Which I find sufficiently amusing.
I see this as spiritual degeneration (Empire, Sophism, Christianity) leading to physical intellectual degeneration. They asked to be stupid, and this prayer has been answered.
Emphasis mine:
Someone recently said this truism, paraphrasing: modern war will be all about offense, as defensive systems have not caught up in development to offensive ones.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-dragonbear-hug-signals-unprecedented
It can't catch up. This is a problem with molecular bonds. Short of psionic-style Star Trek shields, offence will always overmatch defence. You're lucky if stopping a munition only costs 20x the damage it can do, because munitions can deliver more energy than molecular bonds can withstand.
Fighting the last war: in this case, everyone is still trying to field a knight, with nigh-impenetrable armour. This is no longer possible and there is no reason to think it will ever again be possible. Ironically, this makes warfare a lot like chess, where every piece can take every other piece. You get defence not by stopping attacks but by threatening to counter-attack. Tit for tat. "If you move into range of me, sure I can't stop you, but I'm also in range of you."
Star Trek writers already knew about this. They had a [structural integrity] field. In other words science magic that held their molecular compounds together more strongly than their inherent bonds. Without this, there's no phasers, no shields, no photon torpedoes, and you certainly don't fight a couple hundred miles apart from each other. As soon as an enemy spaceship is distinguishable from an asteroid field, it gets blitzed by mass drivers.
The general principle is that defence is worthless unless it is impenetrable, due to the fact lines are longer than points. Attacks can always be focused on one point, whereas defence has to cover all the points - either a line or an area. Consequently defence is always dramatically more expensive than offence. Unless the defence is so strong that no attack can defeat it, it will not cost-effective. (Or almost no attack.)
Tanks are supposed to be knights. They're not, so they're obsolete. AA is supposed to be aerial plate armour. It's not, so it's obsolete.
Look at the sequence: drones can be shot down, so you get AA to deny drones. The enemy therefore uses not-drones to shoot your AA, which cost dramatically less than the AA. Then gets to use its drones anyway. You can't afford as many drones because you spent so much money on AA.
I would put AA in for police actions. You do want to defend against half-hearted or civilian-level drone attacks. AA is not a military technology, unless you enjoy wasting money.
It gets funnier: you can play ye olde SNES game Metal Marines, which has AA missiles. If you get enough of them, you can make yourself immune to enemy attack. Problem: it is far easier to explode their ability to attack you. Dramatically cheaper to spam attack missiles and kill them before they have time to blow up all your bases.
Just like real life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What grade level would you say 16-bit videogames are? Fifth grade, maybe? The latest military analysts aren't educated up to that grade. Fourth-grader soldiers. (What grade level to Star Trek writers count as?)
Not educated enough to be familiar with chess either. Only a few thousand years behind state of the art, lel.
Remembering, securing yourself against the government means you have to outsmart technicians who can't outsmart daytime TV writers. Again, the Amish are not exactly shining peaks of intellectual might, and they can manage to outmanouvre the government.
In chess there's no option but to attack. If you don't attack, the game just ends. In real life, you would see that any attack is going to cost far more than you would gain and decline to move, especially as real life is real-time and you can move simultaneously. Your pawns both take each other. Agree on a demilitarized line, then place your horsemen so that anyone moving beyond that line immediately gets blown up. They do the same, and stability is achieved. As long as the Malthusian limit is far and there's enough food for everyone, peace is the Nash Equilibrium.
P.S. Black governments are terrified of allowing a white government to arise. White governments, not being Satanic, can hire logicians and epistemologists for use in warfare, granting them a ludicrous level of asymmetric advantage.
5 comments:
"The Sovereign Individual" talks about this too.
also https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/after-the-state-the-coming-of-neo
Planes don't centralize because they cost more than they're worth. Blimps would have centralized, ironically.
>"This is why in the information age technological advantages are disappearing faster and faster."
Key point.
War is only rational if you're going to die anyway from famine, so you might as well throw bodies at something else before they starve to death. Historically many wars happened anyway, but info tech is making it more and more obvious that the winner of a war between A and B is always C.
Who is winning in Ukraine? China. China, Argentina, El Salvador, Hungary. America could fix its incompetence and 180 the situation, and China will still be winning.
>I’m still not fully sure why centralizing eras exist, how they persist for seemingly so long, or what ends them
Because they're bad and humans like bad, but bad is self-mutilating and self-defeating. They persist due to insane levels of demand, but ultimately demand for self-hatred cannot be supplied.
Don't forget the monopoly on violence is a myth. There is only the monopoly on violence legitimization. They could never stop you, they could only tell you not to demand violence.
danke
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