8 ms·

>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominat

>And i think removing people from the battlefield is a good thing. It is very dangerous, since it will mean that an organization with enough drones can dominate society on its own. Much better if humans were battlefield-relevant.

trhway 1y ago
It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
  - trhway 1y ago
    Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own [very high] class.
    - impossiblefork 1y ago
      I feel we're behind the Swiss, and want to imitate them.
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)? In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.
    - impossiblefork 1y ago
      The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.
  - david-gpu 1y ago
    > This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over. Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      There are no silver bullets. It's just that having (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.
      - david-gpu 1y ago
        Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry. And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.
        impossiblefork 1y ago
        No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They also load and prepare combat aircraft. Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
        Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.
  - graemep 1y ago
    This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns. In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances. I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react. Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
    - impossiblefork 1y ago
      The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army. They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
    - tryauuum 1y ago
      Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
      - graemep 1y ago
        It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces. Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription. They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
  - Gud 1y ago
    I did my conscription service in 2005-2006(iirc), plus one tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. This is the first I hear that this would be the motivation. The main motivation is that for a small country like Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself adequately, conscription is necessary.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing. So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on. That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards. --- And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace. In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty. In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more. We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.
- krisoft 1y ago
  > It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way. Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places. That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world. And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    > Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones. I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics). The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.
MangoToupe 1y ago
Don't we already have this in the form of the state?

trhway 1y ago

It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.

impossiblefork 1y ago
No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.
- trhway 1y ago
  Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own [very high] class.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    I feel we're behind the Swiss, and want to imitate them.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)? In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.
- david-gpu 1y ago
  > This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over. Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    There are no silver bullets. It's just that having (solely) an elite warrior class is an extra risk.
    - david-gpu 1y ago
      Decision-making in the armed forces is always performed by a "warrior class". The people who operate heavy war machinery are also career soldiers; conscripts are light infantry. And there is a very real economic cost to mandatory military service. It only makes sense in the context of a small country (in terms of population) bordering a large aggressive neighbor, such as Finland or (possibly) Canada.
      - impossiblefork 1y ago
        No, conscripts operate also tanks and artillery. They also load and prepare combat aircraft. Artillery and tanks will have some kind of professional officer though.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
        Armed forces culture is also incredibly important. Goal/mission oriented organizations are harder to co-opt than top-down command structure organizations.
- graemep 1y ago
  This is similar to the argument behind the American constitutional right to own guns. In both cases I very much doubt that people lacking the training, organisation and weaponry of the professional military will be able to beat them in contemporary circumstances. I realise military service means people have some training, but as much as the professionals? What about air cover, heavy weaponry, communications? What about timing - a coup might be over before conscripts can react. Most of all, is there historical evidence this works?
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    The people doing the mandatory military service is the army. There is no army without the mass army. They can at least shoot machine guns and carbines, use artillery etc. Even elite units such as jaeger troops/commandos are ordinary people, not necessarily people who stay for longer than their military service.
  - tryauuum 1y ago
    Maybe it's unrelated to the thread topic, but the benefit of the American 2 amendment system is that the conscription officer knows he can be shot in the face when visiting the home of an unwilling conscript. Maybe this would have prevented the war with Ukraine
    - graemep 1y ago
      It did not historically stop conscription in the US though, so I do not think it would do so anywhere else.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        The Second Amendment was expressly (its even in the text) to protect the ability of the state to have and rely on a militia to mobilize against internal and external security threats, not to deny the state the ability to do so and force it rely on professional forces. Large, permanent, professional internal and external security forces were not something the framers of the Constitution trusted, and the Second Amendment was, as much as anything, a way to reduce the temptation to rely on those instead of summoning a posse (for law enforcement) or conscription (for war, when necessary), rather than a way to prevent conscription. They ultimately failed at that, too, though.
- Gud 1y ago
  I did my conscription service in 2005-2006(iirc), plus one tour in Kosovo and another in Afghanistan. This is the first I hear that this would be the motivation. The main motivation is that for a small country like Sweden to have enough manpower to defend itself adequately, conscription is necessary.
somenameforme 1y ago
In a war of attrition (actually any war or even battle for that matter) the war is generally won by the enemy's morale breaking, not by literally running out of soldiers. When one side is losing and they know they're losing (or they see the conflict as not worth dying for), most people would prefer to save their own lives rather than die for nothing. So you get desertion, refusal to enlist, rapid surrender, and so on. This results in the losing state having to resort to ever more brutal means of conscription such as literally dragging people in off the street, making it illegal to film such actions, making it illegal to leave the country, expanding the age range for conscription, and so on. That all results in even worse morale which makes your fundamental problems even worse. That, in turn, can motivate the losing nation to expend soldiers/resources on missions which may have some propaganda benefit, but ultimately serve no military purpose whatsoever. And at some point it all just collapses like a house of cards. --- And I think this fundamental issue of morale will be a perpetual in war. The winner will not be decided by who has the most drones, but by which side's morale breaks first. This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. Those guys' spirit is simply unbreakable and they will fight you for decades, and to the last man, with absolutely no relenting.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for women afterwards. But in order to actually achieve change, you have to invest significantly more resources to actually build the foundations for a viable society: democracy, rule of law and an economic perspective for the populace. In Germany, the Allied Forces stayed for about 45 years, two generations worth of time. Just think of the massive amount of money and resources invested... the first years were taken similarly to Afghanistan - depose the Hxtler regime and rebuild a rule of law afterwards and, as in the Luftbrücke, ensure basic survival. But then, they stayed in for over three decades to make sure that a healthy democracy would not just form but also establish and entrench itself against threats, and that Germany had an industrial base which was used to provide employment and income for the populace. Also, thank God for the Americans deciding not to follow the "Morgenthau plan" that proposed turning Germany into a purely agrarian state with no industrial capability ever again - that would have caused us to follow down the Afghanistan path with utter certainty. In Afghanistan however, the situation after the immediate war and short post-war period was markedly different. The troops were locked up in their bases outside of bombing jihadists, which meant that local warlords had little to no oversight in their atrocities and stuff like "bacha bazi" (organized child sexual abuse) and slavery went on with effective impunity. The local puppet government barely had any income sources other than foreign aid (and selling opium on the black market) which meant there was no way to form a national identity and storytelling or even a common purpose, and a lack of oversight of the occupying forces over the puppet government led to widespread corruption and looting of the external investments, which led to it losing support across the country. And on top of that, we didn't even do decent oversight over our own troops. Abu Ghuraib is far from the only scandal that was barely prosecuted, not to mention all the other shit that was quietly swept under the rug - that led to the populace despising our troops even more. We didn't lose Afghanistan because the Taliban are a strong army - they were and are not, just look at the videos from right after the takeover. We lost Afghanistan because we didn't give anyone in the wide population a reason to fight for themselves and not just submit to the next best warlord.
krisoft 1y ago
> It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. Battlefields have the inconvenient property of sometimes coming to where you are. Even if you would rather not participate in any way. Currently in democratic countries one of the brakes on war is that you need "boots" on the ground, and "boots" on the ground results in caskets draped in flags on TV. Which result in people not voting for you come next election. If you don't need humans to fight on the ground anymore (or you can get away with drastically fewer humans on the battlefield) then you will get a lot more war, and a lot more battlefields in a lot more places. That's the problem. First order effect is of course good for the humans who don't need to die on the battlefield to achieve some goals. Second order effect is what I'm worried about. The lot more suffering caused by a lot more wars and battlefields in a less stable world. And that is assuming you need the resources of a state to fight these autonomous wars. If the tech is cheap enough, and hard to "control" enough that it is available for organised crime you might see it used in assassinations, gang warfare, and protection rackets. And then we all will live on battlefields. Third order effects are the people hurt by the anti-drone weapons missing their target or activating the wrong time. Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones.
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  > Fourth order effects are all the constraints and weird technology restrictions they will put on tech trying to stop the proliferation of autonomous drones. I'm still concerned about the worst case scenario there being Microsoft getting their trusted computing wet dream. However I'm hopeful that it ends up being nothing more than embedded microscopic serial numbers in anything resembling a microcontroller, ID requirements to place purchases, and legal requirements for disposal (no more garage sale electronics). The other scenario that I think might be more likely is radar and video surveillance covering every inch of every city and a related domestic agency capable of fielding rapid, tightly targeted anti-aircraft measures on a large scale.

MangoToupe 1y ago

Don't we already have this in the form of the state?