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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>It is in every nation state’s best interest to reduce the human and property cost of every battle.

It won't happen, drones killing drones will never be as effective a means of coercion than drones killing people. Human suffering is what makes war effective.

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What if one community has money to spend on drones, While the other does not? What if both communities have enough money and value human life so they just send endless drones at each other smashing said drones into pieces until one community has enough money to spend on drones and one does not It could be about power, and from what I've seen, the people that come from that: don't like to not come from that complacency is a word that comes to mind

Imagine people build super weapons and super defenses. With the push of a button you can kill 1000 people. With another you can defend the lives of 1000 people. As the arms race progresses the impact of the offense and defense tech grows. One day the weapons are strong enough to kill a billion people and defend a billion people.

One side runs out of defensive drones. How good is their negotiation position? They would have zero power.

Counter hypothetical: Nations have drone-centric militaries. Nation X moves to attack nation Y's major cities. Y notices and sends its drones to intercept and defend in locations away from the cities. If X or Y lose the ability to fight back, why wouldn't they surrender?

I don't see how the decisions are different from our current wars where humans carry the weapons.

Nation Y is still defending human beings and human territory, so the incentives remain the same.

What's not going to happen is X and Y agreeing to send their drones out into the desert or somewhere away from people to fight things out. War is the external application of a nation's monopoly on force - it just doesn't work unless that force is applied, directly or indirectly, against human beings.

I still don't see the difference between sending humans to attack cities with lethal force versus sending drones to do the same. It's how war's been waged for centuries. World War II took place in cities and fields. No reason to think drones would change the strategies we've used since combat planes.

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