Shrike
20hr ago
The last time the USAF tried switching from using stand-off munitions to dumb bombs
Is there any evidence that the USAF used dumb bombs at all?
The go-to bomb is JDAM, which is a guided bomb with maximum ranges in the double-digit miles - not considered a standoff weapon, but not a "dumb bomb" either. The JDAM-ER triples the range, making it arguably a standoff weapon.
I am also skeptical of your broader claim. Overall, Iranian air defenses likely performed worse than Iraq's in Desert Storm against manned aircraft.
In terms of a concrete timeline, Hegseth said that the US was switching to bombs on March 4, 2026. There's at least evidence of mines dropped in Shiraz dated to March 26, the US bombed the Karaj bridge with a JDAM on April 2, indicating strikes by bombs against targets far inland by that point at a minimum. Iran hit one F-35 on March 19 and 1 F-15E and 1 A-10 (doing CSAR for the F-15) on April 3. A ceasefire was declared on April 7, but on April 5 (the same day the WSO was recovered) Iranians are said to have reported a number of aircraft overflights, including over Isfahan and Alborz - hardly exterior provinces.
And as far as MQ-9s go, by my count the US lost (to ground fire) 16 Reapers in March (12 of them by the 19th), 8 in April, 3 in May, 2 in June, 5 in July.
I don't think that this data (which I am eyeballing, so welcome for any corrections) necessarily excludes the narrative you put forward, but I don't think it maps cleanly onto it. There's no real indication that the US slowed down after the F-35 was tagged on the 19th and there's evidence of a surge on the 5th, after the F-15E and A-10 were shot down.
Shrike
21hr ago
Nearly 100% of ATACMS and PrSM
My understanding is that ATACMS is currently in the early phases of replaced by PsSM, which essentially means the US fired off a lot of missiles instead of decommissioning them (or giving them to Ukraine) and a few test volleys of PsSM (which is likely worth it just for the training data).
If the massive reported build-up of US munitions production materializes, I think that most of these missile expenditures will be relatively negligible over the long run assuming that the long run is what matters. The next 5 years sounds about right.
Shrike
21hr ago
Maybe it was flying in rare Beanie Babies.
Would be almost as hysterical if they flew a plane out there transporting a piece of paper with the number of a checking account on it though.
Shrike
21hr ago
If we're just talking military strength then it's much more debatable and the whole story is China. Ukraine isn't really a sign of a decline in super power status Russia has been meddling in and doing military actions in non-allied nations this whole time and if anything their failure in Ukraine shows that they are not a peer nation.
I think it's pretty clear, and it's not just China. Russia's military declined significantly in the 1990s (although 1990 was not its nadir, as I understand it) before a remodernization program under Putin. As far as China, a single US carrier battle group could probably have won a war against China in 1990. Does anyone think that is true today?
I agree that being a superpower has constraints, no doubt about it. But even if the US is still the world's only superpower, that title went a lot further in the 90s.
it's my position that if you're talking about a declining united states I don't really think people's complaints are that in a hypothetical pacific theater China is marginally more able to push its weight around
I don't think this is true. Any time anyone is speaking of the need to race China or deal with China on AI, they are paying homage (however unwitting) to relative US decline. Nobody in the 1990s was worried about racing China in software development.
I was mainly speaking economically...US Share of world GDP has been flat
Unless you adjust for PPP, in which case it goes down 10 percentage points.
it's sufficient to show that smoke does not always mean fire.
Sure, except that I listed a lot of bad decisions made by (I think it is relatively fair to say) the forces of stability, and you haven't presented either an alternative list or contested my list of bad decisions. This inclines me to think that the populists are at least partially right in their criticisms (which in my opinion implies nothing about their ability to properly govern).
I generally agree with all of your points about the narrative, about dooming as an excuse to avoid action, all of that stuff. But psychoanalyzing your ideological foes is also a (very seductive) form of doing this.
You mentioned social media and that's also certainly a factor. Communications technology is another of the classic preludes to revolution and also often correlates with improvements rather than a decline.
Yes, I think it's quite possible that this is exactly what we are seeing. What I find uncomfortable, though, is what the communications technology is pushing us towards - because it seems, to me, to be very unclear. The printing press pushed us towards clear, logical, ideological thinking - Protestantism, Marxism, the like. Radio and TV may have helped older interpersonal qualities return to the surface, but never really eclipsed the book or essay. But it seems to me the shape of Tik-Tok, AI slop and X posts is still uncertain. The old ideologies are still fighting, using the newer media as a skinsuit. Certainly I expect religious traditions to persist, but politically I feel like this far on we deserve something more interesting than unironic Marxism. So far, though, it seems like new media is better at critique than articulating a positive vision. So if communications technology is shaking up our hybrid book-TV world, what's going to emerge from that shakeup? I don't know, but I am very curious as to your take on this, now or as a topline post at some point.
Could there be more proof of a this being a timeless trope?
Doomers are certainly a timeless trope. But doom and decline also come. Doomers are overfitting, not hallucinating ex nihilo.
I agree things are more complicated but that's broadly my point. We need to actually have a sober discussion about which policies are good and which are bad and seriously consider the trade offs and downstream impacts. Populists are not capable of this, they default to conspiracy theories of elites who inexplicably want the decline.
I think it's more complicated than this, even. For instance, Vance is in the populist wing of the populist wing of the populist party, and I think he's a Motte lurker quite capable of this.
Shrike
1d ago
There is some argument I'm receptive to on protectionism in targeted cases but it's generally the case that we benefit from trade.
I didn't say "trade bad." I said "the US had unambiguously declined relative to other countries as a superpower" which is largely a measure of relative military strength. Trade is actually pretty good for maintaining military strength in many ways.
This just seems like catch up economics, and in a way that mostly makes us better off.
I don't think this is entirely correct - the US made deliberate policy choices regarding China (including the transfer of military and dual-use technology) that got us to where we are today. But assume that the impact of that was negligible. It could be the case that due to catch up economics the US is in relative decline.
And I don't think it makes the US mostly better off not to be the only superpower. The US is not better off because of the war in Ukraine. It is not better off because it needs to maintain parity with China in the Pacific. Those situations make the US worse off. There's an argument that the US is still on net better off because of cheap Chinese labor, but I am skeptical of this: there's a lot of cheap labor out there.
The only way it makes the US better off is that is places restraints on the US itself. So perhaps that is for the best. But it seems like it would be much better for the United States for it to be a sole superpower and use its power wisely than deal with the risks of a multipolar world.
The French Revolution was launched when things were improving and fought most radically in the areas that improved the most. One really can't say where there is discontent there is decline.
The American Revolution too, and I'd be very interested to see that pitch made (in particular I think there's a great argument that social media/the internet achieved a similar effect) but just because it happened twice does not mean it happened that way every time. I think your case would be stronger if you argued that this was what was happening based on specific facts. My argument (that the forces of stability, the educated elites, messed up - which I wouldn't consider monocausal, necessarily) is based on a lot of specific things that happened. The French Revolution is also admittedly a specific thing that happened but the connection here is merely by analogy.
Because the good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burdens are like bitter medicine and unpalatable leafy greens while populist promise that actually sweet cocktails are not only tastier but healthier. Worse the presidential cycle and delayed impact of good policy often reward the populist elected because things weren't getting better fast enough the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of the investments from the good policy even while they hand out the seed corn.
I tend to agree with this but as phrased, this is mostly a generalized argument in favor of any policy that is painful over the short term and against policies that seem nice over the short term, (and as such an argument against, say, offshoring to China!) when I think the reality is slightly more complicated.
Shrike
1d ago
The decline I'm arguing against and would justify how we're better at dealing with communists coming to power now than we will be in five or ten years isn't caused by a recession, which while bad will pass.
The decline that is most readily apparent to me relative to 1990 is the decline of the United States as the world's sole superpower relative to other nations. Pretty much everything else can still be argued, but that is a very unambiguous decline in relative standing. Do you disagree?
Populists are making things worse by getting elected and putting pressure on politicians do things like rent control or putting broad tariffs on our allies.
I agree with this, but it seems to me that there is always someone peddling bad ideas. Why are they gaining traction? It seems to me that all the answers point to some sort of decline (although to be fair that could be something like your setback and not like FC's decline).
responsible for everything while declaring their own leadership as non-elite even if they're the president of the united states or a billionaire. In practice there aren't any two groups in existence you can't force into the plucky rebels vs empire framing that slop loving people won't slurp up if it gives them that "we're the righteous underdogs" tingles.
Sure, this sort of rhetoric is very real. One of the problems with talking about populism is that while it is not true that "everything is populism" it is true that pretty much everyone makes populist appeals in a democracy, particularly if they don't have anything better to run on.
But why pound the table with this sort of rhetoric when you have a track record of good policies that succeed in making people happier and decreasing their burden of living?
Shrike
1d ago
I do think there's some truth to this, although I am interested in your unpacking the "conservative blue-triber" angle a bit more.
It's also very frustrating for me because people often treat succeeding at shaping law and culture as sort of mysterious, which it really isn't - there are actually concrete things you can do that, while not a guarantee, make it more likely that you will succeed in shaping culture and law! And the idea of "Cthulhu only swims left," while it has some usefulness, can quickly become a "as an iron law of nature, the right always loses" and that's neither true nor helpful (except for the left).
Shrike
1d ago
Here's where I point out that I said populism is making things worse, not that it's responsible for most bad events.
Okay, but I think that bad events make things worse, too. If you are claiming populism is making things worse (which I have some directional sympathy for), it's fair to ask what bad events it is responsible for. Unless you're suggesting that populists are making things worse by complaining about bad decisions made by non-populists.
Which is part of why a "top ten bad things since 1990" list could be instructive.
I don't really see the scale to be from populist to bipartisan so much as populist to stability.
The reason I wanted to flag the bipartisaness of the decisions was because you claimed that evaluating those sorts of decisions was likely to get dragged down into partisan bickering. I don't really see it. Do Republicans get mad if you say "yeah I think you know we should have deported the 9/11 hijackers before they flew into the World Trade Center?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Republicans. Do Democrats get mad if you say "yeah I think Clinton shouldn't have deregulated the banking industry?" I think they would largely agree with me, unless they felt like I was only using it as an instrumental argument against Democrats.
It's not necessarily populism to criticize things like Chinese outsourcing, certainly it's not populism to get in the weeds on bank regulation.
Certainly I agree with this.
Populism is when complex topics are collapsed down to simple narratives about how things could be great if not for ${outgroup_schemes} and all we need to do is implement ${simple_fix} and that second order effects are made up by ${hated_outgroup} to prevent good policy.
I am not sure I agree with this. I don't think (for instance) that the "Russia hacked our elections" narrative should qualify as populism, even though I definitely think it could at times collapse a complex topic (foreign interference in US elections) into a simple narrative about how things could be great if not for Russian schemes and all we need to do is implement counter-disinformation schemes and all free speech concerns were made up by MAGA-types to prevent good policy.
Wikipedia's stab at it is more "political stances that emphasise the idea of the "common people", often in opposition to a perceived elite" and I think I prefer that definition, even with the typo - it seems both less pejorative and less prone to "everything is populism."
Shrike
2d ago
It's hard to really do this without it turning into some point by point relitigation of individual things that read as tit for tat partisan nonsense.
Is this really true? The #1 worst political decision [ETA: made since 1990] was probably
- Ignoring 9/11 warning signs
Is that really a partisan nonsense thing? Can't everyone agree that in hindsight it was a mistake for the Bush administration to decide they had more important things to do than listen to the steady drumbeat of warnings about al-Qaeda?
I am rating this as #1 because the cost-to-benefit ratio of rolling up the hijackers before 9/11 is insanely good. There are obvious downsides to counterfactuals on any of the below but putting a tail on Atta or rolling up al-Mihdhar for his alleged role in the Cole bombing or anything like that potentially dodges 9/11 and all of the mess since entirely, basically for free, and potentially mitigates some of the bad effects of the below as well.
Other candidates:
-
Changing banking regulations, leading to the subprime mortgage crisis. This was bipartisan!
-
NATO expansion. This was bipartisan!
-
Offshoring (and related China policy). This was bipartisan!
-
Perhaps COVID policy. This was arguably bipartisan, but I will concede that it is very much a partisan nonsense attracter.
Generally speaking it seems to me that the populists either did not care about these issues or were directionally correct (Chinese manufacturing has been a populist bugbear for decades.) There might have been some populist pressure in the wrong way on the subprime mortgage crisis - which I know little about; I seem to recall some accusations that government policy actually pressured banks to give out bad loans, which I don't think is what right-wing populists have in mind when they support "deregulation."
Either way, it seems to me like a lot of the worst decisions were endorsed by bipartisan elites, and I think the case for that is much stronger than the case for the populists getting everything right.
Shrike
2d ago
I think "let the evidence taken unlawfully be used and then punish the cops" could in theory be a successful policy, but nobody has the guts to punish the cops enough to make that work. If someone says "illegal search" or "warrantless search" I hear "breaking and entering, corruption of a public official" but there's zero desire to trade the exclusionary rule for that, and if someone did offer the trade I wouldn't take it because those charges would ~never be filed.
Shrike
2d ago
I'm tentatively excited about this ruling as possible proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left
I'll be more excited about it when SCOTUS agrees, but I think that there is already ample proof that Cthulhu doesn't just swim left. School choice and right-to-carry/open-carry being big examples.
The thing is that "state passes school choice bill, parents use it" or "state passes right-to-open-carry bill, thousands NOT killed" aren't really gripping headlines.
Shrike
2d ago
I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.
There's a huge lesson here that the right may never learn, because they got lucky with Elon. The thing is you cannot have your strategy revolve around getting lucky with a billionaire. You need to build institutions that will accomplish what you want.
In the right's defense, they were learning this before Elon bought Twitter, and they have made progress on that front.
Shrike
5d ago
I think my favorite part of The Mothman Prophecies might be the very beginning, where Keel talks about the ill-omened visitation of the strange, otherworldly devil disguised as a man upon a rural homestead...before explaining that the devilish creature was in fact himself, wearing a (then-unusual) beard and (if memory serves) in need of a phone due to car trouble, or somesuch. Even if he was a bit of a crank magnet, I think he was at least self-aware about it.
(Although I seem to specifically recall that Keel says that the CIA would not, in fact, harass random people simply for seeing a UFO, but that may not have been in the Mothman Prophecies, or I might be thinking of Vallee or one of their fellow-travelers.)
Shrike
8d ago
I have not investigated the degree to which autonomous targeting has made its way down to FPV-sized drones, but that's an expensive solution and machine imaging is pretty brittle.
Fiber-optic drones are also very tricky (they can't circle a target, for instance, because that might break the cable!) - apparently to the degree that some Ukrainians prefer radio-controlled ones despite the ease of disabling them. Furthermore they are insanely expensive right now thanks to AI datacenter construction (no, really!)
Shrike
9d ago
That can all be true and drones are still a force that revolutionizes the battlefield in a way that reduces the role of small arms
Sure. I am against drone maximalism, not drone usage.
And that's assuming the tech remains static, which it wont.
Right, it will evolve in ways that harm drones as currently employed. You know what's cheaper than a single AI-targeted drone with a 20km range and a cheap armor-penetrating warhead? A tiny interceptor drone with no warhead, a .5 km range, and a mindless acoustic-homing sensor.
The drones were not one of them and they undeniably moved the battlefield in America's favor.
I don't think this is a settled question.
But I'm not sure where you intend to find Americans who have the guts and ideological firmament to resist like the Taliban did outside of Amish communities.
If America is in a state of civil war, then the conditions of America have radically shifted enough that I don't really think this sort of postulating is particularly illuminating. Suffice to say that in civil wars both sides (particularly at the start) usually find many of the men with guts and ideological firmament the same place they did before the war: in the active duty military.
Shrike
10d ago
Medium term?
Forget guns, right now if you pit an untrained person with a big stick against an untrained person with an FPV drone, the smart money is on the guy with the stick.
From what I can tell, the reason that the warfare in Ukraine looks the way that it does is because of guns. If tomorrow Ukraine turned in all of its guns (I'm including here machine guns, howitzers, mortars, etc.) for an equal cash value of drones, Russia would simply jam the entire frontline and roll their mechanized formations all the way to the Carpathians.
Shrike
10d ago
My claim is that it's more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Ukrainians (and Russians) are using machine guns to shoot down drones. That's a thing that happens.
My secondary claim is that firearms technology also benefits from technological developments, including the ones that benefit drones.
This is really all a point about how infantry dismounts aren't going away any time soon which is admittedly a tangent to 2A cases.
What people generally refer to regarding drones are FPV drones. The kind that are extremely hard to shoot down.
FPV drones kind of suck and there are easier ways to deal with them right now than shooting them.
Couple a few of those together with an ISR drone with thermals and any 'Red Dawn' wargames go out the window.
This was the entire US MO in the Middle East: we had MALE and HALE ISR drones coupled with kill-drones (Hellfire missiles, and small bombs/rockets). I think we can conclude that the MALE/HALE ISR + kill-drone combination is not by itself sufficient to defeat a counterinsurgency, both because the US lost in Afghanistan and because the US had to rely on infantry for the entire duration of the GWOT.
This is all despite Afghanistan being smaller than Texas (although with a larger population) and the US rolling out a wide-scale biometric identification program to make identifying insurgents easier.
Shrike
10d ago
Right. I guess that "school choice" doesn't brand as "Catholic literati initiative" (and indeed attracts all sorts) which is part of why people don't see the tremendous strides that it has made as "John Senior sequelae."
Shrike
10d ago
You can have a human operated machine gun and you will lose to a drone.
Please watch the following footage of Ukrainians shooting down Shaheds Gerans with an assault rifle. Note that he's using an ACOG sight, and not, say, SMASH.
Shrike
11d ago
I can look and check a statistic about facts on the ground.
I think this would be a good idea! Look at:
- Shall-issue handgun permitting and right-to-carry laws, and how they have changed since 1990
- The proliferation of school vouchers (I might not describe this as an "elaborate anti-discrimination regime that puts money in the hands of Catholics" but I could see a less charitable take that amounted to that)
- Gay marriage - public and especially young opinion thereof, trends in the last five years
- Catholic acquisition of hospitals throughout the US, making vast swathes of the healthcare system off-limits to abortion and gender transition surgeries - pro-abortion groups have been waving the red flag about this for years, to no avail.
- "What about setting up a lawfare regime that crushes abortion?" - this is obviously an ongoing project; "make abortion providers meet a standard of safety so rigorous that they're effectively put out of business" has in fact been tried, but didn't stick, whereas Dobbs did. Medical abortions have been trending downwards for decades, although I think a lot of that is due to abortion drugs - and a legal effort to restrict mail distribution of abortion drugs is ongoing.
I would not chalk the developments you find entirely up to John Senior's efforts but you'll find the fingerprints of the Catholic literati on a great deal of them, I reckon.
Shrike
11d ago
It's very interesting to me that people never complain about evangelicals for interpreting Matthew 24:14 literally and always for supporting Israel. If the complaint was actually about "evangelicals trying to bring about the end of days" the complaint against evangelicals would be for evangelizing.
Shrike
11d ago
The only things I can find are the most limp-wristed defensive actions.
You are missing some of the more interesting recent ones.
I recommend going to to https://www.scotusblog.com/ and look up the cases that seem to be big culture-war-y cases. Go to the amicus briefs. Find the briefs written by the parties that opposed the ultimate outcome of the case and read them, or go to their websites and read their press releases after the decision came down. (Perhaps avoid the more zealous activist groups, but you can generally expect the ACLU or someone with a similar track record and expertise to show up and opine). Note whether they [the legal experts] construe it as a limp-wristed defensive action or not.
If you want to get really into the weeds, note also the practical outcomes of the case. If the court says "states can do X," note how many states are trying or might want to do X. If the court says "states cannot do X [if they do Y]" note how many states that impacts as well. If you prefer thinking in strictly partisan terms, note whether they are blue/red/purple. Note which institutions they strengthen and which they weaken. Compare the current precedent with the old precedent. Ask yourself what behavior the decisions make easier and more difficult.
And then at this point you might as well write it all up and get an AAQC here!
Shrike
11d ago
Aha! I knew that Texas had the parental sign-off waiver, so I didn't realize that they latched on consumption rather than possession.
IIRC 20th
Yeah I do think that the age should be lowered to 18 (at least). Such a rule might make sense for minors, but it's a bit farcical for someone who may have graduated high school two or three years ago living halfway across the state with his own car and job to have to drink within arms-reach of his parents. With the trend of appellate courts killing under-21 handgun bans, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a future development.
I can say it with a straight face because I pay attention to this stuff. In the 1990s Russia was struggling to maintain territorial cohesion. In 2002 they failed to maintain a continuous at-sea deterrence. They didn't field an active radar-guided air-to-air missile until 2015. (For reference the US had those since the 1970s). Now they sling them at Ukrainians all day long. You think Russia looks weak because it can only slice off small parts of the largest European military power, backed by the largest military power and the world's two largest economies; in the 1990s it couldn't even hold Grozney.
Sure.
Well, because Russia was toothless, the US slashed military spending dramatically, shuttering the US defense industrial base, consolidating the remaining portions into a few primes, and leading to the procurement of cheaper, less capable systems. Then it spent two decades of time, blood, money and attention fighting insurgencies in the Middle East, repeatedly cannibalizing big ticket procurement programs intended to replace Cold War era military technology. Why do you think we still use Cold War kit?
Right. I won't be very surprised if the same thing happens to China. But a big difference between China and Japan is that China is actually very militarily powerful, and if they suffer economic decline it may make them less stable and more hostile. The Japanese military was never a rival to ours, and they were our ally in the 1980s, despite the concerns about their economic growth.
I'm happy to agree that might not be what is causing the "malaise vibes" from the bottom up, but I think that populist thought-leaders are very well aware of China. Some of them receive security briefings on it.
It's their job for things not to go wrong, though. I agree with your point about the status quo catching strays but presumably the point of elections is to vote people who mismanage things out, right? And I while I think it's fair to question whether or not certain decision were foreseeably bad, some of them certainly were - to go back to my 9/11 example, for instance, we know it was foreseeably bad to ignore because people at the time were warning about the dangers of ignoring it - just as how people were pointing out that actually defending the police is a foreseeably bad idea.
I think that if the people who had goofed up stuff had fallen on their sword (figuratively) then populism wouldn't have nearly the purchase it does today, but generally speaking they were not punished and they were sometimes rewarded. For instance, I'm not saying that we should have passed an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law to crucify Wall Street financiers after the 2008 financial crisis, but I am saying that the banks that received US bailout money should have of their own volition not given out billions in bonuses.
I mean, is it that cut and dry? There are a lot of people think that the Democrats cheated and won in 1960, but I'm not really sure that (if true) means our democracy is dissolved. I guess that's a tangent but an interesting one.
If I came up with a statistically solid domestic decline theory, would you buy it? I can whip up a very statistically solid if somewhat undercooked decline narrative, as an example: the cost of college education has risen, and college enrollment has grown to tilt disproportionately female. Despite the fact that women prefer for men to make more money than they do, young women now out-earn men or at least reach parity in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles. This effect is particularly pronounced with young, unmarried women. This leads to tension between the sexes, widespread dissatisfaction, and lower marriage rates. Lower marriage rates in turn make housing less affordable. But because it's not politically correct to discuss, people instead blame their economic dissatisfaction on things like "the evil elites." Thus it can be true that there can be a cultural or even localized economic decline without it necessarily showing up in broader statistics.
Rhetoric is not necessarily irrational, but I think that writing well forces a reader to exercise different skills than a charismatic orator. You can't read your audience, which makes a big difference.
I agree with this.
I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. I am curious if the legacy of AI will be rolling this back.
I think that you and I are probably worried about a lot of the same things. Where we differ is probably that I think that the gatekeepers made genuinely bad decisions in the Cold War and especially in the post-Cold War era. This makes me more sympathetic to populists looking forward even if I have important differences with them. Whereas the populists now make you, looking backwards, more sympathetic to the gatekeepers than (imho) they deserve. I don't really think your distrust of populists is ill-founded. But I don't think you should let that carry over into overlooking the mistakes of the gatekeepers.
Sure, that seems mostly good. (Conspiracies are real, but they often don't take the shape that conspiracies theorists think that they do.)
I realize that calling someone a cynical actor, sociopath, and politician is less inflammatory than calling them a demonic pedophile but is this a bit?
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