Pelic4n

Never heard of a power bottom?

M E L T D O W N

Le Mépris, Pierrot le Fou, A bout de souffle, la Chinoise, Alphaville

You could even use rocket fuel-based drones for the superior range, speed and efficiency compared to electrical motors or jet engines.

You could paint the target using a laser, with the rocket-propelled drones homing on to it. Or extremely precise GPS coordinates!

Wait... It reminds me of something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision-guided_munition

It’s highly likely that a large number of sea skimming missiles would defeat a carrier group.

I agree. But the only platform able to consistently engage a carrier group with this kind of firepower is another carrier group. Land-based artillery can be kept out of range or engaged using the force projection of the carrier.

So would a submarine intelligently positioned.

Submarine capabilities are some of the most well-kept military secrets of the world. There is no way to assert that. In modern doctrines, they are mostly used for intel and as a platform for launching ICBMs, so I would really not bet on that.

The ability of a group to counter a strike from high altitude is also very questionable and let’s not mention the very real anti-ship ballistic missiles.

That is true. Spamming ICBMs could work, and they don't need to be nuclear to defeat a modern carrier group :)

Carriers really are a technology of the past for symmetric conflicts.

This is absolutely and provably false. No systems allows for the force projection that a carrier group afford. France was able to deploy & support an incredible amount of power from the Charles de Gaulle against the Islamic State. No other system could have achieved that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charle...

So, in your described scenario, drones are functionally no different than a missile barrage, except slower, cheaper and maybe easier to deploy. So:

- Effective countermeasures already exists against this kind of threats, like CIWS.

- Carriers don't exists in a vacuum, there are a lot of other systems in a modern carrier group.

- Just like launching a missile barrage, deploying the tens/hundreds of thousands of drones is going to be quite the logistical achievement, especially bringing it in range of a modern carrier group, designed to project force against threats hundreds of kilometers away.

- Drones have significant range/projection issues. The Bayraktar, at $2M a piece, has ~300km of range and can only bear a very small payload designed to engage armored ground targets, nothing that would threaten carriers or destroyers, even deployed en masse.

- The bigger the range, the bigger the payload, the bigger the size/costs. The effectiveness of your drone swarm is always limited by this equation. Millions of small aliexpress drones bearing the equivalent of a hand grenade are not going to do anything against a carrier provided it can be deployed at all. You would need to be <10km away due to their range limitation and at this stage, there are already fighter jets and destroyers sitting on top of you.

- No single munition under the kiloton order of magnitude will sink an aircraft carrier. For a drone or anything under the scale of cruise missiles/MOAB, this means nuclear. Hand-grenade sized nuclear explosives in drone swarms? I wish! But to quote the fantastic game Highfleet, once you get the genie out, you cannot put it back in the bottle. If you plan to bring nuclear weapons to a war, everybody already has ICBMs.

tl;dr: Drones swarms don't disrupt the current status quo: Nothing except nuclear attacks or another modern carrier group will defeat a modern carrier group in a single engagement. The usefullness of drone swarms is not against modern carrier groups but small-scale asymmetrical engagements, such as the guerilla operations currently carried in Ukraine or in Syria, in which small drones are incredibly effective weapons. This is still a big deal, as it is the most likely form of conflict we're going to see in the rest of this century, not full-on peer-to-peer conflicts between superpowers.

Source for the 93% figure: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr/status/1499470411964235781

On the video, the ukrainian tank is of course performing an effective ambush. I don't pretend I have the answers, but I wonder how would perform a bunch of infantry with NLAWs striking the column from multiple places at once, for cheaper than the tank, able to engage multiple targets at once, much less spottable, and so on.

Correction: A guy hiding in a bush wasn't able to reliably defeat tanks before.

Handheld old anti-tank weapons like RPGs with HEAT warheads were extremely unreliable, defeated by reactive explosive armors, successful only at very close range and so on. Modern ATGMs able to be fired from kilometers away and with >90% kill rates completely changes the dynamic. Those systems are only going to get smarter and cheaper when there is a physical limit on the armor+weight+cost+logistical support equation for tanks.

Do you (honestly) believe the US doesn't have tank armor that can withstand a (from the top) hit from a Javelin?

If this exists, why did the USMC binned their tanks 2 years ago stating they weren't cost-effective anymore? I'll believe this exists when I'll see it, but so far we have seen $4M tanks defeated by $100K javelins with a 93% kill rate, and so far cope cages have done nothing against them.

Reported kill rate of javelins fired against tanks in Ukraine is 93%. Just saying.

$4M tanks are defeated by a $40K NLAW. Much like cuirassiers cavalry who were rendered obsolete by muskets becoming rifles with increased penetration, it's not because tanks don't works, it's because it's so cheap to kill one and so expensive to make one.

Until very recently, 2 guys hiding in a bush couldn't kill a tank, you needed a predator drone, an helicopter or some other advanced system requiring heavy logistics. Now behind every bush and every road corner is a potential enemy able to defeat you. With >90% kill ratio for javelins, the tanks needs to be lucky for weeks on end to survive, and the ATGM needs to be lucky only once.

I want to see the picture

Enforcing the No-Fly zone actually means running SEAD missions to take care of those, including in russian territory. That's why it would bring WW3.

Don't you love it when the once in a lifetime opportunity for generational wealth is also a great fundamental investment? In case the biggest short squeeze the market would have ever seen, with the potential to crash the US economy, somehow doesn't happen (damn hedgies!). With all of that that, it doesn't matter that physical sales of video games are dying and that the company is bleeding out money with a loss of $100 millions in Q3 2021 alone.

Heart disease is mostly a lifestyle disease based mostly on eating habits (e.g. eating too much cholesterol over a long time). This speaks volumes about the US diet.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31838890/

"This advisory was developed after a review of human studies on the relationship of dietary cholesterol with blood lipids, lipoproteins, and cardiovascular disease risk to address questions about the relevance of dietary cholesterol guidance for heart health. Evidence from observational studies conducted in several countries generally does not indicate a significant association with cardiovascular disease risk."

Dietary cholesterol is not a threat, surplus calories and processed sugar is.

It seems that bored billionaires are either on their way to start a cult or they rape children.

unironically quoting Pierre Sprey

https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense

A list of this exact kind of books is presented here: https://blog.fogus.me/2015/04/27/six-works-of-computer-scien...

I agree with you and don't have a cynical reading of the Prince at all! Machiavelli simply talks about what works and what doesn't. As he explains, as a leader, helding upon your promises for the sake of it is a liability. Why be angry at successfull politicians when they apply what works?

Thing is, nothing you've just stated is fact. It's just a viewpoint. Which is fine, but let's not pretend we have some absolute truth in front of us.

Absolutely! I would like to see a political entity led by Kantian ethical formalists. My opinion is that such a faction couldn't come into power. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Relevant case in point: I live in New York, where until recently we had a governor that was all about ruthless assertion of power and ruled by personality. Then, when he ran into problems everyone turned their back on him because everyone hates him.

Sure, the history is littered with the corpses of the Hitlers and Mussolinis (and the mountains of corpses they have caused), the small petty tyrants who thought brutality and charisma it was ALL you needed to rule. They meet their ends alone at a moment or another, but this doesn't make a case for the success of ethical leaders either.

I fully agree with you.

Thanks for this shard of realpolitik in this discussion among people disappointed that their hero turns out to not be the hero they thought. Who would have seen that coming?

My own enlightenment was realizing that neither virtue nor the expectation of virtue was rooted in anything that I should concern myself with.

From Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Virtuous: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2...

If you wish to acquire any kind of power, you cannot embarass yourself with right and wrong. Those who compete with you and won't do so will overrun you. Just like companies in a market or competing species in an ecological niche, you need to be as ruthless as possible. The universe has no regards for your morals.

And against the Putins and Xi Jipings of the world, I would not want a virtuous saint upheld by a tight moral code as a leader for my country.

He's not trustworthy, he's a horrible manager of people, and he never pays off on what he promises.

The man was running for POTUS. Do you expect the men who lead the world to uphold your own moral standard?

From Machiavelli's The Prince:

Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft . Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. [...] A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Prince_(Marriott)/Chapter...

If you don’t care about their goals, then the ethical decision is to quit.

What if I don't suscribe to your "ethics"? Sure, if you own the company I'm employed at, you can fire me. But you can't force your arbitrary ethical standard on anyone else in any other case.

they’re offering to pay you in exchange for supporting their goals.

They're offering to buy my work in order to support their goals. Not making me care. I have my own goals and I only care about those. There is no benefits at all for me to care about their goals aside from feeling good about being a good worker bee who cares about the hive if I drank the yuppie corporate kool-aid (I didn't). Both the company and me have to make sure that our work agreement satisfy both their goals and mine, or someone is gonna be unhappy. There is a power imbalance in that relationship due to supply and demand of both work and workers, and I'm thankful I'm a skilled professional in that regard.

I’m a professional and consider myself ethical and I don’t see a huge ethical difference between stealing and accepting pay for work I didn’t do.

Do you uphold the same ethical standard from the company you work for? In a market economy, the incentive of the company is to pay you as little as possible for your work. If they're able to buy your work for less and they don't do it, they will get run over by the competition who will get the edge. Is that unethical?

Ethics and morals are not based in anything concrete and are made to domesticate you. If someone is explaining to you what is good or evil or just, they're trying to make you behave in a certain way to their benefits. Companies that wants "team players" and people "having a personal investment in their work" want complacent workers that will do more for less.

Damn, the more you learn!! Thanks!

Lobster fed to prisoners was grounded whole, with the shell, which contains a tremendous amount of ammonia. Pretty close to eating a bowl of crab soaked in urine with small pieces of shell tearing into your gums.

Edit: This post is wrong, that's a myth actually!

Ritalin extended release, an empty stomach, lots of caffeine

Do your own therapy macrodosing MDMA you can buy from under bridges!

Because a person's worth is directly tied to how much value they can produce for their company's shareholders.

And if someone mediocre ends up being able to do the job, the company's management may face the fact that they're just a bunch of lame yuppies spending their life in the office to make someone else richer, not changing the world/making the world a better place/any other bullshit eaten from the trashcan of ideology (sniffff).