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The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we ar

The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we are not), you realize that you really just help to kill people.

megous 3y ago
Autonomous killing with good UI/UX is the future, you know... "Human operator supervises autonomous mission execution with intuitive UI/UX to enable increased understanding and decision advantage ." https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/ https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/ When AI assisted mass target selection is already a thing: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal... Autonomous killing tools are an obvious next step.
adastra22 3y ago
You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that humanity is not an intrinsically violent species, and that if we all held hands and sang Kumbaya we'd be able to get along peaceably and without need for defensive tools. Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe. The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.
- steve_gh 3y ago
  Don't know who said it, but: Every country gets an army. The only question is: whose?
  - adastra22 3y ago
    That's good. I love pithy sayings like that.
  - d3ckard 3y ago
    I know it as: country that does not pay for its own army will sooner or later pay for someone else’s.
  - ElectronCharge 3y ago
    Reminding me of an old joke: Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the German soldiers can march in the shade! ;-)
- mplewis 3y ago
  In reality, the “sheepdog” ends up being a government surveillance state that keeps you compliant with spending all the money on peacetime military waste, rather than serving any of the citizens. The chickens always come home to roost.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Ok so tell me: why has the US and its allies been largely free of risk from territorial invasion, for such a long time that people like you feel comfortable lobbying for the elimination of the military? Why didn't Stalin continue his march into Western Europe after defeating Germany?
  - skjoldr 3y ago
    One man's "peacetime military waste" is another man's only hope of resisting Russian invasion and the reoccurrence of 20th century-style cleansings.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Ok, but why hasn't there been a WW3 yet?
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      We’re currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates. The waste of the US military in Iraq, the defeat in Afghanistan, the failures of domestic spying and PSYOPs dividing the nation, and the failed war in Ukraine has precipitated a state of weakness where rival countries are jockeying for position in both the Middle East and SE Asia. China is openly waging irregular warfare against the US, killing 100,000+ Americans per year in the Second Opium War. Our borders are regularly not only breached by Mexican paramilitaries, but the invasion assisted by DOD flights. The failure of the “sheepdog” to keep the herd safe is happening right now. Edit: If you disagree with my conclusion — I explained why I thought that in my post, so please explain either where you thought I was wrong or what you know that I don’t. Rather than trot out the very tired “muh conspiracy theories!”
      - sho 3y ago
        I think you need to re-evaluate your sources of information, because what you wrote in this comment comes across as a bunch of unfounded, conspiracy-addled fantasy world nonsense. Not only is "NATO vs BRICS" not escalating, there is no "NATO vs BRICS". What are you even on about.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        > We're currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates. And yet before the end of December you'll likely see the USAF working with Brazilian armed forces in Guyana against Maduro's invasion, and now the B of BRICS is out of the equation. You should stop reading Russian propaganda as if it was news…
- tamimio 3y ago
  Same goes with other nations, it sounds nice from your perspective but not so much when others do it too, you think you’re enforcing “peace” but reality is completely different, for that reason MIC exists and thrive for these “peaceful” wars, that we all know they are far from being peaceful. Sure, it’s naive to think that everyone will halt offensive/defensive work, but trying to justify it that it’s to protect the “herd” and bring “peace” is far more naive, there are no wolves, it’s another dogs and other herd too, it’s always about dominance and power struggles.
- dbspin 3y ago
  > enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.
  - skjoldr 3y ago
    That loss of life is not enormous if you look at the overall graph of civilian and military war-related deaths throughout 20th and 21st century. It very obviously trended downwards, especially after the Cold War, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused a spike. Then again, communism resulted in millions more civilian deaths in the same time period. The US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason, it's as if people are entirely unaware of events like Holodomor and The Great Leap Forward.
    - StockHuman 3y ago
      > US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea. Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.
      - skjoldr 3y ago
        Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?
petre 3y ago
Once those people will realize that they cannot win without machines and replenish the human resoruce fast enough, it becomes a game of who gets bankrupt first loses the war. If your country doesn't do it, China and Russia and Iran will.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
In general, I 100% agree with you, and I totally see how the technology displayed here can, is, and will be applied to more offensive purposes. But in this one specific case, this thing is a missile defense tool. Its sole purpose is to reduce killing.
- m4rtink 3y ago
  Well, it looks like a more fancy VTOL Shahed. ;-)
ansible 3y ago
I get where you are coming from. In the last two decades, the USA and allies have spent trillions of dollars increasing the suffering and death in Iraq and Afghanistan, and didn't even gain much geopolitical advantage in return. A giant waste of time, money, and human life. Had we not invaded them, there might be a million more Iraqis alive today. Afghanistan would still be a failed state though. The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not a significant news event for me. Ukraine was weak, and the tepid response to the invasion from Ukraine and the rest of the West meant that Russia just rolled in without opposition or much drama. Fast forward 8 years, and Ukraine has further developed its national identity and is starting to become a real democracy. The 2022 invasion was a big wake-up call for the West. We had thought that we had won the Cold War in 1992, and that our geopolitical rivals, while still warranting concern, were not a direct threat to us and our allies anymore. Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize.
- danbruc 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ansible 3y ago
    > This is what got us the Ukraine war in the first place, an uncompromising hard line against a weak Russia because the USA was in the position to do so. Russia opposed each NATO expansion but did nothing in the end and it was the same gamble with Ukraine, hoping that Russia will once more do nothing. Ah, the classic "The West forced Russia to invade Ukraine. Like the government in Ukraine didn't have any legitimate reason to align itself with the West after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Have you heard the rhetoric coming from Putin and the Kremlin? About how Ukraine doesn't have a legitimate national or ethnic identity of their own, and how the territory of Ukraine should just be a part of Russia. And how the Ukrainians (who are really just Russians, really) don't deserve to self-govern? Going on right now in occupied Ukraine, the Russians are actively purging all Ukrainian language and culture. Only the Russian language will be taught in schools. Yes, the West is totally to blame here. Totally.
philwelch 3y ago
Some people need killing. But that’s not really the goal of building better weapons systems. Wars only get started by people who think they have a chance to win. Having a large, well-equipped military with the best weapons and then pledging to deploy that military to the defense of half the world deters a lot of wars from even starting in the first place. A lot of people will argue that defense companies want wars to break out to increase their business, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In wartime, the military mostly needs cheap commodities—ammunition, supplies, food, fuel—nothing you can really differentiate on. And especially the most recent wars have mostly been against poorly armed terrorists, when the defense industry makes a lot more money selling weapons that would be total overkill against the Taliban but potentially useful against Russia or China.
tamimio 3y ago
As someone who work in drones and robotics, it’s one of the reasons I always request the end goals not just the project objectives, also, nothing is weaponized, I would prefer to sleep well at night knowing I only hurt flies in my life.

megous 3y ago

Autonomous killing with good UI/UX is the future, you know... "Human operator supervises autonomous mission execution with intuitive UI/UX to enable increased understanding and decision advantage ." https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/ https://www.anduril.com/mission-autonomy/ When AI assisted mass target selection is already a thing: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-cal... Autonomous killing tools are an obvious next step.

adastra22 3y ago

You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that humanity is not an intrinsically violent species, and that if we all held hands and sang Kumbaya we'd be able to get along peaceably and without need for defensive tools. Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the process of keeping all the sheeps safe. The sheepdog is a scary beast. It growls, it bites, and it intimidates sheep and wolf alike. But the herd is better off with it than without.

steve_gh 3y ago
Don't know who said it, but: Every country gets an army. The only question is: whose?
- adastra22 3y ago
  That's good. I love pithy sayings like that.
- d3ckard 3y ago
  I know it as: country that does not pay for its own army will sooner or later pay for someone else’s.
- ElectronCharge 3y ago
  Reminding me of an old joke: Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the German soldiers can march in the shade! ;-)
mplewis 3y ago
In reality, the “sheepdog” ends up being a government surveillance state that keeps you compliant with spending all the money on peacetime military waste, rather than serving any of the citizens. The chickens always come home to roost.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Ok so tell me: why has the US and its allies been largely free of risk from territorial invasion, for such a long time that people like you feel comfortable lobbying for the elimination of the military? Why didn't Stalin continue his march into Western Europe after defeating Germany?
- skjoldr 3y ago
  One man's "peacetime military waste" is another man's only hope of resisting Russian invasion and the reoccurrence of 20th century-style cleansings.
zmgsabst 3y ago
[flagged]
- adastra22 3y ago
  Ok, but why hasn't there been a WW3 yet?
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    We’re currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates. The waste of the US military in Iraq, the defeat in Afghanistan, the failures of domestic spying and PSYOPs dividing the nation, and the failed war in Ukraine has precipitated a state of weakness where rival countries are jockeying for position in both the Middle East and SE Asia. China is openly waging irregular warfare against the US, killing 100,000+ Americans per year in the Second Opium War. Our borders are regularly not only breached by Mexican paramilitaries, but the invasion assisted by DOD flights. The failure of the “sheepdog” to keep the herd safe is happening right now. Edit: If you disagree with my conclusion — I explained why I thought that in my post, so please explain either where you thought I was wrong or what you know that I don’t. Rather than trot out the very tired “muh conspiracy theories!”
    - sho 3y ago
      I think you need to re-evaluate your sources of information, because what you wrote in this comment comes across as a bunch of unfounded, conspiracy-addled fantasy world nonsense. Not only is "NATO vs BRICS" not escalating, there is no "NATO vs BRICS". What are you even on about.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      > We're currently at the start of WW3, as NATO vs BRICS escalates. And yet before the end of December you'll likely see the USAF working with Brazilian armed forces in Guyana against Maduro's invasion, and now the B of BRICS is out of the equation. You should stop reading Russian propaganda as if it was news…
tamimio 3y ago
Same goes with other nations, it sounds nice from your perspective but not so much when others do it too, you think you’re enforcing “peace” but reality is completely different, for that reason MIC exists and thrive for these “peaceful” wars, that we all know they are far from being peaceful. Sure, it’s naive to think that everyone will halt offensive/defensive work, but trying to justify it that it’s to protect the “herd” and bring “peace” is far more naive, there are no wolves, it’s another dogs and other herd too, it’s always about dominance and power struggles.
dbspin 3y ago
> enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.
- skjoldr 3y ago
  That loss of life is not enormous if you look at the overall graph of civilian and military war-related deaths throughout 20th and 21st century. It very obviously trended downwards, especially after the Cold War, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which caused a spike. Then again, communism resulted in millions more civilian deaths in the same time period. The US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason, it's as if people are entirely unaware of events like Holodomor and The Great Leap Forward.
  - StockHuman 3y ago
    > US impact on the worldwide death toll is often overstated for some reason It is only perceived as overstated when the second-order effects of its actions are dropped from the count; the actions of the dictatorships backed and installed by the US never seem to make the tally. Kissinger’s (topical) Chinese containment strategy alone is responsible for as many deaths as the Holodomor. See accounts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Korea. Should proxies, direct actions by those one supports, etc. not count? Who knows, but that always seems to divorce foreign policy decisions from their consequences when we do.
    - skjoldr 3y ago
      Well, if you start taking into account the second-order socioeconomic effects of shooting millions of people who could have led productive lives and could have had children, or the effects of putting millions more through the Gulag system... I get the point, however I suppose the full extent of the tragedy of communism is just way too depressing to really think about compared to thinking about the US' global influence, especially now when similar ideas in Moscow led to another goddamn war. The existence of communism and its history poses a strong moral dilemma, either let it spread and watch the inevitable ensuing devastation, or intervene, but with a chance of your actions backfiring and, formally speaking, "causing" something bad. It's an open question which choice would have been better in which situation, and I don't think it's productive to just look at mistakes while ignoring the overall intent. How do you even count how many lives the US foreign policy managed to save?

petre 3y ago

Once those people will realize that they cannot win without machines and replenish the human resoruce fast enough, it becomes a game of who gets bankrupt first loses the war. If your country doesn't do it, China and Russia and Iran will.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

In general, I 100% agree with you, and I totally see how the technology displayed here can, is, and will be applied to more offensive purposes. But in this one specific case, this thing is a missile defense tool. Its sole purpose is to reduce killing.

m4rtink 3y ago
Well, it looks like a more fancy VTOL Shahed. ;-)

ansible 3y ago

I get where you are coming from. In the last two decades, the USA and allies have spent trillions of dollars increasing the suffering and death in Iraq and Afghanistan, and didn't even gain much geopolitical advantage in return. A giant waste of time, money, and human life. Had we not invaded them, there might be a million more Iraqis alive today. Afghanistan would still be a failed state though. The 2014 invasion of Ukraine was not a significant news event for me. Ukraine was weak, and the tepid response to the invasion from Ukraine and the rest of the West meant that Russia just rolled in without opposition or much drama. Fast forward 8 years, and Ukraine has further developed its national identity and is starting to become a real democracy. The 2022 invasion was a big wake-up call for the West. We had thought that we had won the Cold War in 1992, and that our geopolitical rivals, while still warranting concern, were not a direct threat to us and our allies anymore. Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize.

danbruc 3y ago
[flagged]
- ansible 3y ago
  > This is what got us the Ukraine war in the first place, an uncompromising hard line against a weak Russia because the USA was in the position to do so. Russia opposed each NATO expansion but did nothing in the end and it was the same gamble with Ukraine, hoping that Russia will once more do nothing. Ah, the classic "The West forced Russia to invade Ukraine. Like the government in Ukraine didn't have any legitimate reason to align itself with the West after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Have you heard the rhetoric coming from Putin and the Kremlin? About how Ukraine doesn't have a legitimate national or ethnic identity of their own, and how the territory of Ukraine should just be a part of Russia. And how the Ukrainians (who are really just Russians, really) don't deserve to self-govern? Going on right now in occupied Ukraine, the Russians are actively purging all Ukrainian language and culture. Only the Russian language will be taught in schools. Yes, the West is totally to blame here. Totally.

philwelch 3y ago

Some people need killing. But that’s not really the goal of building better weapons systems. Wars only get started by people who think they have a chance to win. Having a large, well-equipped military with the best weapons and then pledging to deploy that military to the defense of half the world deters a lot of wars from even starting in the first place. A lot of people will argue that defense companies want wars to break out to increase their business, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. In wartime, the military mostly needs cheap commodities—ammunition, supplies, food, fuel—nothing you can really differentiate on. And especially the most recent wars have mostly been against poorly armed terrorists, when the defense industry makes a lot more money selling weapons that would be total overkill against the Taliban but potentially useful against Russia or China.

tamimio 3y ago

As someone who work in drones and robotics, it’s one of the reasons I always request the end goals not just the project objectives, also, nothing is weaponized, I would prefer to sleep well at night knowing I only hurt flies in my life.