[maxglute]

The real thought experiment is ~600m people in central/south American within ~6000km, i.e. IRBM range of US gulf coast, where ~50% of US oil refinery and LNG plant production are. Now that Iran has validated mid tier power can cobble together precision strike complex, it's only going to be matter of time before relatively wealthier countries realize only way out of M/Donroe is to build conventional strike against US strategic infra. This stuff going to get commoditized sooner than later with competing mega constellation ISR. It's pretty clear building up conventional airforce/navy etc will simply get overmatched vs US projection and only credible deterrence is PRC style rocket force. There's a fuckload of places to hide 8x8 missile launchers in the Americas.

E: 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.

[AnthonyMouse]

> 50% of PRODUCTION, not plants, as in a few plants responsible for 50% of US refinery / LNG production.

This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is.

The primary historical impediment to electric vehicles was high up-front cost, in turn driven by high battery costs. However:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-battery-cell-pric...

We're soon to have electric cars (and trucks) that cost less ICE ones, on top of the lower operating costs. Which in turn cost even less when more solar and wind are added to the grid because the "charge more when power is cheap and less when it's expensive" thing lowers their operating cost even further and reduces the amount of natural gas you need in the grid because periods of lower renewable generation can be offset by deferred charging instead of natural gas peaker plants.

Even without any purposeful efforts to do anything about climate change, the economics point to fossil fuels declining over time as a proportion of energy. Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years and the next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result rather than impede it. Which makes a long-term strategy of building the capacity to target petroleum infrastructure something that could plausibly be increasingly irrelevant by the time it would take to implement it.

[maxglute]

Yes, refinery mismatch vulnerability something that can be built around, ~10-15 year horizon. US can also bring down oil as % of energy mix and distribute renewables. If US smart they would do this.

But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list). Refineries just most immediately very high value targets that happens to be closest to missile range.

But the assumption is less about US adaptability/smartness, as the way commodity conventional strikes is trending, CONUS _ will _ be vulnerable eventually. Fortress America is as much function of geography as technology. Just like how 20 years ago Iran couldn't hit Israel or many GCC companies even if it wanted to... now it can. The natural outcome of longer and longer range strikes is at some point US becomes in range of Monroe neighbours who doesnt want to be Monroed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> But at same time, extend IRBM range by 1000km, and replace refineries with hyperscalers, or whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list).

Hyperscalers are probably not a great example because a) they don't really benefit that much from being physically centralized (especially at the building level rather than the regional level) and b) data is one of the easiest things to keep redundant, and then even if you destroy a large facility, backups get restored to another facility or distributed set of facilities with no downtime at all if the target is well-prepared and only a short period of time if they've done even minimum diligence.

The critical ones can also do the "build it on the inside of a mountain" thing and then your capacity to take down grandpa's WordPress is mainly useful to the target for rallying opposition against you.

> whatever targets that worth deterrent value (energy at top of list).

If "energy" turns into solar panels on the roof of every house and widely distributed low density wind farms etc., that's pretty hard to target.

In general centralization is often done because it has economies of scale, but those same economies of scale have diminishing returns. One huge facility reduces certain fixed costs by a million to one (i.e. 99.9999%) over having a million small facilities, but a thousand medium facilities are much harder to target while still reducing them by 99.9% and the remaining 0.0999% is negligible because you're long since already dominated by unit costs. The target can also choose where to take the trade off based on how likely they expect to be targeted. And that's a broadly applicable principle rather than something that only applies to any specific industry.

[maxglute]

Hyperscale/data just one example, f35 manufacturing, specialty feed stock production, transformers, gas compression etc, the list of currently centralized (as in have large target profiles) that will remain soft for decades is long with varying degree of disruption/dislocation, i.e. you don't restore hardware with multi year lead times.

Those are ridiculous / absurd economies of scale numbers, splitting piles up 20-50% per duplication inefficiency, especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout), splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost - costs private or public will not go for, and is prematurely self defeating because others can always build cheaper missiles than US can build infra (hence goldendome theatrics).

In principle, US can preempt CONUS physical vulnerabilities, where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable. In practice the chance of that happening approaches 0. Didn't even harden CENTCOM air shelters and planners have been noting vulnerability for years. Not just economies scale, but JIT and all other aggregate downstream optimizations US likes to make in name of efficiency. US simply not culturally PRC who does not mind (and is optimized for) some extra concrete for physical security. Not that PRC does not have huge vulnerabilities, just development has been made with mainland strikes in mind.

[AnthonyMouse]

> splitting 1 hyper to 1000 medium is not marginal more cost, it's magnitudes / 1000%s more cost

It isn't. The primary costs of both the medium and enormous facility are the same: Server hardware and electricity, and server equipment and electricity don't have significantly lower unit costs when you're buying a million instead of a thousand. Also, you can still buy a million servers and then put them in a thousand different buildings.

It's only when you get down to very small facilities that things like staffing start to become significantly different, because amortizing tens of thousands of employees over millions of servers results in a similar unit cost as amortizing tens of employees over thousands of servers. It's only when you get to the point that you have only tens or hundreds of physical servers that you get scale problems, because it's hard to hire one tenth of one employee and on top of that you want to have more than one so the one person doesn't have to be on call 24/7/365. Although even there you could split the facilities up and then have multiple employees who spend different days in different locations.

> especially in US context (expensive regulatory/physical buildout)

This is another reason that "hyper economies of scale" don't actually do you any good. Which costs less, having dozens or hundreds of suppliers for the various parts of an aircraft, or one single Lockheed that should nominally capture all of these great economies of scale from being a single company?

It's the first one, because then it's a competitive market and the competitive pressure is dramatically more effective at keeping costs under control than a single hyper-scale monopolist that should be able to do it more efficiently on paper until the reality arrives that they then have no incentive to, because a monopoly is the only one who can actually bid on the contract and a duopoly or similarly concentrated market can too easily explicitly or implicitly coordinate to divide up the market. At which point they can be as inefficient as they like with no consequences.

This does mean you have to address the regulatory environment that tends to produce concentrated markets, but we need to fix that anyway because it's a huge problem even outside of this context.

> where 100+ years of built up over assumption of CONUS not being vulnerable

That's not true, there was a significant push during the Cold War to decentralize things to make them less vulnerable to nuclear strikes. The government pushed people into the suburbs on purpose:

https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-weapons-and-american-urb...

There are obviously significant costs to that but Americans were willing pay them when there was a reason to and much of the landscape is still shaped by those decisions even now.

You also see this in the design of the internet, which came out of the same era and has a design that facilitates the elimination of single points of failure, and that sort of thing is as close as we've seen to an unmitigated good.

[maxglute]

When I say hyper, I'm referring to hyper size vs distributed, not limited to data centers. It generalized reply to your insinuation of economies of scale is broadly applicable when it is absolutely not, i.e. 99.9999,99.9%,0.0999% which fantasy figures. The general economics of economies of scale is you split 1 facility in 2 you add 20-50% overhead due to duplication. The immediate cost of redundancy/resiliency is adding double digit overhead. The point is duplication doesn't happen when "only when you get down to very small facilities", it happens when you go from 1 to 2, incremental distribution increase cost disproportionately. Breaking economies of scale of 1 hyper facility int to 2,5,10,100 smaller facilities is possible on paper, but no one doing it in practice.

>don't actually do you any good.

Sure, economy of scale good for consolidator being net bad is valid, but this wasn't discussion on optimal macroeconomics, this discussion on what US politically able to do. There are things US should do, but systemically can't.

> Cold War to decentralize

Cold war dispersion for nuclear math and precise conventional strike math is different. Spreading 2 factories apart so they draw 2 nukes vs 2 factories get 2 conventional packages regardless of spatial separation.Circle back to feasibility, what is required for distributed / dispersed survivability. Is US going to dismantle gulf oil infra and move it inland. Most physical infra processes are not fragmentable or self healing like internet. How much are Americans willing to pay, coldwar was eating 15% of GDP. All this ultimately secondary to the point that doing all this costs US more (because everything in US costs more) vs adversaries simply getting more missiles, it's economically/strategically self defeating. Let's not forget Soviet answer to US disbursement was building more missiles while US still pays inefficiency tax on suburbs.

[zimpenfish]

> This is making a pretty big assumption that the long-term US energy mix is going to stay the way it is.

It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it?

> Meanwhile the US administration flips parties every four to eight years

Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though"

> next time they're Democrats they'll be trying to hasten that result

Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.

[bluGill]

It might be the goal - but there are a lot of other factors than just one party.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It's the stated goal of one of the parties to keep or increase fossil fuel usage, isn't it?

The stated goal of the same party is to have "cheap energy" and the way voters judge is by things like how much they're paying for electricity. Which means their incentive is to make a lot of noise about how much they hate windmills and love coal while not actually preventing data center companies from building new solar farms to power them. One of their most significant benefactors is also the CEO of the largest domestic electric car company.

> Magic 8 Ball says "yeah, in the past, 2028 isn't looking good though"

Two years is forever in politics. We also have the leader of the Republican party doing all the pandering he can right now because he's trying to sustain a majority in the midterms, whereas in 2028 he can't run, and what's Trump going to do in the intervening two years during which he has no personal stake in the next election?

> Which will be blocked and/or immediately overturned by the current/next Republic Congress/Senate/SCOTUS/President.

That's not what happened last time. The electric car subsidies were introduced in 2008 and sustained until 2025.

We're also at the point where these things are going to get rapidly adopted during any period without active resistance to them.

How many years of the majority of new vehicles being electric or plug-in hybrids would it take before there are enough in the installed base to cause a long-term reduction in petroleum demand, and in turn a reduction in the economic and political power of the oil companies? Also notice that this still happens if Asia and Europe adopt electric vehicles regardless of whether or to what extent the US does, since it's a global commodity market.

[gizmo686]

The problem for a would be attacker is that the US still has enough military power to give almost any country on the planet a very bad day every day for as long as the US cares to. Historically, the way to win against the US is to survive long enough for the US to get bored and leave. The last time that happened, it took us 2 decades to get bored.

[maxglute]

The problem is they are not would be attackers, they're countries building up domestic defense that US would have to preempt ala Cuban missile crisis, and sustain preemption over entire continent, with each preemption legitimizing rational for more build up.

Of course US can try to coerce INF for conventional in Americas, but commoditized conventional precision strike are conventional... and commoditized, it's the kind of product where specialized dual use components may need to be sourced... among millions of TEU traffic, but otherwise local industries can build, like Iran.

There's also no global pariah status for proliferating conventional missiles for self defense and hence accessible to many players, coercion / enforcement would require trying to mow grass to keep capabilities out of 600m people...in perpetuity... tall task even for even US. Especially considering form factor of missiles... i.e. sheltered / hidden, they are not major battlefield assets like ships and planes that needs to be out to have wheels turned.

Ultimately it's not about winning vs US, it's about deterring US from historic backyard shenanigans by making sure some future time when US is tempted, and US always tempted, it would risk half of CONUS running out of energy in 2 weeks.

Like the Iran logic is extremely clear now, no amount of defense survives offensive overmatch, the only thing left is to pursue some counter offensive ability that can have disproportionate deterrence value. The thing about US being richest country is US has a lot of valuable things.

[b112]

I think you underestimate how much of that 50% is just exports. And how much other plants can be scaled up quickly. And how the US can temporarily nationalize things, and ensure all the output goes domestic. Just a backroom threat of emergency, temporary nationalization, would ensure CEOs give the US priority.

IE, they'd get to retain higher profits.

What I think would really happen, is the rest of the world would suffer and run out of energy. Not the US.

[maxglute]

There's no think, this is know territory.

Gulf coast PADD3 refineries = disproportionate production of diesel, aviation, bunker fuel for CONUS use. Something like 70% of all refined products used in US comes from PADD3, other refineries cannot replace PADD3 complexity/production levels (think specialty fuels for military aviation, missiles etc). US economic nervous system is EXTRA exposed to gulf coast refinery disruptions. PADD3 refineries (or hubs / pipelines serving east/west coast which more singular point failure) itself enough to cripple US with shortages even if all exports stopped. Gulf gas terminal is for export i.e. doesn't materially impact CONUS, it's deterrence conventional counter-value target. There's also offshore terminals. The broader point being gulf coast has host of targets along escalation/deterrence ladder.

[b112]

Yes, I'm not disagreeing that there are lots of interesting things to hit on the Gulf coast. PADD3 is just another way to say "gulf" refineries, it's a location not a technical specification.

Other refineries can indeed take up the slack. Especially if the US stops exporting. Trains can deliver fuel, trucks. The US military would not be crippled, most certainly, and the domestic US would see primary production kept in-nation, not exported.

I'm not sure why you think that only Gulf refineries can make jet fuel.

NOTE: I'm not saying it wouldn't be a key attack vector, or non-disruptive. I'm just saying the US would do what it always has done, as any nation would do, it would ensure survival first, and so the rest of the world would suffer far more.

[maxglute]

It's location, it's also recognizing refineries in PADD3 are, in fact, technically specific and different from other regional refineries which cannot pickup the slack. Light/sweet vs heavy/sour geographic refinery mismatch are not interchangeable, some products other refineries can produce with low yield, some can't be produced at all. Hence specific highlighting their complexity AND productive/yield levels. US has never tried to survive this level of disruption, which is not to say it couldn't, simply it will be at levels that will significantly degrade CONUS beyond any historic comparison, enough to potentially constrain/deter US adventurism in Americas.

Some specific products like SPECIFIC mixes of aviation fuel, only some PADD3 refineries are setup to produce or produce significant % i.e. IIRC something like 90%+ of military JP5/JP10 come from PADD3. That's why I said "specialty" aviation fuel, not just general aviation fuel. Or taking out out Colonial pipeline which ~2.5m barrels - US doesn't have 10,000k extra tankers or 5000 extra rail carts in reserve for that contingency. Turning off export has nothing to do with this, there isn't enough to keep in-nation due to refinery mismatch, or not enough hardware to move it in event of pipeline disruption.

Of course predicated on timeline/execution, i.e. US can potentially fix refinery mismatch and harden/redundant over next 10 years. We don't know if/when Monroe countries will start adopting their own rocket force. Just pointing out after Iran has demonstrated defense is useless for midtier powers and mediocre offense can penetrate the most advanced defense, the only rational strategic plan is go hard on offense for conventional counter-value deterrence. The logic like Iran, it matters less RoW suffers more, only specifically that US suffers as well, the harder the more deterrent value. And due to sheer economic disparity, could be trillions for US vs billions for others, even if trillions for US is relatively less.

[jacquesm]

> it would ensure survival first

The US was ensuring survival just fine when it was big on soft power. If you let go of soft power your remaining choices are diplomacy (which takes skill) and hard power (which takes a different kind of skill). If you go down the hard power road (which the US seems to be doing) you will end up with a very long list of eventually very capable enemies. It's a madman's trajectory and historically speaking it has never worked. I suspect it also will not work for the US.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The biggest effects would be economic, and would drive any sensible country away from a reliance on Gulf Oil.

The US is essentially a military/petro-oligarchy wrapped inside a republic pretending to be a democracy.

If the global oil economy is badly damaged, the US will be badly damaged with it.

This isn't about who can blow the most shit up. It's about global standing in the economic pecking order, which is defined in part by threat credibility, but also by control over key resources.

If some of those resources stop being key, that's a serious problem for any hegemon.

We're seeing a swing towards global decarbonisation, and this war is an ironically unintentional turning point in that process. The US has had decades of notice that this is inevitable, but has failed to understand this.

[fastasucan]

>What I think would really happen, is the rest of the world would suffer and run out of energy. Not the US.

Then why is it the US that is crying about opening the Strait? You know there are oil produsers outside of the US?

[jcattle]

Afghanistan took only 18 years.

For the 20 years war you are probably talking about: I wouldn't call significant civil unrest in opposition of the war "getting bored"

[fastasucan]

"Bored", is that what you call thousands killed, a massive national debt and a political minefield?

[dinkumthinkum]

You think the lesson from recent events is that these countries can challenge the IS militarily? Is this real?

[alsetmusic]

Downvoting a description of a technical solution for smaller nations based on actual evidence from existing conflicts is silly. You might not like the politics you perceive from someone using particular vocabulary, but the proof is there. The USA's supremacy has been challenged in a meaningful way (along with every other major military power). The strategies of the large powers will have to evolve.