When great powers continually destabilize each other and foment unrest
May 30, 2021 10:21 PM   Subscribe

The future of war is bizarre and terrifying [thread(reader)] - "Drones, eternal cyberwar, info ops, and the specter of biological warfare."[1,2]
The world may yet explode into another WW2-style conflagration, or the kind of nuclear holocaust we feared during the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dominate that battlefield. But most of the modern military technologies led themselves to a very different kind of great-power war — a war of constant sniping and harassment. Assassin drones, cyberattacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the possibility of never-ending low-grade attacks that are below the threshold of massive retaliation.

To forestall this, military strategists should try very hard to think of new, robust, sophisticated methods of deterrence. Deterrence is the key to peace; it’s risky, but when it’s successful, it makes military technology act as a protector of human life rather than a destroyer of it. If new technology makes deterrence impossible, it might condemn us to a future where everyone is always on the offense.
also btw...
Violent Crime Is Spiking. Do Liberals Have an Answer? [thread(reader)] - "James Forman Jr. on the wicked problem of crime and the messy politics of safety."[3,4]
Homicides in cities were up by 25-40 percent in 2020, the largest single-year increase since 1960. And 2021 isn’t looking any better. This is a crisis on its own terms. But it’s also a crisis for the broader liberal project in two downstream ways.

First, violent crimes supercharges inequality. Families who can flee, do. Business close or never open. Banks won’t make loans. Property values plummet. Children are traumatized, with lifelong impacts on stress and cognition.

Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics. Just look at America post-9/11. Or after the crime surges of the 70s and 80s and 90s — strongmen politicians win, punitive responses like mass incarceration and warrior policing rise, social trust collapses...

There is good news here: We know a lot more about what works to prevent violent crime — both in terms of policing and in terms of other institutions we can and should build — and we’re not in an age of austerity. There’s a lot we can do, and should do. But we need to do it fast.
posted by kliuless (45 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Why does the left have to have the answer to the problem of rising violent crime rates?

The left didn’t hollow out the social safety net.
posted by awfurby at 2:11 AM on May 31, 2021 [49 favorites]


What does the supposedly increasing US murder rate (which BTW is far lower than it was in the 1990s) have to do with drones and cyberwarfare? Other than being useful for scaremongering.
posted by Umami Dearest at 2:24 AM on May 31, 2021 [11 favorites]


The use of drones is ... worrying. There's a prescient novel by Lem, The Invincible that proposes one potential outcome of autonomous/semi-autonomous, self-replicating drone systems.

Maybe a variation of Myhrvold's mosquito laser is the best option.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:47 AM on May 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


>Why does the left have to have the answer to the problem of rising violent crime rates?

Because otherwise the right will get to implement their answers.
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 4:48 AM on May 31, 2021 [31 favorites]


There are so many new and exciting ways for imaging technology to turn boring hardware into long-range terror weapons! And do you know what's better than terror weapons that kill? Weapons that maim! Dead people don't need social support & aren't a constant reminder to others.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:52 AM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


At this point, to be honest, I'm really only interested in hearing about whatever small aspects of the future might not be bizarre and terrifying.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:20 AM on May 31, 2021 [10 favorites]


Smith's forecast on the future of war is good, although I'm persuaded he overstates bioweapons (because they just work badly). Drones continue to advance, both improving what they can do as well as getting cheaper. Think of the "Slaughterbot" video, a few years ago, or the end of Warren Ellis' Normal.
posted by doctornemo at 5:47 AM on May 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


I thought that autonomous weapons must be banned under the CCW in 2010 and I still think so today.

As for Klein, I said much the same on Twitter, but between this take and his meritocracy take from a couple weeks before, I am done with him.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:23 AM on May 31, 2021 [1 favorite]


I am not an expert on crime rates, and statistics can be used to back any number of narratives. It is important to note the increase in violent crime, and to respond to it. But it is also important to see it in context. That 25% increase is from 5 to 6.25 per 100,000. That is still lower (and mostly significantly lower) than any point between 1968 and 1998. Comments like "the largest single-year increase since 1960" makes this sound unprecedented, when things are actually pretty good. The narrative that crime is out of control is a right wing one, and I don't agree with it. At a time of extreme polarization, high economic stress, and social upheaval, we saw an increase that brings the murder rate up to what it was in that terrible hellscape of 1999. Of course we should not ignore any increase like this, but we are already seeing articles claiming "you defunded the police, this is what you get" and that's not true or appropriate.
posted by Nothing at 6:30 AM on May 31, 2021 [30 favorites]


>[W]e are already seeing articles claiming "you defunded the police, this is what you get"
Which is already bad-faith misinterpretation of where the funds for the police go to support social work that realises reduced criminality.

But I came here to say: the pandemic made me value spare capacity and redundancy so that people can take care of other people. Knowing who your metaphorical and literal neighbours are became a pressing need in contrast to the "you can go it alone" message of c.21 exceptionalism, and especially when there were right things and wrong things to do in evading this illness. So I'm looking forward to a leftist vision of community organisation that maps our overlapping needs to take these collective priorities to a manifesto, a mandate and governing.
posted by k3ninho at 7:01 AM on May 31, 2021 [5 favorites]


Back on the worrying topic of murderous drones: they kill on their own.
posted by From Bklyn at 7:04 AM on May 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


(Actual question:) Do killings and such by police get counted in violent crime stats?
posted by eviemath at 7:08 AM on May 31, 2021 [7 favorites]


The interesting/frustrating thing about how violent crime is viewed in the US is that both
First, violent crimes supercharges inequality.
and
Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics.
can be entirely true even when the violent criming is semi-organized (or egged on by right wing politicians) oppression or terrorization of already disenfranchised groups. Especially apt today, on the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which until recently was described as if the Black victims had rioted. The uptick in violence over the past few years by domestic right wing terror groups has added to violent crime stats. Increasing murders and assaults of trans women (especially of color) have added to murder and violent crime stats. Yet the phrases "violent crime rate" or "murder rate" still likely make most white Americans think of gang violence and "scary" Black or Latino young men.
posted by eviemath at 7:25 AM on May 31, 2021 [9 favorites]


Violent Crime Is Spiking. Do Liberals Have an Answer?

Yeah. Remove the spiker-in-chief from office and install a government that actually makes some attempt to address the underlying issues instead of trying to impose Security By Tweet.
posted by flabdablet at 7:40 AM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


Obviously we need to continue selling record numbers of guns every year until the violent crime subsides.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:55 AM on May 31, 2021 [15 favorites]


The Left has to answer for rising crime rates when crime rates go up. The Left has to answer for rising crime rates when crime rates stay the same. The Left has to answer for rising crime rates when crime rates go down.
posted by wotsac at 8:00 AM on May 31, 2021 [16 favorites]


Obviously we need to sell autonomous flying guns to make everyone safer.
posted by adept256 at 8:01 AM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


Also I think the potential for bioweapons lacks imagination here. We may be grateful for our fleet of deterrence daleks when the war with the tarantulas comes.
posted by adept256 at 8:06 AM on May 31, 2021


Some direct footage of the Azerbaijan Army Drone Strikes - warning, NSFW. It makes it so clear that humans no longer have a place in the modern battlefield. These are a combination of Turkish and Israeli drones.

Speaking of battlefield technologies, the IDF in Israel are being networked using the Fire Weaver control system, similar in concept to the capability that JSTARS provides its US air assets.

So this networking solution fuses all sensor data from every soldier, land and air vehicle, and uses AI to identify and categorize targets. It then applies Rules of Engagement on whether to engage or not (carrying weapon, type of weapon, etc). Once the targets are "painted" the system then sends orders to a nearby "shooter" in the network most appropriate to take the shot - which could be any kind, could be infantry, jet plane, helicopter, drone, artillery.

This system claims to be able to process and execute dozens or even hundreds of targets per second.

Basically this sensor fusion "closes the loop" where a soldier on the ground spots a target, and an aircraft loitering overhead can fire on it within a few seconds. Even in the US army today, it would take minutes for this action to occur. Or, well, what is publicly known, anyway.

As you can see even the human soldier is redundant within the Fire Weaver system: all it is, really, is a vast network of sensors and autonomous weapons directed by a centralized hybrid human / AI controller.
posted by xdvesper at 8:07 AM on May 31, 2021 [10 favorites]


Why does the left have to have the answer to the problem of rising violent crime rates?

The left didn’t hollow out the social safety net.


Yeah and a much more honest take is "Progress undone: How four years of extremist right wing government with an overt rhetoric of unbridled rage has triggered an increase in violence across the United States during an unprecedent pandemic".
posted by srboisvert at 8:19 AM on May 31, 2021 [28 favorites]


You cannot overstate the damage this kind of violence does to people in their communities.
I'm pretty sure you can. And that doing so leads to policy decisions and personal choices that make the world worse for many people. "Think of America in the post 9/11 moment?" Think of the role that breathless, exaggerated reporting and the lack of a quantitative analysis of threats had in the post 9/11 moment.

Walking through several of the most dangerous neighborhoods in one of the cities held up by all sides as an example of extreme, rampant, unchecked violence a few times a week is . . . the same as it's always been. Lots of nice people. Some people struggling. Slightly more theft than an average sports stadium or mall. I'm not a fourteen year old Black kid whose cousins have enemies. They deal with things I don't. (And that's important and needs to be addressed.) But, I suspect, neither are either of the speakers. For some reason, we don't talk much about the emotional trauma that knowing your mother might be killed in a car wreck while commuting does to suburban, professional-class white kids. Surely that destroys communities too.

I actually agree with a lot of what's in the article and am happy to have read it. But, the impending crisis of exponential urban violence was a red herring in the '70s. Now it's a joke.
posted by eotvos at 9:16 AM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


I used to joke that Idiocracy was prophesy and well, here we are. I now say in all seriousness that America War by Omar El Akkad is prophecy and I hope I'm dead by the time it happens. Autonomous killer drones are nothing to joke about.
posted by photoslob at 9:29 AM on May 31, 2021 [5 favorites]


The mods might want to delete this one. The drones and crime stories are each individually interesting but have nothing to do with each other, and this thread is two separate, worse conversations as a result.
posted by star gentle uterus at 9:54 AM on May 31, 2021 [14 favorites]


Also, Smith gets it backwards regarding the future of war. The future of war is the past.

The late 19th century-early 21st century was the bizarre period in terms of war and politics, and we're returning to the historical norm. We all grew up in a period of artificial relative stability enforced by the terrible might of superpowers, but that's an anomaly in recorded history. We're going back to the endless low-level conflict, power-jockying, and sniping/espionage that characterized most of history before the modern era. The tools are more advanced, but I imagine the rest of the 21st century would be more recognizable to someone from the 14th century than the 20th century was.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:00 AM on May 31, 2021 [5 favorites]


MetaFilter: and this thread is two separate, worse conversations as a result
posted by elkevelvet at 11:23 AM on May 31, 2021 [7 favorites]


"According to a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya, a Turkish-made STM Kargu-2 drone may have "hunted down and ... engaged" retreating soldiers fighting with Libyan Gen. Khalifa Haftar last year."
posted by BungaDunga at 11:25 AM on May 31, 2021




What is the current state of the art to protect a sensitive area from cheap drones?

In the medium- to long-term, the US military is betting heavily on laser-based systems to take out small drones.

Friendly neighborhood defense contractor Lockheed has a 30kW laser-based system called ATHENA, but it's hard to tell how effective it really is, and how much is the usual industry goldbricking.

Boeing has a competing system (naturally) called HELMD, which is a slightly different big laser mounted on a truck.

In the near-term, there's M-SHORAD, which throws everything but the kitchen sink at the problem. It's a Stryker chassis with four Stinger heat-seeking missiles, an XM914 30mm gun, an M240 7.62mm gun, and two Hellfire missiles.

The Russians have a seemingly impressive system called the Pantsir S1 (SA-22 Greyhound), which has 12 command-guided missiles and two 30mm guns. However, Israel is alleged to have destroyed at least nine in Syria, with video of at least one getting smoked by a basically off-the-shelf Delilah loitering cruise missile (rather than something exotic, like a drone swarm). And to add insult to injury, the US managed to capture one, intact.

So, basically, it's a problem that lots of people are working on, but nobody has really solved conclusively.

Sidenote: the Delilah loitering cruise missile is an interesting example of an intentionally non autonomous weapon; it retains a "man-in-the-loop" for longer than other weapons, and in doing so actually has a battlefield advantage over a purely fire-and-forget system. The operator can deploy it, get it close to a target by loitering over an area, then do something to provoke the target into revealing itself (turning on radar, moving, firing weapons, whatever) and have the missile go in for the kill very quickly. Rather than trying to cram the intelligence into the missile, it relies on the human operator to basically fly it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:57 PM on May 31, 2021 [8 favorites]


It's a Stryker chassis with four Stinger heat-seeking missiles, an XM914 30mm gun, an M240 7.62mm gun, and two Hellfire missiles.

"My favorite" - Zorg
posted by banshee at 1:11 PM on May 31, 2021 [16 favorites]




If they convince the emus to join the cause, we're screwed.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 2:10 PM on May 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


Violent Crime Is Spiking. Do Liberals Have an Answer?

Like, what?

"Our Forests Are Disappearing. What Are The Gays Doing To Fix It?"
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:54 PM on May 31, 2021 [8 favorites]


To mash this and the previous thread, all drones and no tanks makes George a dull boy.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:09 PM on May 31, 2021


I'm honestly surprised there haven't been more drone assassinations. Didn't a drone crash in front of German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a speech a few years back? They're cheap to procure in bulk, easy to use, and it seems like it would be impossible to stop a swarm of drones coming in from different directions all carrying even simple explosives. You'd only need one to get through any defenses and get close to the target, set to detonate automatically when it gets within a certain proximity.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:32 PM on May 31, 2021 [3 favorites]


William Gibson nods in agreement...
posted by Windopaene at 5:26 PM on May 31, 2021 [4 favorites]


Lest anyone hope that vastly expensive, old-fashioned warfighting may be passé, consider the Plan To Buy 145 B-21 Raider Bombers Gets Endorsement From Biden Air Force Nominee— The Air Force wants to acquire a B-21 fleet that is nearly seven times bigger than its current B-2 stealth bomber force., The War Zone, Joseph Trevithick, 5/26/2021:
Frank Kendall, President Joe Biden's nominee to become the next Secretary of the Air Force, says he supports the service's current position that it needs to acquire at least 145 stealthy B-21 Raiders in the coming years. These aircraft, work on which is steadily progressing, are set to supplant its existing B-2 Spirit stealth bomber fleet, which comprises just 21 jets, in total, not all of which are available for combat operations, as well as its aging B-1Bs.

Kendall, who has worked in the halls of the U.S. government in the past, including for a time as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics [WP bio], made his remarks about the B-21 fleet during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 25, 2021. Then-Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein had first publicly mentioned plans for a B-21 fleet with 145 aircraft during a separate congressional hearing in 2020.
...
Per the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in 2016, the Air Force had estimated it would cost $80 billion to buy the first 100 B-21s, equivalent to just over $89 billion in 2021 dollars. Last year, CBO estimated that the total purchase cost of one B-21 and 10 Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) cruise missiles to go inside to be around $500 million [pdf], with the Air Force having to spend another $40 million each year to operate and maintain that complete package....
These are preliminary estimates: the optional electronics package, sporty insignia, and extended warranty are extra.
posted by cenoxo at 5:29 PM on May 31, 2021 [2 favorites]


floam, the trick is drones are usable and being used. Nukes are potentially game enders, which is why they stay on the shelf. Drones are disruptors and based on that Azeri-Armenia video above, they are going to be very disruptive in the coming decade.
posted by Meatbomb at 4:01 AM on June 1, 2021


Meatbomb: eponysterical (in this thread’s context).
posted by cenoxo at 6:32 AM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


The B-21 Raider doesn't seem totally crazy, most of our military actions aren't against first-rate powers and the B-52 is really long in the tooth. I don't know why we're still building aircraft carriers though. They are a multibillion dollar target that are going to be swarmed and sunk by a few hundred million dollars worth of drones and missiles.
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:06 AM on June 1, 2021


I'm honestly surprised there haven't been more drone assassinations

Incident at Gatwick Airport a few years back, possibly someone testing the waters?
posted by Bee'sWing at 7:13 AM on June 1, 2021


I don't really understand the strategy behind investing in the B-21 Raider when the "Russian model" exists as an alternative.

The Russians' main strategic bomber platform, the Tupolev Tu-95 "Bear", is a loud, unstealthy, turboprop-driven aircraft, from around the same era as the B-52 (although somewhat less technologically advanced for its time). The Russians have a lot of them, and rather than replacing them, have concentrated on stealthy and/or hypersonic standoff munitions.

This approach makes more sense to me: rather than trying to make the entire aircraft stealthy enough to get close to a target, you just treat the aircraft as a "delivery truck" that just has to get within the standoff weapons' range, which can be thousands of miles. You don't worry about actually penetrating enemy airspace with the aircraft itself, because you don't need to.

But the USAF seems to have a problem with long-range standoff weapons. The US invested an unknown, but surely significant, amount of money in developing the AGM-129, a stealthy long-range nuclear cruise missile on par with the Russians', but then destroyed them all in 2012 rather than downconvert them to non-nuclear payloads. (My theory is that they didn't want the AGM-129 to threaten the AGM-158 JASSM program, despite—or perhaps because of—the latter's much shorter range.)

It's hard not to see this as evidence within the USAF for an irrational bias towards manned aircraft, even when strategic and operational needs would be better met—and put fewer personnel at risk—with longer-range weapons and less-sophisticated aircraft. But the USAF is a "pilot led" organization; my feeling is that they are desperate to have pilots not be reduced to delivery "truck drivers", and the B-21 program is part and parcel of that.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:05 AM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]


For those interested in a poetic take on drones, contemporary and future American war-making, & all of the attendant human costs, I'll recommend Jill McDonough's Reaper. There are also a number of poems about the robotic dogs / future overloads made by Boston Dynamics, which I know folks here on the Blue have posted about.
posted by foodbedgospel at 11:41 AM on June 1, 2021


Charlie Brooker pretty much nailed it with Metalhead. Not sure there's much more to be said beyond that.
posted by flabdablet at 12:44 PM on June 1, 2021


It's a Stryker chassis with four Stinger heat-seeking missiles, an XM914 30mm gun, an M240 7.62mm gun, and two Hellfire missiles.

Put this on legs and you have yourself a decent light Battlemech.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 5:36 PM on June 1, 2021 [5 favorites]


“A French Opinion On The Ethics Of Autonomous Weapons,“ Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, War on the Rocks, 02 June 2021
posted by ob1quixote at 5:56 PM on June 6, 2021


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