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Nowhere is safe

Nowhere is safe

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Comments (154)

  • brianjlogan
    Hmm...Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
  • cryptonector
    Imagine the cost of a shahed drone being as low as $5,000, or less. Imagine the cartels south of the U.S. having tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. It could get painful fast. That's one thing this war is showing.
  • pianopatrick
    Seems to me that instead of digging a tunnel, you could get the same protection from ISR by building those road coverings out of corrugated metal, plywood, or even just laying vines over them. The benefit of the vines is they are cheap and could regrow after a drone hit.Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.
  • firefoxd
    I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.
  • gopalv
    The first part of the parabellum quote matters - we have to let the people who want peace prepare for war.The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.Si vis pacem ...
  • daft_pink
    I definitely think that Saudi Arabia is wishing it’s pipeline was underground right now.
  • ms_menardi
    I had this idea for a "drill" that I'd like to make someday.Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me."we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this
  • krisoft
    > what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a dayIf you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
  • anon
    undefined
  • gmuslera
    There is a layer over this that should be noticed. Nowhere is safe, because international order is a joke. You can conduct invasions for land, to exterminate population, to whatever Trump is doing, every instrument of international law was just useless, or even cooperative with the stronger offender. Which will be the ones taking advantage of this situation? China, Brazil?Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
  • varjag
    A tunnel 15-30 feet underground is not "shallow" at all, it's a major earthworks undertaking.
  • Legend2440
    The trouble with missile interceptors is that they're overkill. Drones are slow, unarmored targets that could be taken out by a bullet.What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
  • decimalenough
    The ridiculous AI slop image of troops posing around a TBM that's apparently just dug a tunnel several multiples its own diameter is a good illustration of how clueless the author is about tunneling. TBMs are hugely complicated and expensive machines, need vast amounts of materials and the associated logistics network to operate, and drill 200 to 700 meters per week depending on the terrain. Deploying and operating one in battlefield conditions is absurd, all the enemy needs to do is fly a suicide drone into the open end of the tunnel and now you have a multi-hundred-million-dollar paperweight.
  • maxglute
    Against subsonic, low supersonic threats, short / medium term it's still about magazine depth and interceptor economics and sheer attrition math, i.e. PRC can build cheap interceptors at scale... has magnitude more targets due to sheer size, many of which are hardened, entire underground civil/mic infrastructure etc etc.Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
  • jmward01
    "The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it."This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.
  • anonymousiam
    "The U.S. has discovered that"...I think the U.S. already knew that, and has done what can be done.
  • wormius
    Elon pops up, Boring Company business card in hand: You rang?
  • trhway
    i already wrote that drones (or more precisely - cheap semi- and fully autonomous weapons) are a new strategic parity weapon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203848 - it has been playing that role in Ukraine vs. Russia, and now in Iran vs. USA.Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.
  • Aboutplants
    Cool world we’ve built everybody! No notes
  • intended
    Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance.I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
  • outside2344
    Trump has blundered like an idiot into this in Iran ...... but the upside is that the same dynamics are making it possible for Ukraine to beat back Russia too.It is a bad time to be an invading force.
  • jay_kyburz
    I think it would be really interesting to study the costs/ benefits of digging a tunnel 10 meters underground compared to placing a sturdy building where you want it, and using bulldozers to cover it with 10 meters of earth and rock.
  • zoklet-enjoyer
    We (United States) should have gone to war with Israel in 2006
  • josefritzishere
    I find this vaguely analogous to the proliferation of cheap handguns in America. If drones are a response to asymmetrical power, the solution would be diplomacy. It undermines existing power paradigm, the solution isnn't complicated. Don't pick needless fights with your neighbors and allies. Maybe drones ultimately make better neighbors.
  • carlosjobim
    Do drones just appear out of thin air? Or are they made in factories, which as far as I know are "high value fixed civilian infrastructure" - which is vulnerable to attack?If drones become a big enough problem for countries like the US, then drone factories in China will be bombed, I have no doubt about that.The author is quite misguided if he thinks wars can only be fought defensively and never offensively.
  • chipsrafferty
    How about not attacking countries and then you don't have to worry about them attacking you?
  • amazingamazing
    It’s a shame there’s inherent performance cost to homomorphic encryption. If there were not it could make sense at least on the compute front to treat it as a commodity and just put it everywhere l, importantly including untrusted locations and have a control plane handle coordination for low latency.Otherwise why not wipe out these gigawatt dcs? They don’t employ many and are of high consequence for rich countries.