3 ms·

> Every country ... Only every country that is, wants to be or pretends to be a military power. Many (smaller) countries realized long ago that if they would e

by sspiff 12y ago

> Every country ... Only every country that is, wants to be or pretends to be a military power. Many (smaller) countries realized long ago that if they would end up at war with a much larger neighbour, their own military power would be of no use, and gave up on maintaining and building self-sufficient military machines. Instead, they focus on a certain aspect of military operations, and develop and maintain that segment of their armies in order to make a somewhat meaningful contribution to a certain alliance, hoping that alliance will help them should they ever need it. Others gave up on having armed forces at all.

hessenwolf 12y ago
Defensive versus attacking capabilities differ very strongly though. The quagmire defense is not soo expensive, I would think. For example, Switzerland has lots of basements and guns and gun training. That just sounds like such a lame headache to take and hold.
- TillE 12y ago
  And mountains. Despite all the hideous death-dealing technology developed in the past century or so, mounting a successful invasion is still nearly as constrained by geography as it was a few thousand years ago.
- vidarh 12y ago
  A great example of the cost discrepancy in the context of drones: You see a "drone" flying towards you. Is it a) a dressed up $20 RC toy plane, or b) a flying bomb that can take lives or take out hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of hardware? Presumably, you wouldn't want to risk b), which means for every instance of a) you'd presumably end up committing resources to counter it, if the odds of b) are "high enough", where "high enough" could easily be 1% chance of a bomb or less if the 1% case is sufficiently lethal. You could see a hidden defending force "swarming" an invader with toys with the odd highly lethal weapon in the mix very cheaply to slow an advance...
  - LyndsySimon 12y ago
    There are already several people working on collective autonomous UAVs. Example: http://www.nature.com/news/autonomous-drones-flock-like-birds-1.14776 http://www.nature.com/news/autonomous-drones-flock-like-bird... A "flock" of light unarmed vehicles surrounding with one or more armed vehicles that drop in and out of the flock to do their thing would likely be extremely difficult to deal with.
  - hessenwolf 12y ago
    I feel like that must have been mentioned in an Ia(i)n Banks Culture novel somewhere...
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Armed drones could be a very cheap, effective part of any such strategy.

by sspiff 12y ago

hessenwolf 12y ago

Defensive versus attacking capabilities differ very strongly though. The quagmire defense is not soo expensive, I would think. For example, Switzerland has lots of basements and guns and gun training. That just sounds like such a lame headache to take and hold.

TillE 12y ago
And mountains. Despite all the hideous death-dealing technology developed in the past century or so, mounting a successful invasion is still nearly as constrained by geography as it was a few thousand years ago.
vidarh 12y ago
A great example of the cost discrepancy in the context of drones: You see a "drone" flying towards you. Is it a) a dressed up $20 RC toy plane, or b) a flying bomb that can take lives or take out hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of hardware? Presumably, you wouldn't want to risk b), which means for every instance of a) you'd presumably end up committing resources to counter it, if the odds of b) are "high enough", where "high enough" could easily be 1% chance of a bomb or less if the 1% case is sufficiently lethal. You could see a hidden defending force "swarming" an invader with toys with the odd highly lethal weapon in the mix very cheaply to slow an advance...
- LyndsySimon 12y ago
  There are already several people working on collective autonomous UAVs. Example: http://www.nature.com/news/autonomous-drones-flock-like-birds-1.14776 http://www.nature.com/news/autonomous-drones-flock-like-bird... A "flock" of light unarmed vehicles surrounding with one or more armed vehicles that drop in and out of the flock to do their thing would likely be extremely difficult to deal with.
- hessenwolf 12y ago
  I feel like that must have been mentioned in an Ia(i)n Banks Culture novel somewhere...

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Armed drones could be a very cheap, effective part of any such strategy.