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 The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> if we're talking Ukraine, we have to talk Poland
No, we're not ;) They are where they are because they lease the ground under a NATO base, WHICH is actually doing the job. Not the Polish government.
Whis has been a very unreliable partner for the last 4 years, constantly using their geographical position to push Ukraine into submission and leverage their own political interests for internal and external programs.
> geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive, if not thrive
As long as Ukrainian military power is there, the region is safe. That's why the Baltic and Northern countries are investing so much in Ukraine + constantly taking our war experience.
In general, are they being useful? Absolutely yes. Do we need to include them in any discussions? No, since they are already misusing their position. Plus telling everyone how useful they are. Like, in case anybody can forget.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It's wildly naive to think that dictators are 'nutjobs'. They are, without exception, shrewd political operators. You don't get to be dictator and stay dictator without a certain skill set, and part of that is having a good sense of which actions get you a bigger bank account and which ones end with your head on a stick.
They might be wrong like any human, but they aren't cartoon villains.
maybe not nut jobs, but I think the argument that the inherent structure that they put in place to maintain power is poor at optimizing human capital and expertise, such that they will aways make lousier decisions because they are surrounded by yes men
Granted, there is what is China is "openly saying" in terms of official warnings and such, and what they are "openly saying" in terms of what they are actually spending money on in terms of material, equipment and capability (of which there is at least some degree of logical, non-nut job type thinking behind):
> 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.
1. “Reunification” is straight Chinese propaganda. Taiwan has never been part of the PRC. Japan has a stronger claim for “reunification” than the PRC does (and that’d also be very dumb)
2. Taiwan and Taiwanese allies also have agency. China doesn’t just get to fire 20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan with no consequences. The consequences would maybe be asymmetrical, but they’d no doubt be very painful for China.
China is constrained on this by near certain mutually assured economic destruction.
Even the food supply in China would basically be destroyed unless you believe that the population is going to just go back to a diet of largely rice with meat being a luxury.
20-30k ballistic missiles at Taiwan would cause a global depression that dwarfs the great depression. There would be almost no way the CCP survive this. That is why this subject is mostly people talking nonsense.
Reunification has to happen politically, persuasively, over time and without firing a shot.
1. That I see it as payback for the KMT losing the civil war.
2. Yeah, dunno about that, who will do what exactly to China? I also think that, since you mentioned it, Japan would intervene, China will pretty much use it as an excuse for retribution on what the Japanese did to the Chinese during WW2.
I'd assume China wants to keep as much manufacturing capabilities of Taiwan intact. If it was just about unification, then it would have happened long time 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.
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?
> 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.
That’s wrong. The US and UK airlifted anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles among other things to Ukraine while telling the world Russia was about to invade (which Europeans refused to believe).
You may be confusing European support and their lack of it (remember the famous time Germany just sent 45,000 old helmets?) with how the United States and United Kingdom helped.
There were no airlifts into Ukraine, arms had to cross the border as they have since. The supplies were in small quantities up to the invasion. They were an important help to Ukraine, but you are overstating how crucial they were - as if stingers and NLAWs did the fighting, or as if Ukraine didn't have its Soviet legacy or homegrown systems like Stugna-P which had a much more decisive impact those early months.
Western support at any scale didn't arrive until later in the year.
There's a difference between "airlifted 24/7 since the beginning of the invasion" and:
- the two packages promised in March were delivered by April, all pushed via conventional transport through Poland and Romania (IIRC deliveries didn't start until at least mid-March, and by that time Ukraine was already suffering heavy losses, logistics collapses etc. )
- there's a nebulous commitment to <list of weapons> which we know barely trickled in as US committed, then withdrew, then commited, then withdrew support, then claimed Ukraine was too stupid to use these weapons, or that it would lead to escalation, or...
> 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.
This is bullshit from anyone in the know.
There had been multiple YEARS of Western Special Operations inside Ukraine leading up to and during the opening phases of the war. Some were pulled back to defend Kyiv / Zelensky during the original search for him in the opening days of the war. Without UK SOF and their initial deployments of anti-armor weapons, there is a good chance Russia would have gotten much further.
Ukraine has had comprehensive intelligence, logistics, etc support for a long time, but it has been a fraction of what each country could contribute.
> There had been multiple YEARS of Western Special Operations inside Ukraine leading up to and during the opening phases of the war.
That is why Russia quickly reached Kiev, and Ukraine still can't win the war? Because there were inhales, screams MULTIPLE YEARS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS?
> Without UK SOF and their initial deployments of anti-armor weapons, there is a good chance Russia would have gotten much further.
No one denies that there were Western Weapons in Ukraine. What is bullshit is that they were somehow airlifted 24/7 during initial phases of the war. They decidedly weren't. Neither before the invasion, nor during the first days. Nor, indeed during any phase of the war.
"In February 2022, amid a build-up of Russian forces on the Russo-Ukrainian border and concerns of an impending Russian invasion, the UK began supplying Ukraine with anti-tank weapons, including NLAW missiles. Teams of UK military personnel were deployed to provide training on how to use the weapons, within the framework of Operation Orbital.[10] Some 2,000 missiles were airlifted to the country by the Royal Air Force using C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft. RAF surveillance aircraft, including Boeing RC-135, were also involved with collecting intelligence on Russian ground movements."
"But when the president approved $350 million in military aid on Feb. 26 — nearly six times larger — 70 percent of it was delivered in five days. The speed was considered essential, officials said, because the equipment — including anti-tank weapons — had to make it through western Ukraine before Russian air and ground forces started attacking the shipments. As Russia takes more territory inside the country, it is expected to become more and more difficult to distribute weapons to Ukrainian troops."
"Within 48 hours of Mr. Biden approving the transfer of weapons from U.S. military stockpiles on Feb. 26, the first shipments, largely from Germany, were arriving at airfields near Ukraine’s border, officials said."
"The military was able to push those shipments forward quickly by tapping into pre-positioned military stockpiles ready to roll onto Air Force C-17 transport planes and other cargo aircraft, and flying them to about half a dozen staging bases in neighboring countries, chiefly in Poland and Romania."
"Now it is being turned back against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, part of a vast airlift that American and European officials describe as a desperate race against time, to get tons of arms into the hands of Ukrainian forces while their supply routes are still open. Scenes like this, reminiscent of the Berlin airlift — the famed race by the Western allies to keep West Berlin supplied with essentials in 1948 and 1949 as the Soviet Union sought to choke it off — are playing out across Europe."
"In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military cargo planes so they can make the trip by land to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities. So far, Russian forces have been so preoccupied in other parts of the country that they have not targeted the arms supply lines, but few think that can last."
> No one denies that there were Western Weapons in Ukraine. What is bullshit is that they were somehow airlifted 24/7 during initial phases of the war. They decidedly weren't. Neither before the invasion, nor during the first days. Nor, indeed during any phase of the war.
---
Article:
> In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons,
>> In less than a week, the United States and NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons
Please do go on quoting literally the same sentence:
--- start quote ---
NATO have pushed more than 17,000 antitank weapons, including Javelin missiles, over the borders of Poland and Romania, unloading them from giant military cargo planes so they can make the trip by land to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other major cities.
--- end quote ---
Strange how the totally prepared FOR YEARS special operations were left scrambling to deliver enough weapons before projected logistics collapse.
I'm not sure what your precise argument is to be honest, it seems to be all over the place.
All I know is Russia has over a million dead troops, a dying economy, and fuck all to show for it.
They got to Kyiv and did nothing. Their plans were shit. Their intel was shit. And now they're throwing their people into the meatgrinder with no hope for them in sight.
This is easily proven false. See my above comment about both the UK SOF operations and the US flights of weapons. The info is well documented and sourced.
Russian logistics failed because of Ukrainian resistance. The NLAWs and stingers were extremely useful to Ukraine, but the more important fact is that the Ukrainian army was prepared, disciplined, and didn't melt away as Russia expected.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
There is a lot of resistance from the Ukrainians to going to the frontlines as we can see in the endless videos of people fighting the government “recruiters” who come to forcibly take them and the large stream of people fleeing the country. It’s hard to tell if the will to continue fight comes from the people or the government, it’s not nearly as clear as you imply.
In my view, it’s a huge crime against life for this war to continue. A compromise is the only solution. From both sides of course. But it seems both sides still consider the continuing fight and death toll is worthwhile and preferable to the compromises they would need to make to end the craziness. We will look back at this time as a huge failure of Europe and the US to manage to first prevent Russia aggression, and then even worse , prolonging the conflict for several years by simply failing to provide what was needed to defeat Russia while providing just enough for the Russians to advance only very slowly and at a high cost - the worst possible outcome since Ukraine still loses a huge amount of territory and more importantly, people, while Russia loses a much smaller proportion of its population while achieving many of its goals and proving to the West that it can challenge its political position near its borders even if war is the only way to do so.
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.
Wow, I just looked up how self-sufficient the island is and the answer is barely at all. Which initially seems surprising given the continual threat. But I guess they're counting on global support as a tech chokepoint.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Maybe, but I wish people in these conversations would sometimes point out that China is also dependent on imports to continue to make the stuff it makes.
China is a heavy importer of petroleum, food and fertilizer. A modern economy needs petroleum to grow food and to deliver food to consumers. Although China is wisely trying to replace that dependence on petroleum with electric vehicles, it has not yet succeeded. If there's ever a sustained shortage of food, Chinese young men are likely to start revolting and rioting like they've done dozens of times in Chinese history in response to food shortages. China relies on foreign nations for approximately 75% to 80% of its total iron ore consumption, making it the world's largest importer. Despite having had semiconductor manufacturing self-sufficiency as a top national priority for many years, it is still the case that Chinese smartphone manufacturers rely heavily on Samsung and TSMC for the SOCs that go into those smartphones -- and MediaTek (Taiwan) and Qualcomm (US), not Chinese firms, design most of those SOCs.
Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan argues that the United States is the only major global power fully capable of national self-sufficiency. I.e., if global trade is ever disrupted by world war, the US would be able replace its missing imports much faster than China would be able to.
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.
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.
> If massively provoked, e.g. Taiwan declares independence and joins NATO, sure.
You think NATO would stand there with open arms in such a case? NATO membership requires agreement from all member states, and I don't sense a great appetite among the European countries for a war with China.
I agree with the overall point of your post though.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Most drones are controlled by humans, so they don't need neural networks. Larger drones still don't use anything too advanced, as specialized neural networks actually don't need beefy hardware.
Maybe this will change in future, but the US still has enough semiconductor manufacturing capacity to produce a few million chips for drones.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I agree and upvoted you for a good comment with a good source.
In my mind I was thinking about how humans have to actually go back to the land. In Ukraine we’ve seen what amount to drone enforced no-man’s lands where no human can really seize or make use of the land. There of course can be the case where the drones clear the land of enemy troops and drones and then your own people or soldiers move and then occupy the land.
There is a very very large ocean between China and the USA, you cant just assume the lessons from the Ukraine-Russian war will transfer. It would be a completely different beast, and as OP said, missiles might play an important role for both sides. In such a scenario we might see both powers having most of their industrial base destroyed before any of their soldiers (or drones) come into reach of each other.
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.
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.
> 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.
The internet never forgets: you go and find the first speech about why the war was started and look at the outcome. You can then judge for yourself if the war was won or lost. Obviously with all its nuances.
By that logic Iran has lost the war too, because they can't possibly come out of this situation in a better place than before the war started, which really was back in October 2022.
Since then Iran's economy has been crushed, government was decapitated (and could be again at a time and place of our choosing), they face a naval blockade that prevents them from selling oil, their military was drastically reduced in size and capability by American bombing, they've made their fellow Arabs in the region very, very angry, and they've come to see that both China and Russia (don't forget, Iran sells drones to Russia to kill Ukrainians) were powerless to come to its aid. Their nuclear program is at best on pause.
Now we can sprinkle in that they've depleted a lot of their munitions, and both Hamas and Hezbollah were nearly destroyed and have become shells of their former selves, resorting to hiding behind children and attacking UN aid convoys.
Just in case you thought Iran was somehow coming out of this situation better than before, the above shows that is unequivocally false.
Russia is not using their drones in the same way that Ukraine is.
Russia cannot get conventional artillery close enough to use it properly, and Ukraine is keeping personnel away from the front line so they're hard to spot and harder to hit.
Russia is bombarding Ukraine's population centres with long-range cruise missiles. This is the failed Blitz strategy that Britain goaded Germany into during WW2 - get the enemy mad enough to bomb population centres, and not military or economic assets (Germany had almost achieved air superiority by bombing British airfields). Ukraine is leaving the population centres alone and focusing on economic and military production facilities.
Russia is losing this war. And has been for over a year.
There was lots of discussion within Russian and Ukrainian war analytics that nukes (at least tactical) are useless in this war for the following reasons:
- they would not change much on battlefield - there is no large concentrations that you can nuke - everything is dispersed
- nuking urban centers again won't change much on battlefield but would alienate China
- Russia's equipment is known to be not most reliable/maintained and worst that can happen to Russia is them trying to nuke and nukes not working
Nuking all the major population centers would pretty much destroy the ability of Ukraine to manufacture weapons in any meaningful number and it would also deprive its army of any new soldiers, no reinforcements, no food supplies and so on. I think it will change the course of the war pretty fast and pretty drastically.
You're mistaken. A significant portion of Ukraine's manufacturing now happens abroad, out of Russia's reach. Meanwhile, a large part of its domestic production is decentralized and widely distributed. (You can easily find snobbish and pejorative comments by Rheinmetall's CEO about this.)
Nuclear weapon use would lead to no meaningful military success, but it would immediately alienate the superpower Russia depends on in almost every way. China will not tolerate any nation using nuclear weapons. With its extremely dense population, it can't afford a modern wartime precedent to be set for their use.
Yeah, I was going to point out there's a few "big bombs" out there that aren't useless at all . .
Someone will break the First Use taboo, but I wouldn't put money on it being Russia, at the moment, not for Ukraine, as odd as it sounds to say that.
There are more important concerns keeping Putin from breaking First Use, but one interesting one is a genuine anxiety that the stupid thing just wouldn't work. Just lay an egg of fissionable material in Zelensky's bedroom.
I think if there is no retaliation to a nuclear strike on Ukraine, every nuclear capable country will rush towards nuclear weapons as fast as possible.
The reason being, Europe has a long term understanding they are under the nuclear umbrella of the USA which means that Europe does not need to maintain their own atomic weapons. If that long term agreement does not hold, the only way to deter Russia is to have nuclear weapons of your own since you cannot rely on deterrence from other countries.
Once everyone has nukes, Russia can no longer bully countries around because they will glass Moscow. This is a worse state than today where Russia can invade countries using conventional weapons without much consequence.
That's the thing I don't understand: why would they try to nuke Moscow if they weren't the ones attacked? And would they risk their own demise (considering the imbalance in warheads between them and Russia)?
Yup. Because a country attacking another with nuclear weapons in its mad genocidal occupational war it started under false pretenses will definitely sit back and do nothing once it showed it can and will use nuclear weapons for any cause.
Yup. A country that starts nuking other countries in a genocidal war of conquest will not ever be seen as a threat by any other countries and will not suffer any consequences ever.
Russia has already entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them.
I maybe missing something, but it feels bonkers to me of why with all the MIRVs they have on hundreds of nukes they do not feel the need to carpet bomb Ukraine with them.
What you're missing is a simple bext step in your thought process: why are you so entirely sure that Russia will not suffer any single consequence for doing so?
(also this assumes that russia actuall has hundreds of working nukes)
(this also assumes that carpet bombing a country of 40 million people with nukes will find love and support inside Russia despite all the propaganda)
Edit: you have now replied many times with "I don't understand why Russia doesn't nuke Ukraine". Perhaps you should take the time to try and understand?
> What you're missing is a simple bext step in your thought process: why are you so entirely sure that Russia will not suffer any single consequence for doing so?
There could be consequences. But I am wondering how painful would they be and if the US would get into a nuking game with them. Would it be worth it for the west to become a wasteland just because there needs to be consequences for Russia.
> Edit: you have now replied many times with "I don't understand why Russia doesn't nuke Ukraine". Perhaps you should take the time to try and understand?
Hence the question here again and again: why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
> Would it be worth it for the west to become a wasteland just because there needs to be consequences for Russia.
In your scenario you're saying that Russia is going to show its willingness to lay waste to everything in its genocidal war, including carpet-bombing a country of 40 million people with nuclear bombs. Making it surpass any war in history, including WWII.
Again, in this scenario, somehow, everything just stops, everything is handy-dandy, Russia suffers literally no consequences, everyone just says "oh yeah, the genocidal maniacs are satisfied now, they will never ever carpet bomb anyone else with nuclear bombs".
> why doesn’t Russia unleash the nuclear armageddon on Ukraine? They would stop the Ukraine’s attacks on itself and get a very large no-go zine between itself and NATO - win-win.
Because, once again, you seem to assume that Russia will suffer literally no consequences externally or internally for doing so.
E.g. Russia will be immediately carpet bombed themselves since we already know that their air defenses aren't worth shit.
Because the point of the war was part of the plan to reform the Soviet Union under Russia/Putin.
The idea was to spend a few days, a couple weeks at most, taking Kyiv and the major cities, and then absorb Ukraine into a greater Russian state.
If they have to nuke Ukraine to make them do that, then that's not going to work. Absorbing a radioactive hellhole, with all the problems that will bring, isn't the plan.
Of course, the plan has gone badly wrong, and pretty much everything has gone the opposite to the way Putin wanted it do, so he could still nuke Ukraine just out of petty spite.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, very interesting fact. If a unit is performing badly due to lack of equipment, they won't get the points to get the equipment they need. I wonder if that's a problem in practice. I'll read up on it, very interesting stuff.
Basically yes. Ukraine has a big problem with soviet commanders who waste lives needlessly. The post Soviet younger commanders have much better reputations and use that to recruit, ie 'you can join my unit and won't be conscripted'. The popular and successful units grow and split into sub units. This way they dont have to fire the unpopular soviet era but politically connected commanders, they just slowly lose relevance.
I often think about how culture impacts efficacy. Hindering individuals through reconditioning of a hierarchical top down structure (follow orders unconditionally) limits collaboration, cohesion, and creativity often in situations where it's needed most. I understand the advantages of rapid decision making, but I often think about how if any leader in the chain makes a poor decision it loses the trust of those below. Tactical, creative, non-conforming, and adaptive reduces single points of responsibility and failure. While this might exist in pockets, it's far from the norm in most traditional environments and I'm curious what a culture shift like this might yield at a wider scale.
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.
The point was just that gameification is just a modern word that doesn't reflect any change in behaviors. Presumably you were familiar with these practices under previous descriptors. And your moral objections would have been shared by many millions before you, long before gameification was coined.
On the other side of the coin to thinking there's something new about the way war is waged are the people who think they can wage war without the same consequences as befell nations before. It's fundamentally the same err, IMO. So I take moral objection to the pretense that there's something morally novel to criticize. This stuff is what happens in war, always. And things can get way worse than this, and will get worse the longer we tolerate open hostilities among nations.
I think the difference is between:
1) me doing a nice thing and them reciprocating later, possibly. Others may or may not see this display of niceness.
2) me doing a nice thing, getting karma points my friend and other sees, which I can possibly use to get perks of some kind.
Gamification is not a new word for an old idea. It's a new thing, at least in many contexts.
I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games - "20 tokens for this character!" feels better than $40), this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
Sorry for the rambley and extremely verbose reply but tbh it's absolutely horrifying and sickening to see as a fellow human, and I just wanted to get it out. (I'm obviously not saying Ukraine is wrong for wanting to protect territory - but it's the other aspects that are "awesome" (or awe-full?), in the wrong way of awe.)
Nobody in Ukraine is separated from the carnage, least of all the soldiers. The value in the points system is in communicating target priorities down the line. It's just another technological improvement in the vein of, say, the radio. All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people. But war is fundamentally dehumanizing. In fact, for most soldiers dehumanizing the enemy is a necessity, because otherwise they can't pull the trigger. The dehumanization to be worried about is the dehumanization of people from the perspective of non-combatants, especially those isolated from the war, like Americans.
Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence. In that sense having a professional rather than conscripted army should be much more morally repugnant than e-points. Again, no one in Ukraine is isolated from consequences in any meaningful way.
The Ukraine War is the most televised war in history. Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed. Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality, a reality which is only hidden from one's view by choice. (After a few videos that left me crying, I figured I saw enough to ensure I was dutifully more engaged with the reality than the typical non-veteran at a comfortable remove.)
If anything drones and the necessity of having to record a kill for "points" is arguably an improvement over traditional aerially bombardment. Being forced to watch people injured and killed comes with a greater cost, even for veteran soldiers. On HN we take for granted that, e.g., Facebook employees forced to sift through child porn continually pay a price no matter how long they've been at the job, yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game. That perspective betrays a certain callousness that is in some respect even more worrisome than these technological advancements on the battlefield.
Unfortunately I'm too tired to give a more thought out reply at this time of the night, but there were a few things I wanted to add.
To clarify at the outset, I full understand your view and partly agree with it.
I just had some thoughts, and was reminded of something while reading your comment.
> All technological improvements will seem to have the effect of dehumanizing people...
> Where technology creates greater moral hazards in war is when it helps insulate the leadership and population from the consequences of war, and so lowers the sociological and political costs to violence...
These were also the results of the invention of the gatlin gun.
A gun made by the creator to save lives.
Of course, if you now can shoot 100 times as many bullets, you don't use 1/100th as many men, you just shoot 100x bullets.
Which... yeah. I wish I had a solution, but I don't. And obviously no one's going to ramp down their own death causing machines™ when the enemy has no incentive to. (Nuclear proliferation was probably only sucessful mainly because of the high level of difficulty in both the processes as well as material sourcing.)
> Debates over e-points, to me, reflect a failure to appreciate the reality...
I don't think the debate (at least not from my side) is over e points; it's more "shit, war's already terrible, and this is even more dehumanising".
> ...yet seem to assume soldiers watching a drone video feed feel no different than playing a video game...
I never implied that in the slightest. My ire is primarily directed at the people making the system, which almost certainly are folks at higher ranks - not the average soldier. I fully understand humans are human(e).
> Especially in the beginning I forced myself to watch the videos, just so I wouldn't get lost in abstraction. The human suffering is gut wrenching. You can watch men getting shredded down; soldiers embracing each other in fear and helplessness moments before they're killed or maimed.
I have also watched many of these absolutely messed up videos; but I am absolutely not convinced that the e-points system reduces this suffering in any way. Psychological distance absolutely can make it "easier" to kill, and perhaps a man with a broken down tank was already effectively a "Hors de Combat" but if you shoot him you get 12 points, and...
Also I just wanted to add - I'm nowhere claiming this is a cushy job for Ukrainian drone operators who won't get PTSD due to it being via a screen.
In my original comment, I had said
> this is way more similar to CoD or any other shooting game than it has ever been in human history, and by a significant amount.
I'm saying it's far closer to CoD. It's absolutely still fucked up, regardless of whether you're an operator or a family of someone on the frontline. But I'm not claiming it's identical to a game.
This post is so insanely out of touch with reality. What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country. Trying to project criticisms of the American drone program onto Ukraine in such an openly transparent and uncritical manner is the only thing sickening here. For your platitudes about humanity you clearly care so little about such a deadly conflict to have clearly done no research into the basic facts. The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious. But really it's the arrogance of this post paired with the professed humanity that is so unnerving. It's like you took an essay about America's drone program and just copied it into the Ukranian context with no critical thought or self reflection. That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.
> That seems the most charitable way to interpret your post. And I'm really trying.
Ps, if you're genuinely curious, I can share a link where I got Gemini 3.1 Pro (at max thinking) to analyse this chat as neutrally as I could. Seeing as Gemini had an easier time than you did, maybe it could give you some help?
This explains so much. I truly feel sad for you. The fact you think this is a point in your column tells me everything I need to know. I wish I had seen this before wasting my time with the other reply. Have a nice day buddy. Enjoy the chatbot.
> What an irony. Their country is being invaded. Their families are being affected and killed. Their land is being taken. The goal is to end their country.
And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
I'm talking about "Shit, it's bad to dehumanise war even more".
Are you saying "No, that's a good thing if your country is under attack"?
Because if you're actually wanting to say "It's a fucked up situation for them", then, yeah, I agree... and I've never said anything to the contrary? Are we on the same page then, or not?
> The comparison to CoD in particular is so deeply egregious.
So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
If you're saying "we shouldn't be crying about gamification because there are more important things as their country's at stake", well, there are more humans dying of hunger every day than in Ukraine, so therefore the EU should put all its funds supporting Ukraine into reducing global hunger? By that logic??
Please, if you're a grown adult, have the nuance and the maturity to show it. Multiple things can be issues at the same time, and calling one out doesn't make the other justified - because that's what it feels like you're accusing me of. And please feel free to correct me if I've said anything wrong (or if you disagree with any of my options.)
> I think something fundamentally new is not only the incentivisation directly affecting kills - as a top team/unit can iterate up much faster, unlike a soldier who could boast more kills, but still have the same rifle as his colleagues - but the layers and desensitisation overall.
What does any of this mean? You think everyone in the military gets the same gear and capabilities and support? You think incentives don't exist in the military? You think rewards for units that are more lethal in war is a new phenomena? You don't think layers exist in the military to ensure that most people do not have to fight at the tip of the spear, and those that do get constant support from other elements? What are you talking about?
> Part of this probably admittedly isn't new, and likely started with drones, where you could kill someone in Iraq sitting in DC, on the other side of the world.
Oh ok so it's not new? But it "likely" started with American drone use in Iraq or something. Ok, explain to me how this started then? Why is the analogous situation? Because you see the word "drone" in the same sentence? Are you not aware much of human innovation around war is not putting yourself at risk when attacking an adversary? This is basically intuitive. Why did it start here instead of in the first conflict where tribes of men were beating each other to death with sticks before someone invented the sling or the arrow? Please tell me what version of combat you find most humanizing.
> But now with both, being separated from the physicality, and the incentives via points...
Um except they aren't separated from the physicality? It's people invading their own land? How can you make a claim about being separated physically or the "physicality" and from "incentives" and think pointing out their country is being invaded is a time to ask "And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?" What species of logic is this?
You: They are separated from the physicality and the incentives via points (the same way arguably in app currencies are used in gacha games[...]
Me: Well no, it's not really like that at all. I mean their country is being invaded. Their families are dying. Their friends are dying. They liberate towns and find dead civilians. They endure bombing on their own civilian infrastructure. How on Earth could that be separated from the "physicality and incentives" re warfare? How could you ever compare going through that to a video game?
You: And what does that have to do with anything I was talking about?
Um buddy have you been playing too many of these games? What are you talking about?
I'm sorry how close do you want them to get? Are all attacks from the air dehumanizing or gamified? At what range does the humanization kick in? It's "CoD" unless what the Ukrainian runs across the frontline with a club to bludgeon a Russian to death? How many drone videos have you watched? Is your claim a Ukrainian would be less likely to take the opportunity at a clear shot at a Russian via a rifle than with a drone? Because they would fear for their humanity? Do you know how humans about to be blown up by a drone act? Suddenly the Russian invader is not so aggressive. And how are they separated from the incentives? You mean the incentive of stopping an army from invading their land and ending their nation and having domination over their families? The "points" is a scrappy formalization of a system. You think a Ukrainian soldier needs "points" to want to defend his country? Gee if I wasn't about to get this CoD style achievement I'd probably just let him go?
> So you're saying this war isn't the closest we've been to a gamified war perhaps ever in human history?
Yes, of course I'm saying that. The closest we've come "gamification of war" is having to suffer people like you who clearly don't know anything, can't read their own writing, regurgitate other people's think pieces and talk about a conflict that you are separated from with clear casual indifference and frankly, ignorance. The Ukrainian story is a deeply human one of ingenuity and courage in the face of a stronger, dominating, existential adversary. Their drone program is a big part of this.
The rest of your reply is shallow nonsense ("world hunger", "grown adult", clear cheap rhetorical tricks - inventing an argument that was never made to justify your abysmally lazy takes) like mate, just read your own writing. You're comparing people being invaded to a CoD game. Your acting like an American operating a drone in Baghdad is somehow something like what's happening in Ukraine? Hello, Iraq was not invading the United States? If you're an American drone pilot your family is not being bombed or evacuated. The average American drone costs what, easily 100x more? If not double that? These are people slapping together consumer parts in dire circumstances so their country can be free. And you are just regurgitating this just deeply grating Western privilege style of frankly, uncritical blither about "gamification" and Obama era think pieces that only someone who has not seriously asked how their society would handle an existential invasion could manage. All while not being able to look in the mirror. You're the gamification. To the people in Ukraine, it's not a game. Everything about what they are doing re drones and and combat is consistent with their position in asymmetric, existential conflict. How is an American drone operator in any way related to that? Again because you saw the word "drone"? What else is similar? You think the American drone operator has the same disposition vis-a-vis his targets as a Ukrainian? Is that your claim? How could that possibly be the case? Which is more or less gamified? Let's hear it.
Why don't you actually attempt an answer to that question. I would love for you to actually defend any of this instead of inventing more straw men arguments. Let's see if you can actually defend a single sentence you put forward.
Or does it all boil down to a general indifference?
> I'm talking about "Shit, it's bad to dehumanise war even more".
Perhaps this theory of "gamification" appeals to you because it's simply the soup you swim in. Why don't you "act like an adult" and actually attempt a defense of your own words. Or concede you erred. Where is the "nuance and maturity"? I'm not seeing it. Explain the "multiple things at issue". Let's hear it, please. Are you going to defend your statements or is "shit war sucks" and an inapplicable recitation of other people's thoughts on gamification and drones really the best you can do?
I'm intrigued (but unfortunately not surprised) by the downvote.
I suspect it's primarily due to folks missing nuance/misinterpreting thing (and/or getting emotional and running off with it).
I ran a thread to analyse hidden/missed nuance - where I tried to be as "neutral" as possible (by never identifying myself), if someone's genuinely interested I can share the link. (Hint: Gemini 3.1 Pro at max thinking mode in AI Studio says others are missing a point/some nuance.)
Can you expand on that? There is a long history of warrior codes, just war theory, war crimes, etc. Certainly they have virtually always been followed imperfectly, but I'm not sure that means that they don't exist.
Note that capturing a live Russian soldier is worth 10 times more than killing one. Think about how that affects the incentives of Ukrainian soldiers. Avoid committing war crimes, get better gear for your team.
1. Even in the insanity of war, there are rules and ethics we collectively agree to (except Israel apparently with white phosphorus use). I find that gamifying taking human lives crosses the line.
2. Not every captured soldier of course, some don't even know where they are.
> Gameification of war is the literal worst thing I ever heard.
Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.
The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.
This is silly. Elite units have always gotten better gear. If this is the part of war that causes you moral outrage I think you've got some rexamining to do.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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".
It’s a mixed blessing because while the competition should lead to better designs it also leads to massive fragmentation in the drones used which has negative consequences for maintenance, training etc compared to the Russian approach of making huge numbers of a few proven designs
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.
I think the actual purpose of the market is to reduce corruption. When everyone has to publish prices and Pavel pays his mate 3x for the same drone it's easier to flag for auditing.
I posted this in another reply, but this is relevant to your point about the market place (deeper in article) and for the hacker news audience - the current Defense Minister for Ukraine is a 35 year old from the tech industry, Mykhailo Fedorov
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theo...
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.
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
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.
The spear analogy dates at least as far back as 1940. Heavy mechanized units as the tip and then reinforcing units behind them, further units to secure flanks, logistics flow. From the metal differences across the head of a spear (something that people who have a passing familiarity of artillery or naval gunnery will be able to relate to) the finish of the handle to keep the wood in good shape the analogies basically write themselves. The dick jokes are an obvious follow on.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm guessing with backstabbing he means China's practice of stealing technology and closing off the market for foreign companies.
Lots of smaller and mid sized companies that tried to invest in the Chinese market lost everything because the government protected and supported local copycats, with no intention of giving the foreign company fair access to the market.
And let’s not forget China’s helping of Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine by training soldiers [1] and providing dual use technology access.
It’s interesting how the OP that you responded to was quick to start slinging accusations of propaganda and react so violently without even asking a clarifying question. Well, let’s just say some of us read those comments with a little extra interest.
Okay and how does this materially hurt Americans? The elites in the US hoard all the wealth, US corporations doing well internationally means fuck all for the domestic citizens.
This is what I mean by how much of a farce this all is. Why should I care that China's steal IP? Chinese products are actually good + cheap to a consumer like me, all I see our corporations being unable to compete with an actual competitor that has a different view of the world + vision of the future.
Hard to see why I should be willing to sacrifice Americans to uphold corporations.
Well if this is what you believe you're basically going to just end up in a world where you are sacrificing Americans or Europeans to uphold Chinese corporations and then their elites hoard all the wealth, and tax revenue to fund services vanishes in the United States, though I think Trump and co would be happy about that development.
At the end of the day, corporations will be upheld so it's a question of whether you'd like some degree of control and ownership, or whether you'd like to, well who knows what you'd do because how are you going to buy products when you don't have a job, and makes you think Chinese companies won't eventually raise their prices or start cheating out? They already do via companies like Temu which are producing e-waste and plastic junk at artificially cheap prices and of course that ends up polluting the environment too.
If nothing else, consumerism and cheap material products at the expense of all else I'd argue isn't a good thing and we should move away from that as a society.
Iran routinely denied inspectors access to facilities. American intelligence isn’t 100% accurate. And why should we have to effectively pay off Iran or have some special deal where they hold the world hostage less they build a nuclear bomb? Why do we only have to do that with Iran but not other countries?
I’m all for diplomatic solutions to problems, but Iran was building nuclear weapons under our nose anyway and loading up on missiles and drones to make it difficult to impossible for the US to do anything about them without severe regional casualties. Nevermind Iran’s continued funding of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis and their support for Russia in its war against Ukraine.
It’s even more simple. All countries don’t have equal rights. The strong make the rules and the weak suffer what they must. That’s how the world actually functions.
But if you want to argue that countries have equal rights, well, in order to have equal rights one must have some rule, or law, or some other mechanism in which to receive and agree upon such rights or a forum to argue that such rights have been violated requiring some sort of justice. Otherwise these aren’t really rights, just claims.
The closest thing we have to an entity that defines and adjudicates relations with respect to countries and rights is the United Nations.
What does the United Nations say about nuclear weapon proliferation?
It's even simpler than that: all countries do have equal rights. The fact that russia or israel or the USA feel differently, and violate those rights, is immaterial.
But if you want to argue that it's legally and morally okay for any country to attack and invade whomever they want, for whatever reason they want, go for it. It kind of cuts against your point though.
> The closest thing we have to an entity that defines and adjudicates relations with respect to countries and rights is the United Nations
What does the United Nations say about israel's actions in Lebanon and Palestine? I'll give you a hint: it matches what they say about russia's actions in Ukraine, because they're the same thing.
> What does the United Nations say about nuclear weapon proliferation?
The United Nations agrees that countries have equal rights. Beyond that, are you talking about israel's nuclear weapon proliferation here, or iran's civilian nuclear program?
israel, a religiously fanatical autocracy which routinely threatens, attacks, invades, and occupies other countries, holds no moral high ground, and doesn't have or deserve any special rights above and beyond iran here. What does israel have as far as a nuclear program? That's what other countries are now entitled to, unless israel wants to give up theirs.
> It's even simpler than that: all countries do have equal rights. The fact that russia or israel or the USA feel differently, and violate those rights, is immaterial.
You forgot some countries (Venezuela, Iran, &c.) but this very fact proves my point. Those rights are just fictions which are mostly backed by American military power.
> What does the United Nations say about israel's actions in Lebanon and Palestine? I'll give you a hint: it matches what they say about russia's actions in Ukraine, because they're the same thing
What does that have to do with Iran? And why would the bad actions of one country excuse the bad actions of another?
> The United Nations agrees that countries have equal rights. Beyond that, are you talking about israel's nuclear weapon proliferation here, or iran's civilian nuclear program?
I’m talking about Iran’s nuclear weapon proliferation. There are rules, you think all countries should be beholden to those rules. Why are you excusing Iran breaking the rules?
If you want to excuse them, then fine, but then I excuse any rules a country I agree with breaks and we just go back to my original point which is at the international stage might makes right.
> What does that have to do with Iran? And why would the bad actions of one country excuse the bad actions of another?
If israel's nuclear program isn't a "bad action", then Iran's nuclear program isn't a "bad action", either. If there is no bad action there, then there's nothing to excuse, and we're left with unjustified israeli attacks on Iran (along with Palestine and Lebanon to boot).
> I’m talking about Iran’s nuclear weapon proliferation. There are rules, you think all countries should be beholden to those rules. Why are you excusing Iran breaking the rules?
Why are you excusing israel breaking those rules? Iran has been an NPT member for decades, israel refuses to even sign it, much less abide by the restrictions and safeguards around nuclear nonproliferation. Clearly they are the real proliferation threat here.
> If israel's nuclear program isn't a "bad action", then Iran's nuclear program isn't a "bad action", either. If there is no bad action there, then there's nothing to excuse, and we're left with unjustified israeli attacks on Iran (along with Palestine and Lebanon to boot).
Who said it wasn't?
We're also left with unjustified Iranian attacks (along with Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis).
> Why are you excusing israel breaking those rules? Iran has been an NPT member for decades, israel refuses to even sign it, much less abide by the restrictions and safeguards around nuclear nonproliferation. Clearly they are the real proliferation threat here.
I didn't excuse them. I think the only country that should have nuclear weapons is America. Maybe the UK. Israel's bad actions don't excuse Iran's. If you want to argue that countries have equal rights (which just isn't reflected in reality and arguably isn't even a good thing) the construction of those rights require rules and laws and arbitration and you have to be fair and also criticize Iran for breaking those rules. Iran breaking the rules, stands opposed to your ideals about countries having equal rights. If Iran has the right to break their signature for nuclear non-proliferation, so does anyone else. Whatever the excuse or justification anyone can also do the same and it's equally valid.
You're quick to stand in defense of Iran and attack Israel. I'm saying both countries suck and both are breaking the rules.
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?
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.
- "autocratic government that doesn't respect individual rights" may describe china and north korea, but also describes the usa and israel over the last couple years (who have done more invading than china)
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.
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.
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.
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.
So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.
It's not as easy as plopping a new SW on it. Have you wondered why, despite this conflict dragging on for this long, autonomous targeting is still not common? It's just much harder to do, and doing it reliably is actually super hard.
Hw access is also not as easy as you think. Try getting a Pixel 9 class SoC board that you can actually dev stuff on, you'd be surprised how hard it is to get such a thing. And when you get it, it will probably be 2x as expensive for just the board.
Oh, put the Pixel 9 on it then. Have you tried doing optical flow on rolling shutter cameras?
Then, whatever solution you get, you need sufficient volume and reliable supply of the thing. Oh, you can't find the chip anymore? Good luck porting the stack you have since the pipeline is different.
Whereas these rc FPV drones you can basically build what what you find in the back of your drawer.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
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
An enemy that knows you are doing this has incentive to jam Communications.
The idea being that there is no communication to jam because the drone is fully autonomous. Given that, one needs a foolproof way for it to identify the enemy.
In this case the absence of communication would be what gives it permission to engage. Jamming the drone would not save you, but you could potentially make it attack its own forces if there happened to be any around at the time it comes for you. An IR beacon would make that very hard to accomplish.
I think one way communication should be sufficient together with a shared secret. It's probably less reliable compared to two way communication, but it should satisfy the criteria. IR visual pattern propagation will respect this. You don't have radio spectrum that is too prone to jamming, and if the drones are visual navigation/targeting based, if they can see you to acquire the you as a target, they can identify you as a friend as long as you can ensure emitters are not occluded from your side.
It's not perfect, but it's cheap and it should work.
Give me a couple hundred k and I can probably build the prototype, haha.
The driving force of peacetime military procurement and organisation is bureaucracy. Hence we see the real developments in military doctrine from Ukraine, Iran etc.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely. On the other hand, Russia's previous conquests / adventures (Chechnya; Georgia, 2008; Ukraine, 2014) were shrugged at by the west. It's wasn't insane to expect that taking over the rest of Ukraine, if quickly successful, would have been treated likewise. I'm cynical enough to think it probably would have been.
The "yes men" told Putin the military was able to do it. Probably they even thought it was, because everyone below them - right down to the individual soldiers selling off their fuel and ammunition - said everything was a-ok.
Even so, the initial invasion was a near-run thing.
The US was publicly announcing Russia’s troop movements literally weeks in advance. it was pure delusion to think blitzkreig would actually have worked.
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.
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.
If you flatten all of them and kill the residents, you will win the war. The question is just how far are you willing to go, not the lack of capacity to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the defense budget recently doubled and they lose account of trillions of dollars, I guess I don’t see how they aren’t spending money on the tail.
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.