4 ms·

It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation

It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation. The thesis of drone warfare is that quantity has a quality all of its own. Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity. Not 100% effective, but nobody asks this. All of everyday life holds the small chance of disaster. Being much less likely to die via drone attack is valuable even if the odd rogue attack succeeds.

bostonsre 4y ago
What about the nation state actors that don't sign on to the pledge? Ukraine would be at a significant disadvantage if they were playing by these hypothetical rules but Russia didn't.
- asdff 4y ago
  Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy. These actually work pretty well when they are targeted at the oligarchy of a given nation state. This puts pressure on the state leaders who exist to serve the oligarchy to work to lift sanctions. The oligarch doesn't care about anything unless it makes them money, and by forcing them to lose money you shift incentives accordingly.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy. You can't disarm America, Russia or China's nuclear weapons like that. The example of nuclear weapons only shows that cat like this won't go back in bags. The only way you'll get countries like this to disarm and renounce a class of weapons is if those weapons were never very good in the first place (e.g. chemical weapons) or were rendered obsolete by new sorts of weapons (battleships.)
  - marshray 4y ago
    It's very difficult, but still much easier to inspect processing facilities for illegal enrichment than it would be to prevent manufacturing of military drones. Drones are increasingly used by civilians, and we see in Ukraine that consumer drones are being employed in military operations with little more than a software upgrade.
- ahelwer 4y ago
  Arms control diplomacy has never managed to get everyone on board with full ratification all at once. Doesn't mean it doesn't make a difference, especially as the years go on. Using widely-banned weapons in a conflict has more-severe diplomatic repercussions than invasion by conventional means.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Up to a point. As far as nukes go, the main reason for having one is as a deterrent to conventional attacks. Sure, you can try to starve people out, but sanctions regimes often run out of moral legitimacy before their targets do. And countries like Iran or North Korea that are near to or in possession of a nuclear capability are not going to cast it away. Gaddafi did that and look how poorly it turned out for him.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation. Unfortunately good intentions don't make bad ideas any better. Otherwise, let me propose that we solve world hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog. A terribly dumb idea, but motivated by the best of intentions trying to solve the worst sort of problem.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > let me propose that we solve world hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog An incredibly dismissive straw-man.
anigbrowl 4y ago
I was tired when I wrote that last night and it doesn't explain my point of view well, so let me give you a more considered reply. Firstly, the inevitability of the disaster is not at all obvious. Drone attacks don't scale in anything like the same way nukes do. Nor do kinetic attacks have the same long-term environmental hangover that nukes and chemical weapons do. Drone swarms are a potentially deadly problem for military elements and potentially political organs, but they excel at narrowly targeted objectives. They're not on the same level of existential risk to entire cities, unless we get into skynet territory with wholly autonomous factories and logistic chains. What I'm saying is naive is the belief in technical (legal) methods. You write: Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity but this is clearly not the case. Small arms trafficking is actually widespread despite all the hand-wringing, and efforts at gun control in the US are token at best. They're ineffective partly because they are asinine and pursued in a childish fashion. Gun control as a policy objective is wholly reasonable, and I can give numerous arguments on its behalf. But in the US, the legal environment is ruled by the 2nd Amendment, whose language about how 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' is so plain as to be inarguable. Gun control proponents really won't make any serious headway for the foreseeable future unless they try to repeal or rewrite this. None of them want to do that because it's a political non-starter. (Incidentally, this is not an argument for just giving up on the problem; a small tax on the sale of ammunition, with all revenue reserved for the medical or funeral expenses of shooting victims, is both politically and legally feasible imho). My argument is not only about quantity, but versatility. I mentioned how easy it is to manufacture weapons. The sad reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in uniform), in a month's time you would have a gun problem again. It would be on a smaller scale - at first. But it wouldn't stay that way. It's costly to manufacture a really well-engineered gun, of course, but it's very very easy to manufacture a crappy gun that's Good Enough. You don't need a fancy workshop or a degree in mechanical engineering, as the Abe assassination showed. If you have some mechanical aptitude or admit the use of cheap and easily available tools, the emerging insurgency in Myanmar is making extensive use of 3d printed guns. A less spectacular but increasingly widespread use of 3d printing is the manufacture of auto sears, a mechanical part that swapped into the trigger mechanism of a semi-automatic gun to allow fully automatic fire. It's really simple, just a lever with a particular shape about the size of your index finger. They're trivially easy to make and very easy to apply. The ATF charges people for selling them quite frequently, but let's be realistic: they are only finding the suckers who are so stupid/greedy that they advertise more or less openly. This is not such a huge problem in my view because most people who want to use one of these are into the novelty factor of shooting a high powered weapon for kicks. But you'd be foolish to assume that they're not proliferating wildly in certain circles just because of a few prosecutions. Just as very basic hardware can be repurposed toward weapon manufacture, any computer with a network connection is theoretically a cyberattack vector. It doesn't have to be a super-clever or advanced cyberattack; you can trade off quality against quantity if you are just basically competent in python or shell scripting, and you can even get results with crude readymade tools like Low Orbit Ion Cannon. So it is with drones. Weaponizing them is trivial; payloads don't need to be huge and the same technology that can save a life by dropping medical supplies can end one by dropping a hand grenade (both of these techniques are being used in Ukraine on a daily basis). Computer vision, maneuver, obstacle avoidance, communications etc. etc. can all enhance the capability of a drone swarm, but all those things have valid purposes too. Like a piece of steel tubing or a Raspberry Pi with Linux installed, it's not the device itself that's the problem but the purpose for which it is configured. So I think it's childish to think you can legislate away drone swarming, the same way it's childish to think you can just legislate small arms or cyberattacks or drugs or protests out of existence. In the end, legislative solutions are just about making a really nasty example out of the few people you catch doing a Bad Thing and then hoping it scares everyone else into compliance. Once you lose legitimacy or people decide they don't care that much any more, it's useless. I'm emphasizing 'people' here because drone technology is so simple and accessible that it's not limited to nation states or large industrial concerns. Any garage could be a drone lab, any pickup truck can be a launchpad.

bostonsre 4y ago

What about the nation state actors that don't sign on to the pledge? Ukraine would be at a significant disadvantage if they were playing by these hypothetical rules but Russia didn't.

asdff 4y ago
Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy. These actually work pretty well when they are targeted at the oligarchy of a given nation state. This puts pressure on the state leaders who exist to serve the oligarchy to work to lift sanctions. The oligarch doesn't care about anything unless it makes them money, and by forcing them to lose money you shift incentives accordingly.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > Same thing that happens when nation state actors decide to refine uranium to weapons grade: sanctions that kill the economy. You can't disarm America, Russia or China's nuclear weapons like that. The example of nuclear weapons only shows that cat like this won't go back in bags. The only way you'll get countries like this to disarm and renounce a class of weapons is if those weapons were never very good in the first place (e.g. chemical weapons) or were rendered obsolete by new sorts of weapons (battleships.)
- marshray 4y ago
  It's very difficult, but still much easier to inspect processing facilities for illegal enrichment than it would be to prevent manufacturing of military drones. Drones are increasingly used by civilians, and we see in Ukraine that consumer drones are being employed in military operations with little more than a software upgrade.
ahelwer 4y ago
Arms control diplomacy has never managed to get everyone on board with full ratification all at once. Doesn't mean it doesn't make a difference, especially as the years go on. Using widely-banned weapons in a conflict has more-severe diplomatic repercussions than invasion by conventional means.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Up to a point. As far as nukes go, the main reason for having one is as a deterrent to conventional attacks. Sure, you can try to starve people out, but sanctions regimes often run out of moral legitimacy before their targets do. And countries like Iran or North Korea that are near to or in possession of a nuclear capability are not going to cast it away. Gaddafi did that and look how poorly it turned out for him.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> It is "adult" thinking, I guess, to impugn the very idea of trying to steer the world away from obvious disaster through diplomacy and international cooperation. Unfortunately good intentions don't make bad ideas any better. Otherwise, let me propose that we solve world hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog. A terribly dumb idea, but motivated by the best of intentions trying to solve the worst sort of problem.

sitkack 4y ago
> let me propose that we solve world hunger by mailing everybody a free hotdog An incredibly dismissive straw-man.

anigbrowl 4y ago

I was tired when I wrote that last night and it doesn't explain my point of view well, so let me give you a more considered reply. Firstly, the inevitability of the disaster is not at all obvious. Drone attacks don't scale in anything like the same way nukes do. Nor do kinetic attacks have the same long-term environmental hangover that nukes and chemical weapons do. Drone swarms are a potentially deadly problem for military elements and potentially political organs, but they excel at narrowly targeted objectives. They're not on the same level of existential risk to entire cities, unless we get into skynet territory with wholly autonomous factories and logistic chains. What I'm saying is naive is the belief in technical (legal) methods. You write: Bans and controls are effective at limiting quantity but this is clearly not the case. Small arms trafficking is actually widespread despite all the hand-wringing, and efforts at gun control in the US are token at best. They're ineffective partly because they are asinine and pursued in a childish fashion. Gun control as a policy objective is wholly reasonable, and I can give numerous arguments on its behalf. But in the US, the legal environment is ruled by the 2nd Amendment, whose language about how 'the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' is so plain as to be inarguable. Gun control proponents really won't make any serious headway for the foreseeable future unless they try to repeal or rewrite this. None of them want to do that because it's a political non-starter. (Incidentally, this is not an argument for just giving up on the problem; a small tax on the sale of ammunition, with all revenue reserved for the medical or funeral expenses of shooting victims, is both politically and legally feasible imho). My argument is not only about quantity, but versatility. I mentioned how easy it is to manufacture weapons. The sad reality is that if you could wave a magic wand and make all guns in the USA vanish immediately (or just privately held guns if you enjoy being pushed around by people in uniform), in a month's time you would have a gun problem again. It would be on a smaller scale - at first. But it wouldn't stay that way. It's costly to manufacture a really well-engineered gun, of course, but it's very very easy to manufacture a crappy gun that's Good Enough. You don't need a fancy workshop or a degree in mechanical engineering, as the Abe assassination showed. If you have some mechanical aptitude or admit the use of cheap and easily available tools, the emerging insurgency in Myanmar is making extensive use of 3d printed guns. A less spectacular but increasingly widespread use of 3d printing is the manufacture of auto sears, a mechanical part that swapped into the trigger mechanism of a semi-automatic gun to allow fully automatic fire. It's really simple, just a lever with a particular shape about the size of your index finger. They're trivially easy to make and very easy to apply. The ATF charges people for selling them quite frequently, but let's be realistic: they are only finding the suckers who are so stupid/greedy that they advertise more or less openly. This is not such a huge problem in my view because most people who want to use one of these are into the novelty factor of shooting a high powered weapon for kicks. But you'd be foolish to assume that they're not proliferating wildly in certain circles just because of a few prosecutions. Just as very basic hardware can be repurposed toward weapon manufacture, any computer with a network connection is theoretically a cyberattack vector. It doesn't have to be a super-clever or advanced cyberattack; you can trade off quality against quantity if you are just basically competent in python or shell scripting, and you can even get results with crude readymade tools like Low Orbit Ion Cannon. So it is with drones. Weaponizing them is trivial; payloads don't need to be huge and the same technology that can save a life by dropping medical supplies can end one by dropping a hand grenade (both of these techniques are being used in Ukraine on a daily basis). Computer vision, maneuver, obstacle avoidance, communications etc. etc. can all enhance the capability of a drone swarm, but all those things have valid purposes too. Like a piece of steel tubing or a Raspberry Pi with Linux installed, it's not the device itself that's the problem but the purpose for which it is configured. So I think it's childish to think you can legislate away drone swarming, the same way it's childish to think you can just legislate small arms or cyberattacks or drugs or protests out of existence. In the end, legislative solutions are just about making a really nasty example out of the few people you catch doing a Bad Thing and then hoping it scares everyone else into compliance. Once you lose legitimacy or people decide they don't care that much any more, it's useless. I'm emphasizing 'people' here because drone technology is so simple and accessible that it's not limited to nation states or large industrial concerns. Any garage could be a drone lab, any pickup truck can be a launchpad.