Nowhere Is Safe

Hmm...

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?

I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.

The first part of the parabellum quote matters - we have to let the people who want peace prepare for war.

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 ...

> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day

If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?

Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?

Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?

And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?

I definitely think that Saudi Arabia is wishing it’s pipeline was underground right now.

"The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it."

This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.

Against subsonic, low supersonic threats, short / medium term it's still about magazine depth and interceptor economics and sheer attrition math, i.e. PRC can build cheap interceptors at scale... has magnitude more targets due to sheer size, many of which are hardened, entire underground civil/mic infrastructure etc etc.

Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.

The trouble with missile interceptors is that they're overkill. Drones are slow, unarmored targets that could be taken out by a bullet.

What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.

A tunnel 15-30 feet underground is not "shallow" at all, it's a major earthworks undertaking.

"The U.S. has discovered that"...

I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.

There is a layer over this that should be noticed. Nowhere is safe, because international order is a joke. You can conduct invasions for land, to exterminate population, to whatever Trump is doing, every instrument of international law was just useless, or even cooperative with the stronger offender. Which will be the ones taking advantage of this situation? China, Brazil?

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.

Cool world we’ve built everybody! No notes

Elon pops up, Boring Company business card in hand: You rang?

Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance.

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.

I think it would be really interesting to study the costs/ benefits of digging a tunnel 10 meters underground compared to placing a sturdy building where you want it, and using bulldozers to cover it with 10 meters of earth and rock.

Trump has blundered like an idiot into this in Iran ...

... 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.

I find this vaguely analogous to the proliferation of cheap handguns in America. If drones are a response to asymmetrical power, the solution would be diplomacy. It undermines existing power paradigm, the solution isnn't complicated. Don't pick needless fights with your neighbors and allies. Maybe drones ultimately make better neighbors.

We (United States) should have gone to war with Israel in 2006

Do drones just appear out of thin air? Or are they made in factories, which as far as I know are "high value fixed civilian infrastructure" - which is vulnerable to attack?

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.

How about not attacking countries and then you don't have to worry about them attacking you?

It’s a shame there’s inherent performance cost to homomorphic encryption. If there were not it could make sense at least on the compute front to treat it as a commodity and just put it everywhere l, importantly including untrusted locations and have a control plane handle coordination for low latency.

Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.