[chroma]

What's next? Drones. No matter how strong one's industrial base, warfare has always been limited by the number of boots on the ground. Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.

There will be no flag-draped coffins to discourage a nation with a fully automated army. War will become a purely financial drain. As technology advances and drives drone costs to the price of raw materials, the drain will lessen while destructive capabilities grow.

These factors could drastically increase the amount of warfare in the world. I'm not sure how probable this scenario is, but it worries me.

[zyx321]

Well, you're not gonna target the drones. You'll want to destroy the enemy's ability to control those drones, or their ability to build and maintain them.

Or, more realistically/cynically, you want to PRETEND that's what you're doing, when you're actually targeting major population centers in order to terrorize the enemy into surrendering (as used in WW2 by the USA against Japan, Japan against China, Germany and Britain against each other, etc...)

And simply disengaging when you decide you've had enough is a luxury that the USA and USSR have enjoyed in their proxy wars. Americans haven't had to defend their homeland in over 200 years now, and it seems a very skewed view of the horrors of war resulted from that. If war is nothing but a drain on resources to you, you're not so much fighting as you are trying to mug someone who can't really fight back.

[vinceguidry]

> Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.

That seems to me to be quite an oversimplification of what wins wars. Every war tech has had edge cases that motivated adversaries managed to overcome.

For example, despite the Vietcong's gross disadvantage in terms of technology, it's leaders managed to force over time the US's withdrawal. We didn't run out of men. We ran out of political will. The battle over political will is vastly different than the battle to save and destroy men. The Vietcong eventually came to realize this and optimized their strategy around it, and none of our horrific technological marvels could defeat that tailored strategy.

In fact, if you're just looking at body count, the North Vietnamese should have lost before we withdrew. We optimized around body counts but were unable to attain our military goals. These days, men won and lost are, if not the least of our concerns, are definitely not the most.

[chroma]

I think you misunderstand me. The sides can have different thresholds for "too many body bags." The american threshold was lower, because the americans weren't fighting in defense of their homeland. Had the war been a purely financial expense for the US, they would have stuck around for much longer.

[vinceguidry]

Body counts have nothing to do with it. There's no 'differing threshold', even if it might look that way, if that's the only data you have available to you.

A democratic nation-state fights a war in a very different way than one without such sophistication. The American political will to fight arises out of its sense of justice and duty. We really believed we were fighting for freedom. Until it became abundantly clear that we weren't, we were happy to throw men and money into the meat grinder for years upon years.

A non-democratic nation fights for as long as the person directing the war maintains his ability to do so. That is the key difference between a western power and an emerging nation. We've got beliefs that can be orchestrated into terrific displays of force, other nations have to coerce the means to project force from the people somehow.

It's what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan right now. As long as most Americans believe that what we are doing there is right, we'll keep at it no matter what. Oh we might pour more or less money into it, adjust our military footprint, but we're going to keep fighting the good fight for as long as we believe that it's the good fight. That belief is robust, it will resist attempts to dislodge it, the same way that a person's irrational beliefs aren't simply changed.

The Vietcong eventually came to realize this. They used their dwindling resources to stage attacks, not where they were needed militarily, but where they would be filmed. The culmination of this strategy was the Tet Offensive, which was carefully orchestrated to look far more large-scale, at least on cameras, than it was. It was an amazing feat, and it accomplished exactly what it had set out to, to tip the balance of public opinion against the war. Militarily, it was a failure, none of the attacks went anywhere and the fighters faded back into the jungle as quickly as they emerged.

It wasn't anything like how many soldiers we lost that caused us to pull out. It was the public perception of how the war was going, what we were doing there, where it was going.

[authatheist]

Draft-eligible men, huh?

You say it like it's something men would want. "I'm eligible for being shipped overseas to kill or be killed. Yay for me."

You're worried about what drones will do to warfare?

Imagine you're a psychopath ruler of say, 320 million people, you have a massive fleet of killer drones at your disposal and you're electronically monitoring everything your subjects do. There's an old piece of parchment that says you can't be naughty, but you've already "normalized" violations of its rules, and hey, it's not like text on a piece of paper actually binds you in any way - you're the ruler after all.

Suppose that you don't really feel like giving up your power, even after you've completely destroyed the economy. The masses of human livestock on your tax farm are understandably upset about not being able to secure work, food or shelter. Can you think of ways to use your fleet of killer drones for maintaining your position in power?

[jerf]

"even after you've completely destroyed the economy.... Can you think of ways to use your fleet of killer drones for maintaining your position in power?"

It is worth pointing out something that a few modern-day tyrants have already discovered to various degrees, which is that the tools of modern oppression require modern economies to keep functioning. If the economy is "completely destroyed", the drones aren't working either. They require power, maintenance, replacement parts, replacement drones, technicians to manage the gear who will need to be fed (and who will be in a position to turn on you), etc. Mind you, small comfort, but a bit of one.

[jmcmichael]

There's nothing preventing the inputs required to keep the drones going - power generation, parts, repair, etc. - being automated exactly the same way as every other facet of our economy is being automated.

[jerf]

If we're to the point where that level of automation has been achieved, it will not be drones in the sky that are your biggest problem. I'm sticking in the forseeable future here, not near-Singularity future.

[jrochkind1]

Drone warfare is terrifying for me.

More hypothetically for me now; horribly immediately for some in Pakistan and Palestine.

But you know how technology goes, especially this kind of technology, it won't be long until everyone has drones. And I don't think any of us will be immune from being victims either.

Even just from a self-interested position, if the U.S. were smart we'd be pushing for international treaties against the use of militarized drones. Just like international treaties against chemical weapons. In both cases, they make warfare just too horrible, and the only way to minimize their use is to make clear international norms that put them beyond the pale.

Of course, instead, we won't even sign the anti-landmine treaty. And are setting an example of maximizing use of militarized drones. One gets the feeling the current governments of the U.S. in the current context wouldn't have agreed to anti-chemical weapons treaties either, if they had a do-over.

[howlin]

There's no clear distinction between today's drones and older intelligent munitions such as cruise missiles.

[jrochkind1]

Wikipedia says:

> Currently cruise missiles are among the most expensive of single-use weapons, up to several million dollars apiece. One consequence of this is that its users face difficult choices in targeting, to avoid expending the missiles on targets of low value.

That's one distinction. What makes drones scary is how they can be, and are being, used to terrorize entire populations, in ways that cruise missiles have not been and are unlikely to be.

Not that cruise missiles aren't terrifying too, but the affordability and perceived 'precision' of drones is leading to an entirely new scale of un-manned warfare.

Also, drones increasing autonomy, in a way that cruise missiles have not been and are unlikely to ever be, is another distinction.

There are in fact a variety of clear differences.

[cromwellian]

Drone War seems like it will tend towards the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon", no one wants to go nuclear, and no one wants direct confrontation with boots on the ground, so fleets of drones will fight it out and bomb strategic and tactical targets with conventional weapons while the civilian populations can do nothing but count the destruction.

[dragonwriter]

> Eventually, one side sees enough body bags (or simply runs out of draft-eligible men) and disengages.

More accurately, eventually one side perceives the cost of continuing as outweighing the expected benefits. Battlefield casualties are usually a significant factor in generating that perception, but other costs are also often factors, and more importantly shifting perception of what can actually be achieved by continuing the war is usually a factor.

> There will be no flag-draped coffins to discourage a nation with a fully automated army.

Only true if the other side exclusively targets the automated army. Which is one reason that won't happen.

[toomuchtodo]

You don't need a sky full of drones to attack another country that has an army of drones. You need only a nuclear warhead delivered via cargo container to a strategic port by cargo ship.

[pas]

That's just a scaremongering clishé, in reality you don't need anything other than good old TNT or a lot of magnesium to cut the ship in half.

Blow the port. You have just wrecked at least a digit percent of that nation's GDP, the cargo ship (net present value of its production capacity loss), especially if you can manage to get your container at the bottom of the stack, you disabled the port (if you blow it in a narrow place you cut off the port until they remove the wreck and/or dredge a new deep enough way).

And even if you don't achieve any of this, do it a few times and insurance premiums will rise considerably, people will be demanding "ACTION", and so on.

Of course, in a war, effective home propaganda can stifle these sentiments and you might be shooting yourself in the foot indirectly if you turn the civilian population against yourself.

[SnacksOnAPlane]

As usual, Simpsons did it:

The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you. -- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"