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Your logic is backwards. Factories are not designed to withstand sustained aerial bombardment because the chance of sustained aerial bombardment is small to no

by Veserv 2y ago

Your logic is backwards. Factories are not designed to withstand sustained aerial bombardment because the chance of sustained aerial bombardment is small to non-existent due to effective (geopolitical) mitigations. But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment. You do not just throw your hands up in the air and say: “Who could have expected this totally routine and expected situation in our operational environment? We can not be blamed for not adequately mitigating known risks and intentionally mischaracterizing our risk mitigations as adequate for commonplace risks we know we can not adequately mitigate.” If there were effective geopolitical mitigations that made the chances of a attack minimal, then your argument holds weight. But, that is not the case. Failure to accommodate for known, standard, commonplace failure modes is incompetence. Deceptively implying you do mitigate risks while lying or with a disregard for the truth is fraud and maliciousness. There is also a second problem with your argument which is the relative accessibility of executing these attacks being trivial compared to military operations; being easily within the reach of lone individuals, let alone groups, organized crime, or entire governments. They require 10,000% security improvements to actually stop commonplace and routine attacks. But that is a longer argument I am not going to get into right now since the qualitative argument I made above applies regardless of the quantitative difficulty.

lifeisstillgood 2y ago
I suspect the truth lies between the two - we are under constant attack, but we aren’t as a society reacting as if we were. It’s like a building occasionally gets hit by a shell and we dont get on a war footing. The closest analogy I can come up with is England in the 1600s and early 1700s. Fairly regularly ships would be attacked by pirates from North Africa, and sometimes an actual land raid woukd occur- pirates from North Africa would take slaves from small seaside towns. It was not till Englands navy grew strong enough that the threat was eliminated - and perhaps that’s the real issue here - we know it’s happening, we cannot turn the Wild West into urban peace, so we just have to keep taking the licks and keep building more secure and stronger
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > The closest analogy I can come up with is England in the 1600s and early 1700s. I like your point, but that it a hell of an analogy. 1600 is when they formed the East India company, which was basically a state sponsored bunch of pirates, looting the wider world with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
- Veserv 2y ago
  It is not about war footing it is about mitigating known environmental hazards. This can be done geopolitically, collectively, technologically, etc. but the point is that you need to mitigate or accommodate the known, routine risks. It is silly to point to situations where the risks were mitigated as evidence that you do not need to mitigate the risks as the person I was responding to did. You can do that to argue that we need to mitigate the risks in a different manner, but not to argue that you can not be blamed for not mitigating the risks. And to examples from history, we could look to Israel’s anti-rocket defenses as an example handling occasional shelling. Ancient castles and walls as an example to handle stray bandits, mercenaries, and armies. Private merchant naval vessels of the 1600s who routinely had their own cannons. Armored compounds and communities in areas with high crime. Armored trains and trucks. This is standard practice. We just figured out more effective and cheaper collective mitigations. But until that happens, you need to handle it yourself or you are incompetent.
WJW 2y ago
Sure, if there was an active war going on. But while NK and the USA are not exactly friendly, they're definitely not at war either. In basically any other field, the question of "what do we do when a nation state deploys hundreds of people, well funded and well trained, specifically to screw us over?" is met with some variant of "that's why we pay taxes, so the army can protect us from that". A normal bank being robbed for 1.5 billion, ESPECIALLY by a pariah country like North Korea, would absolutely not be met with "oh that was definitely your own fault" as many of the sibling comments seem to imply.
- Projectiboga 2y ago
  Actually we have been at war with North Korea continously since the 1950s, we only have a cease fire with them. The Korean War ended with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953, which stopped active fighting but did not establish a formal peace treaty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict I know that soldiers stationed in South Korea get paid at the wartime rate.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    Only another 300 years to beat the record between Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly. Maybe the US and North Korea will sign a peace treaty in the 24th century. Captain Picard can mediate.
    - kgwgk 2y ago
      US and North Korea have never been at war though. The US (and other countries) assisted South Korea under the UN flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command
- jfengel 2y ago
  As you say, it's weird. There absolutely is an all out war going on online. They attack us and we presumably throw just as much at them. The chief US adversaries have the advantage of national firewalls, and less of their crucial infrastructure is online, so it is perhaps less effective against them. Or for all I know they are subject to equivalent thefts every day and just keep it out of the news.
jdietrich 2y ago
>But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment. That's not really a viable strategy. It has been tried a few times - Mittelwerk and Kőbánya spring to mind - but you can't really build a self-contained factory. If your enemy can't bomb the factory, they'll bomb the roads and railways serving your factory, they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions. At least during WWII, it was generally far more effective to rely on camouflage, secrecy and redundancy. Rather than having a super-fortified factory that shouts "this is vital national infrastructure", spread your capacity out into lots of mundane-looking facilities and plan for a certain level of attrition. Compartmentalise information to prevent your enemy from mapping out your supply chain and identifying bottlenecks. Your overall system can be highly resilient, even if the individual parts of that system are fragile.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions. All true, and German WW2 production kept increasing despite the bombing.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  All of those are methods to be resistant to aerial bombardment in my book. If nobody knows where your factory is, it looks like a parking lot from the air and you have multiple smaller factories instead of one big factory to mitigate the impact of a damage event you are resistant to aerial bombardment, even if your ceiling isn't any sturdier than a normal factory roof. Same if the factory is out in the open but everybody thinks your drone factory produces windshield wipers
- Veserv 2y ago
  Yes, I am aware. I was using “resistant to sustained aerial bombardment” in the general sense of all classes of mitigations, not just fortification. But thank you for elaborating when I was too lazy to. It helps further reinforce my point that the key is mitigating the risk however you can, not specific risk mitigations somehow absolving responsibility.
fc417fc802 2y ago
No one said "they didn't need to defend", or at least that's not how I read OP. The observation is merely that the situation is so wildly different from the physically local world. It's remarkable.

by Veserv 2y ago

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

I suspect the truth lies between the two - we are under constant attack, but we aren’t as a society reacting as if we were. It’s like a building occasionally gets hit by a shell and we dont get on a war footing. The closest analogy I can come up with is England in the 1600s and early 1700s. Fairly regularly ships would be attacked by pirates from North Africa, and sometimes an actual land raid woukd occur- pirates from North Africa would take slaves from small seaside towns. It was not till Englands navy grew strong enough that the threat was eliminated - and perhaps that’s the real issue here - we know it’s happening, we cannot turn the Wild West into urban peace, so we just have to keep taking the licks and keep building more secure and stronger

lostlogin 2y ago
> The closest analogy I can come up with is England in the 1600s and early 1700s. I like your point, but that it a hell of an analogy. 1600 is when they formed the East India company, which was basically a state sponsored bunch of pirates, looting the wider world with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
Veserv 2y ago
It is not about war footing it is about mitigating known environmental hazards. This can be done geopolitically, collectively, technologically, etc. but the point is that you need to mitigate or accommodate the known, routine risks. It is silly to point to situations where the risks were mitigated as evidence that you do not need to mitigate the risks as the person I was responding to did. You can do that to argue that we need to mitigate the risks in a different manner, but not to argue that you can not be blamed for not mitigating the risks. And to examples from history, we could look to Israel’s anti-rocket defenses as an example handling occasional shelling. Ancient castles and walls as an example to handle stray bandits, mercenaries, and armies. Private merchant naval vessels of the 1600s who routinely had their own cannons. Armored compounds and communities in areas with high crime. Armored trains and trucks. This is standard practice. We just figured out more effective and cheaper collective mitigations. But until that happens, you need to handle it yourself or you are incompetent.

WJW 2y ago

Sure, if there was an active war going on. But while NK and the USA are not exactly friendly, they're definitely not at war either. In basically any other field, the question of "what do we do when a nation state deploys hundreds of people, well funded and well trained, specifically to screw us over?" is met with some variant of "that's why we pay taxes, so the army can protect us from that". A normal bank being robbed for 1.5 billion, ESPECIALLY by a pariah country like North Korea, would absolutely not be met with "oh that was definitely your own fault" as many of the sibling comments seem to imply.

Projectiboga 2y ago
Actually we have been at war with North Korea continously since the 1950s, we only have a cease fire with them. The Korean War ended with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953, which stopped active fighting but did not establish a formal peace treaty. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict I know that soldiers stationed in South Korea get paid at the wartime rate.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Only another 300 years to beat the record between Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly. Maybe the US and North Korea will sign a peace treaty in the 24th century. Captain Picard can mediate.
  - kgwgk 2y ago
    US and North Korea have never been at war though. The US (and other countries) assisted South Korea under the UN flag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Command
jfengel 2y ago
As you say, it's weird. There absolutely is an all out war going on online. They attack us and we presumably throw just as much at them. The chief US adversaries have the advantage of national firewalls, and less of their crucial infrastructure is online, so it is perhaps less effective against them. Or for all I know they are subject to equivalent thefts every day and just keep it out of the news.

jdietrich 2y ago

>But, if you are in a active war and being actively bombed, then you absolutely design your factories to be resistant to sustained aerial bombardment. That's not really a viable strategy. It has been tried a few times - Mittelwerk and Kőbánya spring to mind - but you can't really build a self-contained factory. If your enemy can't bomb the factory, they'll bomb the roads and railways serving your factory, they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions. At least during WWII, it was generally far more effective to rely on camouflage, secrecy and redundancy. Rather than having a super-fortified factory that shouts "this is vital national infrastructure", spread your capacity out into lots of mundane-looking facilities and plan for a certain level of attrition. Compartmentalise information to prevent your enemy from mapping out your supply chain and identifying bottlenecks. Your overall system can be highly resilient, even if the individual parts of that system are fragile.

lostlogin 2y ago
> they'll bomb the worker housing, they'll bomb the less-sensitive factories that supply your factory with raw materials and components. You very quickly run into the diseconomies of operating under siege conditions. All true, and German WW2 production kept increasing despite the bombing.
wongarsu 2y ago
All of those are methods to be resistant to aerial bombardment in my book. If nobody knows where your factory is, it looks like a parking lot from the air and you have multiple smaller factories instead of one big factory to mitigate the impact of a damage event you are resistant to aerial bombardment, even if your ceiling isn't any sturdier than a normal factory roof. Same if the factory is out in the open but everybody thinks your drone factory produces windshield wipers
Veserv 2y ago
Yes, I am aware. I was using “resistant to sustained aerial bombardment” in the general sense of all classes of mitigations, not just fortification. But thank you for elaborating when I was too lazy to. It helps further reinforce my point that the key is mitigating the risk however you can, not specific risk mitigations somehow absolving responsibility.

fc417fc802 2y ago

No one said "they didn't need to defend", or at least that's not how I read OP. The observation is merely that the situation is so wildly different from the physically local world. It's remarkable.