alt.hn

4/10/2026 at 7:27:58 PM

Nowhere is safe

 https://steveblank.com/2026/04/09/nowhere-is-safe/

by sblank

4/10/2026 at 8:08:07 PM

Hmm...

Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.

The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.

Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.

Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?

by brianjlogan

4/10/2026 at 10:51:41 PM

Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.

Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.

Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.

The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.

That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.

The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.

The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.

If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.

by cladopa

4/11/2026 at 4:28:38 AM

How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for a dollar just to sell that dollar immediately for oil would only help the USD. It all gets turned into oil quickly, so wouldn't that mostly balance out in how demand for oil then relatively-weakens the dollar against the value of toil itself? The "medium of exchange" need has some effect, but I don't see it by itself driving "store of value." If there was a better store of value for the people selling the oil, what prevents them from swapping out those dollars essentially immediately? And then switch to taking payment in those other things as well?

And "just printing dollars" has well-documented inflationary effects inside the US too.

by majormajor

4/11/2026 at 6:25:04 AM

Not an economist but the petrodollar concept helps the dollar because everybody that needs oil needs to buy dollars. You see it as small thing but it is fundamental thing because oil is used in so many places that as we have seen a disruption of 20% of it would start causing real problems on almost the entire world.

QED: oil powerful, only dollar buy oil, dollar stronger.

by gls2ro

4/11/2026 at 6:36:03 AM

The use of dollars to purchase any commodity is a negligible fraction of demand for dollars.

What you should be looking at is investment demand for dollars, that is, in which currency does the seller store their surplus.

Think about it:

I need to buy a barrel of oil, but I am in Argentina. So I sell my pesos for dollars, I buy the oil with the dollar. The seller now has dollars, and sells the dollars for Swiss Francs and invests the money in swiss bonds.

Now, what happened? The global demand for dollars by the buyer was exactly offset by the seller. It is the seller that decides, by choosing where to store his surplus, of what currency is boosted by oil. And it is not the currency that oil is sold for, it is the currency that the proceeds are invested in.

So oil is completely irrelevant for the value of the dollar, what is relevant is that investors want to store their funds in the US capital markets. That's what matters, and it is investor preference to store their earnings in capital markets that determines why they want to denominate oil in dollars. It just saves on an extra transaction.

But focusing on the transactions misses the picture of the dollar's strength, because denominating oil in dollars is merely a consequence of the desirability of US capital markets as a destination for foreign capital. And that desirability drives everything else. It's not oil, it's deep, liquid capital markets with established foreign investor rights. That trumps everything else.

Think about it -- would you keep your earnings in a country with weak foreign investor rights or lack of financial transparency or illiquid markets where you couldn't easily pull your money out when you wanted to? That is much more important to the seller of the oil than anything else. It will drive what oil is priced in. And it will drive the demand for dollars.

by carefree-bob

4/11/2026 at 11:52:29 AM

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the comment. How can you read that comment and not conclude that this is the way of thinking from before "Pax Americana"? They are talking about "wealth extraction" ... in other words, free labor (not money), without paying. In other words, slavery.

Nations used to fight for extracting tax, and with it free labor, from each other, and that situation was pervasive, and the cause of many wars, before WW2. In fact WW2 is the last such war.

Before WW2, France and England extracted (a LOT of) tax, without doing anything, from Germany. That's how the wealthy in France and England got richer, you know, without producing anything.

Before WW1, the Ottoman empire (the "islamic world" as people like to refer it now) extracted wealth, by capturing slaves and forcing them, at gunpoint (well "at knifepoint", and by simply letting them starve chained up in ditches until they worked), from essentially all of Africa. By the end of the slave trade, Europe participated. Again, let's not pretend that either the caliphs or sultans or royal houses used what was effectively unlimited free labor to end poverty. In fact they made it a lot worse, everywhere, from England to "the islamic world" to India.

You can go back thousands and thousands of years and compare the many situations (e.g. people would not tax foreign nations directly but tax things they needed, sometimes as dramatically as water, but lots of things, including access to international trade), but it goes back very, very, very far. The story of the Minotaur (slaves, militarily extracted from foreign nations would be thrown to a beast if they didn't work). The Exodus story. The Vedas. Right up to the story of Epic of Gilgamesj.

The comment you're replying to is a scream that this situation must be restarted. The US does wealth extraction, and, read the comment, their point is not that they want wealth extraction to stop. No. They want to ... uh ... participate in it.

by spwa4

4/11/2026 at 3:30:44 AM

Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.

by sidewndr46

4/11/2026 at 6:24:58 AM

This isn't really a given. Historically, whenever you have a civil war the existing state's military splits down the middle, with people generally unwilling to fire on friends, family, and neighbors. Former military officers usually form the core of the rebel military, taking their training, experience, and oftentimes equipment with them to fight for the other side.

The mistake here is thinking of the U.S. government as a monolith. Ultimately it's all just people, bound together by being paid for in dollars that are either raised as taxes or borrowed as treasuries. GP's post posits a world where the dollar is worthless; what's binding them together then?

by nostrademons

4/10/2026 at 10:58:31 PM

Except America went to war with Saddam Hussein a full decade before the move to the Euro and was largely a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.

by ctippett

4/10/2026 at 11:19:08 PM

Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).

Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.

by coldtea

4/10/2026 at 11:57:41 PM

To add, the primary reason the US supported Iraq was because it didn't want Iran to send oil to the USSR.

This was because the US didn't want a communist nation to have a good economy.

That's the story of a bunch of the CIAs operations.

by cogman10

4/11/2026 at 1:53:33 AM

Iran itself in its current form is a continuous line of failures of CIA and MI6 that led to their revolution against highly unpopular shah that was undemocratically installed only by those powers.

Why do you think back then the us embassy situation evolved as it did. 'Embassy' my ass, full of cia folks regardless what shallow hollywood flicks try to propagate, meddling with internal affairs for profit and power of british and americans, while impoverished common locals suffered greatly.

As usual with cia it backfired tremendously, made huge mess for decades in entire region, killed gazillion of innocents but since there aint no us citizens its just some annoying background noise of some brown 'people', right.

Anybody with above-maga intelligence can piece together those few wikipedia articles, but egos got hurt so its highly emotional topic for americans. If at least you guys learned from your collosal mistakes...

by kakacik

4/11/2026 at 2:29:12 AM

[flagged]

by YZF

4/11/2026 at 4:08:24 AM

IMO, invasion of Iraq was to support Israel.

by DeathArrow

4/11/2026 at 5:27:48 AM

>> the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts

How does this work exactly? It doesn't. It's a misunderstanding of public debt.

When you say stops buying US bonds, you're talking about the secondary market for US government bonds right - because in practice, contrary to the econ textbooks and common understanding, only a small number of institutions are allowed to purchase them in the primary market, not only that but these purchasers are compelled by law to continue buying them, to continue bidding for them at a fair price, and if they don't have the reserves to buy them then these purchasers will be given the reserves to continue to buy them. The entire premise of the argument falls apart as soon as you step away from the econ model and look at the legislation governing what actually happens by law.

by CraigJPerry

4/10/2026 at 10:35:03 PM

>The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.

The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.

Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).

This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.

by roncesvalles

4/11/2026 at 1:14:39 AM

Of all things there's a relevant Tumblr post from nearly a decade ago that I often think everyone should consider (in agreement BTW):

"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."

by llbbdd

4/11/2026 at 3:39:24 AM

That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once".

This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 1:18:26 AM

I know a number of people who grew up in extreme poverty who are extremely well reasoned here and others who are extremely spoiled and fortunate who would gladly enter into a holy war.

I don't think you can quite generalize that much.

Additionally cooperation is an evolutionary advantage and world war is a species level threat now that we have nuclear weapons.

I don't believe that everyone wants peace. I believe the people who have the ability to shape policy and invest capital would want peace.

Which I think is also complicated. Kind of harkens back to the cliche that WW1 was caused by old people romanticizing war. Most letters between the heads of states confirmed they were anticipating industrial destruction and death but they felt the pressure to initiate war anyway.

by brianjlogan

4/11/2026 at 5:21:15 AM

I think it's a bit more complex than that, because sometimes even the people outside that bubble still don't want to rock the boat because they're comfortable enough, or worry that things could get even worse.

Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:

> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.

by BrenBarn

4/11/2026 at 12:15:24 AM

[dead]

by cindyllm

4/11/2026 at 11:19:54 AM

I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.

Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point.

That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace.

I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.

by _heimdall

4/11/2026 at 12:07:03 PM

>I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.

There is no post-WWII goal of permanent peace. It’s a side effect of the invention of nuclear weapons, which made wars amongst powerful countries a lose-lose scenario for everyone.

by IAmGraydon

4/10/2026 at 9:46:01 PM

Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.

If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.

by TheGRS

4/10/2026 at 9:49:54 PM

I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.

by Centigonal

4/10/2026 at 10:10:35 PM

As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another.

Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).

We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.

by PaulDavisThe1st

4/10/2026 at 11:03:42 PM

> People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.

Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.

Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.

Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.

by michaelt

4/10/2026 at 10:07:39 PM

As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.

by some_random

4/10/2026 at 10:38:09 PM

>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.

For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.

by cucumber3732842

4/10/2026 at 10:42:59 PM

One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.

In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.

Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.

by mikestorrent

4/11/2026 at 3:13:20 AM

Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 3:43:33 AM

Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.

Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 4:00:10 AM

If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible excuse for failure.

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 6:55:10 AM

> Henry Ford himself started from nothing.

Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.

Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".

This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"

Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.

by defrost

4/11/2026 at 6:43:29 AM

Makes you wonder why poor people don’t just start their own companies.

by crummy

4/11/2026 at 8:31:58 AM

I would like to evolve beyond the archaic notions of nationalism.

The idea that you can mark a map and define property and consolidate identities to property is so anti-human.

If you embrace humanity then you should also reject the premise that there is any Other humanity.

It's historically supremacist.

by hackable_sand

4/10/2026 at 11:00:37 PM

“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings? “Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings, “Ere the drowsy street hath stirred— “Every masked and midnight word, “And the nations break their fast upon these things.

“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space. “The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place, “Where the anxious traders know “Each is surety for his foe, “And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.

“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit, “God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit. “But behold all Earth is laid “In the Peace which I have made, “And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”

The Peace of Dives Kipling, 1903

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_dives.htm

(As you know, there have been no major wars since then)

by voidmain

4/10/2026 at 10:24:46 PM

So the problem is that people in poor countries are finally not starving but not that the person with a chainsaw owns hundreds of billions of dollars?

by cicko

4/11/2026 at 2:09:06 AM

The problem in my view is, once dirt poor countries that work for nothing in horrible sweatshops to make cheap trinkets skill finally up and entire region moves from horribly poor to just poorish, the not en-vogue parts of the rich world will suffer some decline if they dont adapt and refocus on whats needed now and in near future.

Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.

If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.

I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.

by kakacik

4/11/2026 at 4:35:23 AM

>nothing to do with socialism

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." - Karl Marx

by DeathArrow

4/10/2026 at 10:32:27 PM

I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out.

Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.

by pedalpete

4/10/2026 at 11:55:59 PM

>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?

Because nature is filled with examples.

Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.

And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.

War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement

>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?

Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.

Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.

by pixl97

4/11/2026 at 1:23:22 AM

Human cooperation is another survival strategy, and a very effective one when achievable. Peace in no way disagrees with what you said, anymore than plant cooperation with bacteria is a counterexample.

by squibonpig

4/11/2026 at 3:03:02 AM

I think you're thinking of it the wrong way. Cooperation is effective if the party you're cooperating with has something to give in return that's within a couple of orders of magnitude of value. Just as much as war has a cost, peace/cooperation has a cost.

by pixl97

4/11/2026 at 4:40:42 AM

You think we live in a world shaped by prisoner's dilemma?

by DeathArrow

4/11/2026 at 7:28:08 AM

Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?

by procaryote

4/11/2026 at 4:28:08 AM

I do not think mural understanding works. It just allows you to merely accept someone, but it doesn’t mean that you want to work with them.

What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.

Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.

But we are reaching the limits of it.

by harrall

4/10/2026 at 10:32:18 PM

That could work if the actors were rational. Unfortunately, they are largely ideological.

by rembal

4/11/2026 at 2:50:23 AM

you don't have to be ideological. You can be perfectly rational and continue a seemingly useless pointless war, when the alternative is "armed men return home and start to question your power". Your goal is to stay in power and every move which helps you with it is rational

by tryauuum

4/11/2026 at 8:58:05 AM

If anything, the prospects for war are far higher now, because drones provide economic victory to a gigantic number of countries against a larger foes.

by AtlasBarfed

4/10/2026 at 8:40:36 PM

> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?

Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.

And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.

by CodingJeebus

4/10/2026 at 8:45:57 PM

That's a property shared by any large scale government spending.

The difference between pouring 80B into a war and pouring the same into infrastructure is that one gives you a more developed MIC and a lot of munitions and a lot of explosions (exported), and the other gives you... infrastructure, and construction industry.

by ACCount37

4/10/2026 at 9:38:24 PM

A big part of this is that apparently, any president can unilaterally decide to go to war and spend $1B per day destroying things, but building infrastructure for Americans requires the agreement of 60 US Senators.

Pre-emptive strikes are “national security”, but ensuring nutritional food for children in schools, safe bridges and potable water, and healthcare are not “national security”.

Look what Biden had to do to try and get Americans a piddling amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave. And still 60 votes couldn’t be mustered. But if he wanted to bomb another country to the stone age, that was well within his capacity.

by lotsofpulp

4/11/2026 at 3:20:44 AM

US states are free to build infrastructure without any federal involvement or permission. California just spent $114M to build a wildlife crossing bridge over Highway 101.

https://smmc.ca.gov/liberty-canyon-wildlife-corridor/

by nradov

4/11/2026 at 11:45:51 AM

That’s not the same thing tho. issit?

by gmerc

4/11/2026 at 3:26:39 AM

> but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.

Sounds like you're buying into reddit propaganda. The US spends more on social programs than it does on war, so apparently we have and can definitely find the courage to improve healthcare and hunger.

In fact, hunger is mostly not an issue in the united states.

by abletonlive

4/10/2026 at 8:53:34 PM

I think the reason we can imagine conflict easier than peace is pretty structural. Wars usually happen because of disequilibrium, and we're sitting right in the middle of a big one.

The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.

Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.

by poszlem

4/11/2026 at 10:57:52 AM

>But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either.

How is it that Hacker News people can be so smart on tech, yet lack Econ 101 understanding that the world is not a zero-sum place? The pie can grow for everyone.

Why do you suppose that the World Bank and the IMF make loans to developing countries? Under a zero-sum frame, wouldn't it be better to keep them underfoot by denying them credit?

by 0xDEAFBEAD

4/10/2026 at 10:15:01 PM

> US when it was the uncontested superpower.

significant parts of the current world order evolved when the US was very much a contested superpower, c/o the USSR. While many things have changed since the dissolution of the USSR, many things have remained the same.

Further, you can guarantee that if Russia had announced in the days of war rumors re: Iran that they would militarily (not just intelligence & logistics, if stories are to be believed) support Iran, the US would likely not have attacked in anything like this way. That they did not doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested", merely that Russia wasn't interested in that sort of positioning of its own (nuclear) military threat over US action in Iran.

by PaulDavisThe1st

4/11/2026 at 4:50:29 AM

Russia has its own war, they can not afford to militarily support Iran or other countries. They do not have the troops, weapons or money.

And they would totally not enter a nuclear war with US for Iran.

by DeathArrow

4/10/2026 at 8:59:38 PM

I don't think there are major unresolved economic tensions between US and Iran or the likes. US isn't, somehow, mad because Iran or Venezuela are suddenly very rich and prosperous and independent - that simply isn't true.

The closest to your dynamic would be that between US and China, and those two aren't at war as of yet. Iran is vaguely supported by China, but it's a low level of support, and it isn't China's proxy.

by ACCount37

4/10/2026 at 10:00:16 PM

One theory is that control over Venezuelan and Iranian oil is a means of constricting Chinese economic competition.

by tmnvix

4/10/2026 at 10:31:42 PM

It definitely is control over the currency in which oil is traded.

by the_gipsy

4/10/2026 at 10:45:06 PM

Yes that's the "it actually makes sense" the more repugnant conservative pundits have been pushing because those guest spots on the right wing networks require you not to criticize the administration in any way.

by XorNot

4/10/2026 at 11:04:26 PM

Trump may be a violent moron, but this goes back further. US sanctions and intimidation of Iran and Venezuela has been supported by both parties when in power. It's a US regime thing, not a party/administration thing (that stuff is for the mugs who believe they have a democracy).

by tmnvix

4/11/2026 at 1:45:40 AM

The US relationship with China is fascinating. My entire life it has both been an economic boogeyman, the nation nipping at our heels, and yet also the manufacturing engine powering everything out companies were creating.

Ignoring the one sided benefits of that even though you shouldn't it kind of reminds me maybe of the US and Britains relations?

Not a 1:1 but the continental separation, the "greed" of external companies trying to exploit the natural resources and work force.

And yet we're allies today.

If you're interested in the topic I'd highly advise checking out Sarah Paine and her lectures. An interesting view point of Mao and the rise of China.

by brianjlogan

4/11/2026 at 4:42:13 AM

>The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower.

You mean after the fall of the Soviet Union? Because Soviet Union used to contest US power.

>Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either.

So you believe relations between countries are a 0 sum game?

by DeathArrow

4/11/2026 at 3:34:34 AM

I would agree, except that de-escalation generally assumes there's a rational reason for conflict. That is, both sides want or need something that makes sense, and the failing to come to some sort of terms is what leads to war.

In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 1:35:20 AM

> Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict.

There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.

Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.

While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".

by TacticalCoder

4/11/2026 at 1:52:53 AM

[dead]

by neonsunset

4/10/2026 at 10:12:11 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

4/10/2026 at 8:17:14 PM

The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.

When all you have is a hammer…

by testing22321

4/10/2026 at 8:25:19 PM

The theory behind the US having a large military is that it acts as a sort of fleet in being - that the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily. In turn, having stable global relations and protected global trade provides the US with a huge economic boon to fund its large military.

That's the theory anyway - our Idiot King and his idiots have completely missed the point of the US military existing and are using it as a primary method of engagement, which is causing the economic boon used to fund the military to evaporate.

As an aside, it's not a huge issue, but China's military costs use different accounting than the US, and seem lower by comparison. Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.

by Apes

4/10/2026 at 8:40:35 PM

> the US prefers other methods of engaging with countries, and having a stronger military precludes other countries from engaging militarily

If the US has such a strong military why are they always begging European countries to help them with their various totally-not-a-war "actions", like most recently in Iran?

Last time the UK got into something in the Middle East with the US we lost more people to "friendly fire" than enemy action. There's no real appetite for that any more.

by ErroneousBosh

4/11/2026 at 3:49:41 AM

Because the US doesn't want sole responsibility or complicity for the wars it starts. It looks a lot better if everyone is involved.

And besides, even if you have a large, capable military, why not spread the cost (in lives and materiel) around?

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 11:55:48 AM

US wants nato countries to buy US weapons.

by Hikikomori

4/10/2026 at 9:36:06 PM

> Apples to apples, China probably spends about half what the US does on military.

With fours times the population

by testing22321

4/10/2026 at 8:24:48 PM

I mean we could just go back to talk softly and carry a big stick. There are options between pacifism and boisterous rabble rousing and picking fights that don't particularly need to be fought without good plans.

by tracerbulletx

4/11/2026 at 3:22:49 AM

Bullshit. Those numbers are not to be trused. China simply lies about their military spending, but independent estimates put their spending alone close to the USA.

by nradov

4/10/2026 at 7:58:39 PM

I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.

by firefoxd

4/11/2026 at 3:53:07 AM

It's a lot more than "just" not bombing. We also need to stop meddling in other countries' affairs. 9/11 and the war on terror are a direct result of all of our "nation building" over the prior decades. If we'd left well enough alone, the twin towers would likely still be standing, and we might still be able to bring as many liquids as we want on planes, and see our loved ones off at the gate when they're taking a trip and we're staying behind.

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 11:21:52 AM

Pacifism at such a large scale is a self-defesting strategy though. If its well understood that a country will never respond, eventually someone will take them over or wipe them out.

by _heimdall

4/10/2026 at 8:36:54 PM

Who did the US bomb before 9/11? Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor? Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked? https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/east-african-embass... Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?

I would love for nobody to bomb or kill anyone. Did Ukraine bomb Russia? Is Taiwan bombing China that declares it is going to take Taiwan by force?

There isn't a single conflict in the world today where I can see that someone can just say "we're going to stop" and they'll be safe. There is always something more to it. If Ukraine says we'll just stop attacking Russian soldiers is that war over? If Russia says we'll just stop attacking Ukraine and stay where we are is that war over? Is there any other conflict where the answer is simply stop and it'll be fine?

by YZF

4/10/2026 at 8:43:52 PM

> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?

Iraq, during the Gulf War.

> Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?

Japan, though the US didn't bomb them, it instituted an oil embargo and asset freeze.

> Who did the US bomb before its embassies in East Africa were attacked

Iraq, during the Gulf War.

> Who did the US bomb before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103 ?

Tripoli and Benghazi, Iran Air Flight 655.

I don't understand the purpose of these questions. Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it?

by stavros

4/10/2026 at 8:49:02 PM

The US are also the major enabler of Israel's colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This was clearly expressed by Bin Laden himself as one of the motives behind the 9/11 attacks.

> Were you thinking the US was just minding its own business and some bad guys came and attacked it

As I remember, this was exactly the way the US explained 9/11: "they hate us for our freedom".

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 10:10:10 PM

Yeah, he also justified it by citing the US's acceptance of homosexuality so maybe it's more complicated than that.

by some_random

4/10/2026 at 10:41:00 PM

No, he didn't. His "letter to America" starts with the question:

"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

Because you attacked us and continue to attack us."

And proceeds to list all the ways the US are militarily attacking and oppressing Muslims in the Middle East. It's a long list.

Homosexuality is mentioned only once in the letter, in the next section, where he criticises American society and morals in general and calls it to embrace Islam. This is explicitly an exhortation and not part of the reasons for the attacks (so probably intended as a diagnosis of the symptoms of a moral disease and the proposal of a cure - note that I'm not endorsing it, just explaining its function in the letter).

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 11:57:15 PM

[flagged]

by some_random

4/11/2026 at 1:52:36 AM

No, there is no "or else", you are plainly making it up. As I've said, this is the exhortation part of the letter and it's not listed among the reasons for the attacks. Regressive, certainly. Brought as a justification for terrorism, no.

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 8:56:08 PM

Sure, but I'd hope any commenter here would be smart enough to not believe such a facile explanation.

by stavros

4/11/2026 at 3:51:31 AM

[flagged]

by fortran77

4/10/2026 at 9:33:24 PM

[flagged]

by YZF

4/10/2026 at 9:51:46 PM

You asked "who did the US bomb before 9/11" and you got the answer. Now you're arguing that they shouldn't have reacted even if the US bombed them before (calling it "an excuse")?

As for the peace process with Palestinians, it was always a sham. The US (as it's evident now to many) are entirely unable to apply any sort of pressure on their "ally". What they've done is just buying time for Israel to expand its colonisation under the temporary pretense of some ongoing "peace process".

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 11:30:25 PM

[flagged]

by YZF

4/10/2026 at 9:54:55 PM

>There is always an excuse

"excuse" is a funny way of wording it -- "motivation" or "explanation" might be more appropriate here. is the expectation that the US can and should be able to kill and destroy and the victims just turn the other cheek?

by gazebo2

4/10/2026 at 10:06:08 PM

West bank and Gaza were never under full Palestinian control since 1967 both were under brutal occupation or blockade + contant Israeli meddling into internal affairs.

by megous

4/10/2026 at 10:56:42 PM

[flagged]

by YZF

4/10/2026 at 11:49:58 PM

[flagged]

by xdennis

4/11/2026 at 12:01:33 AM

So are the Palestinians?

by paulryanrogers

4/10/2026 at 9:56:55 PM

> Who did the US bomb before 9/11?

Korea, Vietnam, Laos...

by cyberax

4/10/2026 at 11:46:59 PM

Bombing Korea led to bin Laden attacking on 9/11?

You did not read that GP was saying. He's saying that many conflicts are not started because US bombed a place.

by xdennis

4/10/2026 at 9:43:06 PM

> Who did the US bomb before 9/11? Who did the US bomb before Pearl Harbor?

Right, they just hate the US because of their freedoms.

/s

by gib444

4/10/2026 at 8:15:25 PM

Well yes, and actually instead of wasting billions creating understandable cause of hate, this could be injected into domestic social spendings, and there would probably still be a lot staying on the table to throw in humanitarian endeavors around the globe creating love through so called soft power.

by psychoslave

4/10/2026 at 8:19:41 PM

The US is a country of violence and war. Founded from a war, massive civil war, almost perpetually at war for the last many decades.

Military spending costs a trillion a year (Trump wants 1.5 trillion). It’s big business and makes some people very rich.

by testing22321

4/10/2026 at 8:42:19 PM

[flagged]

by ACCount37

4/11/2026 at 3:58:46 AM

> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.

Where's the proof that Iran has, or is even remotely close to having, nukes? I mean, actual proof, not the kind of "proof" that led us to invade Iraq in '03.

> I'm not at all mad at the US government for deciding to get rid of Iran's regime.

Ah, you're one of those people. You probably thought "Team America: World Police" was an instruction manual, and not satire, yeah?

by kelnos

4/11/2026 at 5:04:32 AM

Iran having nukes is unsubstantiated. I also don’t think they wanted to have nukes. But they also enriched Uranium up to 60% according to IAEA which has no non-military use. They perhaps wanted to use that as leverage in negotiations which turned out to be not much of a deterrence.

by throwawayheui57

4/10/2026 at 10:31:08 PM

Difficult to reconcile the justification of current efforts of "Iran can't have nukes" with the unequivocal claims made less than a year ago that Iran's nuclear capabilities had been "obliterated".

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/irans-nuclear-fa...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2025/06/sunday-shows-pre...

by brandon272

4/11/2026 at 2:26:40 AM

It's possible for both of these to be true: The leaders of the US are incompetent, and bombing Iran was the right decision.

"Even a stopped clock..."

by stickfigure

4/11/2026 at 4:00:03 AM

Pretty sure if the leaders are incompetent, it's not gonna be the right decision to bomb anyone. Seeing as that act requires competence as well.

As we're seeing, they're incompetent at waging war against Iran as well.

by kelnos

4/10/2026 at 10:42:17 PM

[flagged]

by ACCount37

4/10/2026 at 10:20:23 PM

Tell me about the problems outside of N. Korea that have resulted from N. Korea's ownership of nuclear weapons?

by PaulDavisThe1st

4/11/2026 at 2:31:30 AM

North Korea started out with a "nuclear weapon": Seoul is within artillery range of the border. Consequently the Kim regime has been able to starve and torture its own population, and yes - develop nuclear weapons - without anyone willing to stop them.

You think the problems inside North Korea are ok? Koreans are human too.

by stickfigure

4/10/2026 at 10:32:55 PM

Why are we ignoring the problems inside of North Korea? I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.

That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate, with the government sponsoring everything from extorting hospitals with ransomware, to dealing drugs, to counterfeiting currency, to abducting film makers (from Hong Kong).

by gpm

4/11/2026 at 12:26:46 AM

> I take slavery and starving people pretty poorly regardless of where it happens.

A great many of us feel that way, however historically GreatPowers do not - it's control of resources that move the needle for them.

Currently the US makes much of 30K protesters killed in Iran (number in dispute) but it is very much an action rooted in petro dollar geopolitics, oil, and Israel.

Starving people globally no longer get USAID .. a fractional cost compared to the Iran excursion.

The US didn't feel the need to get involved in regime change following any part of the Rwanda Genocide, and the US took the side of Indonesia (who were going for the resource control) against the West Papuans .. the US and UN turned a blind eye to exactly who and how people were tortured to get a favourable vote.

There's a long long list of starving and essentially enslaved people globally that have been ignored in favour of others by the French, the Dutch, the British, Belgium, USofA, etc.

> That said North Korea routinely acts against the rest of the world in ways that are only possible because the rest of the world is unable to retaliate

In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.

by defrost

4/11/2026 at 12:30:24 AM

> In real politik terms the same can be said about the USofA and has been said about the former British Empire.

Sure... I think minimizing the number of entities who have this sort of impunity is a good thing even if we can't eliminate all of them.

by gpm

4/10/2026 at 9:40:31 PM

> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.

There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.

Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.

by krisoft

4/11/2026 at 12:10:50 AM

[flagged]

by towledev

4/11/2026 at 12:49:29 AM

Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time.

If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.

by krisoft

4/11/2026 at 12:00:28 PM

I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.

by towledev

4/11/2026 at 12:29:07 AM

An accord reached between Iran and several world powers, including the United States, in July 2015.

Not Just Obama.

Can the world be saved from central north American partisan squabbling please.

by defrost

4/11/2026 at 11:56:18 AM

It would be truer to say the agreement was between several world powers and Obama, as the Senate didn't ratify.

by towledev

4/11/2026 at 12:00:35 PM

did the senate ratify starting a war with iran or president is ok to bomb with isreal at will but any agreement requires “ratification” by senate?!

by bdangubic

4/10/2026 at 9:46:18 PM

> Iran has been the driving force behind a lot of instability in Middle East

I'm loving the current stability that the USA has gifted the world and looking forward to many decades of peace and calm in the middle east. Thank you so much.

by gib444

4/10/2026 at 10:42:47 PM

That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.

by hypersoar

4/10/2026 at 10:29:51 PM

> we only planned for the absolute best case scenario, why didn't that scenario happen?

IRGC sympathizers across the world that would rather have the current government than the more progressive predecessor.

by cmxch

4/11/2026 at 5:49:54 AM

A citizen of the country attacking others wrote a post about country protection. How funny.

by sakesun

4/11/2026 at 6:39:58 AM

Americans are for the most part incredibly out of touch and still think they are at the center of the world.

They voted in the orange turd twice, a third of their population didn't even vote.

The US has become a laughing stock worldwide and internally looks like a prelude to Idiocracy.

Well, at least they know how to hire smart people, from China/Russia/Germany/India.

Bringing it back to your message, they love this! To be the center of attention, show off how strong and powerful of a nation they are.

Except, they messed with the wrong region. Same mistake Russia made.

by slekker

4/11/2026 at 10:37:16 AM

Sounds to me like you have a lot of envy and jealousy. That's normally what tantrums and name calling result from; that and a need for attention. Congrats.

by raptor99

4/11/2026 at 1:09:22 AM

Imagine the cost of a shahed drone being as low as $5,000, or less. Imagine the cartels south of the U.S. having tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. It could get painful fast. That's one thing this war is showing.

by cryptonector

4/11/2026 at 1:19:50 AM

Things are cheap and easy enough that this sort of state of the art warfare is accessible to individuals.

It was obvious ten years ago that this was coming, but saying so just made you sound crazy.

I said a similar thing when the Nordstream pipeline was popped. Basically anyone with, say, $400k to rent a boat and a work class underwater ROV could have done it. Sure, pricey, but that's low enough that a single individual could have financed it.

by 01100011

4/11/2026 at 8:43:28 AM

If the cartels attack American civilian infrastructure with drones, the American public will support a full on land invasion and annexation of Mexico if they're told that will make it stop.

by kaashif

4/11/2026 at 8:42:28 AM

This makes no sense. The only real danger are religious nutters like Iran, USA and Israel. Everyone else just wants to make money.

by ilovecake1984

4/11/2026 at 11:24:59 AM

So its your argument that if the US, Iran, and Israel laid down arms the world would find an indefinite peace?

by _heimdall

4/11/2026 at 1:44:54 AM

Those supply chains are highly visible and relatively limited. Building a vast number of Shahed-level drones is going to be noticed long before you actually build them.

by jandrewrogers

4/11/2026 at 5:40:06 AM

You mean more visible than a drug distribution network?

I dunno anyway. Buying a roll of a thousand of some component here and there wouldn't appear on anybody's radar. Maybe the motors would be a problem, but then, Mexico has enough good enough motor factories.

by marcosdumay

4/11/2026 at 3:27:47 AM

Sure hope so. But what if it's a partnership with parts of the Mexican army or something?

by cryptonector

4/10/2026 at 7:46:47 PM

The first part of the parabellum quote matters - we have to let the people who want peace prepare for war.

The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.

Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.

Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.

Si vis pacem ...

by gopalv

4/10/2026 at 8:19:41 PM

aposiopesis is followed presumably by some latin phrasing of prepare for war?

[edit, found the real version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_vis_pacem%2C_para_bellum ]

adapted from a statement found in Roman author Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's tract De Re Militari (fourth or fifth century AD), in which the actual phrasing is Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum ("Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war").

by jjtheblunt

4/11/2026 at 2:28:33 AM

I was also thinking about this and I think it has to go a step further: Assets don't just need to be underground, they need to be on mobile rails underground. They need to constantly be moveable and pop out of one of thousands of holes to attack or if it comes to defensive e.g SAM sites they need to be moveable so that when an incoming missile is not interceptable that it can simply move away to a different underground location, pop out somewhere else and be able to keep defending. All you should be losing when a missile hits is a one of the underground exit holes. And of course to defeat such underground networks you need vast armies of small intelligent drones that can go in there and explore every tunnel where no human wants to risk setting foot in.

by Nathanba

4/11/2026 at 8:50:59 AM

https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Command_System

> And of course to defeat such underground networks you need vast armies of small intelligent drones that can go in there and explore every tunnel where no human wants to risk setting foot in.

In the book they're defeated by biological warfare.

by vizzier

4/11/2026 at 5:34:55 AM

The cost of building all the tunnels is astronomical. Making tunnel boring cheap, fast, and resilient to different soil types + rock would also pay huge dividends for urban mass transport (subway lines).

by solatic

4/10/2026 at 11:52:05 PM

The ridiculous AI slop image of troops posing around a TBM that's apparently just dug a tunnel several multiples its own diameter is a good illustration of how clueless the author is about tunneling. TBMs are hugely complicated and expensive machines, need vast amounts of materials and the associated logistics network to operate, and drill 200 to 700 meters per week depending on the terrain. Deploying and operating one in battlefield conditions is absurd, all the enemy needs to do is fly a suicide drone into the open end of the tunnel and now you have a multi-hundred-million-dollar paperweight.

by decimalenough

4/11/2026 at 2:44:37 AM

I don't think that the prospect of getting hit under battlefield conditions is the problem here because that's always the problem and the tunnel is supposed to be the thing that helps you avoid getting hit. Tunneling under battlefield conditions has also been a thing in military conquest of castles for a very long time. These days you don't really have to tunnel towards an enemy, you just have to create underground spaces for your missiles, aircraft, etc. and as safer bases so the situation is vastly easier.

by Nathanba

4/11/2026 at 6:57:17 AM

I think he's right about covered tunnels though-- i.e. that a trench covered with concrete slabs can be built fast and provide useful protection.

by impossiblefork

4/11/2026 at 10:51:09 AM

Ah, the price we pay for infinite growth.

I guess there's just no other option. Freedom isn't free.

by boomskats

4/11/2026 at 11:34:50 AM

Infinite growth is not the only way.

by strogonoff

4/10/2026 at 10:41:02 PM

I definitely think that Saudi Arabia is wishing it’s pipeline was underground right now.

by daft_pink

4/11/2026 at 1:28:30 AM

I think the solution is more drones(sorry, American here). The only cost effective way to fight drones is similarly cheap drones or possibly energy weapons. Given the cost of energy weapons, you can't deploy them everywhere you want protection.

Therefore the only solution is drones.

You could try an idealistic approach like making drones illegal and attempting to control proliferation, but as we've seen with other weapons that's really not an effective strategy.

by 01100011

4/11/2026 at 3:38:12 AM

We have the prospect of AI destroying humanity and living life underground. It's more like The Matrix every day.

by srj

4/11/2026 at 7:52:54 AM

Its not AI, its humanity itself. There is no AI, because none of those tools are actually autonomous. There no AI commenters here or anywhere, it is always humans causing that slop to be posted.

Anyway, this idea goes back to long before The Matrix, try H G Wells The War of the Worlds, ably voiced by David Essex and Richard Burton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcAwrLzhnzQ

by clort

4/11/2026 at 6:29:53 AM

I maintain the position that people will chose to go into the matrix

by verdverm

4/11/2026 at 7:40:49 AM

With TikTok and co they already kinda did.

by _ink_

4/11/2026 at 9:12:37 AM

The irony is that we know it’s vastly cheaper to curtail war with treaties, diplomacy and mutually assured destruction… the US is the primary force moving away from it.

by gmerc

4/10/2026 at 8:15:33 PM

The trouble with missile interceptors is that they're overkill. Drones are slow, unarmored targets that could be taken out by a bullet.

What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.

by Legend2440

4/10/2026 at 8:18:11 PM

There is a layer over this that should be noticed. Nowhere is safe, because international order is a joke. You can conduct invasions for land, to exterminate population, to whatever Trump is doing, every instrument of international law was just useless, or even cooperative with the stronger offender. Which will be the ones taking advantage of this situation? China, Brazil?

Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.

by gmuslera

4/10/2026 at 9:04:54 PM

The same line of reasoning leads to constitutions and laws being jokes, too.

The simple fact is that rules matter if and only if they are enforced effectively by a community. And power is the ability to direct and control that enforcement.

The international order has declined in the past one or two decades because the UN security council was hamstrung by the enormously powerful veto rights held by Russia, China and the U.S. This has slowly emboldened those countries to de-value the UN and pursue their own interests.

by gmueckl

4/10/2026 at 11:02:37 PM

There has never been any ability for the UN to work the way people seem to think it should work.

Because who exactly, outside of those major powers, is going to enforce anything?

by XorNot

4/10/2026 at 9:18:00 PM

It is not that laws are being jokes or not because are not in place, but ends being that way when they are in place and they are blatantly ignored, specially for some power groups or communities. Then they can break those laws with impunity, and then others follow example with varied success, but still, those laws are already a joke.

by gmuslera

4/11/2026 at 1:22:53 AM

We're finding out quickly that international law is a farce and might makes right, more or less.

You can defend yourself with letters of strong condemnation only as long as someone stronger doesn't want what you have.

by 01100011

4/10/2026 at 8:27:24 PM

Precisely.

I think it's sort of laughable when people try to invoke international law about the strait being closed when the country closing it was being bombed in the first place. Once your civilian infrastructure is being attacked all gloves are off.

What people fail to understand is that international order being respected favors the stronger and more developed countries first. Those are the countries that depend more on complex supply chains, on more expensive infrastructure, etc.

That the US of all countries would be the one dismantling an order that favored it first and foremost is sort of fascinating to watch, especially when it is replacing it with nothing. Definitely not something I would have guessed even a few years ago.

by surgical_fire

4/10/2026 at 9:00:11 PM

[flagged]

by YZF

4/10/2026 at 10:16:28 PM

A tunnel 15-30 feet underground is not "shallow" at all, it's a major earthworks undertaking.

by varjag

4/11/2026 at 12:42:05 AM

Often undertaken by subsistance miners with hand tools .. eg: Coober Pedy is surrounded by a rabbit warren of tunnels 30 ft down and fanning out following opal.

Admittedly that's "soft" rock, but 30 foot is shallow underground mining compared to major league underground mines and open cut super pits.

by defrost

4/11/2026 at 10:10:33 AM

People built the pyramids with primitive tools too, and it also was a major undertaking.

by varjag

4/10/2026 at 10:44:35 PM

In Reddit hand wringing land where your 3-gal homeowner air compressor gets called a bomb, yeah sure it's a major undertaking.

15-30ft holes in the ground can be constructed with bog standard earthmoving machinery that isn't even "wide load" so it's "within normal capabilities" by professional or military standards.

by cucumber3732842

4/11/2026 at 10:13:23 AM

Spoken with the confidence of someone who never dug a full height trench.

No the military doesn't do 30ft deep tunnels on the frontline, and it has no equipment to do it.

by varjag

4/10/2026 at 10:04:58 PM

> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day

If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?

Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?

Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?

And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?

by krisoft

4/10/2026 at 10:53:19 PM

That cover dirt materially adds to the resistance of the structure.

This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of practicality.

There are entire civil engineering textbooks that focus exclusively on the types of scenario you are alluding to. It is a very mature discipline and almost all of it has been tested empirically.

I used to have a civil engineering textbook that was solely about the design of structures to resist the myriad effects of nuclear weapons. It was actually pretty damn interesting. Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.

by jandrewrogers

4/10/2026 at 11:15:55 PM

> Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.

I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)

I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.

by krisoft

4/10/2026 at 10:17:18 PM

> If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?

I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.

TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".

by PaulDavisThe1st

4/10/2026 at 11:43:39 PM

> I have no opinion on this

Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.

> visibility

There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.

Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.

> susceptibility to attack

Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.

> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce

I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.

by krisoft

4/11/2026 at 3:22:35 AM

> Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.

I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.

by PaulDavisThe1st

4/11/2026 at 3:44:58 AM

The suggestion from the author sounds like someone early in WWI suggesting the problem with the war effort was a lack of entrenchments to conduct infantry charges from

by sidewndr46

4/11/2026 at 3:55:09 AM

No, not at all.

It sounds more like somebody from WWI suggesting the entrenchments absolutely _needed_ to be staggered and zig-zagged so that artillery blast shock waves don't kill everbody.

Which was a solid observation.

Now the solid advice is to leave _nothing_ above ground and parked for very long - roll everything .. including radar .. in and out of bunkers to protect assests when wave upon wave of wooden cheap arse semi smart bombs come in on the back of Chinese / Russian / Indian / US satellite targeting.

by defrost

4/10/2026 at 11:28:14 PM

I had this idea for a "drill" that I'd like to make someday.

Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.

After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.

I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.

"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this

by ms_menardi

4/11/2026 at 7:35:31 AM

One thing is that “underground” is not a homogenous single thing. Sometimes it is loose water logged sand, or clay, or gravel, sometimes it is solid hard rock, sometimes it is large very hard pieces of fractured hard rock forming a loose rubble. Which kind of obstacle are you thinking when you are thinking of your method of digging? Based on your method description it sounds like you are thinking of loose soil with a few big rocks?

> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.

That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.

> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate

How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.

by krisoft

4/11/2026 at 1:25:55 AM

I figure a big issue is you still need to move all of that displaced rock and earth out of the way

by squibonpig

4/11/2026 at 1:27:11 AM

I’m having trouble picturing this, I think. Maybe this will help: after this big hammer hits the rock with the outline of drilled holes around it…where do you think the rock goes? It’s not hollow under there…

by senordevnyc

4/10/2026 at 8:50:30 PM

Against subsonic, low supersonic threats, short / medium term it's still about magazine depth and interceptor economics and sheer attrition math, i.e. PRC can build cheap interceptors at scale... has magnitude more targets due to sheer size, many of which are hardened, entire underground civil/mic infrastructure etc etc.

Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.

by maxglute

4/10/2026 at 8:38:59 PM

Elon pops up, Boring Company business card in hand: You rang?

by wormius

4/10/2026 at 8:57:42 PM

Because who do you think will be the main customer for his millions of humanoid robots?

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 8:59:01 PM

It’s where the author lost me. I’d bet on the Army Corps of Engineers over TBM any day of the week, especially when the stakes are warfighter lives.

by TimorousBestie

4/10/2026 at 8:11:52 PM

Cool world we’ve built everybody! No notes

by Aboutplants

4/10/2026 at 10:40:53 PM

"The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it."

This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.

by jmward01

4/10/2026 at 10:43:25 PM

State actor, yes. But not a Tier-1 state actor anymore.

by chiph

4/10/2026 at 10:57:52 PM

> This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat.

You can do a tremendous amount of damage with off the shelf consumer drones, and a minimal budget. Ukraine did an billions of dollars of damage to Russia's airfleet with a couple million dollars of drones hidden in trucks. Well in the range of cartels and terrorist groups.

> The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy.

You are very much correct that the way to not get into this situation is to not start a war.

by empath75

4/11/2026 at 12:48:45 AM

Seems to me that instead of digging a tunnel, you could get the same protection from ISR by building those road coverings out of corrugated metal, plywood, or even just laying vines over them. The benefit of the vines is they are cheap and could regrow after a drone hit.

Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.

by pianopatrick

4/10/2026 at 10:19:04 PM

"The U.S. has discovered that"...

I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.

by anonymousiam

4/11/2026 at 4:50:52 AM

This is the classic tech person trying to sound smart in a domain outside of their expertise.

Fixed civilian infrastructure has never been safe. The way you protect it is diplomatically, by having that region not be attacked in the first place or putting incentives such that certain bits of infrastructure are considered off limits.

Secondly, people whose only experience of war comes from fictional media have a drastically distorted view of the impact of chemical explosives. The science of chemical explosives became a mature discipline pre-WWII. Our best chemical today are maybe 1.7x more dense than TNT and our standard chemical explosives are often sometimes less energy dense because we prioritize safety over explosive power.

The science of rocketry became mature in the 60s, for a given fuel quantity, we can roughly lob X mass Y distance at Z speed.

The only area we've made massive advancements is precision, relevant if you want to put a small bomb through a window to kill one guy, not so relevant if you want to hit an oil refinery that is several square km wide.

The long and the short of it is that there's a massive, misunderstood gap between temporarily disabling something and destroying it. Take the Crimea bridge for example, back in 2022, there was a massive, high profile truck bombing that completely destroyed the center part of the bridge. However, it was fully repaired within 4 months. Subsequent, there have been 3 more attacks, and repaired every time and still transporting vital war materiel [1]. Concrete and steel are heavy. Even if left 100% undefended, the amount of weaponry needed to totally destroy the bridge, such that it could not be used for 3 years+ is a substantial chunk of Ukraine/US weapon's arsenal. Same goes for every power plant, oil refinery, airplane runway, tank factory etc. There's a reason why Ukraine still has reasonably reliable power after 6 years of Russian bombardment and the allies were never able to degrade German production abilities all the way down to zero despite near saturation bombing campaigns over cities like Dresden.

Bombs just aren't that powerful and our ability to produce them definitively peaked at the tail end of WWII. Currently, globally we're about at 1/20th of of that ability to produce that quantity of explosives and we likely never will reach that amount again.

The only way to actually truly destroy civilian infrastructure energetically is tactical nukes but that's an entirely other ball of wax.

In short, any time you see an expert in one field confidently expound in another field, you should be wary because, while they might be high IQ, their priors could be wrong in drastic ways that make any analysis foolish. The entire essay is arrant nonsense and would be laughed at by anyone with any degree of military analysis.

(Disclaimer: I did use AI to help me generate two numbers: the energetic ratio of WWII vs modern day high explosives and estimates of global military explosive production over time. All writing was my own).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge#Attacks_after_t...

by shalmanese

4/11/2026 at 5:56:25 AM

Your analysis presumes air power alone. Assets are seized by cavalry (in modernity, APCs and tanks) and held by infantry. Nothing new under the sun.

The only reason anybody is thinking of destroying civilian infrastructure (wealth) is because everybody took off the table the prospect of sending in cavalry and infantry to seize and hold it.

by solatic

4/11/2026 at 8:10:47 AM

USA rightly hesitates to send in the cavalry & infantry, because there, against much more numerous opponents, it no longer has the crushing advantage that it has in air power.

The chances of success of such an action are very low, unlike for air strikes, as it has already been demonstrated by the failure of the incursion attempted by USA one week ago, which resulted in significant US material loss, e.g. the 2 scuttled transport airplanes.

by adrian_b

4/11/2026 at 6:42:25 AM

That was an interesting article, but this comment is what made me sit up:

    The B-1 is only stationed at 2 bases with public access <2mi from the flight line. Often with all or most birds out of hangars.
    
    The B-2 is only stationed at 1 base with public access <1mi from the flight line and hangars.
    
    The US is not prepared at all for near-peer conflict.

by alfiedotwtf

4/11/2026 at 5:57:20 AM

That's totally not the case. Asymmetry is that when the adversary starts doing it, US is politically and socially not allowed to reply in kind. For instance: ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones - knock out every power plant and grid transformer and conduct surveillance using IR cameras to find everything that resembles thermal power plant cooling, and knock it out as well - without electricity, industry can't work.

Drones work for Ukraine and Russia because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them had, they'd win without the need for drones. They work for US because political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force.

by anovikov

4/11/2026 at 6:39:27 AM

> ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones

> political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force

Are you arguing that destroying a country of 90M's entire basic infrastructure is an "appropriate" use of force?

by verdverm

4/11/2026 at 7:12:53 AM

But Iran is trying to do the same right? It's just that they can't do it wholesale for lack of resources - ballistic missiles are too expensive and drones are too weak/have small warheads.

Just as i say: problem is not the technology. Guided bombs are cheaper than drones, more precise and a lot more powerful, US can use them and Iran uses drones simply because they don't have a viable air force. Problem is that they are fine attacking "anything of value" and Americans aren't.

by anovikov

4/11/2026 at 8:29:17 AM

There is little evidence for your theories.

We do not know exactly how much Iran can really destroy, because regardless if they can or they cannot destroy more, their current strategy of threatening to destroy much more than they have destroyed is the correct strategy.

If they had destroyed everything they can, then the adversaries would have no reason of further restraint. As it is, the adversaries are still fearful of greater retaliation, which has forced them to enter negotiations.

Also the fact that the Americans are not attacking "anything", is only partially true.

Of course, the Americans could destroy much more, but they have already destroyed many civilian targets, including the oil exporting infrastructure, bridges, rail stations, etc., in some cases also taking care to hit again the first responders.

by adrian_b

4/11/2026 at 11:07:29 AM

The only trick is Hormuz strait blocking by Iran... and it's very hard to tackle without a land invasion which Trump is reluctant to execute. Nothing else Iran could possibly do, matters at all.

by anovikov

4/10/2026 at 8:45:23 PM

Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance.

I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.

The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.

by intended

4/11/2026 at 1:00:52 AM

I dunno, seems to me that they're slow enough and fly low enough you could shoot them down with 50 cal ammo. The hard part is aiming and hitting them. But seems to me that someone could make a radar assisted point defense system that automatically aimed and fired a 50 cal gun, like automatic skeet shooting. Such a system would have limited range and could not hit very fast moving or high altitude targets, but would be cheap enough to deal with the cheap slow drones.

by pianopatrick

4/11/2026 at 6:46:50 AM

Look into what Ukraine is doing, they are at the forefront of all this.

They already have the system you describe. The German one's with radars are expensive compared to the technicals aimed by soldiers. Neither has very large effective range and the drones do not fly straight paths. You'd need millions of them.

They are mass producing interceptor drones for a reason.

by verdverm

4/10/2026 at 9:44:39 PM

I'm skeptical about the "cheap drones: who knew?" narrative. Such drones have existed since 1944.

by dboreham

4/10/2026 at 10:40:50 PM

There's been a massive step change in their capability per unit cost.

What used to cost millions per unit now costs tens of thousands. That's significant.

It's like saying artillery isn't that big a deal in 1914. After all, it's been around since 1452.

by dontlikeyoueith

4/10/2026 at 11:04:22 PM

it’s basically smart grenades that “throw” themselves, high tech shit, there’s def going to be some kind of automatic helmet-mounted counter devices coming

by luxuryballs

4/10/2026 at 8:13:32 PM

Trump has blundered like an idiot into this in Iran ...

... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.

It is a bad time to be an invading force.

by outside2344

4/10/2026 at 9:58:26 PM

That's how low in MAGA think.

by throwoio

4/10/2026 at 9:45:09 PM

Like an idiot?

by dboreham

4/10/2026 at 10:38:10 PM

:)

by jonners00

4/10/2026 at 8:18:46 PM

I think it would be really interesting to study the costs/ benefits of digging a tunnel 10 meters underground compared to placing a sturdy building where you want it, and using bulldozers to cover it with 10 meters of earth and rock.

by jay_kyburz

4/10/2026 at 7:54:44 PM

I find this vaguely analogous to the proliferation of cheap handguns in America. If drones are a response to asymmetrical power, the solution would be diplomacy. It undermines existing power paradigm, the solution isnn't complicated. Don't pick needless fights with your neighbors and allies. Maybe drones ultimately make better neighbors.

by josefritzishere

4/10/2026 at 8:02:50 PM

This is the "people are more respectful when everyone is armed" theory.

by SoftTalker

4/10/2026 at 9:03:48 PM

Yes, it's called MAD. It doesn't work for very large groups with many unstable individuals but seems to have worked so far for the small group of nations.

by throw310822

4/11/2026 at 8:26:10 AM

(Note though that in MAD you always shoot back at your opponents and never miss the target- which changes things quite a bit.)

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 8:14:38 PM

I think handguns in the US has shown that it doesn't work.

by jay_kyburz

4/10/2026 at 8:33:34 PM

Well at the risk of making a "hasn't been tried" argument, the vast majority of people in the US don't walk around with guns.

by SoftTalker

4/10/2026 at 8:35:57 PM

Why not? The friendliest people in the US are exactly in the open carry states.

NYC on the other hand has the biggest number of jerks per capita I ever seen. (No offence to all nice people from NYC, which there are still plenty.)

by AndriyKunitsyn

4/10/2026 at 8:40:02 PM

This really depends on what you look like. Open carry states can be very unfriendly if you look a certain way.

by cortesoft

4/10/2026 at 8:47:47 PM

OK, can't argue with that. I have no first-hand experience on this, you are probably right.

by AndriyKunitsyn

4/11/2026 at 4:23:32 AM

My personal experience is that LA has NYC beat on a per-capita basis (and possibly an absolute numbers basis; it has roughly half the population, so it would only need to be double per-capita to "win").

by aidenn0

4/11/2026 at 1:01:08 AM

i already wrote that drones (or more precisely - cheap semi- and fully autonomous high-precision weapons) are a new strategic parity weapon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203848 - it has been playing that role in Ukraine vs. Russia, and now in Iran vs. USA.

Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"

I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.

by trhway

4/10/2026 at 8:13:35 PM

We (United States) should have gone to war with Israel in 2006

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/10/2026 at 8:37:33 PM

The government of Israel can fight its own wars, it sure as hell doesn't need US help.

by esseph

4/10/2026 at 9:05:57 PM

Then it should stop getting $3 billion/ year from the US. Maybe also give back the $14 billion gift from a couple of years ago.

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 10:00:13 PM

When are you giving back the land to natives?

by throwoio

4/10/2026 at 9:20:09 PM

@esseph I meant US vs Israel, not USA/Israel vs anyone else

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/10/2026 at 10:43:19 PM

Why in 2006?

by throw310822

4/10/2026 at 11:03:54 PM

Israel bombed an apartment building in Beirut and killed a kid from a message board I posted on at the time. Haven't liked Israel since. I was young and didn't really have an opinion on Israel until then.

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/10/2026 at 11:32:54 PM

Killed isn't a strong enough word. I should have said, "2006 was when I learned that IDF indiscriminately murders humans who are just trying to live their lives, and many of those humans are children."

by zoklet-enjoyer

4/10/2026 at 7:38:14 PM

Do drones just appear out of thin air? Or are they made in factories, which as far as I know are "high value fixed civilian infrastructure" - which is vulnerable to attack?

If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed, I have no doubt about that.

The author is quite misguided if he thinks wars can only be fought defensively and never offensively.

by carlosjobim

4/10/2026 at 9:53:09 PM

> If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed

Bombing China would be an insane course of action to take for virtually any reason.

That aside consider this: You currently have the power to buy a handful of the shelf parts and assemble your own deadly drone at home. You don't need very specialized parts to do this. Bombing drone factories would do nothing to stop the use of drones.

by SkyeCA

4/10/2026 at 10:00:33 PM

And making drones and drone parts for massive assaults on stationary targets in the US is not an insane course of action?

For proxy wars, super powers won't bomb each other. But if one of them is attacked by weapons from another, then they will.

> You don't need very specialized parts to do this.

So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes? Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?

by carlosjobim

4/10/2026 at 10:11:01 PM

> So making drones and drone parts do not require any highly advanced technology or manufacturing processes?

I'll understand if you aren't a hardware person, but I think you severely overestimate how complex a drone needs to be if you only intend for it to be single use (which is apparently all the rage in modern war).

You don't even need drone specific parts, the parts you need are used in all kinds of other applications...many are even in your home right now whether you know it or not.

To destroy the supply of these generic parts you would have to destroy...basically everything.

> Then why weren't they widely used in the first world war?

This statement alone makes me not take your argument seriously. You aren't arguing in good faith.

by SkyeCA

4/10/2026 at 11:12:07 PM

No they're exactly right: drones need cheap, powerful parts which have only become possible due to highly concentrated mass production in places like China. You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs in a shed in Ukraine, and the cheapness of the parts depends on large unfettered supply chains. They're not "with some skill, you can build a lathe and then machine a pipe gun" simple.

In a direct conflict, no one is going to sit back and be destroyed by drone swarms: they'll bomb the industrial districts.

In war, the enemy gets a say in your plans: Iran can't beat the US directly, but it can hit energy infrastructure around the Gulf which is politically untenable for the US.

But it works the other way too: if your enemies plan is "you won't bomb the big industrial facilities so we'll just win" then you break out the fancy expensive missiles and bomb the industrial facilities. Or the power plants.

by XorNot

4/11/2026 at 12:24:19 AM

> You aren't fabbing up integrated machine learning SOCs

All the basic sensors you need for flight exist in the literal billions of Android phones produced in the last 15 years.

I'm trying to be evasive about how you'd build such a thing because I don't want a visit over a comment online, but if you understand aerodynamics you can make almost anything fly.

I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thinking something super high tech and precise, whereas I'm thinking of the minimum thing viable thing to create chaos/fear for you enemy.

by SkyeCA

4/11/2026 at 11:58:22 AM

> I think the disconnect here is people reading "drone" and thinking something super high tech and precise, whereas I'm thinking of the minimum thing viable thing to create chaos/fear for you enemy.

Even something like a ball bearing is super high tech and precise. Any kind of modern (post WWI) technology is super high tech and precise. Giant efforts were made to destroy ball bearing manufacturing in WWII, not to mention the rest of the war machine. Including German drones.

In a total war scenario, all enemy war factories and infrastructure will be attacked, and even civilian residential areas providing workers to the enemy war effort. This is how the allies mainly fought WWII against Germany.

When you start assembling drones from spare parts from other machines, and making custom drones, then you are at small scale and drones aren't anymore the cheap, mass produced weapon.

by carlosjobim

4/10/2026 at 10:08:42 PM

> is not an insane course of action?

No? Flat out arming proxies is literally the point of overt proxy warfare. Sometimes one tries to to be deniable and source other weapons, but other times it's just, enjoy quagmire, cry about it. It's like suggesting PRC going to start blowing up Lockheed plants if they ever lose anything to US munitions.

by maxglute

4/10/2026 at 10:51:46 PM

Yes, if mainland China is successfully invaded by a country being supplied with American military equipment and having their fixed infrastructure destroyed - like described in the article - you can be dead sure that they will try to destroy American military plants.

None of the super power countries will ever accept defeat in their homeland and being conquered without using all means possible to hinder it. That's why the USA has strong opinions on how the Ukraine uses long range weapons in the war with Russia.

by carlosjobim

4/11/2026 at 5:29:10 AM

That's borderline nonsense scenario. Superpowers aren't going to be existentially invaded via lesser proxy. We're talking about being quagmired in war of choice where proxys being supplied. Lots of escalation rungs up the ladder that run before looping into superpower vs superpower peer conflict.

by maxglute

4/11/2026 at 12:00:59 PM

That's the scenario of the article. He suggests putting all US infrastructure in tunnels, bunkers, and in space, to protect it from Chinese drones. I say, how about bombing the drone factories. Which idea do you think is more realistic? Have you started digging?

by carlosjobim

4/11/2026 at 8:39:50 AM

The scenario being unlikely doesn't make the OP's point irrelevant: the situation you see today is because that scenario doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen because countries are relatively circumspect about the way in which their military aid is deployed for exactly this reason.

by XorNot

4/10/2026 at 7:48:21 PM

A lot of the Ukrainian drones are produced in small buildings like homes and buisness, not massive centralized factories.

Hard to take out your enemy's production capability if A) you can't find it and B) it's highly distributed.

by malfist

4/10/2026 at 7:55:06 PM

They're assembled in small buildings, but at least some of the components require sophisticated factories. There are with all certainty weapons in orbit right now, locked on to these crucial factories, ready to fire if needed.

by carlosjobim

4/10/2026 at 8:00:59 PM

In orbit? Probably not. No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets. They would need to launch missiles or send drones.

In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry. But this is easier said than done; they tend to be deep inside enemy territory. And drones are made out of commonplace consumer electronics parts, which could be made in thousands of factories around the world.

by Legend2440

4/10/2026 at 8:12:41 PM

> No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets.

Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.

Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.

> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.

And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.

by carlosjobim

4/10/2026 at 9:10:16 PM

> It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.

Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.

If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.

Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.

> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.

I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.

by krisoft

4/10/2026 at 8:29:00 PM

No idea how actually efficient that would be even in theory. I guess it's not technical technicaly impossible, but would it really bring any benefit compared to launching possibly many more cheaper transcontinental rockets from earth were maintenance and control is definitely easier.

by psychoslave

4/10/2026 at 10:39:03 PM

The sophisticated factories they need are basically just for chips. And the problem with chips is that civilian life is just as dependent on them as military armaments.

The rest of the drone is all stuff that can be fabricated in small batches in a garage... of course bigs factories are more efficient at fabricating just about anything so to the extent that's possible it's done, but bombing all the big factories won't stop it.

by gpm

4/10/2026 at 8:01:35 PM

You think the US will unleash nuclear holocaust of the human race for some drone parts?

The US will do none of that shit because they wont be able to do it. Given the US is struggling against Iran, couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield yet they want to force down China which is an order of magnitude bigger than Russia.

by dragonelite

4/10/2026 at 8:41:28 PM

> struggling against Iran

Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.

> couldn't outproduce Russia on the battlefield

??? What does this even mean?

It's not like the US is in a wartime economy.

by esseph

4/10/2026 at 9:44:57 PM

> Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.

I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.

by krisoft

4/10/2026 at 10:29:58 PM

The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict. The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.

by jonnybgood

4/10/2026 at 11:52:34 PM

> The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict.

You think so? Then why did the US make it the condition of cease fire? Why did the US even agree to a cease fire? It is not like Iran is hurting the US mainland kinetically.

> The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.

Sometimes you have a thing and you don’t appreciate how important it is for you until you don’t have it anymore.

by krisoft

4/11/2026 at 1:59:36 AM

> I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing.

The comment was alluding to impotent tactical prowess, which is... silly, to say the least.

> Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.

This whole thing is extremely stupid, yes.

by esseph

4/10/2026 at 8:02:11 PM

How about not attacking countries and then you don't have to worry about them attacking you?

by chipsrafferty

4/10/2026 at 8:08:52 PM

When did Ukraine attack Russia?

by cortesoft

4/10/2026 at 11:00:11 PM

Exactly.

by rnewme

4/11/2026 at 2:19:07 AM

Russia attacked Ukraine. What's your point?

by chipsrafferty

4/10/2026 at 8:05:02 PM

You must not have read any history books.

by paulddraper

4/10/2026 at 8:19:50 PM

The ones written by the empires, or the ones that empires throw in the fire with anyone that dare to pretend otherwise? :)

by psychoslave

4/10/2026 at 7:47:10 PM

It’s a shame there’s inherent performance cost to homomorphic encryption. If there were not it could make sense at least on the compute front to treat it as a commodity and just put it everywhere l, importantly including untrusted locations and have a control plane handle coordination for low latency.

Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.

by amazingamazing

4/10/2026 at 7:52:55 PM

I think it's more the performance cost of building the servers themselves, and their density, why put compute in a flood basin or tornado hotspot if you know the latency improvements won't be immense enough to offset the cost of their destruction

by WorldPeas

4/10/2026 at 8:33:24 PM

Even biology doesn't cross check that much. Cells are happy to copy virus materials.

by contraposit