There should be two rules in wars. Do not hit civilian infrastructure, and do not put military infrastructure near civilian infrastructure. Both should be a war crime, both during and outside of wars.
Military infrastructure should also not be dependent on civilian infrastructure as that blur the line between military and civilian.
It is an open question what media and thus we the public should do when nations ignore this. If a nation put military surveillance equipment onto fishing boats, like the Russian shadow fleet did, with some military personal onboard that operate the equipment, does that make the civilian fishermen also military personal, or should the military equipment and personal be treated as civilian since they are in a technically civilian ship?
I don't think the question we should ask is if people think hitting civilian drinking water as retaliation for a military helicopter is ok. It is obviously not ok and framing it like that only normalize the idea that hitting civilian targets could ever be acceptable. The only question we should be looking at is if the civilian infrastructure and military infrastructure was intentional built close to each other, thus making this two war crimes.
All civilian infrastructure is dual-use. Militaries will use civilian roads, highways, bridges, and airports when necessary. Militaries use civilian water facilities, buy fuel at civilian petrol stations, and power military equipment using the civilian electrical grid. Militaries frequently commandeer civilian infrastructure when necessary. Without providing a clear definition of what is civilian infrastructure and what is military infrastructure, all civilian infrastructure can be considered military infrastructure.
people might not like it if it was targeted, but if it got slightly damaged (and currently functional) as collateral damage to a military target, I assume more people would be okay
This is all wishy washy without an actual court, but I’m dubious this would rise to that standard.
From what I can tell, international law requires attacks to be distinct and proportional. Distinct meaning they distinguish between civilian and military targets (you cannot intentionally attack civilian targets), and proportional meaning that the collateral damage to civilians is proportional to the military value of the strike.
This probably doesn’t meet that bar. Cutting off water is bad, but 20k people is a fairly small population for this kind of thing and presumably the US won’t stop them from repairing it (that probably would be a clear cut war crime). Presuming Irans government is functioning, this should be extremely hard for those people but probably not lethal. Trucking water around is an option, even if it’s not great.
My problem is that this happened after Trump repeatedly and emphatically threatened to target civilian infrastructure. It could be an accident, or it could be exactly what he said he would do.
The countries currently bombing Iran have boasted for years of their precision targeting systems. They've also made countless statements that show a willingness to targets civilians and infrastructure [1].
At this point, every direct hit on a school or a water source or a charity being accidental collateral damage just doesn't ring true.
Either they've been lying about capabilities (and all the precision strikes were undergone with reckless disregard for human life) or they have the capabilities claimed and are doing exactly what they said they would.
... and Iran's islamist regime has for 5 decades boasted of committing warcrimes, inside and outside of Iran.
Btw: hitting water reservoirs is only a warcrime if the purpose is to kill (or at least replace) a civilian population from a large area. I don't see how this even qualifies that definition.
"But Iran did it!" is not the clinching argument you think it is. If killing civilians is bad for Iran to do, then it's bad for the US to do, and you can't commit the same evils as the ones you're using to justify your actions.
You need to have higher standards; "no worse than Iran" is not something the US should aspire to.
You misunderstand the argument I'm making. Legislation is only what is enforced, is only it's consequences, otherwise it is about as relevant as pointing out Iran has severely violated the "magic for all" legislation of Equestria.
As for standards: they are useless unless they allow for doing what is required to make the other side comply. Or at least, without that standards won't achieve their goal.
The world has chosen to not enforce war crime legislation under any circumstances, decades ago. Specifically, the agreement is the Rome statute, which essentially says that no government can ever be accused of a warcrime except in one of two circumstances. One, the government one whose soil it happened agrees to enforce war crime legislation AND asks for a conviction (Iran has not, and will not, do this). Either that or the UNSC convicts you.
Other than those 2 situations, war crimes aren't possible. And this is not something the US has chosen but the world has agreed. If any parties are responsible for that, it's Russia and China.
By the way, Iran has managed to commit bad enough warcrimes that China, Russia, US, France and the UK all agreed they were guilty of warcrimes. The US has not.
No of course not. The problem is that the point of morality is to achieve a just world. Therefore using morality to allow one side to commit more crimes must be immoral, even if the actions taken to prevent are pretty bad ones. Any moral system must allow for this if it is to exist.
In other words: shooting someone to prevent a murder is not immoral. Despite the fact that shooting someone is obviously immoral under almost all circumstances.
True. Hitting the water reservoir is childsplay compared to the targeted attack on a girls' school with which the US decided to open this war when Iran was signalling agreement to make a deal. It also still makes the US far more reserved in its willigness to kill civilians than its ally which dragged them into this war.
More or less, but "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." And also that the sticker price is a good indication of how easy it is to get an new one quickly.
The side with $25M helicopters and $4m patriot missiles is at a big disadvantage to the side with $40K shaheeds here. Attrition favours the latter side. Assuming that both sides have stockpiles, the latter side will have more items in the stockpile, and will replenish it sooner. What happens when the air defences run out?
Don't those Shaheds run on nVidia Jetson? Jensen cashing in again. Funny that most of the hardware in those drones is designed in the US. Stop hitting yourself.
Local wood frames, carbon from Japan, hardware designed in the USA, produced in China with Nvidia soft. It's kind of funny if it wasn't so wasteful on global resources.
Friedman's gift to the world was erasing the legacy of justice and desire to help the common person Keynes left behind.
Keynes lived through two world wars and learned that global trade does not in fact mean that nations won't irrationally attack each other. In Keynes' view, the purpose of the economy is to lift up the average person out of poverty, and is so doing greatly eliminate one of the causes of war.
Just a few decades after world war 2 Friedman would come along and talk about the power of "freedom" (ie, keeping the current status quo). He would repeat the ideological lies that led to people being unprepared for WW1 / WW2, namely being that free trade means nations won't attack each other, that there is a price at which racism is reasonable, among many other things.
Friedman on segregation for example:
“...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”
Component / part Company Company country Public factory / manufacturing-origin info
TJ150 turbojet engine PBS Velka Bites Czechia EU Czechia; manufacturer is PBS Velka Bites
TW1721 GNSS antennas, block of 4 Calian / Tallysman Canada Canada / West Ottawa, Canada manufacturing publicly stated by Calian/Tallysman
AD9361BBCZ RF transceiver Analog Devices USA USA COO/assembly: South Korea; wafer diffusion: Taiwan
MIMXRT1052 microcontroller NXP USA / NXP USA / Netherlands West Distributor COO often China; NXP PCN references SMIC8 40nm wafer fab
N63A0QI chip Intel USA USA Exact COO not found publicly
STM32F405 microcontroller units STMicroelectronics Switzerland / France / Italy Europe / Switzerland Probably Manufactured in China
ADIS16480 inertial measurement unit Analog Devices USA USA COO: Philippines; ADI PCN adds IMI Philippines as approved assembly site
TMS320F28335PGFA microcontroller Texas Instruments USA USA COO/assembly: Philippines; wafer diffusion: Japan
I found some details on an "AI version" of this drone, using Rockchip chips.
All of that stuff minus the turbojet is like water. It is everywhere. No supply chain control is going to stop it. Not only are these specific parts ubiquitous, but they have set the standard in the industry, so there are numerous compatible and competing parts that could easily substitute.
Reminds me of the news program in the early 2000's that breathlessly reported that an American company was contributing to terrorism.
The "evidence?" Someone found an unexploded IED that had a component with a logo that's familiar to probably every EE in the Western world: Texas Instruments!
Problem is that it was a generic "jellybean" 74LS logic IC that's churned out by the millions and sold everywhere, to everyone and also made by a dozen other manufacturers. Hell, I probably had a dozen or so in my parts drawers.
The drawback to having easily obtainable electronic components is that the people you don't like can also get them.
The article also states that Iran shot down the fighter jet the US had to recover the weapons officer of. I recall news reports at the time insisting that this was actually an accident or friendly fire incident as it had been the previous time they lost an aircraft within the Iranian sphere of influence.
Given the US government's spiraling disregard for factuality, it's safe to assume any loss of equipment or personell in the area of operations is hostile, not accidental.
So, the US relearns all the lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian war the hard way? Choppers proved very vulnerable already in 2022.
History often repeats itself. In a similar way, Great Powers like France refused to study the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 because it was something that happened in barbarian lands far away from glorious Europe, so it was obviously irrelevant to them, right? And then the shock of industrial warfare almost shattered the French army in summer 1914.
Absolutely incorrect. The attitude within the military industrial complex towards drone/UAVs has shifted enormously since the Russia/Ukraine conflict. However, procurement times on new equipment is on the order of several years to nearly a decade. There's not enough time to produce nor acquire this hardware.
The US military is sitting on decades of older equipment. The Ukraine conflict started four years ago. Complaining that the US has not overhauled its inventory in just four years is unreasonable and unrealistic.
> However, procurement times on new equipment is on the order of several years to nearly a decade. There's not enough time to produce nor acquire this hardware.
This has not seemed to be a problem for the countries using them; what makes the US so uniquely inefficient?
But Iran and Ukraine are being very effective with their basement drones. If the US's manufacturing is fancier but not faster, meaning that it takes longer to get weaponry, that's not a good thing. It sounds like waste more than industry.
US-produced Hornets (ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt is the CEO) are very modern and are now destroying Russian logistics to Crimea. From what I have heard, they are iterating fast based on what the Ukrainian operators report back.
This shows that the US private sector can well produce contemporary drones on a compressed time scale.
It is the Pentagon which is not interested in overhauling settled vendor relations.
Assembly lines are much faster but less flexible, which is probably a bad fit for something evolving as quickly as drone weapons.
A basement lab can start making new drones as soon as you can get them the components. An assembly line will take months to get any new machinery it needs, set it up, ensure production works, figure out how to QA it at scale, etc.
It doesn’t matter if you can make 8 million drones if the enemy already has a way to counter that particular kind of drone. Eg I think Ukraine has been through a bunch of iterations as they adapt to Russian tank armor, jammers, extended range, etc.
Are you sure it is because they aren't manufactured in a garage are they they are manufactured by MIC. The MIC is working as intended, it turns tax payer debt in MIC dollars. That by definition, can't happen in a garage.
Quite a lot of Ukrainian-designed drones are nowadays produced in Western Europe in normal factories and sent to Ukraine. That is one of the reasons why Russia cannot simply destroy Ukrainian factories.
Ukraine deploys several million drones a year, you can't get there by mere artisan workshops in garages.
Sure, the designer teams back in Ukraine are lean, their members wear tracksuits and don't have a 50-head Human Resources to watch their behavior, nor three levels of managers wearing Philippe Patek above them. That is part of the efficiency and lower cost.
"However, procurement times on new equipment is on the order of several years to nearly a decade."
Interesting that the Ukrainians can design, develop, produce and deploy a new type of a drone in something like 6 weeks.
Of course, they are in a life-or-death struggle and thus cannot afford a decade of paper wars with various lawyerly and MBA types who want to have their say.
That said, the US cannot afford those either, but it is under the illusion that it still can. Structural ossification at its best, and the result is ... inability to beat an impoverished, long sanctioned Middle-Eastern authoritarian regime into submission.
Ukraine has been operating under general mobilization and martial law since 2022. Comparing Ukraine to the United States which is under no mobilization and civilian rule is not a fair comparison. If the United States was fully mobilized and restructured into a war economy like Ukraine, we would see rapid changes in military doctrine.
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to. Same with Russia vs Ukraine. Both the USA and Russia have ICBMs. Neither choose to use them, for political reasons.
The gap between weeks and years is big, though. Even in peacetime conditions, this process could be sped up if necessary. Indeed it might not make any sense at all to think in years and decades when it comes to such a quick-evolving industry. Whatever drone the DoD sets in stone now, will likely be obsolete by 2030.
The Ukrainian drone industry isn't particularly expensive, BTW, and mostly grew up from private sector grassroots. Ukrainian military has had its own share of problems with ossified Soviet-era leadership. They were able to route around these, though. The US does not want to do this so far; probably too much money involved, and not enough risk to rock those boats (or yachts).
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to.
Are you sure, with the shortages of equipment that take years to replenish? In what sense? I am not even sure if the US has enough naval capability to make a D-day-like landing in Iran right now. That requires specialized ships and training.
The US could probably win the war if it went in fully: as you say, if it was fully mobilized and restructured into a war economy like Ukraine. But that is already quite a bad situation to be in. If a superpower needs to do this in order to fight someone like Iran, it is not really a (conventional) superpower anymore.
The US could also wipe Iran using nuclear missiles, but the political ramifications of such a step would be catastrophic.
So could Pakistan. Pakistan has enough nukes to wipe Iran off the Earth (not that they want to). But no one mistakes Pakistan for a superpower just because they have deliverable nukes.
My impression from reading your comment is that you do not understand US doctrine. The US focuses on blitzkrieg, air supremacy, and precision strikes. Its doctrine is totally opposite of what is happening in the Ukraine/Russia conflict, which is a protracted WWI-era trench warfare conflict with minimal airpower by either side. The US is not optimized to fight such a war.
Neither do you understand that the US has optimized its military around conflict against the PRoC. The US has fought multiple proxy wars against the PRoC. Arguably, the current Iran conflict is a proxy war against the PRoC. Future military spending is focused on countering China, not on the style of conflict Ukraine is facing.
That is why the US is phasing out military assets such as infantry forces and artillery, and is investing in unmanned vehicles and long-range missiles.
Further, you incorrectly quote and misinterpret what I wrote about ICBMs. The US (and Russia) could always win their current conflicts with ICBMs, but choose not to. That is a calculated choice, not an inability to win as you claim.
You present two issues: 1) the US is slow to adapt to drone warfare and 2) the US is losing to Iran.
For 1), the US isn't in a hurry because there's no actual threat. The lack of drone warfare capabilities only impacts US action overseas and of the little bipartisan consensus left, one thing is clear: no new wars (Trump's Iran war is seen as betrayal from his own party but it's hard to oppose Dear Leader).
For 2), it's hard to win when you don't know what you're doing or declare victory when you don't know what your goals are. I'm not sure there's even domestic agreement that it's a war.
1) actual threats tend to mature in weeks, so this is a good recipe to get caught with pants down.
2) I concur, there seem to be no actual goals there. There is a Croatian saying that "form whomever who doesn't know where he wants to sail, no wind is useful". This fits.
1) Threats from who? Canada? Mexico? For the past ~150 years, the US has really only had overseas conflicts with few threats to domestic territory. The best argument you could make it the Cuba Missile Crisis, I suppose? If your immediate plan is to stop fighting in far away places, then drones aren't really a worry.
I am far from a US supporter, but just because a single Apache was downed, doesn't mean the US isnt adapting to the new kind of warfare we've seen from Ukraine. Also Iran =/= Ukraine.
Furthermore, Choppers arent obsolete and if you got em, it makes sense go use them.
Currently it's hard for any nation to meaningfully adapt, as the new tech develops far faster than any governement procurment process.
I haven't claimed that choppers are obsolete. I have said that they are vulnerable, and they indeed are.
Both UA and RU still operate helicopters, but their survival envelope has tightened drastically and they won't even try to fly a chopper over a wide body of water anywhere near the enemy. To survive in a drone-infested war theatre, a chopper must fly really low and mask itself using terrain features as much as possible.
The French 75 was the best mobile gun in Europe. They entered the war expecting to be mobile and were the first to use poison gas. Compared to the Imperial Russian Navy? I don’t see it. The most dramatic lesson was that Japan prefers surprise attacks.
The most important lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian war weren't the naval ones. The siege of Port Arthur was an almost perfect pre-image of future trench warfare in WWI.
It was a defensive flight deploying defensive missiles and defensive bullets against offensive school children who were threatening other countries by being in their own country. Shooting back is an act of war that must be responded to.
(I would add that this is sarcasm, but it is reality for a lot of people sadly)
> Why does Iran have the right to fire drones into other countries?
If America hadn't started bombing Iran in the first place this wouldn't have happened anyway. Things would have been peaceful and oil prices would have been fine.
The pretense that has already been debunked you mean. Iran was nowhere near having nuclear weapons.
The purpose of the war was keeping Netanyahu in power by having a constant war going on. And Trump went along because he was promised a quick win which he could have used to turn his midterms around.
tristanj 3 hours ago [dead] | root | parent | next [–]
> Iran was nowhere near having nuclear weapons.
No, that's outdated. Iran had ~440kg of uranium enriched to 60%, enough for 9-10 nuclear weapons enriched to weapons grade. Given Iran's enormous centrifuge fleet, enrichment to enough material for a single weapons grade nuke would take 2-3 days. To enrich the entire amount would take 2-3 weeks.
No, that's outdated. Iran had ~440kg of uranium enriched to 60%, enough for 9-10 nuclear weapons enriched to weapons grade. Given Iran's enormous centrifuge fleet, enrichment to enough material for a single weapons grade nuke would take 2-3 days. To enrich the entire amount would take 2-3 weeks.
The "reason" for this war was created by Trump in 2017 when the US left the agreement with Iran, while US intelligence agencies all testified to congress Iran was following the agreement and was not working towards a bomb. Then US imposed sanctions and Iran eventually started enrichment again.
JCPOA was a terribly designed deal, it never addressed the Iranian missile issue, which is arguably just as bad the Iranian nuclear issue.
While following JCPOA, Iran decided to build tens of thousands of conventional missiles and drones instead. Enough to swarm and overwhelm air defense systems. 1000 conventional missiles cause as much infrastructure damage as a single nuclear warhead. Iran basically bypassed JCPOA, and built the equivalent to a nuke with conventional weapons.
Obama had the choice to negotiate missile limits in JCPOA, but chose not to, because he wanted a quick politcal win, without realizing the future consequences.
And if you think paying a country tens of billions of dollars not to develop a nuke is a great deal, that incentives every other country to develop their own nuclear weapons.
It started because Trump abandoned the agreement Obama signed and that was working, then sanctioned Iran for no good reason.
At this point, every country with the ability to do so should be procuring nuclear deterrence capability, if for no other reason than to defend themselves from the US.
Or maybe Iran decided to start building nuclear weapons? They already have long range missiles, with enough range to strike most of Europe. Iran can place a nuclear warhead on one of these missiles, and they have an ICBM.
This entire conflict was fully avoidable if Iran never pursued nuclear weapons.
Why can't Iran just be a normal country, and not pursue nuclear weapons?
Iran would largely be left to itself if it did not pursue hostile foreign policy against countries in the region.
Is Iran in a better position after firing missiles at Azerbaijan, Oman, and Turkey? All three of these countries were neutral or friendly towards Iran, until Iran fired missiles at each unprompted.
Its current situation is largely self-inflicted, and a result of poor foreign policy choices.
> If anything, history shows that every country should pursue Nuclear weapons.
Why stop there, we should give every person on Earth nuclear weapons.
That policy will lead to world peace, since there will be no world left to live in.
I think they mean the Apache was there to shoot it down and managed to fly too close while blowing it up. On the plus side: blowing it up successfully. On the down side ... well that's why it's in the news.
This is why you don't used manned systems to hunt unmanned ones ...