Also that Tenet no man left behind bonds us and we fight harder.
Keeping cohesion when dispersion is required has been a very discussed and worried over problem since repeating firearms were invented. The Tenet of leaving none behind is part of the solution.
Yeah, it's all great and all, but at the end of the day the autonomous theater of war will diminish the cost of the military human losses, but does nothing to prevent the loss of civilians, because that will always be the leverage. The leverage is not "can I get my soldiers out?", the leverage is (just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki), if I bomb the s*** out of your civilian population, will you concede? Because I have a ton more drones that can do that en masse.
Civilians in war have always been considered collateral damage until recently. Do you think that Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan gave a crap about civilian deaths? Their motto was "trample the weak and hurdle the dead" until the enemy submits. That is how you win wars.
There are too many "rules" of war today, which in the aggregate, serve only to enable warfare and extend killing.
Your conclusion "The technology that keeps them home is a moral asset, not a moral hazard".
Morality has nothing to do with war.
The phase is really: "The technology that keeps them home is a population motivation asset. The population in a democracy and even in Russia, is more motivated to support the war if their sons and daughters are not in danger"
America is the nation that kidnapped one nations leader, assassinated another, bombs civilian boats and is responsible for the energy crisis that is causing severe pain all over the world, likely deaths in poor countries. They keep endlessly blathering on about the hypothetical wars China might wage but the only one I see constantly building weapons and salivating over war is America. Their VCs will push any narrative it takes to sell their companies.
The production-mass gap is the harder-to-fix half of this argument, not the AI-talent gap. Chinese drone production reportedly exceeds NATO capacity by an order of magnitude per open-source estimates, and Operation Spiderweb showed what 117 FPV drones at roughly $500 each can do to a target the post pegs at $7 billion in losses. Treating attritable autonomous systems as ammunition rather than F-35 successors is the procurement reform that follows, and the gating constraint sits at the contracting category, not the model layer.
The contracting angle is where the $54.6 billion Pentagon autonomous warfare request gets interesting. Two companies already hold the production-line contracts, which suggests the procurement category is forming around primes rather than the ammunition model you're describing. If attritable systems get bought like F-35s, that order-of-magnitude gap doesn't close.
The USA lags so far behind Russia and China militarily that it cannot catch up. We have not deployed a single 21st century and our F-35s ship without AESA radar because Northrop ran out of REEs.
Automotive tier ones have figured out how to ship millions of phased array radars per year at scale. Look at how many waymos are on the road. If you want a us example look at the adas hardware tesla is putting out.
Great article. Really got me thinking. Not nitpicking but the example of Truman may not be the best one. He was an Artillery Unit Captain in WWI and his unit saw quite a bit of action and he was on the trigger. Lincoln is a good example - he was in the Blackhawk War but no actual battlefield experience. Wilson, or Clinton or anyone post Bush 41 is a good example - no actual military experience since Bush 41 in the CiC.
Thank you.
Also that Tenet no man left behind bonds us and we fight harder.
Keeping cohesion when dispersion is required has been a very discussed and worried over problem since repeating firearms were invented. The Tenet of leaving none behind is part of the solution.
Thank you for all do.
Yeah, it's all great and all, but at the end of the day the autonomous theater of war will diminish the cost of the military human losses, but does nothing to prevent the loss of civilians, because that will always be the leverage. The leverage is not "can I get my soldiers out?", the leverage is (just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki), if I bomb the s*** out of your civilian population, will you concede? Because I have a ton more drones that can do that en masse.
Civilians in war have always been considered collateral damage until recently. Do you think that Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan gave a crap about civilian deaths? Their motto was "trample the weak and hurdle the dead" until the enemy submits. That is how you win wars.
There are too many "rules" of war today, which in the aggregate, serve only to enable warfare and extend killing.
Great article.
Your conclusion "The technology that keeps them home is a moral asset, not a moral hazard".
Morality has nothing to do with war.
The phase is really: "The technology that keeps them home is a population motivation asset. The population in a democracy and even in Russia, is more motivated to support the war if their sons and daughters are not in danger"
What’s wrong with your mind? You guys wake up in the morning think the first thing is always war.
Maybe they are being realistic and then responsible?
America is the nation that kidnapped one nations leader, assassinated another, bombs civilian boats and is responsible for the energy crisis that is causing severe pain all over the world, likely deaths in poor countries. They keep endlessly blathering on about the hypothetical wars China might wage but the only one I see constantly building weapons and salivating over war is America. Their VCs will push any narrative it takes to sell their companies.
No man left behind sounds great on paper. But what about the ground reality of all the homeless veterans?
The production-mass gap is the harder-to-fix half of this argument, not the AI-talent gap. Chinese drone production reportedly exceeds NATO capacity by an order of magnitude per open-source estimates, and Operation Spiderweb showed what 117 FPV drones at roughly $500 each can do to a target the post pegs at $7 billion in losses. Treating attritable autonomous systems as ammunition rather than F-35 successors is the procurement reform that follows, and the gating constraint sits at the contracting category, not the model layer.
The contracting angle is where the $54.6 billion Pentagon autonomous warfare request gets interesting. Two companies already hold the production-line contracts, which suggests the procurement category is forming around primes rather than the ammunition model you're describing. If attritable systems get bought like F-35s, that order-of-magnitude gap doesn't close.
The USA lags so far behind Russia and China militarily that it cannot catch up. We have not deployed a single 21st century and our F-35s ship without AESA radar because Northrop ran out of REEs.
Automotive tier ones have figured out how to ship millions of phased array radars per year at scale. Look at how many waymos are on the road. If you want a us example look at the adas hardware tesla is putting out.
It's the REE shortage, not manufacturing, that's the problem.
Great article. Really got me thinking. Not nitpicking but the example of Truman may not be the best one. He was an Artillery Unit Captain in WWI and his unit saw quite a bit of action and he was on the trigger. Lincoln is a good example - he was in the Blackhawk War but no actual battlefield experience. Wilson, or Clinton or anyone post Bush 41 is a good example - no actual military experience since Bush 41 in the CiC.