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Comment by fncndhdhc | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to be forgetting that no two first-world, nuclear armed nations can ever engage eachother ever again without total mutual nuclear annihilation occuring. He spends the entire time worrying about highly advanced technologies that are only possessed in sufficient quantities by nuclear armed states. If that equipment were ever used, it would become pointless in a matter of hours once the nuclear weapons start flying.

With that in mind we ought to quit pouring all of our money on weapons designed for enemies that we can never realistically fight. It would make far more sense to retool for conflicts against insurgencies and developing nations.

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That's been the thesis every since the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949. It didn't stop Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran/Iraq, or the two Persian Gulf wars from happening.

What seems to occur instead is that major powers fight via proxy wars, where they provide arms, training, covert assistance, and sometimes even open troop commitments on the soil of vassal states. This provides plausible deniability to the superpowers (neither of which actually want to see the world end in nuclear annihilation); offloads the human cost of the war onto foreign, less-developed countries; offloads the political cost onto puppet governments that can be disposed of when no longer needed; and prevents widespread public discontent from threatening the ruling government.

Just because the war is likely to happen in the Persian Gulf or Sea of Japan doesn't mean that the weapons & tactics involved won't be developed by first-world nations.

>It didn't stop Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran/Iraq, or the two Persian Gulf wars from happening.

So why do we need lasers, railguns, and stealth fighter jets to fight bands of rice farmers and goat herders?

Because those rice farmers and goat herders are armed with man-portable anti-aircraft missiles, explosives mines, assault weapons, and in a future conflict, likely lasers and railguns too.

...that we sold them when they were fighting for us.

If they were ill-equipped in Vietnam, ill-equipped in Iraq and Afghanistan, then why would potential combatants suddenly come into possession of weapon systems more expensive than their nation's GDP? World powers don't just hand out state of the art weapon systems all willy nilly, lest they end up falling to the enemy.

They were equipped by the Chinese during Vietnam, and they were very well equipped by the USA in Afghanistan (the original Russian invasion). Everything the Iraq army has ended up in the hands of various resistance and terrorist groups (including ISIS).

The article is about highly advanced anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapons. They don't even have armored infantry, let alone those.

It's a stretch to call them "ill-equipped" in Vietnam and Afghanistan, considering that the insurgents won both campaigns (with generous military assistance from the opposing superpower). No, they didn't have armored infantry - but they had surface-to-air missiles, anti-personnel mines, anti-tank missiles, and automatic submachine guns, all provided by the opposing superpower. The U.S. lost many aircraft against the North Vietnamese, and the Soviets lost many tanks and helicopters against the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

steve19 also makes the very good point that these weapons did fall into the hands of the enemy: most of the Taliban were trained by the CIA, and the weapons our forces faced in Afghanistan were largely ones we had sold to the mujahideen in the 80s. Now the weapons left behind in Iraq are largely in the hands of ISIS.

The point of this article is that the U.S. is likely to face similar asymmetric threats in any future war, where the opposition doesn't have the same weapons as us but they do have weapons that are very effective at countering us.

Because those things aren't purchased for national defense. Their sole purpose is to sustain the MIC as part of a self-reinforcing money grab just as General Eisenhower warned.

2 reasons: first, we don't really use that state-of-the-art stuff against them. Most of these conflicts are being executed with comparatively boring, conventional means. The railgun, however, are a marked improvement over current naval-based artillery, and allow us to strike much further inland with them. Its a lot faster, cheaper, and safer to fire a cannon than to send a plane with a bomb in certain situations. The cutting-edge toys are used as deterrence mechanisms for other more sophisticated countries, which we have healthy diplomatic channels to communicate over. My comment above explains why merely having them is necessary and sufficient in most cases, especially since other powers are developing similar tech.

Second, we are much more squeamish about losing American lives than we ever have been before. Any administration that chooses to throw bodies at the problem like we did in both World Wars will be quickly replaced. I can't defend every project (especially not the F-35), but by and large this tech is designed to maximize effect with minimal risk to American lives.

"no two first-world, nuclear armed nations can ever engage eachother ever again without _the threat of_ total mutual nuclear annihilation occuring" certainly two nuclear nations can go to war without using nukes, either using direct limited confrontation (imagine Falklands war with Argentina having nukes) or through proxy (US vs Soviet Union or Russia many times)

Geopolitics is much more complicated than that. The development of these weapons, and the organizational capability to use them, is necessary and sufficient in most cases to be used as vehicles for diplomacy. They essentially become the stick by which the myriad of trade agreements and treaties that nations develop between each other are realized. If for example, as the article says, Russia develops anti-aircraft weaponry that is capable of bringing down American aircraft, and if they sell that weaponry to countries like Egypt, Syria, and especially Iran, then the US is no longer able to secure those locations in a real or hypothetical conflict. So when, say, the US wants to contain a country like Iran and limit its nuclear capability, such as what happened last year, its negotiating ability is diminished significantly.

What I'm saying ultimately is that developing these capabilities is necessary and sufficient to enable these countries to engage in diplomatic relations with other countries in the current geopolitical climate. It's not enough to hold our thumb over the world-ending button and say "We'll kill everyone if you don't do what we say!" (which is North Korea's strategy, and even they need China's backing to make their threats credible)

Even betweeen nuclear superpowers, there is a Nash competition to field superior conventional forces.

The goal is to achieve escalation dominance, in which your military forces are strongest at all levels of conflict intensity. Think of conflict escalation as a ladder, where the lower rungs are covert or plausibly deniable operations, middle rungs involve conventional war, and the highest rungs involve nuclear war.

All wars involve the escalation of conflict. As a war fighting power, you want to seek dominance not only on the thermonuclear rung, but also on all the rungs below it so that you are not forced into an escalate-or-lose situation. If you achieve escalation dominance on every level, you have achieved hegemony which is a term of art meaning you can compel other powers to act without having to act yourself.

(I leave the proof as an excercise for the reader)

Or retool for figuring out how to get everyone on Earth to chill the fuck out for a minute.

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