Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.

I guess there's just no other option. Freedom isn't free.

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

Fixed civilian infrastructure has never been safe. The way you protect it is diplomatically, by having that region not be attacked in the first place or putting incentives such that certain bits of infrastructure are considered off limits.

Secondly, people whose only experience of war comes from fictional media have a drastically distorted view of the impact of chemical explosives. The science of chemical explosives became a mature discipline pre-WWII. Our best chemical today are maybe 1.7x more dense than TNT and our standard chemical explosives are often sometimes less energy dense because we prioritize safety over explosive power.

The science of rocketry became mature in the 60s, for a given fuel quantity, we can roughly lob X mass Y distance at Z speed.

The only area we've made massive advancements is precision, relevant if you want to put a small bomb through a window to kill one guy, not so relevant if you want to hit an oil refinery that is several square km wide.

The long and the short of it is that there's a massive, misunderstood gap between temporarily disabling something and destroying it. Take the Crimea bridge for example, back in 2022, there was a massive, high profile truck bombing that completely destroyed the center part of the bridge. However, it was fully repaired within 4 months. Subsequent, there have been 3 more attacks, and repaired every time and still transporting vital war materiel [1]. Concrete and steel are heavy. Even if left 100% undefended, the amount of weaponry needed to totally destroy the bridge, such that it could not be used for 3 years+ is a substantial chunk of Ukraine/US weapon's arsenal. Same goes for every power plant, oil refinery, airplane runway, tank factory etc. There's a reason why Ukraine still has reasonably reliable power after 6 years of Russian bombardment and the allies were never able to degrade German production abilities all the way down to zero despite near saturation bombing campaigns over cities like Dresden.

Bombs just aren't that powerful and our ability to produce them definitively peaked at the tail end of WWII. Currently, globally we're about at 1/20th of of that ability to produce that quantity of explosives and we likely never will reach that amount again.

The only way to actually truly destroy civilian infrastructure energetically is tactical nukes but that's an entirely other ball of wax.

In short, any time you see an expert in one field confidently expound in another field, you should be wary because, while they might be high IQ, their priors could be wrong in drastic ways that make any analysis foolish. The entire essay is arrant nonsense and would be laughed at by anyone with any degree of military analysis.

(Disclaimer: I did use AI to help me generate two numbers: the energetic ratio of WWII vs modern day high explosives and estimates of global military explosive production over time. All writing was my own).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge#Attacks_after_t...

... 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.

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

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.

Ukraine didn’t attack anyone, but that did not keep them safe from being attacked. Clearly not attacking anyone doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about being attacked.

Be careful not to compare absolute sizes of militaries (which matter in a long term, strategic sense) to the number of soldiers deployed to a specific battlefield (which matter in a short term, tactical sense, for that particular battle). Adversaries who deploy large numbers of troops into a small area make them vulnerable (to foreign air power, yes, but mainly artillery). Adversaries like Iran may have staggering military sizes on paper but their ability to deliver significant numbers of troops to a battleground, particularly when roads, airstrips, and paratrooper transports are destroyed first (by air power), is far more limited.

But you're alluding to a separate concern, which is whether the US military has enough manpower for long-term strategic purposes, particularly since we can't do much about the size of adversary militaries before wartime, but can do something about the size of our own.

> significant US military loss, e g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes

If the loss of two measly planes is ever enough to be a "significant" military loss, then God help us. The military wastes far more, even in peacetime. We should be so lucky that the enemy continues to hurt us less than we hurt ourselves.

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.

The rest of the drone is all stuff that can be fabricated in small batches in a garage... of course bigs factories are more efficient at fabricating just about anything so to the extent that's possible it's done, but bombing all the big factories won't stop it.

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.

Its well reported in the western press that the US and Europe haven't been able to outproduce the Russian side regarding shells, drones and missiles etc.

And Oil is not crucial for the US at all, it is hitting Europe and poor countries the most by far.

(I'm from Europe)

I'll understand if you aren't a hardware person, but I think you severely overestimate how complex a drone needs to be if you only intend for it to be single use (which is apparently all the rage in modern war).

You don't even need drone specific parts, the parts you need are used in all kinds of other applications...many are even in your home right now whether you know it or not.

To destroy the supply of these generic parts you would have to destroy...basically everything.

> Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?

This statement alone makes me not take your argument seriously. You aren't arguing in good faith.

No? Flat out arming proxies is literally the point of overt proxy warfare. Sometimes one tries to to be deniable and source other weapons, but other times it's just, enjoy quagmire, cry about it. It's like suggesting PRC going to start blowing up Lockheed plants if they ever lose anything to US munitions.

Even something like a ball bearing is super high tech and precise. Any kind of modern (post WWI) technology is super high tech and precise. Giant efforts were made to destroy ball bearing manufacturing in WWII, not to mention the rest of the war machine. Including German drones.

In a total war scenario, all enemy war factories and infrastructure will be attacked, and even civilian residential areas providing workers to the enemy war effort. This is how the allies mainly fought WWII against Germany.

When you start assembling drones from spare parts from other machines, and making custom drones, then you are at small scale and drones aren't anymore the cheap, mass produced weapon.

This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.

The World Bank/IMF were designed to integrate developing countries into a system on WESTERN TERMS as suppliers of raw materials and labour, as markets for Western goods, as borrowers denominated in dollars. The loans weren't charity but architecture. They worked great as long as the recipients stayed in their lane. The tension now is precisely that countries like China used that system to climb the ladder and are now competing for the parts of the pie that were never supposed to be on the table, semiconductor fabs, AI leadership, alternative financial infrastructure, military projection in their own regions.

Societies that are split along these lines are doomed to fail. Take a simple example of a new neighbor moving next door to you. If they don't speak the same language, do you think you'll form much of a relationship? Possible, yes, but more likely no. Now add religion, tradition, etc into the mix.

Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).

We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.

Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.

Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.

Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.

aggregate economic growth is positive sum, but the things that actually matter in geopolitics, namely who controls chokepoints, who sets standards, whose currency denominates trade, who has military primacy in a given region are zero-sum or close to it. china getting richer grows the pie. china getting rich enough to contest US naval dominance in the South China Sea does not. both are happening simultaneously. pointing at the first doesn't make the second disappear.

I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.

You did not read that GP was saying. He's saying that many conflicts are not started because US bombed a place.

The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?

And they would totally not enter a nuclear war with US for Iran.

Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.

Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.

If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.

I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.

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.

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

Ignoring the one sided benefits of that even though you shouldn't it kind of reminds me maybe of the US and Britains relations?

Not a 1:1 but the continental separation, the "greed" of external companies trying to exploit the natural resources and work force.

And yet we're allies today.

If you're interested in the topic I'd highly advise checking out Sarah Paine and her lectures. An interesting view point of Mao and the rise of China.

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.)

For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.

In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.

Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.

QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.

Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.

Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.

Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.

You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.

The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in 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".

Now, in the past we had a gold standard, so you could literally move your money from one country to another. Now during both WW1 and especially the runup to WW2, the wealthy moved much of their money to the United States as a safe harbor, since we were the only advanced economy with deep liquid bond markets, rule of law, and foreign investment rights (sorry, Canada, but it's true).

This was the greatest wealth transfer in history. By 1940, the US held 80% of the world's global gold reserves. 80%! And this was in the era when international trade was settled in gold.

So it all happened in single decade between 1930 and 1940, and the US instantly became the world's global reserve leader, an extremely dominant position, merely because people were afraid of war and wanted a safe place to park their money.

After the devastation after WW2, the flood of European money into the US continued and more than offset the Marshall plan.

So already at the end of WW2, the majority of the world's liquid savings was tucked away in America.

Now, people like to tell stories of American soldiers spending dollars somehow making the dollar a reserve currency, and those are the types of things that seem plausible to people who don't monitor global capital flows, but that's honestly a ridiculous story. That was chump change.

Bottom line, there are no special technical reasons beyond "I want a safe place to store my money". That controls everything else.

There is an adage in the world of money markets: "It does not matter what currency you trade in, what matters is what currency you store the proceeds in".

And the moment that some other nation opens its doors to foreign capital inflow, establishes rule of law (which takes decades to develop a reputation for stability and not confiscating assets), is safe, stable, and secure, establishes financial transparency, and has deep, liquid capital markets -- then the world's wealthy will flood that nation with money also. But unlike declaring that "I will sell my oil for euros", doing the above takes decades of building trust and reputation. Gimmicks aren't going to do it when you are looking for a safe place to store your money.

Do Americans really hear "Iran" and think of durka-durka from Team America?

We've simply had decades of propaganda teaching us that the US is the most moral nation that has only fought moral wars for moral reasons.

A lot of the history books are about American exceptionalism and triumph. Even when they cover topics like slavery and civil rights, they paint it as being temporary embarrassments that we got over and now everything is OK.

MAGA is just a bunch of people who swallowed that propaganda whole and never questioned it in the slightest. We can see that in the fact that they get really upset about history lessons that are even slightly critical or analytical of America's past.