This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The quality of military analysises on the web is very low as usual.
People think that if the U.S was invading Ukraine they could do it in a matter of months, spoiler: they can't.
Firstly occidental populations are past the point of dying for killing humans, the number of americans willing to die is a scarcer resources than in authoritarian countries.
Secondly, war has changed the prior advantage of air superiority and tank superiority is gone. Anti air such as S-300s have broken the economics and impact of aviation. Secondly ATGMs have broken the economics of tanks.
This is it, we can no longer make disruptive military attacks, it's all a slow attrition and geographic crabbing, with extreme losses of military machines.
I could argue that soviet miltary machines are in many regards highly superior to their U.S counterparts both in metrics and in economics but that is besides the point, for both superpowers, the efficiency and economics of past wars is long gone as Ukraine spectacularly shows.
The only remaining "hopes" for military tactical disruption would either be true drone swarming, which russia doesn't do enough, or tactical nuclear bombs, or bio-weapons or a much more highly targeted attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine.
The only classical card Russia has not played is the real terror bombing of using bombers which russia has not used a single time in this war. While modern antiair would destroy a lot of bombers during a swarm, if russia sent enough they would achieve disruptive destruction also, it would be interesting to see the TU-160 in action since it is the fastest military aircraft to exists.
edit tu-160 is the fastest bomber, not the fastest aircraft.
APS surely are an interesting topic:
The U.S does not yet seems to have a soft kill APS in production but Russia uses the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtora-1 on T-80 and (all?) T-90s
While russia has in addition 3 generations of hard kill APS, the U.S has 2 independent proof of concept models
first APS in history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drozd
later succeded with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_(countermeasure)
Despite being very interesting, It seems this system is not in use but is available for export versions
Last gen deployed on Armata vehicles:
A few armata (not the T-14) have been seen in Ukraine but not meaningfully deployed yet.
Interestingly Ukraine has its own APS:
About the US prototype APS:
while the other one seems promising:
China recently deployed the GL-5 which has a range of 100 meters, twice that of arena (no clue for afganit)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GL5_Active_Protection_System
innovative since it launch 2 rockets.
The irsaely trophy seems interesting. Gun based.
This is an unrealistic claim as of yet.
Firstly as we can see, at least for Russia and the U.S, hard kill APS are nothing more than uncertain and possibly buggy proof of concepts.
Russia did deploy some successfully in afghanistan but the fact they didn't deploy them shows that the tech is mostly not ready.
It could be that the new APS system on armatas is disruptives and working well, but that is unproven. It's possible but uncertain that using recent machine learning techniques would yield lower danger/false positives but given the classical inertia, if that were the answer, we're not ready to see that deployed until 20 years, and even so ML techniques have generally dangerous error rates.
It would be interesting to evaluate how much deployed in the wild are the ukrainian and chinese and israeli APS systems are though.
and what about hard kill APS for aircrafts/helicos?
As for soft kill APS, well russia is the only to have one widely deployed but Ukraine still manage to destroy T-90s just fine.
beyond the real world production ready-ness/falsepositives issues/safety of hard kill APS, what the manufacturer says is not necessarily objective truth
about the range, the claimed 360 degree coverage, reaction time, etc
especially I suspect many APS are weak and possibly useless against top-down attacking ATGMS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_protection_system#Top_attack_munitions
Overall I am very curious about the future of this technology and we might get answers either by:
studying academic papers/experiments about them
waiting for a china-taiwan war (unlikely)
waiting for a new israel based war (no idea)
waiting for the ukrainian APS system to be deployed or for western countries giving APS to ukraine (e.g. germany supposedly has one)
waiting for the armata systems to see some action in Ukraine, most likely but only if the war last a few years.
But your initial point is wrong, ATGMs have currently and probably for the foreasable future, destroyed tanks economics.
No, pretty much Israeli trophy use fighting Hezbollah showed that is the case.
Feel free to prove me wrong there, however. That's what I remember as being the case.
Also, iirc, US and other NATO are going to buy Trophy and install it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, if USA would invade Ukraine then large part of population would be really happy and even larger part would immediately start to think how to profit from that.
Even if we assume that Ukrainian military fights as much as it can, then we get Gulf War rerun.
Still larger enough to maintain military.
not sure
Definitely not true.
And that is why Kharkiv offensive has not happened.
that is a dead end as far as military use goes, mentioning them seriously is really weird here
Or proper use of existing tools. Assuming no nukes, USA would be able to simultaneously take Kyiv and Moscow and all major cities in both Ukraine and European part of Russia. Even if Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Finland and Baltic states would be hostile to USA.
If USA army would deploy in Ukraine (and gremlins would steal Russian nukes) then the war would be over within months - and that is only because Crimea would be really annoying to retake without heavy casualties.
More options
Context Copy link
That is why America entered into a grueling, year+ long advance and retreat conflict with Iraq which completely degraded the 11th armored cav and the rangers and needed to reactivate the draft leading to... Wait a second, that didn't happen at all!
Listen, if a wizzard magicked all nukes out of existence, Nato could turn Russia into a parkinglot in a couple weeks. Shit, the US could probably do it on their own.
They would then inevitably lose the occupation, but lets not talk about that.
So what the worlwide coalition in the gulf war managed to destroy Irak air defense quickly and that allows you to generalize from a single event to the U.S having a power that make it transcend Russia performance in Ukraine? What is this imaginary magic technology they have that disrupt their abilties? None, you are just wishful thinkingly over-generalizing.
I have not extensively studied Irak military but:
They had osbolete air-defense, zero S-300..
I have heard that the Irakis aircrafts pilots universally refused to fly, no will to fight what a joke
“When United States and coalition forces invaded Iraq in 2003 [during Operation Iraqi Freedom], they faced no Iraqi Air Force opposition. Not one Iraqi warplane attacked the invaders as they proceeded toward Baghdad,” Daniel L. Haulman, PhD Air Force Historical Research Agency.
It seems they didn't use air force significantly in gulf war either.
So Irak air defense and will to fight was basically in practice a joke, not something comparable to Ukraine in any realistic way.
Note though that during the Vietnam war, North Vietnam even with virtually no air force managed to take down a crazy high number of U.S planes: 8,540 + 1,351 allied
A groundless childish fiction based on a weak and uncomparable single event with zero a priori argument, the only one would be the 100 million dollars "stealth" F-35 on which I call bullshit as being not enough to disrupt a war especially considering their weak payloads, maintenance burden and vast detectability loopholes. Besides that point U.S and russian hardware are largely comparable in most cases.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You might have drunk a bit too deep of the propaganda.
You are right I misremembered but:
It is the largest and heaviest Mach 2+ supersonic military aircraft ever built and second to the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie in overall length. As of 2022, it is the largest and heaviest combat aircraft, the fastest bomber in use and the largest and heaviest variable-sweep wing airplane ever flown.[2]
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link