv is also just one city amongst dozens, making up less than 1/10th population of Ukraine.
nradov 17 hours ago [-]
You're missing the point. Russia simply lacks the conventional missile production capacity necessary to flatten Kyiv. They used up most of their missile reserves early in the war and are now firing them off about as fast as they can build new ones. And it's not clear that they're able to accurately target individual buildings; some of those strikes appear to be random collateral damage. Russia is simply no longer capable of large-scale precision manufacturing; it's a relatively poor country with a broken tertiary education system and most of the foreign experts left years ago.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
> it's a relatively poor country with a broken tertiary education system and most of the foreign experts left years ago.
I think you underestimate Russia. The current state of the war is still in a gentlemen state. There are so many escalation steps left. From using chemical weapons to empty Odessa to closing the black Sea to let Belarus enter the war to destroy water systems to use bioweapons in all border area to mass invasion to destruction of all Dnjepr bridges to assissination of government personel to destruction of government buildings to sinking of western oil carriers to dropping nuclear bombs on London or Berlin . Really the current war is nothing yet
nradov 13 hours ago [-]
Nah, you just haven't been paying attention to recent events. Russia doesn't have any forces capable of closing the Black Sea. Belarus is sitting on the fence and while they provide Russia with some logistical support they're not interested in committing suicide by shoving their own small military into the meat grinder. Russia could probably kill a lot of civilians with chemical weapons but Putin still wants to capture Ukraine somewhat intact, and this would also likely trigger economic sanctions by neutral countries such as India. Russia has already made many attempts to assassinate Ukrainian government officials with very little success.
Russia is still dangerous but it's a pale shadow of the old USSR.
siriusastrebe 18 hours ago [-]
Moscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
Cthulhu_ 2 hours ago [-]
Plus deploying nukes would be a guaranteed escalation - after WW2 nobody has ever used nukes in war because of this.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
Why can they not use firebombing and other conventional munitions? If they can deliver a nuke surely they can deliver a conventional warhead. That is enough to level an urban area as we see in Gaza.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
Israel levelled Gaza after capturing the area, with artillery and with air strikes.
Russia hasn’t captured Kiev, their artillery can’t reach that far and they don’t have air superiority - Russia hardly has an airforce anymore.
marking-time 16 hours ago [-]
Also worth remembering that Gaza is effectively an island when it comes to logistics. This made it easy for Israel to cut off food/medicine/fuel. Essentially medieval siege warfare transferred to the present day.
AngryData 16 hours ago [-]
If you level a city you just removed 95% of the reason for trying to capture that city.
Spending untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a pile of ash would never pay itself off.
antihero 6 hours ago [-]
Israel wants the Palestinian land. Many of them would be happy to raze Gaza to nothing and rebuild it.
ponector 14 hours ago [-]
But this is exactly how russians are capturing Donbass: each sity they managed to capture for the last two years are total ruins.
antihero 6 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t Eastern Ukraine have more resources and more ethnic Russians?
ponector 4 hours ago [-]
Eastern Ukraine had more Ukrainians who had russian language as primary one, but they are not ethnic russians. Also this is the result of the ethnic cleansing and mass deportation of Ukrainian people russians did for the last two senturies.
orthoxerox 14 hours ago [-]
That's because Donbass is seen as useless. It's like bombing upstate New York or Michigan when invading the US.
lazide 8 hours ago [-]
Hey, many tears would be shed for the Traverse City Cherry Festival, i’ll have you know.
mothballed 16 hours ago [-]
The reason for Putin at this point is more reputational than inherent value of whatever lies in Ukrainian city. I fully expect Putin would nuke the ever living shit out of Ukraine into a glass worthless pile of rubble if he thought he could get away with it.
siriusastrebe 17 hours ago [-]
Russia fires conventional warheads into Kiev all the time. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. The city survives.
Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
Russia cannot fly a plane into Ukrainian airspace. They barely even fly over Russia's side of the line right now.
They toss bomb from miles back.
Flying conventional bombers over enemy cities requires the ability to replace most of your bombers per year, or air supremacy, neither of which Russia has even a hope of doing.
WW2 was industrialized the likes of which nobody has ever seen again.
skywhopper 16 hours ago [-]
Because Russia doesn’t actually have the resources to do this at the scale required. Russia is also not trying to obliterate Ukraine. They want to take over a real economy, not a wasteland.
actionfromafar 16 hours ago [-]
At this point, I think they would take the wasteland "win" if they had to. But they really don't have the resources to do carpet bombing or something like that. Just lobby pot-shots.
kakacik 16 hours ago [-]
Dude, read some proper war news ffs. During a recent single night, those russian assholes send on Kyiv around 500 shaheds, 50 kalibr missiles, 50 of something else I dont recall etc totalling around 600 long range missiles/warheads/medium sized long range drones, each capable of significant damage due to big heavy explosive load. If they could they would send more, luckily russians and competence dont meet at the same room often.
If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day.
Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.
thisislife2 16 hours ago [-]
> Similarly, why doesn't Kyiv look like Gaza?
The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely.
Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either political spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population - this is corroborated by a UN probe that says Palestinian children and Babies were ‘special targets’ of Israeli killings - https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ ). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights.
> I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move towards Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state.
With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, American allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas).
Thus, in both cases, it is mostly politics that holds them back.
For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit:
> To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations.
That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their underground bunkers, warehouses and tunnels, with the ability to make independent command decisions in the absence of orders from central command. Even Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, is somewhat modelled similarly and that is why Israel's attack on Hezbollah's leadership (the pager bombing) hasn't had the impact that the Israelis hoped for - they are still bogged down fighting them in Lebanon.
ponector 13 hours ago [-]
Russian goal is also a terror and genocide of the Ukrainian nation. It's not a first time, thought.
dahart 22 hours ago [-]
> A very insightful, and correct, piece.
I agree, or at least it feels insightful and right, though I can’t personally validate if it’s correct. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, stop using contractors & no-bid contracts, or simply ask for more?
Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
>who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen
It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
nradov 21 hours ago [-]
Foreign military budget numbers are largely fake and can't be attempted to be believed. China's government spending isn't publicly released and can't be independently verified. A lot of what the US considers to be military spending falls into separate categories in China. At least on a purchasing power parity basis their actual spending is probably close to ours now, maybe even higher.
ecshafer 19 hours ago [-]
This is a good point that shows the weakness in a lot of these comparing military budgets. Imagine an example where one country spends $1000 per soldier and another spends $100k per soldier. IF they both field 100 soldiers. One budget is 100x the other, but by PPP they are equal.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
topgrain2 18 hours ago [-]
> A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
Yeah, between military (active, dependents, retired, et c), elected officials who get government-paid healthcare (in any level of government), government workers (all levels, city, county, state, federal), and school workers (primary, secondary, public colleges and universities), and Medicare (old people), and Medicaid plus CHIP (poor people), and probably some others I’m forgetting, the US engages in as much government per-capita healthcare spending as some peer states do on their national healthcare schemes… but without covering everyone. However, the government does already cover a huge proportion of the population, including some of the most expensive (old people), at least partially. And that’s not counting government spending on contractors that take some of that money and pay for their workers’ healthcare with it.
It’s just split up across thousands of different budgets, instead of one.
remarkEon 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is true, and PRC is pretty explicit about this too. For those who pay close attention to stuff like this, the raw comparisons in dollars spent are just not that useful with PRC has developed entire industry infrastructure around swiftly swapping over to a military purpose.
rawgabbit 20 hours ago [-]
It was written by a major trying to convince both those in charge of military doctrine (army leadership) and military budget (civilian leadership). Both of which can be obstinate and counterproductive. Army brass sometimes prioritize their careers over everything else. Civilian leadership sometimes prioritize their careers over everything else.
kayo_20211030 19 hours ago [-]
Yes. I agree, although careerism in the military is maybe not that strong an influence; it is, for sure, but not that strong yet. Careerism in the political class is probably exactly as strong as you claim it is. However, I do hope there are sensible people within that group too, and they heed the underlying message.
cucumber3732842 19 hours ago [-]
The military is still fairly results focused compared to the political class so that at least sort of pushes back on the most flagrant careerism.
shimman 17 hours ago [-]
How can you make this comment when the US military has literally created an entire industry that has served no single purpose outside of flagrant careerism? Like the military industry complex is a real thing and is almost 100 years old at this point, all it's done is make the world drastically unsafe while doing an immense amount of harm across the planet.
AlexCoventry 19 hours ago [-]
> Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
Deeply entrenched corruption, obviously.
skywhopper 16 hours ago [-]
It’s written by folks who want to convince the military to do better.
The fact that the US wastes a lot of money on what’s likely a very ineffective military is not a surprise, surely. Yes, they should have a better logistics system for all that money.
It’s ok for it to break as long as the enemy’s breaks first. I don’t see anything comparing this to other armies. Air superiority doesn’t exist in the Ukraine war and I question how many lessons can truly be drawn from it for the US because of that. Not chest pumping here, this just feels a little too in the moment.
Havoc 20 minutes ago [-]
Would sure be helpful to have bases in cooperative allied countries to help with logistics…so best not to threaten and shit on them at every diplomatic encounter…
bandrami 10 hours ago [-]
This is a pendulum I've now seen fully swing twice since I enlisted 30 years ago.
"We need more integrated logistics because the teeth can't fight without the tail!"
Some years pass
"Why do we have all these non-combat roles in the military? Shrink everything down and focus on warfighting!"
More years pass
"Why can't we do any support internally? We need stronger and more integrated logistics!"
Lather, rinse, repeat.
bad_haircut72 22 hours ago [-]
When Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody (even the Ukranians) imagined that 5 years later they would have their own missiles hammering Russia 2500kms in the rear. Americans need to start accepting that a) the Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years and b) Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking.
malfist 22 hours ago [-]
> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years
The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
wnevets 19 hours ago [-]
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
To make certain people money by shorting the oil market. There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays.
ashdksnndck 15 hours ago [-]
I never got the logic of this conspiracy theory. If you’re trying to make money insider trading off some events, wouldn’t you want markets to be open when the events occur? You’d like to be able to enter and exit your position immediately before and after any news breaks. Markets being closed when a deal is announced makes it less efficient to trade on that news.
holoduke 14 hours ago [-]
Rights. I think trump announced at least 50 times that a peace agreement was made. Only to be broken a few days later. He and his family are constantly pumping and dumping. He is a mafia mobster. Equals to Adolf Hitler. He need to be removed to make the world better.
dozerly 8 hours ago [-]
Trump is merely a symptom of society that has been culminating for 40 years.
streetfighter64 2 hours ago [-]
You're calling it a "conspiracy theory" despite loads of evidence of insider trading, both traditional and crypto, by Trump and his cronies?
Do you think the Trump-Epstein connections are just a "conspiracy theory" as well?
segbrk 22 hours ago [-]
That’s exactly why it could continue indefinitely. A war with no goal can’t be won. Nor can it be abandoned without bruising powerful egos.
runako 21 hours ago [-]
Per the spec of the last 25 years, they will let it run until the party in control of the White House changes. The new party will be responsible for the exit & cleanup phase.
16 hours ago [-]
forshaper 22 hours ago [-]
There hasn't been a clear goal for an American war since the first Gulf War.
AlexCoventry 19 hours ago [-]
The goals for intervention in the Serbia/Bosnia conflict were clear and noble, IMO.
Cthulhu_ 3 minutes ago [-]
That wasn't an American operation though, that was a NATO and UN operation involving American, British, French and Dutch forces.
forshaper 14 hours ago [-]
I considered that closer to truly multi-national, but we might as well take the win.
kingleopold 14 hours ago [-]
clear goal is making trillions to war profiteer friends, is this too hard to see for the public?
Fizz43 8 hours ago [-]
The public loves that narrative but it collapses under scrutiny.
sillyfluke 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure its accurate to imply that being completely delusional means you have no goal. Gulf War part II had a goal regardless of the deceit involved. The Afghanistan war though I thought took the cake for the sheer delusional premise.
To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.
I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].
Once you've lost something (I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship) then even if you cant win, you also cant leave else its an admission of defeat - so it drags on and on and on.
TSiege 17 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure the US would behave as rationally in that scenario as you hope
m000 2 hours ago [-]
I think they can already sink any US ship that comes in range if they want to. And the US knows it too. But for different reasons, it's in neither's interest to go there.
Georgelemental 12 hours ago [-]
I think the current leadership in Tehran is pragmatic enough to want to avoid that. Of course, the longer this drags on, the more likely they are to be replaced by hard-liners
croes 11 hours ago [-]
The have the Strait of Hormuz, a much bigger asset than sinking a US ship
dctoedt 14 hours ago [-]
> I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship
Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billions of dollars in ship and aircraft — might trigger a Pearl-Harbor or 9/11 fury among the American public. No U.S. president could get away with even a "proportionate" response, let alone doing nothing.
Think of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1965, which led to the U.S.'s widened involvement in Vietnam on the basis of grossly-distorted reports about alleged attacks — which never happened — on U.S. destroyers (which are comparatively small ships). [0] If Iran were to actually sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, then Trump-Hegseth-Miller might well nuke Tehran in response.
We sure as hell don't need anything like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by a terrorist. It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Belgrade, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, they all effed it up almost beyond belief. WWI cost millions of lives and untold billions in resources that could have been put to far better use. Iran sinking a U.S. carrier could be a similar trigger.
Yeah exactly, thats how you win wars, you force the enemy to do things they dont really want to do.
m000 2 hours ago [-]
Win the war, lose the empire.
colechristensen 7 hours ago [-]
>It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history.
Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand.
Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted to use that to gain influence. (of course not literally everybody, but this was a prevailing force)
dctoedt 1 hours ago [-]
> Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country
That was true among some of the players in various governments — Kaiser Wilhelm being a prime example. Can you cite any (reputable) historians who think that was a general attitude?
dctoedt 2 hours ago [-]
So you agree with me — stupid decisions, catastrophic fuckups.
MyHonestOpinon 18 hours ago [-]
The US had the power to start the war. The US doesn't have the power to stop the war.
8fingerlouie 4 hours ago [-]
It takes one party to start a war, but it takes (at least) two to end it.
The war ends when all involved parties agree that it ends, not because one party is tired of it.
The only way the US alone can end the war in Iran is to ensure complete surrender, and then stay put for 20 years like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave like a thief in the night and things reverts to what they were before, only with more local hate for the US than was already there (as most islamic states sees the US as the great devil).
I think most European nations learned their lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those were NATO operations btw. Article 5 was invoked for Afghanistan, but the NATO contribution was limited to a naval operation and patrolling of US airspace. NATO is a defensive treaty, not an aggressive one. The actual ground invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq was done by a US led coalition of the willing, and when the US started the Iran war, most european leaders openly declared that this was not europes war.
pphysch 17 hours ago [-]
It absolutely does, it can simply choose to not bomb Iran after Iran enforces regulations on its (shared with Oman) waterway.
Bombing Iran for a month because Iran fired on 4 ships that were violating its SoH rules is wildly disproportionate and optional.
TSiege 17 hours ago [-]
This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently. Every country with a port on the other side of the strait is going to lose access. This might not be a tolerable situation to those allies of ours and they also have the ability to force the war to drag on. Maybe we walk and pull out from our bases in those countries. maybe they suck it up and live with paying tolls. but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
stymaar 3 hours ago [-]
> This is not necessarily true. Yes the strait of hormuz is technically in their territorial waters, but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador Gerard Araud puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
Zardoz84 6 hours ago [-]
International laws that the USA threw out of the window when this war just began.
throwaway27448 9 hours ago [-]
> but it has been recognized as an international water way until recently
Who cares? International law is quite clear. But regardless, the world really doesn't have a say so long as Iran (& likely Oman in the end) wants to enforce this view.
> but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
...and the strait will still be closed. It just makes zero sense.
kakacik 15 hours ago [-]
Regognized by whom? This is very one sided view, obviously US sided.
This kind of shit or excuses could not be pulled if we would be talking about gulf of mexico for example.
US is not center of the world and rest of the world means >95% of mankind, rest of the world is pretty fed up with that unfair treatment and things are changing. Very slowly, but steadily.
bluGill 15 hours ago [-]
Nearly everybody recognized it as an international waterway. Iran did not official but they acted liked it was international.
frm88 2 hours ago [-]
Iran signed UNCLOS 1982 which most countries signed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_the_United_... in which Iran stated that only parties that signed are entitled to free passage through its maritime territory, except for warships etc. This was accepted by all. The US did not sign.
0x073 7 hours ago [-]
If it's continue 5 years, the country connected to this war in this region will go fast downstairs and maybe even end in a broken state.
I don't sympathies with any monarch country there, but no one wants more unstable countries, especially in the Arabic region.
throwaway27448 9 hours ago [-]
> The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
Or at least the Donbas... I can't imagine they'd want a border pressing up against nato without a rump state in between.
27183 21 hours ago [-]
Initially it's unclear what the goal was. But now the goal must be opening the strait of Hormuz ASAP. There's going to be serious economic fallout if that doesn't happen[0]. It remains to be seen how realistic that goal actually is. Iran has big advantages in their favor.
Can we agree on "the strait was open before the war" so it can't be a goal for the war.
27183 17 hours ago [-]
No, unfortunately, because circumstances change. It was unbelievably stupid to attack Iran, and everyone involved knew this might happen, but now that it has happened it needs to be dealt with one way or the other.
andrewflnr 5 hours ago [-]
It wasn't a goal for starting the war, but it sure is one now.
roenxi 41 minutes ago [-]
It can't be, because if that was the goal they'd just stop attacking. The strait was open until they sneak attacked Iran. Everyone seems to be in agreement that as part of a ceasefire the strait will open. Iran has shown no particular interest in closing the strait except as a war tactic. The US clearly does not have the power to control or open the strait militarily, its been months now. They appear to be outclassed.
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
usiran1286628 5 hours ago [-]
Trump has clearly stated many times the goal is to prevent Iran from obtaining nukes. Many times. Repeatedly, again and again, and all negotiations are directed towards that first and foremost.
63stack 2 hours ago [-]
Trump clearly stating anything is a stretch, that man cannot talk coherently even for a minute.
He has also stated that the war has been won many times. Why would you take anything coming out of his mouth seriously?
27183 2 hours ago [-]
Just the other day at the NATO summit he seemingly claimed Iran's nuclear program is so damaged they'll never be able to build a bomb. So, mission accomplished? Nothing the guy says is credible..
strulovich 22 hours ago [-]
This is not a very charitable explanation, it takes politicians at their word during a war. (One should not do that, and you can refer to Putin’s language at 2022 as a parallel example to Trump’s)
The initial US goals clearly were:
1. Regime change
2. Denial is of nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only by current capability.
AlexCoventry 18 hours ago [-]
According to The Economist, the Iranian theocracy is no longer in power, the IRGC is. Still, not the regime change Trump was hoping for, that's for sure.
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
Forgive me its been a while since I read about Irans political structure, but my understanding is that the IRGC is supposed to take over in times of succession crisis, and sort of take any measures to guarantee the islamic revolution.
The test is supposed to be that they hand back power sometime after the crisis.
If you assume Khamenei Jr is still unwell, and there's still a spot of bother regarding what his succession would look like, and the civilian government is still a bit in shambles, the IRGC taking over seems very easy for them to justify. Whether they hand that power back willingly is another matter that remains to be seen.
The problem here is that Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
williamdclt 2 hours ago [-]
> Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
Your statement actually makes the way out of the spiral very explicit: Trump must stop being in power.
dreamcompiler 21 hours ago [-]
I think regime change is likely to happen within two years. Just not in Iran.
mcphage 22 hours ago [-]
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
What's the goal?! The US/Iran war has a ton of goals! Every day a new goal, each as improbable as the last.
Terr_ 18 hours ago [-]
Not only that, but even the status of the goals is insane.
Right now Republicans are just flipping a coin every day to decide whether each "goal" is (A) a critical need where only Dear Leader can save us or (B) a glorious victory for Dear Leader who has solved everything forever.
We saw the same with the the mutually-incompatible and shifting "goals" of the illegal taxes on American buyers (tariffs.) Some of those "goals" were being pre-declared as achieved simply by announcing the policy. (Narrator: "They weren't.")
Zardoz84 6 hours ago [-]
parafraseando Babylon 5 :
- We ended poverty
- When did this happen?
- Simply, we changed the dictionary
anjel 22 hours ago [-]
As with Ukraine, it's a David and Goliath kind of conflict and in both conflicts, the temptation for Goliath to escalate by leveraging scale is predictable, tempting and frought.
malcolmgreaves 20 hours ago [-]
Iran is not David in this case. They’ve shown that their drone warfare is just a little bit under what the US military can provide. Remember that they destroyed a quarter of a trillion dollars radar installation. And the US has spent billions on munitions. The US can’t actually keep going in this war.
WillPostForFood 4 hours ago [-]
Without diminishing the huge cost Iran has been able to inflict on US radar, quarter of a trillion is off by more than two orders of magnitude, maybe three. There are 1-2 confirmed radar system confirmed hit, a couple more suspected hit or damaged. But that is going to be hundreds of millions in damage, nowhere close to 250 billion,
Terr_ 17 hours ago [-]
I once compared the historic GDP values, and IIRC if Iraq-vs-US in 2003 is 1x baseline, then Iran-vs-US today is 7x. Plus Iran (today) has 2x the population and 3x times the land area than Iraq (today).
tbrake 19 hours ago [-]
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
kneecaping china by cutting off a huge source of its oil imports. Russia will not be able to make up the difference.
onlyrealcuzzo 16 hours ago [-]
> The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
holoduke 13 hours ago [-]
Someone making Putin the image of Russia clearly doesn't understand the country and inhaled to much propoganda. Sorry
jandrese 22 hours ago [-]
The Trump administration forgot all of the lessons of Vietnam.
__s 22 hours ago [-]
If it weren't for those bone spurs maybe that war wouldn't be so forgotten
JBiserkov 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe because they dogged it?
kylehotchkiss 18 hours ago [-]
Write off depreciation on military hardware?
lenerdenator 19 hours ago [-]
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
It varies. Which is the problem.
I can think of a few:
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
bluGill 15 hours ago [-]
3 happened. The new boss is the old bosses son though so it wasn't a useful change.
protocolture 12 hours ago [-]
>1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions.
Every time someone hits them, they learn that they wouldnt be hit if only they had a nuclear weapon.
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
The goal is a very simple one: make Trump look good. It wouldn't be the first war in history to be driven by pure vanity of an absolute ruler.
isleyaardvark 21 hours ago [-]
It's to distract from the Epstein files.
salemh 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Varelion 19 hours ago [-]
> What's the goal of the US/Iran war?
Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you:
1 - Haven't been paying attention since 2008.
2 - Are giving the administration way too much undeserved credit.
post-it 19 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure anything is a distraction from the Epstein files. I don't think the administration cares about the Epstein files. What would be the fallout if they were all released? We already know that a lot of wealthy people were raping children. It's not like the US is going to prosecute.
9dev 16 hours ago [-]
So why exactly is the department of justice in contempt of congress and a judge right now, refusing to release them?
Why are the names of perpetrators in the files censored, while those of victims remained clear?
Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
post-it 11 hours ago [-]
Because Trump likes being antagonistic. And the notion that plundering America is just a distraction from the files is itself a convenient distraction from the plundering of America.
> Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
Because the perpetrators run the government.
Varelion 17 hours ago [-]
Someone's name appears on it more than the word "God" does on the bible, according to the press. I think a tangible confirmation of that, and the deeds that occurred, and the fact Epstein was a Mossad agent with Russian ties would send a lot of things crumbling.
Did Bondi not say on camera that if the list was released "the system would collapse"?
fwip 19 hours ago [-]
Depends on who's in it.
Varelion 17 hours ago [-]
An open secret as to who is.
37374848 18 hours ago [-]
the goal of the war in iran is to produce a regime change that will prevent them from having nukes targeting israel
islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too
the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed
the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
selimthegrim 18 hours ago [-]
Pakistan has nukes and I don't see the Gulf/Levant quaking in their boots
37374848 17 hours ago [-]
It has no way to deliver them to Israel, and it is in itself a US vassal
pphysch 17 hours ago [-]
> the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine!
Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have succeeded. But you are never going to regime change a people who know with certainty that they will be butchered/raped/tortured by their supposed "saviors" the Israelis. There is literally nothing worse than surrendering to Israel.
37374848 17 hours ago [-]
the prevalence of secular jews in the state department makes them completely unable to read islamic countries. it's the third time this happens in a decade
by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology
the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
actionfromafar 16 hours ago [-]
The feedback loop of islamic eschatology is matched by the same in the Christian Right, so I think it's on purpose.
selimthegrim 17 hours ago [-]
I seem to remember a onetime secular Jew named Leopold Weiss did a pretty good job.
37374848 17 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and this breed of arabist has been relentlessly pushed out of the department since the 1960s which is why we are in the mess we are in
there's a devilish mess of evangelical wasps secular jews actual jews irishmen and not a single person who has read more than two lines about islam let alone convert into it
islam has been treated like communism or socialism ie somthkng you can root out in exchange for walmart and free stuff. thats not it. muslims are willing to die for it and they will prove it again and again, and no amount of conventional weaponry will bring afghanistan or iran to its heels for long
selimthegrim 15 hours ago [-]
Uh he was a little more than an Arabist but point taken
ApolloFortyNine 21 hours ago [-]
Well at this point the goal is for Iran to stop randomly blowing up innocent cargo ships. Or firing missiles at airports and cities in retaliation.
That sounds like it would be a return to the status quo.
_trampeltier 18 hours ago [-]
The don't blow randomly ships.
The US and Iran agreed (Point 4 and 5) on, for the next 60 days, Iran is "chief of traffic" in the strait.
Iran say now, ships have to take the route close to Iran. But some ships like to take the route close to Oman. Iran is just shooting on these ships.
QuercusMax 20 hours ago [-]
If that's the goal then the US and Israel are doing their best to stop it from happening. Iran is responding to provocations. Stop provoking them, no more blown up ships.
lenerdenator 19 hours ago [-]
Iran has shown a willingness to do these things through proxies regardless of anyone else before.
Furthermore, if they want to deal with the US or Israel, then they should target American or Israeli assets. Not third party ships manned by citizens of neutral nations who just want to get to port and remit cash to their families back home.
topgrain2 18 hours ago [-]
Should they avoid doing that because it’s working really well at putting their opponents in a bad spot, while costing them almost nothing?
Those ships are bearing goods from (or taking goods to) countries that are hosting US forces attacking them. They’re valid targets, and blockading their shipping… I mean, the US does that to countries that haven’t even helped attack us, seems insane to suggest it’s somehow a foul to do that to countries that are helping attack you.
QuercusMax 18 hours ago [-]
Running a blockade is a risky proposition; it's not something that happens by accident.
A lot of these "neutral" countries either host US military bases, US companies, or are otherwise aligned generally with the US.
lenerdenator 14 hours ago [-]
Are they sailing under the flags of nations who are combatants in this war, yes or no?
lejalv 2 hours ago [-]
US base in a country that allows its use = country is participating in the aggression = legitimate target
QuercusMax 13 hours ago [-]
What difference does that make? A blockade is a blockade, and oil is fungible, so it doesn't matter whose flag it is. Run a blockade, get blown up. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Remember, the US blew up an UNARMED Iranian ship after what was basically a parade at sea in the Indian Ocean. The US started this, and keeps it going.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen. Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine? Why not fire off a littany of missiles? Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
Animats 17 hours ago [-]
- Why don't they carpet bomb all of the Ukraine?
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII.
Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate.
Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit.
The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues.
It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours.
This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
It says, "Officials are checking whether travelers have received draft notifications".
Which means not everyone in this age bracket is prevented from leaving, only literal draft dodgers.
nradov 17 hours ago [-]
Russia has no ability to carpet bomb anyone anymore. They have only a handful of operational strategic bombers left and little or no capability to manufacture new ones. Much of the USSR's old heavy aircraft supply chain was in Ukraine. So Russia is unwilling to risk their aircraft in defended airspace because they need to preserve them as part of their strategic nuclear deterrent triad.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
> People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP (as mush as 50%, see wiki). Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
Other than nukes, Russia does not have significant spare capacity. They use missiles and drones with months of their production. They fly bomber aircraft as close to the front as they can. They've burned through most of their cold war era stockpiles of equipment. 0.5-1% of their entire population is a casualty of this war (so probably closer to 5% of their working age men).
3371 4 hours ago [-]
> Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine?
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
orthoxerox 14 hours ago [-]
> Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because it's hugely politically unpopular. There's a risk that this will happen after the parliamentary election this autumn.
Fizz43 8 hours ago [-]
You cannot mass troops easily in the days of satellite and targeted long ranged missiles. They mass 20 million troops but they have to transport them down supply lines and house them all to get them close to the front. They'd be picked apart.
KittenInABox 18 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that Russia's "full throttle" isn't actually as strong as they had posed...
asdff 17 hours ago [-]
It has to be stronger than Israel just from scale, and that seems plenty strong enough to level a modern city in a few days or weeks.
throw-the-towel 17 hours ago [-]
Ukraine has a proper army with proper weapons and strong foreign support; Gaza only has a bunch of militias with outdated arms and makeshift rockets. Obviously, fighting Gaza is easier than fighting Ukraine.
greedo 17 hours ago [-]
Scale doesn't really matter with an air force. The IAF is much, much stronger and more competent than the Russian Air Force. Plus, the Israelis are bombing defenseless cities (in Lebanon), and getting a lot of help from the US (in Iran).
lostlogin 16 hours ago [-]
> the Israelis are bombing defenseless cities (in Lebanon), and getting a lot of help from the US (in Iran).
No need for the brackets.
The Israelis also bombed defenceless Gaza and had a lot of help from the US with that.
creato 17 hours ago [-]
Israel can fly aircraft over their adversaries at will. Russia can't.
morkalork 16 hours ago [-]
What a difference having proper 5th generation planes makes
lostlogin 16 hours ago [-]
> that seems plenty strong enough to level a modern city in a few days or weeks
How would they do this?
The don’t control the sky or the ground. It’s down to ballistic missiles and drones. Many of these can be shot down.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
To be frank, you seem to have a cartoon's idea of war.
US is the only country that maybe has a capability to carpet bomb someone to rubble. Russia has always preferred to do it with Artillery anyway, which they have done to many many Ukrainian cities.
A prolonged strategic bombing campaign that can "Wipe a city off a map" takes weeks, hundreds of bombers, and tens of thousands of tons of explosive, and either air supremacy to protect your bombers (not sufficient against a target with SAMs) or the ability to build hundreds of those bombers fresh.
Literally nobody can do that anymore. America can maybe do that once or twice. Only 60ish B52s even remain.
4a443da9 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jojobas 4 hours ago [-]
Russian goals are vastly different from US'. US has no intent to incorporate Iran or fight out for each and every mountain village. US goals might not be easily achievable either but for completely different reasons. Iran is also unlikely to get 10% of the logistical support Ukraine has.
mcphage 22 hours ago [-]
> Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
xp84 22 hours ago [-]
It’s an odd declaration and maybe based on Rus/Ukraine. But Ukraine is doing better now than in the first week of the “Special Military Operation” due to having a lot of rich allies who have (in fits and starts) given them a lot of money and gear, and due to a Russia which has stretched its military and economy to the breaking point.
By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving.
Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
Someone 19 hours ago [-]
> Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former.
“In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory”
According to that article, they expended ballpark a third of their inventory of expensive weapons systems such as Patriots or Tomahawk missiles, each with a production lead time of at least 3 years.
If so, they would run out of those expensive weapons in three more months.
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
Perhaps. If we need more, we can make more though, and at a faster rate than Iran can. I really doubt Iran has the capability to significantly threaten the factories where we make those munitions. The same can't be said the other way around.
I also suspect the US military is actively pursuing more cost-effective ways to blow things up, as Ukraine (and indeed Iran) has been doing. We don't have to use Patriots and Tomahawks all the time, unless we're shooting down something fast and dangerous with it. And again, Iran has a limited ability to pay for that type of thing, so I'm not that worried.
light_hue_1 5 hours ago [-]
> Perhaps. If we need more, we can make more though, and at a faster rate than Iran can.
We can't. We built a system that creates a very small number of very expensive munitions and that can't be scaled up. We've been trying to scale up munitions production for years now with the Ukraine war. And it just isn't possible.
Not only does it take years to make any missile now. Our total capacity to make missiles is incredibly low. Like, we can make 600 Patriot missiles per year. We've expended twice that so far with Iran alone. We can make 100 THADD per year. We've expended 300 so far.
The US will run out of missiles way before Iran does. Iran could easily produce 2000 missiles per year and if it pushed it could make closer to 8000.
Iran will recover its missile stocks from the current war in a year. It will take the US until 2031 to do the same.
O3marchnative 18 hours ago [-]
Have you taken a look at Iran's targeting capabilities and the assets they were able to destroy? More importantly, have you considered who facilitated those targeting capabilities?
Thank you - didn't see that yet, not surprising but very disappointing. Still, unless China is gonna start giving kinetic support to Iran, Iran's ability to be "doing great" in the war is still limited by its crippled, single-commodity-based economy and the US and allies' ability to blow a lot of their shit up.
I believe the assessment is based on the desire of the US to offer concessions (such as sanctions withdrawal) in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Which will be painful in the medium term, but less so in the long run as oil is diverted around it.
general1465 21 hours ago [-]
> Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former.
I disagree. The huge problem here is that USAF is showing how they are doing things over and over again. For China it is a treasure trove of data and ideal place for testing of their gear to detect and later shoot down US stealth aircraft which USA is constantly threating to use against China.
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
I actually agree with you on this completely, it's definitely the worst downside of the war. Same reason we don't want S400s being operated by Turkiye, we'd like China and Russia to have as little data as possible on our warplanes.
jandrese 22 hours ago [-]
They'll be getting the Hormuz toll money.
jmyeet 9 hours ago [-]
So if the Iran war is still going on in 5 years the global economy has collapsed. I'm not sure people realize just how quickly this situation is going to be dire. 2-3 months more of this and certain countries are going to have rolling blackouts. We will be having shortages of avgas and huge price spikes in avgas, gas and diesel. Diesel in particular is going to have a massive impact on inflation.
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
stronglikedan 22 hours ago [-]
lol, no. no comparison between those wars
kcatskcolbdi 22 hours ago [-]
It's hard to imagine them in a better place; they seem to have us by the balls already.
paxys 13 hours ago [-]
Big difference between the two - America has elections.
croes 11 hours ago [-]
Iran and Russia have elections too
anjel 21 hours ago [-]
History reveals that every war is won by the nation with superior industrial capacity.
cliglot 21 hours ago [-]
> History reveals that every war is won by the nation with superior industrial capacity.
You’d be pretty hard pressed to refer the victor of any of these wars as having “superior industrial capacity” compared to their opponents.
tclancy 21 hours ago [-]
Is this some kind of subtle gag?
mythrwy 16 hours ago [-]
The Mongol army was much less industrialized than the people they conquered though so I'd say it's factor but not decisive.
vondur 14 hours ago [-]
Yep, how long does it take to replace an F-35 or one Reaper drone? In WW2 we probably could have buried Germany in the amount of tanks we could produce. We are like Germany from WW2 now, with hand stitched upholstery in our Tiger Tanks.
briandw 19 hours ago [-]
These systems are antifragile. Just like what was exposed by the supply chain shock during covid. You optimize like crazy to squeeze every bit of efficiency (I know it's the military, so this is relative) out of a system when times are good / easy. Then the game changes a little and the entire thing comes apart. The US military has been operating in an uncontested space for far too long and there is major weakness in all the unprotected assets away from the front. Think about all the aircraft that are unprotected and near civilians. A project spiderweb in the US would be relatively easy and devastating. The US military needs to get their butt in gear and take action to close those vulnerabilities.
phyzome 11 hours ago [-]
By antifragile, do you mean fragile?
briandw 11 hours ago [-]
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.
recitedropper 10 hours ago [-]
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.
WWII? Fabius did this to Hannibal more than a thousand years ago. The core of his strategy was to dunk on supplies, stall, and have the Carthaginians run out of food.
I imagine Iran, Ukraine, and Russia all know about Fabian strategy.
yborg 20 hours ago [-]
I wonder when the use of 'culminate', v. "reach a climax or point of highest development" for "cease to be effective" became the standard in military-related writing when trying to sound smart. The original usage in the specific context of an army's advance or offensive coming to an end made some sense but it's now used as basically a wordy synonym for "stops" in any context.
coffeecantcode 16 hours ago [-]
Not to mention the closing paragraph of the article essentially says the same thing 8 times - for such a well written paper the closing paragraph was a real disappointment in my eyes. Overall though, good write up.
m_dupont 16 hours ago [-]
I'm also loving their phrase "on a nonlinear battlefield"
... not sure what a linear battlefield would be
eszed 11 hours ago [-]
Static (relatively, at least) battle lines? Think of WWI: you knew where the danger was, and where it wasn't.
Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
wilkommen 15 hours ago [-]
I think a linear battlefield is one in which there is a "front line", which was a given for prior wars but maybe not as much anymore. Future wars might see adversarial forces mixed among each other spatially more than in the past.
haunter 22 hours ago [-]
> If history provides the theory, the ongoing war in Ukraine offers a brutal contemporary lesson: Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics, not when they run out of weapons.
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
jillesvangurp 7 hours ago [-]
If you know your military history, it's a lesson military planners learn with essentially every war that is then forgotten when the next generation of military planners and politicians come along.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
hvs 22 hours ago [-]
That was discussed in the article.
ksd482 15 hours ago [-]
She specifically said "contemporary lesson" while citing the original WW2 lesson on logistics.
By contemporary lesson I assume she means similar lesson but more recent and keeping modern world/logistics in mind.
He learnt the hard way (as did all those who followed him into Russia)
orthoxerox 21 hours ago [-]
Napoleon planned his Russian campaign extensively: he had supply hubs set up all over the Duchy of Warsaw, with feeder routers from Prussia keeping them full.
What he didn't anticipate was how bad the roads in Russia would be and how long the Russian army would retreat along them. You can't resupply an army that is marching on a narrow dirt road through a forest because it's blocking its own supply lines.
lostlogin 16 hours ago [-]
If you’re going to Russia for the winter, have somewhere to stay and take a jacket. Napoleon screwed up the logistics with all his assumptions.
orthoxerox 15 hours ago [-]
Napoleon lost the bulk of his army in the summer.
thrownawaysz 21 hours ago [-]
>the difficulty of transporting extremely heavy 155-millimeter artillery shells and guided multiple-launch rocket system pods across contested oceans and degraded theater road networks
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
LinuxAmbulance 19 hours ago [-]
> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
contubernio 5 hours ago [-]
It could be attacked easily via an alliance with Mexico or Canada. The premise that such a thing could never happen is not a good one for military planning.
AlexCoventry 18 hours ago [-]
According to Zelensky, there will be drones capable of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers within a couple of years. The US mainland is definitely at risk of drone attack in the near-medium term, IMO.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
I did some digging, reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane.
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
eszed 11 hours ago [-]
I have a friend whose dad finished his engineering career at SABRE (he retired some years before it shut down). According to him, the original concept wasn't far-fetched, but that they didn't crack some manufacturing / materials issues. He thought they should have continued to work on those, instead of redesigning to avoid them. He had retired by the time we spoke about it, and I don't know the particular model / design to which he was referring. If that's accurate, then possibly materials technology / manufacturing techniques have matured to the point that the "simpler" design he preferred could be feasible. That's all second-hand speculation, so take it with a dose of salt, but a short timeline might be reasonable.
lostlogin 16 hours ago [-]
The idea that attacks on the US come from afar is an assumption too.
It doesn’t seem impossible that some radical group of attacks the US from within.
And that’s quite apart from the US threats to attack its neighbours.
margalabargala 16 hours ago [-]
North Korea and Iran both have orbital launch vehicles. If you can put something in orbit, that's most of the way to putting something in Times Square or DC.
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
mrguyorama 16 hours ago [-]
A drone capable of traveling tens of thousands of kilometers to its target is called a cruise missile.
They are not cheap.
What "reactive engine" is Zelensky talking about?
kylehotchkiss 18 hours ago [-]
For better and for worse our country is armed to the teeth with civilians who would take great offense to a foreign military invasion
protocolture 12 hours ago [-]
>Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
a34729t 18 hours ago [-]
China has missed their window of opportunity, sadly.
For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.
For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.
manvillej 16 hours ago [-]
I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there. especially since rocket launches tend to be extremely static.
More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.
ceejayoz 16 hours ago [-]
> I just don't see how the fuel costs of getting things up to space winning out unless production is located up there.
Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.
tsimionescu 5 hours ago [-]
Starship is also in theory targetting to reach Mars in 2022.
tofuahdude 16 hours ago [-]
The prospect of cleanup duty has never stopped anyone at war. Fields of landmines maiming children for decades, unexploded ordinance in cities, etc etc.
Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.
tsimionescu 5 hours ago [-]
I'd bet China would like nothing more than the USA basing its future war strategy on Starship, with its long history of fictional timelines and capacities.
icegreentea2 15 hours ago [-]
Unclear how China will react to orbital/near-orbital launches that track near/over China in a hot war situation.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
throwawayqqq11 16 hours ago [-]
Have you considered the cost difference of drone re-entry vs commercial container logistics?
There are many options to deliver drones to a location and i dont think from orbit is the most viable one, let alone moving any production there.
lostlogin 16 hours ago [-]
The next war is going to need the US to do something pretty spectacular if it’s going to reclaim the ground it’s lost in the Iran war.
The situation there is an utter joke, and shows no sign of wrapping up any time soon.
Robotbeat 13 hours ago [-]
That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war. If there was political will, then the area around the Hormuz strait would’ve been seized, as well as the nuclear sites secured. Carpet bombing, too, not just surgical strikes.
lostlogin 6 hours ago [-]
> That’s because there’s no political will for ground forces by the US because it’s a dumb war.
It’s all very well claiming you can win, but when you don’t that’s the result you’re stuck with.
elzbardico 12 hours ago [-]
Most analysts doubt the US, on its present phase, has the capabilities of doing so.
pphysch 18 hours ago [-]
Opportunity for what?
greekrich92 18 hours ago [-]
Not sure if you've noticed, but none of that SpaceX stuff is going to happen
No serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.
Robotbeat 17 hours ago [-]
Having followed SpaceX since the beginning, this is not true at all. People doubted every single step. Industry experts did.
noosphr 16 hours ago [-]
People doubt the timelines, not the claims. The timelines are pure fantasy and have been since the start.
ceejayoz 16 hours ago [-]
> People doubt the timelines, not the claims.
People doubted the claims, too. Particularly landing and re-use.
>“When you talk about conventional technologies on a booster like you see other people doing, and being able to recover and reuse that booster 15 times with relatively minimial refurbishmoent costs, that’s pretty darn challenging, and maybe not the right place, in our view, to start on that problem,” Bruno said.
This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching it given their limited resources.
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
ULA was openly skeptical about the viability of landing at all. Then reuse. Then the goalposts moved to this, repeated reuse.
Robotbeat 13 hours ago [-]
Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”
tim333 3 hours ago [-]
>Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics
It'll be interesting to see how that goes in Ukraine where Russia has ~700k troops and the logistics are being cut by Hornet drones and similar.
zhdc1 6 hours ago [-]
Good article but, like a lot of stategic studies pieces, grossly underestimates what the American industrial base is capable of.
1. The US is second in the world, behind Ukraine, in military drone production.
2. The US is a close second to China in logistics + last mile drone production.
3. The US is still the only country with the proven ability to move mass anywhere in the world.
None of this means that the US will win a hot war against China. However, that has - always - been the case. The US fought against China in Korea and SE Asia/Vietnam and had the opportunity twice to move the conflict into Chinese territory. They didn't, for obvious reasons.
Geography + LOCs + population are a b***h.
lljk_kennedy 5 hours ago [-]
"No-one can match out tririme fleet, or move men as quickly through the Mediterranean" - Athens circa 440 CE
eimrine 6 hours ago [-]
Are there any vessels proved to move mass anywhere, which are still alive from the latest moving mass happened? AFAIK, all those ships are not in service, and all American males got somewhat femalified.
zhdc1 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, well over a hundred iirc that the US can requisition on day one of a conflict. America still leads here.
Worth noting that, outside of WW2, the US has never really had a large merchant fleet.
JeremyHerrman 8 hours ago [-]
> In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack.
"force fields" had me reading that sentence entirely wrong
txoria 7 hours ago [-]
Presumably, the article is intended for military officers. Do military officers have nothing better to do than strain their eyes, reading a light gray text on a white background? And the article gives advice on strain-proof logistics, no less.
Seems like Modern War Institute is more concerned with looking posh, than getting their message across - the message of endurance. That's ironic.
pards 27 minutes ago [-]
> a light grey text on a white background
This makes the page SO hard to read. Why are "designers" still doing this? Have they no respect for their readers?
latentframe 4 hours ago [-]
Precision weapons are shifting the center of gravity from firepower to logistics. Industrial capacity, redundancy, and resilience may matter more than having the most advanced platforms.
marking-time 15 hours ago [-]
I just finished listening to a series of podcasts on Crusades I-IV. It is interesting to note that logistics were as important then as they are today. Many battles were influenced by the simple things like food and water availability. In the IV Crusade, financial logistics became one of the key factors.
As for the article, when the institution that trains future generals says we have a problem then we should _listen_.
gerdesj 11 hours ago [-]
My old man used to say: "an army marches on its stomach".
Most people hereabouts will be wittering on about how best to kill people/do stuff with drones and forget that logistics is rather more complicated than killing things.
Fundamentally: people need food, water and shelter. Vehicles need fuel, mechanics and stuff. Killing people and destroying stuff needs ammunition or at least something sharp (and that will need something to keep it sharp).
Then you need to coordinate all this stuff, along with comms and a lot more details that I've not mentioned.
Then you need to persuade your troops to do their medieval best on the opposition and hope it works.
austin-cheney 1 hours ago [-]
I did cyber defense for the army for more than 10 years before moving into logistics. Logistics is far more complex and challenging.
I can see from many of the comments here people generally have absolutely no idea what logistics management comprises. Let this be a lesson on Dunning-Kruger.
diddid 16 hours ago [-]
This has been true for as long as war has been a thing. The Army logistics won’t break, it’ll adapt, because that’s what war machines do. What’s good today isn’t good tomorrow. It’s a nice piece but nothing Sun Tzu or a good game of hearts of iron couldn’t teach you.
jmyeet 9 hours ago [-]
A lot of people end up commenting on current and potential conflicts clearly knowing nothing about logistics and it shows. I think this whenever I see "China will invade Taiwan". But it also shows up when people don't realize the Iran war is unwinnable and was unwinnable from the start.
First, China. 100 miles of open ocean separate mainland China and Taiwan. To invade you need to put boots on the ground. That means you also need armor. And then you need everything that goes with that. Food, medical, resupply, ammunition, a place to repair your vehicles and so on. You can't airlift this, even with air supremacy. It requires ships, a lot of ships. And that means Taiwan, the US and allies could, if they wanted to, wreak havoc with supply lines.
I've seen one estimate that it would take over a million soldiers for China to occupy Taiwan, possibly two million. China simply does not have that amphibious capability so this is a silly conversation. American politicians talks this up to give more money to weapopns manufacturers for weapon systems that are too expensive and don't work and also to propagandize the population into "China = bad". But it's not a real threat.
On a clear day from Calais you can see the white cliffs of Dover. I believe the distance at its closest point is 17 miles. Yet despite having an Army that exceeded 12 million soldiers, Germany was unable to invade Britain. This is big of a problem water was then. It hasn't changed.
Second, Iran. Iran is surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and the Persian Gulf on the 4th. There is nowhere where a US invasion could muster like they did with Kuwait (ie from Saudi Arabia). We saw the futility of this in the Iran-Iraq war, which was a complete stalemate (with over a million dead) despite an almost decade of the US supplying Saddam Hussein.
So with mountains on 3 sides, that leaves an amphibious landing. Again, the problem remains of where would troops muster? It can't be anywhere beyond the Strait of Hormuz because the Navy can't defend against drone and missile attacks at close range like that, let alone get thousands of supply ships through safely. So that leaves Pakistan or Oman. Both are in range of drone attacks. The US has essentially abandoned all Gulf bases because of the complete inability to defend them. How would the US defend a million troops and all the supplies they need, including landing craft?
Logisitcally, the operation would be as complex and large as D-Day. The US doesn't have that military anymore. The Navy has a pair of amphibious landing craft that could put 5000 Marines somewhere. Great. They'd die. For enough infantry, you'd need a draft. You'd need to build so many ships. It would take years and nobody has that kind of time.
The Joint Chiefs know this. It's why no US president has started a war with Iran despite the Israeli PM asking every one of them to do so since at least Reagan. It's only this president who took the bait of Mossad telling him how the regime would fall within days after a decapitation strike.
The entire Iranian military project is to resist the US military. Bases buried in mountains, cheap ballistic missiles and drones that can be mass-produced, a mosaic defense to avoid potential decapitation and air defenses that are seemingly good enough that the US, even with F35s, still has to stand off.
I bet you won't find a single serious military planner who thought this operation was possible.
susiecambria 13 hours ago [-]
I know nothing about the topic BUT I can remember John Kirby and Jake Sullivan regularly talking logistics, Poland, and other things mentioned here. I don't think I've heard those things from this administration's reps. Not sure if not hearing is good or bad. I sure learned a bunch from Kirby and Sullivan, though.
mcswell 21 hours ago [-]
I was puzzled by this: "...the Army must reinvest in up-armoring its logistical fleet. While adding armor reduces payload capacity and increases fuel consumption, violating the peacetime gospel of efficiency, it is a mandatory trade-off for survival." Where are the armored vehicles now in Ukraine? I don't hear much about them, and I thought that was because drones can find the weaknesses in armor. Instead the emphasis now seems to be on rapidly moving logistical vehicles (and even, for the Russians, on hand-carried "stuff", which seems unlikely to be sustainable). Can someone who knows more than I do comment on this?
mpyne 19 hours ago [-]
> Where are the armored vehicles now in Ukraine?
A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?
And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size.
It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
mcswell 13 hours ago [-]
"A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?"
Well, that's what I meant, where are the Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. Because I consider the areas that Russia occupies to be temporarily occupied Ukraine.
Although you (I) could ask where the armored vehicles are that the US and other countries gave to Ukraine. For awhile, Bradley Fighting Vehicles (lightly armored) and M1A1 Abrams were making a lot of news (I think the former were doing surprisingly well, and the latter not as good as expected). But lately I have heard very little about either, or about other armored vehicles that were given to Ukraine.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
> Why not push that envelope?
The US have have been a nightmare for Ukraine, obstructive and unreliable. The European allies have slowly stepped up, but it’s been painful.
As dependence on the US has reduced, you can see the Ukrainian attacks increase in number, range and audacity.
Distant targets are getting hit. This week shipping had been hit hard, and the Crimea has taken a lot of damage. Bridges and logistics.
It’s a heavily skewed perspective but it if often accurate.
mpyne 15 hours ago [-]
> But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
It's not as easy as it sounds to put the weight of ordnance required in the very tight windows that would be needed to actually cause more than cosmetic or minor damage to that bridge.
Ukraine did pull off a spectacularly successful operation to destroy a laden fuel truck while it was crossing the bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Crimean_Bridge_explosion)... Russia repaired the damage within months and simply redirected fuel transport to other means.
Russia also has dedicated a large amount of air defense and EM jamming resources to protect the bridge, which increases the difficulty of pulling something off for Ukraine.
For a long time Ukraine didn't have the types of weapons that would be needed to even attempt it outside of saboteur types of actions. Now they have some precise ordnance like Storm Shadow but even these weapons are not destructive enough to take the bridge down except in large quantities, and those are quantities they seem to have decided are best put towards other targets.
Ukraine has recently seen substantial success in finding better weapons, with drones that can engage in "medium-range" scenarios to close off the so-called land bridge from Russia to Crimea. These weapons have also helped in degrading Russia's own defenses, but with this in mind Ukraine may feel it best to leave the Kerch bridge standing for now to allow Russian occupiers to flee across the bridge back to Russia, since Ukraine has the northern land route through occupied territories under much more effective fire control than at any point since 2022.
ElevenLathe 17 hours ago [-]
> But it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls?
This is a spitball, but there are several hundred thousand ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea (along with many more ethnic non-Ukrainians who were previously Ukrainian citizens and have been more-or-less forced to take on Russian citizenship since 2014). Even if the Ukrainian war machine wanted to commit war crimes and/or genocide by completely starving out a city of 2.5 million (unclear if this is true or not, at least to me), they would be -- at least partially -- commiting them against their own people.
asdff 15 hours ago [-]
Well they did already try and blow it up at least so that thought must have not crossed their mind. One wonders why they don't continue trying to blow it up though.
throw-the-towel 17 hours ago [-]
Holy cow, they've reinvented the armoured trains from the Civil War (late 1910s to early 1920s). In ten years, everything changes, yet in 100 years, nothing does.
rawgabbit 19 hours ago [-]
The most common truck used by the US army has no armor. The author is saying they need to be up-armmored despite the additional weight and fuel consumption; that is the "A2".
Serious question: does Figure 1 in the article make sense to anyone? If you understand the symbols, do you look at the diagram and it's clear how logistics works?
12 hours ago [-]
CapricornNoble 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. It depicts how supplies arrive at a port, move via roads to a logistics organization that is brigade-sized, assigned to support a corps. It depicts the subordinate units within that logistics organization (the Army calls these "Sustainment Brigades"). From there supplies go to the corps's subordinate divisions. Within one of those divisions, the supplies go to/between sustainment batalions. From there, supplies go to support battalions and maintenance companies at the division's subordinate brigades. Also, along the top you can see supplies delivered from outside of the AO directly to airfields within a Division Support Area. They can also be moved via air from Corps-level airfields. The icons there depict medium and heavy lift utility helicopters.
Many complain on negativism in HN comments, but how in the world can a sane person express anything positive when there's a hell-bent will in conjunction with the "next war"?
paulluuk 22 hours ago [-]
I consider myself an optimist, but given that the US has been in 229 wars over it's 249 years since founding, it seems highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a "next war".
xp84 22 hours ago [-]
There’s nothing peculiar about the US, every country or even tribe has fought many wars.
krapp 21 hours ago [-]
Not every country or tribe has been engaged in near continuous violence for over two centuries. That isn't simply "fighting many wars" it's being "existentially bound to warfare." The US is peculiar. It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder. It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war. It's the only nation to wage nuclear war, and did so primarily against civilians. It's (for the time being) the world's only superpower, with a military orders of magnitude larger than any other. It put the right to shoot people into its Constitution because its founders wanted a government that normalized regular revolutionary violence as a civic principle.
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
shipman05 18 hours ago [-]
I appreciate this comment, and agree with it in some respects, but some of these specifics are demonstrably false.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
krapp 11 hours ago [-]
That's fair criticism. The US isn't that unique in terms of colonialist expansion in the New World and I honestly forgot about Haiti. I just knew that Britain managed to end slavery without a war but I forgot about Haiti and its uprising.
wartywhoa23 22 hours ago [-]
My point is that war is the worst thing that humans can engage in, and that the prevailing sentiment is that constant war is an immutable status-quo, and hence it's okay, there's nothing we can do except downvoting those fucking negativists.
eth0up 21 hours ago [-]
I think the folks disagreeing with you maybe haven't spent much time in war. Almost certainly some in harsh skirmishes, but I reckon a few Nam, Korea and WWII vets would at least entertain your position on the subject. Pretty much every meta variation of terror has surfaced or has the potential to surface in war. Parts of Ukraine, I think, easily represent hell on Earth, for both sides.
Edit: I will go a bit further..
I consider Military the greatest power on Earth. It's sacred, necessary. But those who abuse its power commit, in my view, the greatest of sins. I don't mean the soldiers who fight, but those making the decisions of who they fight. The soldiers do their job, often willingly. And they are the ones who face the consequences. To betray them by corruption is the ultimate betrayal. War is a power that, I think, should be reserved for situations with no other option. Mercenaries not considered.
throw-the-towel 17 hours ago [-]
Sorry for the personal question, but are you a military vet? Because from the way you seem to respect soldiers yet abhor war, it sure does seem that you are.
eth0up 13 hours ago [-]
Only family, friends, and family and friends of the world yet unmet. No. I am not a vet. I've endured episodes of parochial dispute resulting in brutal combat, but always had a home to retire to at the end of the day. Having a functional imagination, general fealty to reality and a wide ear for the reports of others, I can easily surmise the amplified and sustained version of my own exposure. I also love what I love, and know the curse of losing it indefinitely. War pretty much promises an abundance of that. Many vets fester their whole lives in guilt, wishing it was they, not the other (a friend, an innocent) that was lost. I could spiral downward, but shouldn't.
Humans are a tough bunch. We rationalize some fairly insane shit. I've met folks subjected to things that would break me, and they just carry on. I think my perspective on the matter is starkly different from most vets. Where they shrug it off and move along, I sulk and brood. I think I am impervious to being a vet. I'd improbably make it so far. When I enlisted for the Navy, as young uneducated man, weeks passed, and I called several times each week. "we don't know yet" they'd say. And I'd call again. And on the final call, I asked, "when can I start?" they replied "You can't, but I'll put you on the phone now with the Marines..". I put down the phone. I've wondered at times if that was a mistake, and I think for what I might have contributed to good folks it might have been, but with my exceedingly compromised (by design?) view of geopolitics, I don't regret my choice.
What I can say with sincerity: Military is a sacred power, the bulwark comprising of enlisted soldiers. What each of them seek, or whatever the impetus for enlistment, those that wield them would be wise to hesitate when endeavoring to exploit them.
abtinf 22 hours ago [-]
War is not nearly the worst thing. Not even in the top 10.
wartywhoa23 22 hours ago [-]
Oh, really? I'd like to see your top 10.
abtinf 22 hours ago [-]
Things that are worse than war, a wildly incomplete list, in no particular order:
Pogroms; slavery; totalitarian dictatorship; theocracy; intentional mass starvation; mass organ harvesting; mass forced relocation; anarchy; failing to respond to unprovoked violence; restricting freedom instead of defeating the adversary.
malcolmgreaves 19 hours ago [-]
What do you think happens in war? Clean fighting from side to side?
You really think the massive amounts of death and destruction aren’t top ten? What do you think happens to the local population when an invading force arrives? You should go and read about the rape of Nanking. And just read about what happened in wars before the modern era.
amanaplanacanal 19 hours ago [-]
Are you suggesting that the country being invaded should roll over instead of fight? Or is it ok with you for them to prosecute a war?
strictnein 22 hours ago [-]
Are you under the impression that humanity could reach a state where there is never another major war?
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
pjc50 22 hours ago [-]
People were starting to think that way at the "end of history" period between the Cold War and 9/11. At that time the major powers were not involved in wars, and it was believed that regional ones could be "solved" like Yugoslavia.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
throw-the-towel 17 hours ago [-]
> People were starting to think that way at the "end of history" period between the Cold War and 9/11.
And between WW1 and WW2. And just before WW1, during the Belle Époque. And probably before that, too.
wartywhoa23 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, I am. That requires a total reassesment of who the real enemy is, though (hint: psychopaths at power).
AlexCoventry 17 hours ago [-]
How do you reliably prevent a clever psychopath who's set their mind to it from gaining power?
wartywhoa23 13 hours ago [-]
That is the question worth focusing all the available energy and enthusiasm that is always somewhere else, but never at the humankind's worst problem.
I think the answer could arise from a widely growing understanding of
a) the methods of mass manipulation. Without manipulation, or outright mass hypnosis, no dictator is possible;
b) the whole structure of power, and the fact that there are numerous barriers to filter out all non-psychopaths along the way to the top, with multiple checkpoints where an ever increasing degree of corruption and depravity must be demonstrated to the controllers.
But even a) alone should be sufficient.
zemvpferreira 12 hours ago [-]
Where there are simians, there is war. The more primitive the society, the bloodier and more total the war is. I wish our problem were psychopaths in power, but the truth is we are a tribal and fearful species and war is in our genes. It's as certain as a sunrise as long as there are humans.
wartywhoa23 4 hours ago [-]
This is the goto excuse, or mantra if you will, deeply programmed into people by those who need cannon fodder to protect heaps of loot robbed from said fodder.
"We". "War is in our genes".
Start with "me". Do I need war? Do I want war?
Do I have something that differentiates me from a simian?
To bear a reasoning mind, and have a heart that is capable of love, and still to appeal to the animal foundation is a total betrayal of everything that makes you not just yet another animal.
zemvpferreira 4 hours ago [-]
I don't want or need war, but I won't deny to having felt tribal impulses before. I won't deny culture and groups are different from individuals. Idealism is fine until it starts interfering with reality.
wartywhoa23 3 hours ago [-]
> Idealism is fine until it starts interfering with reality.
Idealism has been carving into reality nonetheless.
Our current standards of living are straight out of platonic Eidos, compared to those of our cave-dwelling predecessors.
Computers are also a perfect example of materialized ideals. Airplanes, Internet, space exploration, you name it.
Why should that stop at war for any reason other than someone having a deep vested interest in it?
17 hours ago [-]
marssaxman 19 hours ago [-]
Your concern is reasonable but misdirected. This article is a publication of the "Modern War Institute", a research organization at West Point, the US Army military academy; it is literally their job to anticipate and plan for the next war, whatever it may happen to be. Deciding whether those plans ought to be used is a completely different responsibility.
alansaber 22 hours ago [-]
Comparing the negativity of HN to the inevitability IRL warfare is absolutely hilarious, but I take your point
mcphage 22 hours ago [-]
Ukraine didn't want to go to war, but someone else made that choice for them.
bix6 18 hours ago [-]
Does the US have any initiatives to fix this? Like I keep hearing about reshoring manufacturing but is there actually a concerted effort? It seems like we get a major plant announcement every now and then for some behemoth but is there anything targeted for the SMB or startup space?
malfist 18 hours ago [-]
We had a bill for that, the build back better bill, but it's been gutted.
catigula 18 hours ago [-]
Tariffs and import controls. Why do you think that BYD is banned from the US?
w10-1 17 hours ago [-]
If decisions are actually being made based on analogies instead of analysis, the whole thing is brittle.
The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe.
But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends.
The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
dfedbeef 8 hours ago [-]
Almost all of those things have happened already except for the market crash
neocodesoftware 20 hours ago [-]
What’s missing - the cost of armoring and weaponizing logistics. Maybe easier to invent a new “startup” logistics than replace the old - especially when he talks about a new autonomous delivery in kill zones.
wilkommen 15 hours ago [-]
The arguments in this article seem very similar in spirit to the ones mad in "The Sling and the Stone" book by Thomas X. Hammes.
red_admiral 21 hours ago [-]
I would not underestimate the power of a fully mobilized USA. If we really need to, we can do a lot of things that would die to bureaucracy in peacetime - see WWII.
marking-time 16 hours ago [-]
"see WWII" ... I agree, however it is very unfortunate that we have off-shored so much of our industrial capacity.
asdff 18 hours ago [-]
I read there was actually significant war exhaustion among the public towards the end, contrary to the patriotism lens this time in history is frequently shown with. There was also a lot of effort to censor what was actually happening in the war from the public, both in terms of press coverage and in screening soldier letters to home. I'm not sure how long the american war machine can actually last. All the post WWII wars are characterized by significant public war exhaustion. And these days you are going to have the other side posting on social media POV videos of american soldiers getting decimated by drones.
lostlogin 17 hours ago [-]
What’s more damaging at home? Pictures of your own soldiers dying, or video of the war crimes they are committing?
Sadly, most wars generate both.
asdff 12 hours ago [-]
Both I'd say. These were both large issues for morale during Vietnam with how that war was increasingly documented and stretching on quite long with no real victory condition.
causality0 22 hours ago [-]
Change is not going to happen until it's forced. The US military was born as a force required to rebuff existential threats. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the gravitational center of the US military has been the profit margins of defense contractors. What creates the greatest profit? Centralization. Why have a dozen logistics centers when you can have one big one? A trillion dollar fighter program more efficiently absorbs tax dollars than half a dozen specialized vehicle programs from mid-sized companies. Why get congress to pay you to make cheap drones when you can get them to pay you to build $4M Patriot missiles? The MBAs have been riding the US military into the dirt for forty years and I don't think it's going to stop any time soon.
kasey_junk 22 hours ago [-]
Isn’t the American military logistics the most decentralized supply chain in the world? Famously (perhaps apocryphal) _every congressional district_ has jobs in the military logistics supply chain.
causality0 22 hours ago [-]
It would be decentralized if the same things were being built in different places. The way US government manufacturing is set up is more like taking all your organs out, sticking each of them in a separate room, and piping the blood back and forth. Every item has a mile-long supply chain and attacking any part of it shuts the whole thing down.
Tostino 19 hours ago [-]
Decentralization doesn't matter at all if you still have single points of failure everywhere.
snowpid 21 hours ago [-]
sorry, but the European defence is more decentralised.
AlexCoventry 17 hours ago [-]
> Change is not going to happen until it's forced.
Yes, Pearl Harbor was a known vulnerability, prior to the Japanese attack. The US just wasn't ready to take airpower seriously, at that point.
They are largely congressional jobs programs, not traditional business investments
xp84 12 hours ago [-]
In that, I agree with you. Tbh it sounds almost socialist: The government pays a lot of money to employ lots of workers in really good jobs, with only a pretty modest amount of overhead (money earned by the investors of the contractors).
And then that stimulates the economy further as those people all spend that money, and the government gets a bunch of bombs and fighter jets out of the deal.
bflesch 22 hours ago [-]
I agree with your point but it's incredibly naive to identify "the MBAs" as scapegoat for this problem.
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
Nukes prevented global super powers from going to war against each other for the past 80 years. Maybe the vast democratization and spread of cheap drones will prevent all these stupid little wars that have been fought since WWII. One can hope at least. The whole idea of the US going to war against China is idiotic once any half witted person spends at least 2 minutes thinking about the implications... But hey - it's been great for the military-industrial complex to profit off the fear mongering!
mmooss 14 hours ago [-]
It's important not to overreact:
Early concepts of aircraft in warfare, between WWI and WWII, often said aircraft would make battle lines irrelevant. They assumed nothing could stop aircraft. It didn't work out that way.
Now people say the same about small, uncrewed aircraft (drones). It's based only on a few years of very early adoption - even among technologists in vast, public, civilian markets, who can make predictions like that? Very possibly defenses will improve substantially and possibly defense will gain the advantage or even dominate. I don't believe anyone knows.
One difference between crewed and uncrewed aircraft is that the latter are much less expensive, and easily adopted by forces with minimal resources. The Taliban were not going to build or buy effective crewed fighter planes or bombers - they could not cross NATO battle lines in that way - but now they could build or buy drones.
skywhopper 17 hours ago [-]
Not sure we need to wait for the next war. The Iran war has shown some pretty major holes in US military (mostly Navy) logistics already when they aren’t picking a fight with someone who can’t fight back at all.
Stevvo 22 hours ago [-]
A limited view of the threat. All very well worrying about keeping your armored brigade combat team fueled up, but that won't be much use when the same weapons that threaten the logistics have destroyed all the Abrams and Bradleys that use the fuel.
The Army is still under the delusion that its possible to win a peer conflict, not having learnt the lesson of the cold war there will be no winners in this hypothetical fight.
mmooss 14 hours ago [-]
How much would electrification reduce the fuel logistics burden?
Electricity can be moved anywhere in the world instantly, if you can dig a trench and lay cables. The problem, of course, is density, some combination of (energy OR power) per (liter OR gram) depending on the application:
Batteries don't come close to the energy/power density of jet fuel, but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use? And what about other electrical storage options, such as hydrogen fuel cells?
Some options might be uneconomical in a civilian environment where logisitics is relatively cheap but fine in a warfare environment where logisitics is far more expensive both in moving assets and in the consequences of logisitical failure.
Also, I'm assuming vehicles consume most of the fuel, but maybe there are other significant applications? And I'm assuming throughput on electrical lines is sufficient - it's fast but how much energy can you move per hour? - but that's something I've never had to think about.
protocolture 12 hours ago [-]
> but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use?
In WW2 when low on fuel they would gassify combustible items and run that through the engines. The germans called it Holzgas. You could rig this up in the field. It wasnt good mind but the vehicles could move about when logistics fell through.
The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless. It would become a game of finding and destroying power cables.
mmooss 12 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Maybe you could charge your electric vehicles on local supplies and/or carry emergency generators for charging that burn whatever input that is available, including wind, solar, and maybe even cranks, or that can be made, a la Holzgas. Also, you could charge one electrical device from others - even others at a distance.
> The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless.
I think buried electrical cables would be much more appealing than being tied to roads and trucks full of gasoline. Electrical cables are easy to lay, probably by uncrewed ground or even air vehicles, and could be done quickly with optimization. Redundancy would be cheap and easy, creating a network with few single points of failure. And keeping some generators close to the front, you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
protocolture 9 hours ago [-]
>I think buried electrical cables would be much more appealing than being tied to roads and trucks full of gasoline.
They played this game with communications cables in WW2.
You would need to dig them pretty deep, likely under barrage. And then when the artillery finds them again, back out you go.
>you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
This would likely be the ultimate solution, ICE vehicles.
moi2388 20 hours ago [-]
“ In a future peer conflict, the US Army will not be granted a six-month, uncontested build-up phase, nor will it operate under friendly skies.”
Depends how the war starts. Russia? USA somehow attacks? Easily 6 months of buildup in Europe.
China? Again USA somehow attacks? Again buildup in Australia, Japan, Korea.
Also US air power is absolutely supreme. I don’t see how they will be fighting in actually contested skies even only 2 months in.
siriusastrebe 18 hours ago [-]
Air power relies on fuel and maintenance and runways. It's not necessary to contest the skies if the adversary can destroy the "tail" that supplies the aircraft.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
elzbardico 12 hours ago [-]
As Stalin said: in a war, quantity is a quality in itself.
22 hours ago [-]
hunmernop 22 hours ago [-]
So many armchair quarterbacks
AlexCoventry 17 hours ago [-]
There's likely a major world war brewing. Should I not be thinking and forming opinions about that? It's probably going to profoundly affect me.
bee_rider 21 hours ago [-]
The “game” has been reinvented recently, there aren’t any non-armchair quarterbacks. Thankfully.
lenerdenator 19 hours ago [-]
The entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
We should be throwing people in prison over this.
amanaplanacanal 19 hours ago [-]
We usually wait for people to break laws and be convicted before we do that.
lenerdenator 18 hours ago [-]
I'm sure we could find one. It's the military-industrial complex. It exists to facilitate corruption.
Laurel1234 17 hours ago [-]
> and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
preetham_rangu 22 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
apawloski 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
awfafawf 16 hours ago [-]
LOL IRAN NOT MENTIONED ONCE AND WE SUPPOSED TO TAKE THIS SERIO?
THE MAN POINTING OUT THE PROBLEM - HE IS THE PROBLEM.
HelloMcFly 22 hours ago [-]
This piece seems logical and correct. It also seems entirely AI-generated, but I suppose we've moved into a world where that's just the way content is now.
ranger207 22 hours ago [-]
Nah that's just the way defense essays have sounded for the past 20 years or so
Noumenon72 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, I disagree with Pangram on this. It's a very familiar style, so familiar that things that might look like LLM-isms in another context actually give a smooth feeling of fitting the style exactly.
BadBadJellyBean 22 hours ago [-]
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. You gain nothing from pointing out every post that seems LLM generated. Read it or don't but we don't make the world better by accusing each other of using LLMs. The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration.
HelloMcFly 22 hours ago [-]
There is no "maybe", it is at least largely AI-generated though I'm sure there's a human involved in building the perspective. Run it through any checker you can find, the outcome is without doubt.
I don't think I've made a similar comment elsewhere on Hacker News, reddit, etc., (nor do I plan to make a habit of it) but this one stuck out to me. I know this because I did read it just as I've read previous posts such as these on West Point through the years. This just isn't how things used to be written. It's a little more ambiguous out in the wild on any given site/blog/etc.
> The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration
Mistrust of what? The human voice behind this thought? Yes, I think that mistrust is valid and earned. Nevertheless, I admit the topic seems pertinent and the argument has merit.
BadBadJellyBean 20 hours ago [-]
You can't reliably prove that something is written by an LLM. There are certainly tells but it could be a personal writing style as well. When reading everything with the suspicion that it might be written by an LLM you are at best finding LLM written content and at worst accuse people of using an LLM when they haven't. Nothing is gained by the accusation.
For me a better way is to find out if I want to read the text or not. Does is there something interesting being said? Is it presented in a way that is at least pleasant enough to read? Is it concise enough? If not I don't read it. Or I skim it.
Don't misunderstand me. I don't like the overuse LLM generated texts. I write my words on my own. Still there is nothing to be gained from distrusting and calling out authors.
HelloMcFly 20 hours ago [-]
I'll admit it cannot be proven to the standard of criminal conviction, but I don't think it's beyond a person's or technology's ability to identify enough "tells" to make a solid conclusion. I can share the things that stick out to me if desired, not that it ultimately constitutes any "proof".
> Still there is nothing to be gained from distrusting and calling out authors
Is there nothing? Nothing at all to be gained by resisting the loss of human-created written thought? It may be a futile effort, the tide may be too great, but I guess I'm not just quite so ready to accept the robotic creation of all written content without even a periodic passing comment. It's good for the soul, but I admit I am probably commenting in a community less likely to appreciate or share such a sentiment.
BadBadJellyBean 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think you gain anything. The article is written, it will not be rewritten or unwritten because you said it's written by an LLM. I don't see the author not using LLMs in the future if they did use them.
I don't see how you changed anything by pointing out that you assume that this is written by an LLM. What was gained? I don't really see anything. Do you think anyone is dissuaded from reading the article or from using an LLM the next they write something because you could maybe probably tell that it's probably written by an LLM?
I think we all lose more than we gain if we do this. We look at each other with mistrust over whether they used an LLM and we point fingers as soon as we see a sign of "wrongdoing". I see artists and writers frustrated about being accused of using ML tools. And the people who just use LLMs and image generation tools mostly just don't care.
The whole "AI" industry makes everything diffuse. We have to go by vibes if something is made by a human or not and the signs are ever more subtle. We have to be so incredibly careful not to accuse those who are on our side. People who create real human work.
For me the easiest solution for now is to stop accusing. Unless you know for certain that there was not a real human behind it don't point fingers.
HelloMcFly 18 hours ago [-]
> What was gained? I don't really see anything... I don't see how you changed anything...
From an outcome-orientation, no, nothing has changed. But then why write a letter to my representatives or leave public comments on legislation? That seems to do nothing. Why volunteer to remove amur honeysuckle from an American forest? It will just come back in a few years.
You are being outcome-oriented, I'm being value-oriented. I think the effort is worth it for the act alone. I believe I retained some dignity by still caring about the distinction between human-created content and machine created content, and for caring enough to still be able to tell the difference. To you it's worth nothing, fine, to me it's worth something. It's not like I'm blanketing comment sections across this or any other site.
> Unless you know for certain that there was not a real human behind it don't point fingers
I am telling you, definitively, this article is "penned" primarily if not exclusively by an LLM. You want to hang on to possibility that isn't true? That is your decisions to make!
I find it interesting that your reaction to my observation seems to make the observation more of a pejorative than my own comments have. You act like I'm accusing someone of a deplorable or shameful act. I don't feel that strongly, but I am nevertheless sad to see the loss of humanity in our writing.
I'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point.
> The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined. In modern warfare, the tail is the primary target. If the tail is severed, the teeth are rendered useless.
It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarjacoby/2025/09/19/kyivs-e-...
Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex.
That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.
The paper doesn't mention Ukraine at all, yet it's all about the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting.
[1] https://dset.tw/en/research/000491-2/
[2] https://www.technology.org/2026/03/17/japan-might-sell-weapo...
It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.
Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.
As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.
Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperation with Ukraine is because Ukraine figured out how to stop Russia. Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.
alternatively, there's a Dennis Ross piece out pointing out that China's procurement patterns over the years suggests they are not seriously thinking of invading Taiwan, they just want everyone to think that way...
That's the thing with religious or ideologically driven dictators. They're nutjobs, not beholden to reality in their decisionmaking but to whatever their ideology prescribes - and thus are prone to making decisions that seem to (or end up being) utterly stupid / irrational.
With Yugoslavia, it was Tito's idea to force all the various countries into one common ethnicity. With Russia, it is Putin's dream of restoring "Greater Russia". With China, it's the dream of re-unification with Taiwan on one side, and reversing what is seen as a land grab by back-then Czarist Russia in Outer Manchuria. With Trump it is the desperate desire to be beloved (and the desire of his Project 2025 handlers to turn the US into an ethno-christo-nationalist state). With Ben Gvir and Smotrich in Israel, it is the desire to wipe out anything Palestinian.
And the result of these madmen was and is an untold amount of needless suffering. There is no reason at all to not believe what China is openly saying [1] and to prepare accordingly. Better be prepared than be sorry.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/xi-jinping-vow...
China could just bomb Taiwan into submission if it chooses to. I don't think it is a problem for China to build 20-30k ballistic missile and launch them at Taiwan. Or send a million drones over there just to be sure nothing survives them.
Taiwan is, unfortunately, in a very precarious situation should China decide enough is enough and reunification must happen no matter what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kyiv_(2022)
It was the failure of Russian logistics and the triumph of Ukrainian logistics that beat them back.
There were no 24/7 airlifts of criticql weapons and equipment at any point in this war.
Ukraine was expected to fall quickly, and any help it needed started arriving very reluctantly, very slowly, in small batches stretched over months and years of deliveries much much later.
https://youtu.be/NVnbtbtgu2Y?is=2lMFmF2kQ0SXqIw0
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/03/russia-pla...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/26/russia-provoca...
Polish news: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/07/09/8043294/
---
The head of Poland's Foreign Ministry noted that he cannot comment on intelligence data but stressed that Russia has long been waging a hybrid war against Poland and France.
He said this involves cyberattacks on state systems, attempts to gather information on critical infrastructure using shadow fleet vessels, arson, sabotage on railways and drone attacks.
Sikorski also recalled that before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia allegedly prepared false flag provocations to create a pretext for starting the war. At the time, American intelligence warnings helped thwart those plans.
"Today you must believe us – not just me, but other countries too – that we have credible information that the Russians are planning something again. The purpose of these warnings is to discourage them from carrying out these provocations," he said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, for his part, confirmed that Paris is also recording increased Russian hybrid activity.
To stay within its borders. And that counts for the others on this planet, too.
Oh no, the poor innocent Russia that is currently in year 5 of its totally innocent blameless war it's waging. "Hitler did nothing wrong" vibes.
All Russia has to do to stop its soldiers from dying and its economy from being destroyed is to get the fuck out of Ukraine.
Their success in the conflict is not guaranteed.
Wars of this kind never have winners. Russia also lost too many soldiers to celebrate anything.
Not to lose sight of the very real cost, down to every man and family destroyed. Many may even argue that life under subjugation is still at least life. But many more have walked the walk into the fire, in defiance of that notion. I see no way of arguing the opinions of the living outweigh those of the dead when it comes to opinions on what's worth fighting for.
I would add that this isn't advocating for blindly and endlessly throwing meat into the meat grinder. But to the extent that a country tells you, not from the top down but from the men on the very frontlines of war, that they're willing to die, to win... I'd say believe them when they say they understand the costs, and yet consider it a win not in spite of those costs, but in the face of them, defiantly.
"Putin's list" is a dishonest meme, just like the "rules-based international order" that the Western nations supposedly embrace.
There is no such list, and there are no such rules. There is only deceitful propaganda used to justify geopolitical ambitions. Don't spread it.
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.
But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.
Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.
DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.
[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"
But honestly, I don't think China wants Taiwan "reunification" quite as much as they want to have their economy be prosperous and, just as importantly, not to have millions of people die on both sides. If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure. But I expect non-war outcomes somewhat more than I expect war.
I recognize this is a big bet on the ethics of perhaps a small group of important CPC decision makers, but I do bet on that. Xi Jinping is no Hitler, no Stalin.
We see high quality tech products coming out of the countries and assume that they're very good at building things. In fact they are extremely good at managing complex supply chains going in and out of PRC, while keeping certain high value add parts of the business within their own countries.
1. In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either - Bear in mind that I doubt China would ever want to destroy TSMC though, so I'm talking about a naval blockade rather than artillery destroying the fabs.
2. Although SOTA chips are off the table, we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips. We had great missiles in 2015.
China has enough domestic electronics production to not care. Also, in the event of a war they would probably stockpile necessary parts.
> we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips.
If the factories producing those chips are still operational. Otherwise you end up in the exact same situation as Russia, for example. They have some barely functioning old factories producing extremely outdated chips on foreign equipment.
In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.
In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.
If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.
I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs".
Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light infantry to try and take ground because everything larger doesn't survive (and the light infantry apparently survive for only 20 minutes on average). Russia's Black Sea fleet cowers in port under its anti-air defences and even then takes losses. Their long-range bombers are not being used in the long-range bombing of Ukraine's civilians, that's all down to cruise missiles, because they're too valuable to lose (and a lot of them have been destroyed on the runway by drones).
The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Depends on the application. The drones have to be manufactured somewhere. You need electricity. Running water. Industrial facilities. The big bomb still matters there.
> The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny. I think mechanized infantry will continue to have a place, they’ll just be augmented by drones. But who knows you could be right depending on how things develop.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...
That's changing
Oh wait, no, the other thing.
They were trying to overthrow the regime, for the second time in a year, and failed.
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 different thing.
[1] https://features.csis.org/hiddenreach/china-fourth-carrier/
When the dust settles, China's killed a bunch of Americans, America has killed even more Chinese, and we're in the same place we were before. I don't think China's that dumb, and they're not that evil, either.
Not wrong, but the British were outproducing the Germans in many things (e.g., aircraft[1]) even before lend-lease was a thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_producti...
The Nazis were really bad at running the economy:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
Even then, a custom supply chain can be set up domestically. You'll probably have to limit the number of variations for these servos and motors, but you can produce them even manually if you absolutely have to.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
The key thing is to have second sources for everything. Something the US military seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore in their pursuit of gold-plated weapons systems that give the most kick-backs.
[1] https://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/vtproximityfuze.htm
https://airmail.news/arts-intel/highlights/masters-of-disgui...
The Sherman tank wasn’t the best tank, but being able to make a lot of them was useful.
As per Stalin, quantity has a quality all of its own.
On the other hand, if they just want to kill you for the sake of killing you, that's another story and the enemy will probably resort to "carpet bombing".
The asymmetric warfare that has been enabled by inexpensive drone tech has so many vast implications that I'm not even sure we've seen every possible avenue this could explore. If either side isn't willing to completely obliterate civilian manufacturing centers, it enables long-term protracted warfare without an obvious end.
On the other hand, even obliterating civilian areas might not be an "end game" in its own right if external interests were to keep flooding the front lines with drones. FPV capabilities make conventional guidance systems a little less important, and while fiber has its weaknesses and wireless systems can be jammed, the psychological aspect of never quite knowing when a drone could be waiting in the midst of one's unit is deeply unsettling.
Equipment was worth more than a capture.
Capture was worth more than a kill (get Intel, trade for Ukranian captives).
Kill was xyz points.
The more points, the more weapons, equipment, and support you got.
This was several years ago, I'm not sure its still in play.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-e-points-system-stee...
https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/updated-e-points-system-military-...
https://mod.gov.ua/en/news/the-military-can-exchange-e-point...
I would say it's closer for Ukraine, which has implemented forced conscription, which is pretty far down the path to a total war. There are of course tactics and strategies they have not enacted, that's not obvious which of those would be beneficial to the war effort in a non obvious way. All wars but specially modern Wars have to balance the possibility of publicity blowback or the population giving up the will to fight
I think that’s an apt comparison because it was hard to keep an army fed (https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...)
The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more. Iran has been hitting US air bases. In the last day, they've hit US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. That's just this round. There were previous hits a few months back. It's not publicized much, but it's no secret. It's hard to protect an air base against drones. Air bases are big, everyone knows where they are, airplanes are hard to hide from drones, and are vulnerable to small explosive charges. As Russia keeps finding out as Ukraine hits their air bases. There have been hits well inside Russia. Blast-resistant hangars in Crimea have been attacked. Don't leave a door open.
China is going in for airbase hardening in a big way.[1] This is sometimes called a "concrete sky" program. The USAF is way behind in the Pacific. Too many planes parked out in the open, or in weak hangars.
Active defenses against drones and missiles do work, but they just thin them out. Some get through. If the attacker has enough manufacturing capacity, the defenses can be overwhelmed. Ukraine is currently building about 7 million drones a year.
[1] https://www.hudson.org/arms-control-nonproliferation/concret...
I guess we're all guerrilla fighters now.
Guerrilla forces have to be popular, or at minimum, have the local population cowed. They're useful for kicking an oppressor out of your own country, but not for conquest.
Why are you denying the absolutely destructive power of the US military and it's abject failure in not only making the world safer for Americans but explicitly more dangerous?
Are you personally benefiting from US imperialism?
Also, please refrain from making personal allegations.
Certainly there is some room for negotiation and diplomacy and frankly I think we've tried that and tried it until it was clearly insane and then we still tried it. We (the west) tried to invite Russia to NATO and we opened up Europe to Russian gas. We tried the JCPOA with Iran. We have no clue what to do with North Korea. And we pushed for Chinese entry into the WTO only for them to backstab the west.
Also don't understand what point you're trying to make outside of the US being explicitly poor actors that ignore treaties, allies, and are willing to start wars to run cover for unpopular domestic leadership while causing the unnecessary deaths of millions of people across the world.
Also WTF does backstab even mean in this context? That China didn't bend over and allow US corporations to rat fuck their country dry? Who exactly benefits from enriching US corporations here? It's assuredly not US citizens.
Good grief.
I mean, if minefields are okay with the intention to kill anything that walks in the area, why not drones?
well.. about that. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomou...
this article says "one time test" but i, personally, can't believe it's not being used daily.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
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
Current SecDef thinks looking like a war movie hero is more important, however, so action on this front may be delayed.
I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined.
I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1]
Sanctions and limited parts availability are limiting Russia's ability to manufacture weapons [2]
[1] https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-car-researchers...
[2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/kcl-fasi-paper31-win...
There's no need for a massive assembly plant to produce a lot of drones from dual-purpose components. Most of these components arrive across the EU border and go to random warehouses that have been converted into assembly shops. There the drones are put together, flashed with the latest firmware and sent to the armed forces, where they are armed and launched.
The bigger problem Russia faces is the surprisingly sorry state of its AA. It's been designed to detect and intercept strategic bombers and multirole fighters, but it's been almost 40 years since Mathias Rust, and it still can't handle a cheap and slow flying target, relying only on point defense systems that can be and are overwhelmed. Ukraine has inherited the same Soviet tech but managed to build a better detection system that collects and processes the data from thousands of cheap listening stations across the country.
But flattening cities is a WW2 strategy, and it didn't actually do much to win the war in the end, only cause unnecessary civilian suffering.
1. Putin thinks the disintegration of the USSR in 1991 was a historic disaster and wants to reassemble much of it as some sort of new "Russian Empire" in order to control more resources and establish defensive space to protect the motherland against a future foreign invasion. He sees Ukraine as a fake country.
2. Russian demographics are collapsing and Putin himself is aging so this was his last chance to take decisive action. Despite limited stockpiles of advanced weapons, waiting would have made an invasion even harder.
3. Putin has surrounded himself with loyal yes-men who curried favor by telling him what he wanted to hear instead of giving him accurate information about Ukrainian politics and military capabilities.
4. Putin perceived Joe Biden as being particularly weak and unlikely to take decisive action.
5. Russia's recent invasions of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) had gone fairly well so it wasn't irrational to expect a rapid victory.
To be clear I'm not trying to justify or excuse Putin's decision (I hope he loses) but rather to explain how he might have reached it.
Israel isn't going to sell advanced weapons to Russia in current circumstances. It would be impossible to hide. Intelligence analysts can pick apart little fragments from a missile explosion and determine where the components were made. It's not technology that Russia lacks but the capacity to manufacture that technology at scale with acceptable quality.
China is making a fortune selling weapons and dual-use equipment to both Russia and Ukraine. But they don't sell the good stuff because they don't want sensitive technology to fall into US hands, and because they want the option to bite off a chunk of Russian territory later.
The airport raid by SF on the first day of the war arguably came close to success.
Also Iran.
40k Tons of bomb were dropped on Berlin in WW2. That's nearly all explosive payload too.
That's about equivalent to 80k modern cruise missile warheads.
The US has built less than 5000 Tomahawk missiles ever.
Russia has fired approximately 6000 missiles into Ukraine in the course of the war.
This is why the US still maintains a fleet of ancient "Bomb Truck" style bombers in the B52. Nothing compares to 100 B52s flying over a target for weeks. They allowed us to drop 20k tons of bombs on Vietnam and the surrounding countries. A horrific capability.
Gaza is a combination of Israel being utterly fucking insane and apparently desiring to terrorize people, and the fact that Gaza is super tiny.
I’ve read that the local brain drain has been challenging too, eg https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1176769042/russia-economy-bra...
Russia is still dangerous but it's a pale shadow of the old USSR.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
Russia hasn’t captured Kiev, their artillery can’t reach that far and they don’t have air superiority - Russia hardly has an airforce anymore.
Spending untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a pile of ash would never pay itself off.
Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.
They toss bomb from miles back.
Flying conventional bombers over enemy cities requires the ability to replace most of your bombers per year, or air supremacy, neither of which Russia has even a hope of doing.
WW2 was industrialized the likes of which nobody has ever seen again.
If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day.
Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.
The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely.
Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either political spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population - this is corroborated by a UN probe that says Palestinian children and Babies were ‘special targets’ of Israeli killings - https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ ). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights.
> I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move towards Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state.
With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, American allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas).
Thus, in both cases, it is mostly politics that holds them back.
For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit:
> To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations.
That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their underground bunkers, warehouses and tunnels, with the ability to make independent command decisions in the absence of orders from central command. Even Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, is somewhat modelled similarly and that is why Israel's attack on Hezbollah's leadership (the pager bombing) hasn't had the impact that the Israelis hoped for - they are still bogged down fighting them in Lebanon.
I agree, or at least it feels insightful and right, though I can’t personally validate if it’s correct. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, stop using contractors & no-bid contracts, or simply ask for more?
Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
Yeah, between military (active, dependents, retired, et c), elected officials who get government-paid healthcare (in any level of government), government workers (all levels, city, county, state, federal), and school workers (primary, secondary, public colleges and universities), and Medicare (old people), and Medicaid plus CHIP (poor people), and probably some others I’m forgetting, the US engages in as much government per-capita healthcare spending as some peer states do on their national healthcare schemes… but without covering everyone. However, the government does already cover a huge proportion of the population, including some of the most expensive (old people), at least partially. And that’s not counting government spending on contractors that take some of that money and pay for their workers’ healthcare with it.
It’s just split up across thousands of different budgets, instead of one.
Deeply entrenched corruption, obviously.
The fact that the US wastes a lot of money on what’s likely a very ineffective military is not a surprise, surely. Yes, they should have a better logistics system for all that money.
"We need more integrated logistics because the teeth can't fight without the tail!"
Some years pass
"Why do we have all these non-combat roles in the military? Shrink everything down and focus on warfighting!"
More years pass
"Why can't we do any support internally? We need stronger and more integrated logistics!"
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state.
What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.
To make certain people money by shorting the oil market. There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays.
To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.
I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/11/britainand9...
Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billions of dollars in ship and aircraft — might trigger a Pearl-Harbor or 9/11 fury among the American public. No U.S. president could get away with even a "proportionate" response, let alone doing nothing.
Think of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1965, which led to the U.S.'s widened involvement in Vietnam on the basis of grossly-distorted reports about alleged attacks — which never happened — on U.S. destroyers (which are comparatively small ships). [0] If Iran were to actually sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, then Trump-Hegseth-Miller might well nuke Tehran in response.
We sure as hell don't need anything like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by a terrorist. It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Belgrade, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, they all effed it up almost beyond belief. WWI cost millions of lives and untold billions in resources that could have been put to far better use. Iran sinking a U.S. carrier could be a similar trigger.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
Eh. WWI wasn't an accident, a series of unfortunate incidents, or something that just got out of hand.
Countries and people WANTED the war, war was still thought about as a general benefit to the country, almost sporting. Everybody was feeling powerful with the new capabilities industrialization gave them and they wanted to use that to gain influence. (of course not literally everybody, but this was a prevailing force)
That was true among some of the players in various governments — Kaiser Wilhelm being a prime example. Can you cite any (reputable) historians who think that was a general attitude?
The war ends when all involved parties agree that it ends, not because one party is tired of it.
The only way the US alone can end the war in Iran is to ensure complete surrender, and then stay put for 20 years like Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave like a thief in the night and things reverts to what they were before, only with more local hate for the US than was already there (as most islamic states sees the US as the great devil).
I think most European nations learned their lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of those were NATO operations btw. Article 5 was invoked for Afghanistan, but the NATO contribution was limited to a naval operation and patrolling of US airspace. NATO is a defensive treaty, not an aggressive one. The actual ground invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq was done by a US led coalition of the willing, and when the US started the Iran war, most european leaders openly declared that this was not europes war.
Bombing Iran for a month because Iran fired on 4 ships that were violating its SoH rules is wildly disproportionate and optional.
Yes, until the US bombed Iran and then signed a terrible MoU that didn't reject Iranians claim of control of the said waterway…
As former French Ambassador Gerard Araud puts it, the US diplomacy has been deeply incompetent during the negotiations and they gave way too much to Iran in the MoU. As a result, at this point the US cannot realy claim Iran is infringing international laws anymore (not that international laws matter to the current US admin anyway)
Who cares? International law is quite clear. But regardless, the world really doesn't have a say so long as Iran (& likely Oman in the end) wants to enforce this view.
> but maybe they bomb a port in iran and iran strikes a us base in response
...and the strait will still be closed. It just makes zero sense.
This kind of shit or excuses could not be pulled if we would be talking about gulf of mexico for example.
US is not center of the world and rest of the world means >95% of mankind, rest of the world is pretty fed up with that unfair treatment and things are changing. Very slowly, but steadily.
Or at least the Donbas... I can't imagine they'd want a border pressing up against nato without a rump state in between.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/08/business/iran-oil-trump-strai...
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
He has also stated that the war has been won many times. Why would you take anything coming out of his mouth seriously?
The initial US goals clearly were: 1. Regime change 2. Denial is of nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only by current capability.
> Khamenei’s killing has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men. The irgc appears to wield power with few constraints. Clerics who challenged its influence—including former Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani—were conspicuously absent from the [funeral] processions.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/middle-east-and-africa...
Forgive me its been a while since I read about Irans political structure, but my understanding is that the IRGC is supposed to take over in times of succession crisis, and sort of take any measures to guarantee the islamic revolution.
The test is supposed to be that they hand back power sometime after the crisis.
If you assume Khamenei Jr is still unwell, and there's still a spot of bother regarding what his succession would look like, and the civilian government is still a bit in shambles, the IRGC taking over seems very easy for them to justify. Whether they hand that power back willingly is another matter that remains to be seen.
The problem here is that Trump bombing Iran is going to keep them in power longer. The IRGC being in charge is going to keep Trump bombing them. I dont see a way out of that spiral on either side.
Your statement actually makes the way out of the spiral very explicit: Trump must stop being in power.
What's the goal?! The US/Iran war has a ton of goals! Every day a new goal, each as improbable as the last.
Right now Republicans are just flipping a coin every day to decide whether each "goal" is (A) a critical need where only Dear Leader can save us or (B) a glorious victory for Dear Leader who has solved everything forever.
We saw the same with the the mutually-incompatible and shifting "goals" of the illegal taxes on American buyers (tariffs.) Some of those "goals" were being pre-declared as achieved simply by announcing the policy. (Narrator: "They weren't.")
- We ended poverty - When did this happen? - Simply, we changed the dictionary
kneecaping china by cutting off a huge source of its oil imports. Russia will not be able to make up the difference.
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
It varies. Which is the problem.
I can think of a few:
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
Every time someone hits them, they learn that they wouldnt be hit if only they had a nuclear weapon.
Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you:
Why are the names of perpetrators in the files censored, while those of victims remained clear?
Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
> Why has not a single person been prosecuted since the files were released?
Because the perpetrators run the government.
Did Bondi not say on camera that if the list was released "the system would collapse"?
islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too
the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed
the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
It seems to be tolerating Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir just fine!
Imagine the different place Israel would be if it pursued Oct 7 as a criminal act instead of a pretext to commit genocide. Enormous strategic blunder by the Netanyahu regime. Israel would not be a global pariah state and it's entirely possible that regime change in Iran would have succeeded. But you are never going to regime change a people who know with certainty that they will be butchered/raped/tortured by their supposed "saviors" the Israelis. There is literally nothing worse than surrendering to Israel.
by punching islamic regimes you create a feedback loop of islamic eschatology
the only way out now is forward ie boots on the ground. this is gonna happen whether dems or reps are in power
there's a devilish mess of evangelical wasps secular jews actual jews irishmen and not a single person who has read more than two lines about islam let alone convert into it
islam has been treated like communism or socialism ie somthkng you can root out in exchange for walmart and free stuff. thats not it. muslims are willing to die for it and they will prove it again and again, and no amount of conventional weaponry will bring afghanistan or iran to its heels for long
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-war-live-us-says-iranian-...
The US and Iran agreed (Point 4 and 5) on, for the next 60 days, Iran is "chief of traffic" in the strait.
Iran say now, ships have to take the route close to Iran. But some ships like to take the route close to Oman. Iran is just shooting on these ships.
Furthermore, if they want to deal with the US or Israel, then they should target American or Israeli assets. Not third party ships manned by citizens of neutral nations who just want to get to port and remit cash to their families back home.
Those ships are bearing goods from (or taking goods to) countries that are hosting US forces attacking them. They’re valid targets, and blockading their shipping… I mean, the US does that to countries that haven’t even helped attack us, seems insane to suggest it’s somehow a foul to do that to countries that are helping attack you.
A lot of these "neutral" countries either host US military bases, US companies, or are otherwise aligned generally with the US.
Remember, the US blew up an UNARMED Iranian ship after what was basically a parade at sea in the Indian Ocean. The US started this, and keeps it going.
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII. Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate. Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit. The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues. It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours. This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-cant-fix-this-the-...
This is incorrect.
[1] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/07/23/russia-tightens-bo...
Which means not everyone in this age bracket is prevented from leaving, only literal draft dodgers.
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP (as mush as 50%, see wiki). Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Russia
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
Because it's hugely politically unpopular. There's a risk that this will happen after the parliamentary election this autumn.
No need for the brackets.
The Israelis also bombed defenceless Gaza and had a lot of help from the US with that.
How would they do this?
The don’t control the sky or the ground. It’s down to ballistic missiles and drones. Many of these can be shot down.
US is the only country that maybe has a capability to carpet bomb someone to rubble. Russia has always preferred to do it with Artillery anyway, which they have done to many many Ukrainian cities.
A prolonged strategic bombing campaign that can "Wipe a city off a map" takes weeks, hundreds of bombers, and tens of thousands of tons of explosive, and either air supremacy to protect your bombers (not sufficient against a target with SAMs) or the ability to build hundreds of those bombers fresh.
Literally nobody can do that anymore. America can maybe do that once or twice. Only 60ish B52s even remain.
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving.
Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
Can they? https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitio... says
“In the 39 days of the air and missile campaign before the ceasefire, U.S. forces heavily used the seven munitions in Table 1. For four of them, the United States may have expended more than half of the prewar inventory”
According to that article, they expended ballpark a third of their inventory of expensive weapons systems such as Patriots or Tomahawk missiles, each with a production lead time of at least 3 years.
If so, they would run out of those expensive weapons in three more months.
I also suspect the US military is actively pursuing more cost-effective ways to blow things up, as Ukraine (and indeed Iran) has been doing. We don't have to use Patriots and Tomahawks all the time, unless we're shooting down something fast and dangerous with it. And again, Iran has a limited ability to pay for that type of thing, so I'm not that worried.
We can't. We built a system that creates a very small number of very expensive munitions and that can't be scaled up. We've been trying to scale up munitions production for years now with the Ukraine war. And it just isn't possible.
Not only does it take years to make any missile now. Our total capacity to make missiles is incredibly low. Like, we can make 600 Patriot missiles per year. We've expended twice that so far with Iran alone. We can make 100 THADD per year. We've expended 300 so far.
The US will run out of missiles way before Iran does. Iran could easily produce 2000 missiles per year and if it pushed it could make closer to 8000.
Iran will recover its missile stocks from the current war in a year. It will take the US until 2031 to do the same.
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/war-above-w...
I disagree. The huge problem here is that USAF is showing how they are doing things over and over again. For China it is a treasure trove of data and ideal place for testing of their gear to detect and later shoot down US stealth aircraft which USA is constantly threating to use against China.
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
You’d be pretty hard pressed to refer the victor of any of these wars as having “superior industrial capacity” compared to their opponents.
What is that referring to?
I imagine Iran, Ukraine, and Russia all know about Fabian strategy.
... not sure what a linear battlefield would be
Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
By contemporary lesson I assume she means similar lesson but more recent and keeping modern world/logistics in mind.
Napoleon
What he didn't anticipate was how bad the roads in Russia would be and how long the Russian army would retreat along them. You can't resupply an army that is marching on a narrow dirt road through a forest because it's blocking its own supply lines.
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2042105223989035429
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
It doesn’t seem impossible that some radical group of attacks the US from within.
And that’s quite apart from the US threats to attack its neighbours.
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
They are not cheap.
What "reactive engine" is Zelensky talking about?
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles.
For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.
More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.
Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.
Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
There are many options to deliver drones to a location and i dont think from orbit is the most viable one, let alone moving any production there.
The situation there is an utter joke, and shows no sign of wrapping up any time soon.
It’s all very well claiming you can win, but when you don’t that’s the result you’re stuck with.
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ ̶
̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶
̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶
̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶
Starfall will never happen!
People doubted the claims, too. Particularly landing and re-use.
Concrete example: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/13/ula-plans-to-introduce...
This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching it given their limited resources.
It'll be interesting to see how that goes in Ukraine where Russia has ~700k troops and the logistics are being cut by Hornet drones and similar.
1. The US is second in the world, behind Ukraine, in military drone production.
2. The US is a close second to China in logistics + last mile drone production.
3. The US is still the only country with the proven ability to move mass anywhere in the world.
None of this means that the US will win a hot war against China. However, that has - always - been the case. The US fought against China in Korea and SE Asia/Vietnam and had the opportunity twice to move the conflict into Chinese territory. They didn't, for obvious reasons.
Geography + LOCs + population are a b***h.
Worth noting that, outside of WW2, the US has never really had a large merchant fleet.
"force fields" had me reading that sentence entirely wrong
Seems like Modern War Institute is more concerned with looking posh, than getting their message across - the message of endurance. That's ironic.
This makes the page SO hard to read. Why are "designers" still doing this? Have they no respect for their readers?
As for the article, when the institution that trains future generals says we have a problem then we should _listen_.
Most people hereabouts will be wittering on about how best to kill people/do stuff with drones and forget that logistics is rather more complicated than killing things.
Fundamentally: people need food, water and shelter. Vehicles need fuel, mechanics and stuff. Killing people and destroying stuff needs ammunition or at least something sharp (and that will need something to keep it sharp).
Then you need to coordinate all this stuff, along with comms and a lot more details that I've not mentioned.
Then you need to persuade your troops to do their medieval best on the opposition and hope it works.
I can see from many of the comments here people generally have absolutely no idea what logistics management comprises. Let this be a lesson on Dunning-Kruger.
First, China. 100 miles of open ocean separate mainland China and Taiwan. To invade you need to put boots on the ground. That means you also need armor. And then you need everything that goes with that. Food, medical, resupply, ammunition, a place to repair your vehicles and so on. You can't airlift this, even with air supremacy. It requires ships, a lot of ships. And that means Taiwan, the US and allies could, if they wanted to, wreak havoc with supply lines.
I've seen one estimate that it would take over a million soldiers for China to occupy Taiwan, possibly two million. China simply does not have that amphibious capability so this is a silly conversation. American politicians talks this up to give more money to weapopns manufacturers for weapon systems that are too expensive and don't work and also to propagandize the population into "China = bad". But it's not a real threat.
On a clear day from Calais you can see the white cliffs of Dover. I believe the distance at its closest point is 17 miles. Yet despite having an Army that exceeded 12 million soldiers, Germany was unable to invade Britain. This is big of a problem water was then. It hasn't changed.
Second, Iran. Iran is surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and the Persian Gulf on the 4th. There is nowhere where a US invasion could muster like they did with Kuwait (ie from Saudi Arabia). We saw the futility of this in the Iran-Iraq war, which was a complete stalemate (with over a million dead) despite an almost decade of the US supplying Saddam Hussein.
So with mountains on 3 sides, that leaves an amphibious landing. Again, the problem remains of where would troops muster? It can't be anywhere beyond the Strait of Hormuz because the Navy can't defend against drone and missile attacks at close range like that, let alone get thousands of supply ships through safely. So that leaves Pakistan or Oman. Both are in range of drone attacks. The US has essentially abandoned all Gulf bases because of the complete inability to defend them. How would the US defend a million troops and all the supplies they need, including landing craft?
Logisitcally, the operation would be as complex and large as D-Day. The US doesn't have that military anymore. The Navy has a pair of amphibious landing craft that could put 5000 Marines somewhere. Great. They'd die. For enough infantry, you'd need a draft. You'd need to build so many ships. It would take years and nobody has that kind of time.
The Joint Chiefs know this. It's why no US president has started a war with Iran despite the Israeli PM asking every one of them to do so since at least Reagan. It's only this president who took the bait of Mossad telling him how the regime would fall within days after a decapitation strike.
The entire Iranian military project is to resist the US military. Bases buried in mountains, cheap ballistic missiles and drones that can be mass-produced, a mosaic defense to avoid potential decapitation and air defenses that are seemingly good enough that the US, even with F35s, still has to stand off.
I bet you won't find a single serious military planner who thought this operation was possible.
A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?
And as it turns out, they have indeed started adding armor to transport craft, including trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei
And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size.
It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
Well, that's what I meant, where are the Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. Because I consider the areas that Russia occupies to be temporarily occupied Ukraine.
Although you (I) could ask where the armored vehicles are that the US and other countries gave to Ukraine. For awhile, Bradley Fighting Vehicles (lightly armored) and M1A1 Abrams were making a lot of news (I think the former were doing surprisingly well, and the latter not as good as expected). But lately I have heard very little about either, or about other armored vehicles that were given to Ukraine.
The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
The US have have been a nightmare for Ukraine, obstructive and unreliable. The European allies have slowly stepped up, but it’s been painful.
As dependence on the US has reduced, you can see the Ukrainian attacks increase in number, range and audacity.
Distant targets are getting hit. This week shipping had been hit hard, and the Crimea has taken a lot of damage. Bridges and logistics.
It’s all happening. Keep an eye on https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/
It’s a heavily skewed perspective but it if often accurate.
It's not as easy as it sounds to put the weight of ordnance required in the very tight windows that would be needed to actually cause more than cosmetic or minor damage to that bridge.
Ukraine did pull off a spectacularly successful operation to destroy a laden fuel truck while it was crossing the bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Crimean_Bridge_explosion)... Russia repaired the damage within months and simply redirected fuel transport to other means.
Russia also has dedicated a large amount of air defense and EM jamming resources to protect the bridge, which increases the difficulty of pulling something off for Ukraine.
For a long time Ukraine didn't have the types of weapons that would be needed to even attempt it outside of saboteur types of actions. Now they have some precise ordnance like Storm Shadow but even these weapons are not destructive enough to take the bridge down except in large quantities, and those are quantities they seem to have decided are best put towards other targets.
Ukraine has recently seen substantial success in finding better weapons, with drones that can engage in "medium-range" scenarios to close off the so-called land bridge from Russia to Crimea. These weapons have also helped in degrading Russia's own defenses, but with this in mind Ukraine may feel it best to leave the Kerch bridge standing for now to allow Russian occupiers to flee across the bridge back to Russia, since Ukraine has the northern land route through occupied territories under much more effective fire control than at any point since 2022.
This is a spitball, but there are several hundred thousand ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea (along with many more ethnic non-Ukrainians who were previously Ukrainian citizens and have been more-or-less forced to take on Russian citizenship since 2014). Even if the Ukrainian war machine wanted to commit war crimes and/or genocide by completely starving out a city of 2.5 million (unclear if this is true or not, at least to me), they would be -- at least partially -- commiting them against their own people.
https://oshkoshdefense.com/vehicles/medium-tactical-vehicles...
Ask your favorite LLM for a brief tutorial on "NATO unit symbology" and "logistics-related operational terms and graphics". The relevant publication is "MIL-STD-2525D". https://www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/other_pubs...
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
Edit: I will go a bit further..
I consider Military the greatest power on Earth. It's sacred, necessary. But those who abuse its power commit, in my view, the greatest of sins. I don't mean the soldiers who fight, but those making the decisions of who they fight. The soldiers do their job, often willingly. And they are the ones who face the consequences. To betray them by corruption is the ultimate betrayal. War is a power that, I think, should be reserved for situations with no other option. Mercenaries not considered.
Humans are a tough bunch. We rationalize some fairly insane shit. I've met folks subjected to things that would break me, and they just carry on. I think my perspective on the matter is starkly different from most vets. Where they shrug it off and move along, I sulk and brood. I think I am impervious to being a vet. I'd improbably make it so far. When I enlisted for the Navy, as young uneducated man, weeks passed, and I called several times each week. "we don't know yet" they'd say. And I'd call again. And on the final call, I asked, "when can I start?" they replied "You can't, but I'll put you on the phone now with the Marines..". I put down the phone. I've wondered at times if that was a mistake, and I think for what I might have contributed to good folks it might have been, but with my exceedingly compromised (by design?) view of geopolitics, I don't regret my choice.
What I can say with sincerity: Military is a sacred power, the bulwark comprising of enlisted soldiers. What each of them seek, or whatever the impetus for enlistment, those that wield them would be wise to hesitate when endeavoring to exploit them.
Pogroms; slavery; totalitarian dictatorship; theocracy; intentional mass starvation; mass organ harvesting; mass forced relocation; anarchy; failing to respond to unprovoked violence; restricting freedom instead of defeating the adversary.
You really think the massive amounts of death and destruction aren’t top ten? What do you think happens to the local population when an invading force arrives? You should go and read about the rape of Nanking. And just read about what happened in wars before the modern era.
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
And between WW1 and WW2. And just before WW1, during the Belle Époque. And probably before that, too.
I think the answer could arise from a widely growing understanding of
a) the methods of mass manipulation. Without manipulation, or outright mass hypnosis, no dictator is possible;
b) the whole structure of power, and the fact that there are numerous barriers to filter out all non-psychopaths along the way to the top, with multiple checkpoints where an ever increasing degree of corruption and depravity must be demonstrated to the controllers.
But even a) alone should be sufficient.
"We". "War is in our genes".
Start with "me". Do I need war? Do I want war?
Do I have something that differentiates me from a simian?
To bear a reasoning mind, and have a heart that is capable of love, and still to appeal to the animal foundation is a total betrayal of everything that makes you not just yet another animal.
Idealism has been carving into reality nonetheless.
Our current standards of living are straight out of platonic Eidos, compared to those of our cave-dwelling predecessors.
Computers are also a perfect example of materialized ideals. Airplanes, Internet, space exploration, you name it.
Why should that stop at war for any reason other than someone having a deep vested interest in it?
The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe.
But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends.
The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
Sadly, most wars generate both.
Yes, Pearl Harbor was a known vulnerability, prior to the Japanese attack. The US just wasn't ready to take airpower seriously, at that point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5okm8/why_d...
https://youtu.be/C2gIId1dpDs
And then that stimulates the economy further as those people all spend that money, and the government gets a bunch of bombs and fighter jets out of the deal.
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...
Early concepts of aircraft in warfare, between WWI and WWII, often said aircraft would make battle lines irrelevant. They assumed nothing could stop aircraft. It didn't work out that way.
Now people say the same about small, uncrewed aircraft (drones). It's based only on a few years of very early adoption - even among technologists in vast, public, civilian markets, who can make predictions like that? Very possibly defenses will improve substantially and possibly defense will gain the advantage or even dominate. I don't believe anyone knows.
One difference between crewed and uncrewed aircraft is that the latter are much less expensive, and easily adopted by forces with minimal resources. The Taliban were not going to build or buy effective crewed fighter planes or bombers - they could not cross NATO battle lines in that way - but now they could build or buy drones.
Electricity can be moved anywhere in the world instantly, if you can dig a trench and lay cables. The problem, of course, is density, some combination of (energy OR power) per (liter OR gram) depending on the application:
Batteries don't come close to the energy/power density of jet fuel, but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use? And what about other electrical storage options, such as hydrogen fuel cells?
Some options might be uneconomical in a civilian environment where logisitics is relatively cheap but fine in a warfare environment where logisitics is far more expensive both in moving assets and in the consequences of logisitical failure.
Also, I'm assuming vehicles consume most of the fuel, but maybe there are other significant applications? And I'm assuming throughput on electrical lines is sufficient - it's fast but how much energy can you move per hour? - but that's something I've never had to think about.
In WW2 when low on fuel they would gassify combustible items and run that through the engines. The germans called it Holzgas. You could rig this up in the field. It wasnt good mind but the vehicles could move about when logistics fell through.
The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless. It would become a game of finding and destroying power cables.
> The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless.
I think buried electrical cables would be much more appealing than being tied to roads and trucks full of gasoline. Electrical cables are easy to lay, probably by uncrewed ground or even air vehicles, and could be done quickly with optimization. Redundancy would be cheap and easy, creating a network with few single points of failure. And keeping some generators close to the front, you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
They played this game with communications cables in WW2.
https://www.infoage.org/history-ia/world-war-ii-radar/wire-a...
https://www.keymilitary.com/article/laying-lines
Have a look at the "Buck Eye"
You would need to dig them pretty deep, likely under barrage. And then when the artillery finds them again, back out you go.
>you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
This would likely be the ultimate solution, ICE vehicles.
Depends how the war starts. Russia? USA somehow attacks? Easily 6 months of buildup in Europe.
China? Again USA somehow attacks? Again buildup in Australia, Japan, Korea.
Also US air power is absolutely supreme. I don’t see how they will be fighting in actually contested skies even only 2 months in.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
We should be throwing people in prison over this.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
I don't think I've made a similar comment elsewhere on Hacker News, reddit, etc., (nor do I plan to make a habit of it) but this one stuck out to me. I know this because I did read it just as I've read previous posts such as these on West Point through the years. This just isn't how things used to be written. It's a little more ambiguous out in the wild on any given site/blog/etc.
> The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration
Mistrust of what? The human voice behind this thought? Yes, I think that mistrust is valid and earned. Nevertheless, I admit the topic seems pertinent and the argument has merit.
For me a better way is to find out if I want to read the text or not. Does is there something interesting being said? Is it presented in a way that is at least pleasant enough to read? Is it concise enough? If not I don't read it. Or I skim it.
Don't misunderstand me. I don't like the overuse LLM generated texts. I write my words on my own. Still there is nothing to be gained from distrusting and calling out authors.
> Still there is nothing to be gained from distrusting and calling out authors
Is there nothing? Nothing at all to be gained by resisting the loss of human-created written thought? It may be a futile effort, the tide may be too great, but I guess I'm not just quite so ready to accept the robotic creation of all written content without even a periodic passing comment. It's good for the soul, but I admit I am probably commenting in a community less likely to appreciate or share such a sentiment.
I don't see how you changed anything by pointing out that you assume that this is written by an LLM. What was gained? I don't really see anything. Do you think anyone is dissuaded from reading the article or from using an LLM the next they write something because you could maybe probably tell that it's probably written by an LLM?
I think we all lose more than we gain if we do this. We look at each other with mistrust over whether they used an LLM and we point fingers as soon as we see a sign of "wrongdoing". I see artists and writers frustrated about being accused of using ML tools. And the people who just use LLMs and image generation tools mostly just don't care.
The whole "AI" industry makes everything diffuse. We have to go by vibes if something is made by a human or not and the signs are ever more subtle. We have to be so incredibly careful not to accuse those who are on our side. People who create real human work.
For me the easiest solution for now is to stop accusing. Unless you know for certain that there was not a real human behind it don't point fingers.
From an outcome-orientation, no, nothing has changed. But then why write a letter to my representatives or leave public comments on legislation? That seems to do nothing. Why volunteer to remove amur honeysuckle from an American forest? It will just come back in a few years.
You are being outcome-oriented, I'm being value-oriented. I think the effort is worth it for the act alone. I believe I retained some dignity by still caring about the distinction between human-created content and machine created content, and for caring enough to still be able to tell the difference. To you it's worth nothing, fine, to me it's worth something. It's not like I'm blanketing comment sections across this or any other site.
> Unless you know for certain that there was not a real human behind it don't point fingers
I am telling you, definitively, this article is "penned" primarily if not exclusively by an LLM. You want to hang on to possibility that isn't true? That is your decisions to make!
I find it interesting that your reaction to my observation seems to make the observation more of a pejorative than my own comments have. You act like I'm accusing someone of a deplorable or shameful act. I don't feel that strongly, but I am nevertheless sad to see the loss of humanity in our writing.