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Comment by nunez | Hacker News Reader

What an incredible article. The other articles referenced within are also excellent.

My concern: given that this is becoming more common knowledge, in a world in which other, potentially adversarial, countries are more than fine sending their soldiers through the mental meat grinder, how can we prevent outcomes like the ones shared here while retaining hard power?

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In the medium term, these posts are all voluntary. They say you volunteer 3 times before you're a Ranger (enlisting, Airborne, Ranger). As people learn that they will likely kill themselves at 45, when you're supposed to retire at 40 and have 40 years of retirement, then they will leave SF early.

In the short term I could see leadership pushing a fourth volunteering (volunteering to commit suicide so the Mission can continue)

Its mostly a question of pr I think. More highly trained troops are less likely to die or mess up, and that is bad pr. So we train them more, but if that training also causes deaths, which becomes bad pr, we will train them less. Younger less trained soldiers are cheaper too, so I think the tradeoff will favor less training as soon as this becomes common knowledge anyways.

Robots and drones.

Flesh and mind are weak. Metal and code is strong.

EMP says hi.

The only usable EMPs we have are nuclear weapons. So if you are willing to use one, then just detonate it a bit closer to the surface and it will work just as well against everything we have.

https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/media/article/the-specter-of...

Technology. Let the adversaries’ soldiers fight against your machines.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” - Patton

The best part of turning over waging war to machines is that they will fight 'adversaries' just as well as they'll fight your own subjects.

Soldiers can do that perfectly well too.

Only if they have faith in you and your legitimacy.

That's a valid point. They certainly need more persuasion than machines.

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