The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.
Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.
Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.
Si vis pacem ...
[edit, found the real version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum ]
adapted from a statement found in Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract De Re Militari (fourth or fifth century AD), in which the actual phrasing is Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").
Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.
NYC on the other hand has the biggest number of jerks per capita I ever seen. (No offence to all nice people from NYC, which there are still plenty.)
Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.
I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?
There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?
Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.
> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked
Iraq, during the Gulf War.
> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?
Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.
I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?
> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it
As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".
How about we extend the idea of not using violence to everyone, state and non-state actors, not just the US?
Why does Iran need its missiles and proxies and 60% enriched Uranium? What about use of violence internally, is that ok?
The US did enable Israel's withdrawal from Sinai when peace was signed with Egypt. So clearly an enabler of colonial expansion. It also enabled the peace process with the Palestinians that led to the handing over of territory including Gaza and areas of the west bank to Palestinian control.
Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.
Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East for decades now, and not at all shy about it. They support armed proxies and radical insurrections in the entire region - many of them internationally acknowledged as terrorist organizations.
I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime. Long overdue, the moment was picked reasonably well, the military has performed well. The broad scope planning, however, simply wasn't there. What transpired reeks of Russia style "we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?"
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
When all you have is a hammer…
That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.
As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.
If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?
Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.
With fours times the population
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions, and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.
Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.
Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.
It is a bad time to be an invading force.
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
I think it's sort of laughable when people try to invoke international law about the strait being closed when the country closing it was being bombed in the first place. Once your civilian infrastructure is being attacked all gloves are off.
What people fail to understand is that international order being respected favors the stronger and more developed countries first. Those are the countries that depend more on complex supply chains, on more expensive infrastructure, etc.
That the US of all countries would be the one dismantling an order that favored it first and foremost is sort of fascinating to watch, especially when it is replacing it with nothing. Definitely not something I would have guessed even a few years ago.
The simple fact is that rules matter if and only if they are enforced effectively by a community. And power is the ability to direct and control that enforcement.
The international order has declined in the past one or two decades because the UN security council was hamstrung by the enormously powerful veto rights held by Russia, China and the U.S. This has slowly emboldened those countries to de-value the UN and pursue their own interests.
I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.
The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
carlosjobim•2h ago
If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed, I have no doubt about that.
The author is quite misguided if he thinks wars can only be fought defensively and never offensively.
malfist•2h ago
Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.
carlosjobim•1h ago
Legend2440•1h ago
In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry. But this is easier said than done; they tend to be deep inside enemy territory. And drones are made out of commonplace consumer electronics parts, which could be made in thousands of factories around the world.
carlosjobim•1h ago
Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.
And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.
psychoslave•1h ago
krisoft•40m ago
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
dragonelite•1h ago
The US will do none of that shit because they wont be able to do it. Given the US is struggling against Iran, couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield yet they want to force down China which is an order of magnitude bigger than Russia.
esseph•1h ago
Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.
> couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield
??? What does this even mean?
It's not like the US is in a wartime economy.
krisoft•6m ago
I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.