Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone strikes

Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by xenihn on Saturday September 14, 2019 @12:30PM (#20971846)

I've been thinking about this lately. I feel like it will lead to an increase of nuclear powers. If you can't match a neighboring nation's robot output, and they aren't dealing with local attrition due to a negligible loss of combatants' lives (since most of it is machine loss and not human loss), your only reasonable form of resistance is MAD, and you can't have assurance if you are dependent on another nation's decision to use nukes in your defense.

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Re:Major Saudi Arabia oil facilities hit by Houthi drone str... by warbird on Saturday September 14, 2019 @02:29PM (#20972756)

Attribution?

On some podcast (Malicious Life?) I heard an interesting take on this. Short version: cyber war is not yet real war because attribution is too difficult to justify irl bombs.

So, if the barrier to entry in drone attacks is sufficiently low, could not a nation outsource some tactical operations to controllable private entities in order to obfuscate the origin of the attack? This, I would think, is plausible if the goal is to cause damage, rather than to demonstrate national prowess.

In this scenario, nukes would not be a sure deterrent.

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