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Comment by throwup238 | Hacker News Reader

The battlefield will always be where the people are until all industrial capacity is fully automated (if ever). Why would a robot army that finds itself at a disadvantage ever attack a superior army out in a field somewhere far from strategic targets? They will focus their attacks on logistics, manufacturing, C&C, and any civilian population that can actually influence enemy politics.

It’d be nice if all wars were basically a simulated conflict with robots fighting each other far from any humans but the defector that turns their robots on human populations will always have an advantage in actually winning wars.

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I remember reading a sci-fi story - kind of an echo of ender’s fame - where that was the precise setting, smart kids being raised to compete against other nations in what were essentially hyper-realistic RTS games as a proxy for actual wars. I don’t remember if it had the same twist as ender’s game, but maybe it did? Man I should try to dig that up again.

Also Surface Detail where a large portion of the plot involves a virtual war to solve a disagreement.

It reminded me too of Star Trek's "A Taste of Armageddon". Not the same, but a computer simulated "civilized" war.

I remember reading that one too, the child commanders were hyper-precise with their motion controls, getting down to microns of accuracy.

I'm sure there was a plot or something too

Sounds like "The Last Child Into The Mountain": http://www.williamflew.com/omni54a.html

Due to defence keeping them from strategic targets. Same reason large parts of human wars today occur in trenches in the middle of nowhere (witness Ukraine).

Those trenches aren’t in the middle of nowhere. They’re dug around cities and other strategic targets. The fights in the middle of nowhere are fought by mobile combat units.

Besides, these are wars of attrition where killing off the young men who fight wars is the entire point. A robot that takes a few months to manufacture instead of 18 years to raise changes the calculus entirely.

> A robot that takes a few months to manufacture instead of 18 years to raise changes the calculus entirely.

The robot could still take 18 man-years to manufacture.

This whole thread is fun to think about, but misses something.

War is largely about fear / intimidation. Yes, an RTS-like "destroy the assets" is how it's abstracted, but ultimately it's about intimidating a leader and population into submission. Keeping the attackers away from cities is very much part of that calculus, as is dropping long-range attacks on those cities.

If both sides have robots that take months to manufacture, the goal would still be the same: "Keep their robots away" and visa-versa "Get into their population centers and seize power symbols". At this stage, with established defenders, the goal seems to be "seize ground yard by yard"

And "outproduce them" aka "grind down their will" is still going to be a viable strategy.

What about a war for genocide. Second world war, for example. And something that is ongoing right now which shall not be mentioned.

WWII was not a war "for" genocide.

The genocide was not the war. It was a "police" operation against a nearly entirely unarmed enemy.

The war was to to stop Germany from expanding past its borders, and also maybe to stop the genocide.

To be fair, the Racism / Xenophobia component is always alive. AFD does exist in Germany, and Trump can get away with saying 'poisoning the blood' (He later said he didn't copy it from Hitler but he didn't apologize)

As I understand it, Racism was a strong motivator in the propaganda. It was part of Hitler's narrative even before he was in power (something something culture destroyers something something parasites lorem ipsum)

Only recently have I noticed that some groups support a Theory that downplays racism because people are obediently blind. I have seen racism and xenophobia and know it is neither obedience nor blind. But as to the extend of the power it held in the Germany of 1930, I have only read about it.

I think it's far more complicated than "racism / xenophobia".

Hitler had delusions about "Aryan" race, white blond people, even though he was not blond. Also, the war was mostly fought in Europe (or at least started in), i.e. mostly among people of the same race.

It couldn't have been "xenophobia" either, given he wasn't even German!

A lot of people who were sent to the concentration camps, besides Jews, were Roma (Gypsies), gays [1], Slavic people, probably more.

I havne't studied history that deeply, maybe this talk about "undesirables" was all just propaganda, conveniently constructed to help fulfill military goals, but it's clearly far from neatly fitting "racism / xenophobia".

In some sense, a robot fighting force will be a sort of Next Generation Neutron Bomb (TM). It will have the capability to enter the population center of a non-peer opponent and sever communications and secure key locations for immediate occupation by friendly force hoominz - but entirely without the muss & fuss of kinetic destruction or the toll in souls of massed gunfire.

Of course this kind of scenario was the fantasy outcome of the lightning win over and occupation of Iraq, with "thunder runs" and such, but in the longer term it didn't work out that way.

Russia literally complained about Ukraine putting its military installations in civilian centers rather than putting them in the middle of nowhere (where they'd be more exposed and easier to destroy). "Human shields" have been a consistent talking point by Israel in its attacks on Gaza despite IDF infrastructure likewise being in civilian areas.

Most wars today don't occur in trenches in the middle of nowhere. Actually the most recent thing I can think of is medieval battlefields but even then a major component of warfare were sieges which targeted entire cities because it didn't make sense to have your military fortress out in the sticks where it was easy to cut off the supply lines. Even World War 1 doesn't count because the "middle of nowhere" where the trenches were were often only uninhabited because of the war.

That said, we won't see wars of Terminator-style killing machines pitted against each other just like we don't see genuine tank-on-tank duels anymore. It's far cheaper to put some explosives on a UAV and call it a day. Any evenly matched war between nations capable of producing battle robots is likely one between nations with access to nuclear bombs. If Indian border conflicts are any indication, those wars are more likely to be fought with literal sticks to avoid any action that could trigger a nuclear first strike.

There will be no serious international wars anymore. The loser would go nuclear.

I think we will now have asymmetric wars.

Africa doesn't count because those countries don't have nuclear bombs

> There will be no serious international wars anymore.

The Russo-Ukrainian war seems pretty serious.

> The loser would go nuclear.

If annihilation was viewed better than even unconditional surrender, unconditional surrender would never have happened in the past. But it has, and thus if there is a credible marginal threat of nuclear retaliation for a nuclear strike, there is very good reason to suspect that the loser in major convential war would not go nuclear. The risk of nuclear escalation of course impacts the calculus of war involving one or more nuclear powers, but a firm statement that “the loser will go nuclear” does not seem justified, except perhaps in the case where the otherwise winning side is not, and would not (at least in the perception of the losing nuclear power) in the event of nuclear attack be protected by, a nuclear power.

> Africa doesn't count because those countries don't have nuclear bombs

The vast majority of non-African countries also don't have nuclear bombs.

> The loser would go nuclear.

it depends if loss will be significant enough to justify mutual annihilation. Assume Russia attacked Finland, and NATO started military operation and lost. It will be very unlikely France, Brits and Americans will launch nukes for Finland loss.

Thanks for pointing out that such conflict must be considered serious. Maybe 500,000 Russians and 70,000 Ukranians have died.

Instead of "serious" I wanted to say "With serious possibility of escalation" I mentioned Asymmetric conflicts, as the two conflicts occupying our international News (Gaza & Ukraine) are good examples

I don't have any foundation to have an opinion on an invasion to Finland. I would expect there was a possibility of escalation as that is the only purpose of belonging to NATO. I would expect nobody to escalate over a Taiwan Invasion.

I think China won't seriously threaten Indian borders, just based on having nuclear weapons or not. (An opinion hanging of a spider threat)

> I would expect nobody to escalate over a Taiwan Invasion.

there is semiconductor industry on the table. I think there is high chance NATO will be suppressing invasion forces through launching anti ship missiles from aircrafts and cruisers as well as secretly supplying them to Taiwan.

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